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The Welsh Church Act 1914: A Century of Constitutional Freedom for the Church in Wales?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 December 2019
Extract
The approach of the centenary of the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales offers a good opportunity to reflect on legal aspects of the life of the Church in Wales since 1920. Religious equality had been the principal stimulus for the Welsh Church Act 1914. This statute, together with the release of the Welsh dioceses by the Archbishop of Canterbury to form a separate Anglican province, necessitated the formulation of a constitution for the Church. Innovation was avoided, and continuity protected. ‘Vestiges of establishment’ continued, in burial and marriage, as the result of political expediency. The original structure of the Constitution continues to this day – a complex of various instruments. Change has been piecemeal. The Church still has no modernised body of canon law and its soft law has increased dramatically. However, understandings about the purposes of the Constitution have changed, and the demand for constitutional change has quickened recently, particularly since the Harries Review of the Church in Wales in 2012.
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Footnotes
1
This paper was presented at the Ecclesiastial Law Society Conference at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor on 5 April 2019 and is based on N Doe (ed), A New History of the Church in Wales: governance and ministry, theology and society (Cambridge, forthcoming 2020), ch 5.
References
2 Representative Body of the Church in Wales v Tithe Redemption Commission and Others [1944] 1 All ER 710 at para 711 per Viscount Simon; Re MacManaway [1951] AC 161 at para 165, arguendo; Powell v Representative Body of the Church in Wales [1957] 1 All ER 400 at para 403 per Wynn-Parry J.
3 Official Report of the Proceedings of the Convention of the Church in Wales Held at Cardiff (Cardiff, 1917), pp 11, 13, 17, 18, 25.
4 Diaries of John Sankey, Bodleian Library, MS Eng Hist e 271 (1917); e 272 (1918); e 273 (1919); e 274 (1920).
5 Letter from the daughter of Richard Campbell-Davys of Neuadd Fawr, Llandovery, 9 June 1929, Bodl, MS Eng Hist c 543, fol 108.
6 Letter from Sankey to Ivor Nicholson, 21 September 1936, Bodl, MS Eng Hist c 515, fol 36: it appears at number 5 and ‘took me about 5 years’.
7 E.g. the Clergy Ordination Act 1804; the Clerical Subscription Act 1865; the Clerical Disabilities Act 1870.
8 Owen, R, Institutes of Canon Law (London, 1884), p xxvGoogle Scholar.
9 Ibid, p viii.
10 Owen, R, An Apology for the High Church Movement on Liberal Principles (Oxford, 1851), pp 1–2Google Scholar.
11 Green, C, The Setting of the Constitution of the Church in Wales (London, 1937), pp 80, 98, 283Google Scholar.
12 Watkin, T, ‘Disestablishment, self-determination and the constitutional development of the Church in Wales’ in Doe, N (ed), Essays in Canon Law: a study of the law of the Church in Wales (Cardiff, 1992), pp 25–48Google Scholar at 46, 48.
13 A Lewis, ‘The case for constitutional renewal in the Church in Wales’ in Doe, Essays in Canon Law, pp 175–190 at p 175.
14 R Davies, ‘Some reflections’, in Doe, Essays in Canon Law, p 191.
15 Williams, R, ‘Foreword’ in Doe, N, The Law of the Church in Wales (Cardiff, 2002), p xiiiGoogle Scholar.
16 Church in Wales Review (2012), pp 3, 5, 33, 34.