SUBSCRIPTIONS at £10p.a. (£5 retired and ordinands) for 2007 are now due and if not paid by Standing Order should be sent to the address above by cheque. New Members joining in October receive fifteen months' Membership as a welcoming gesture.
ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING is at 11.30a.m. on Monday, 12th May,
2008, at St. Giles-in-the-Fields (near Centre Point/Tottenham Court Road, London).
Holy Communion (B.C.P.) is at 12.45p.m., and a good Buffet Lunch 1.35p.m. (please
reserve – donations basis rather than fixed charge).
ANNUAL ADDRESS 2P.M. with an opportunity for Questions. This is open to all, and is attended by numerous Patrons of Livings. Speaker – the Rt. Rev'd and Rt. Hon. the Lord Bishop of London, Dr. Richard Chartres.
Please note that 2008 will be the 70th Anniversary of the Clergy Association, and of our magazine Parson & Parish, of which the present issue is the 168th. We have most of the old issues, as does Lambeth Palace Library, and the Copyright Deposit Libraries.
So it would be particularly good if each Member recruited a Member this year, and any ideas for a worthy Celebration and Commemoration of this Anniversary are very welcome, and can be made to any Member of the Council of the Association.
Download Next Event Poster - Monday 12th May 2008
The report Review of Clergy Terms of Service: Part Two (puts bishops, clergy, and laity into a new climate of suspicion. The caring tone the document seeks to set is belied by the likely consequences, were its proposals to be enacted as legislation and used with the frequency envisaged.
The Incumbents (Vacation of Benefices) Measure 1977, expensively revised since, was also going to be the best thing since sliced bread. Will the capability procedure fare any better? The employment tribunals are unknown quantities, and too much expertise is asked of them if they are all to get to grips with the unique culture of the Church of England. Is not this passing the buck - and when the new Clergy Discipline Measure is so untried and novel?
The review would usher in a control freak's paradise. There is much good in the recommendations, particularly in the giving of real security to the licensed through common tenure. But those with permission to officiate are still in outer darkness. Ministerial review becomes compulsory and intrusive. Human-resources staff, costed at an extra £800,000 p.a., will be in the control-room of a Big Brother House.
The distinction between enhanced ministerial review and the new capability procedure will be less than clear in the psyche of most clergy and laity. Bishops and archdeacons will be put in an impossibly convoluted position, needing to maintain a distance from anyone who might be likely to appear before them in a capability proceeding, and knowing that, costs apart, the whole issue is likely to go to an employment tribunal anyway.
What of St Paul's injunction that we should settle matters among believers? Do the proposals reflect badly on devoted chancellors and registrars? Do the new procedures apply to them? In the past, they were aided by elected assessors and committees. Even examiners under the consistory-court system were appointed by an elected committee. Now we go over to a system of non-transparent appointment. We shall all be sorry.
Then we have this illogical proposal that the benefice property should be transferred to the diocese. This Association believes that a truly independent national panel of guardians is required, and that without the consent of the two guardians of each benefice, appointed by lot from the panel as and when such a question arises, nothing may be sold.
We want to protect the interests of the future against short-termist temptations. Diocesan ownership has a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too dimension that will discourage parishioners and other donors. The review group acknowledges that the contents of the parish church are owned by the churchwardens for the time being. There is no reason why the churches and parsonages should not continue to be owned by the rector or vicar for the time being, even if, like the churchwardens, he has no freehold of office.
It is perverse to make a recommendation of this character as if it were consequentially inevitable. The properties are parish, village properties, effectively held in trust by incumbents, often provided as well as maintained by local people - now faced with an illogical confiscation. Why? The repair and running liabilities are left locally. We are assured that this is not asset-stripping, and that rights of objection will exist. Will the next review also take those church halls (the great majority) that are not part of incumbents' freeholds?
Synod ought not to be bamboozled by the wrong-headed and disingenuous persistent recommendations of the Clergy Terms of Service Review Group. The recommendations to change the ownership of Parsonage Houses are not appropriate. The Group’s earlier report The Property Issues Revisited (GS1593) was debated by the Synod in November 2005. It took account of the reservations expressed by Synod during the February debate and replaced them with recommendations that the parsonage house should vest in the Diocesan Parsonages Board (and not, it is said, be accessible to creditors in the event of the DBF's insolvency) and that decisions about the houses of parochial clergy should no longer be taken by committees with more general finance or property responsibilities. Is this plausible, and right? Quite apart from the asset-stripping implications, most parsonages having been locally provided effectively by Patrons and Parishioners, or earlier Incumbents themselves, there will be untoward consequences. First, people would be less inclined to bequeath or donate monies and estates to local Churches when they saw how easily General Synod could legislate to expropriate property. Second, in the event of legal proceedings over the debts or bankruptcy of a diocese or its Board of Finance, it is far from certain that the Courts would not be persuaded by urgent creditors that a Diocesan Parsonages Board was just a device: not truly an independent corporate body holding ring-fenced assets! Are we not asked to be not a little naïve? Parsonages would likely go into the pot of debt. To be inaccessible to diocesan creditors, Parsonages are safer in their present ownerships by incumbent clergy. Third, the continued ownership and control of their Freehold property by Rectors and Vicars as Corporations Sole is some small consolation to vulnerable clergy, and in Natural Justice modest compensation for the fact that they are not, like almost everyone else, able to have the home security of a personal freehold property. Human Rights are at stake. If the law obliges Incumbents to live in official residences approved by the diocese, and not in private houses, they would be now doubly the losers, possessing neither kind of security. They are already in a far weaker position than Dignitaries, who are well empowered in Church decision-making and lose less by not having freehold of their houses.
GS 1593 also recommended that “the vestigial (sic) legal estate in the church and churchyard should continue to vest in the incumbent as ‘corporation sole’. An amendment which would have had the effect of leaving the ownership of the parsonage house with the incumbent as corporation sole was narrowly lost by 11 votes.” The Group listed various rights and duties in relation to Churches and Churchyards, curiously without stating the obvious implications of freehold, which are well established in law. These facts were ignored. The Incumbent is the only person entitled to the keys of the Church. He is the only person entitled to go in and out at will. He has, under such law as may apply, control of the Church’s use – although the Churchwardens may legitimately comment on the use to which he puts the Vestries; and, if rooms have been built attached to the Church on consecrated ground or in its curtilage, they will be under the Incumbent’s control and the Faculty will perhaps have asked the P.C.C. to record in its Minutes that it knows this, and understands that in a Vacancy it will be not the P.C.C. but the Sequestrators who exercise the Incumbent’s guardianship of his Freehold. The Review Group’s assertion of vestigiality is as misleading as its assertion about the equivalence of “defined rights and responsibilities instead of property ownership – essentially the same protections will be afforded”. The Review Group seems to have retreated from this position, and now to be threatening only Parsonages – more easily saleable?
King William III. Declared that one of James II.’s most notorious legal transgressions had been against the Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, who "were turned out of their freeholds, contrary to law, and to that express provision of Magna Charta, that no man shall lose his life, or goods, but by the law of the land".
John Masding
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