Between 1947 and 1965, 408 British children were sent to Australia under the auspices of the Church of England Advisory Council of Empire Settlement and its successor bodies. Situating this work in wider policy contexts, this article examines how the council involved itself in this work with support from some senior clergy and laity despite being poorly resourced to do so. Noting the council's failure to maintain standards expected of this work by the Home Office and child-care professionals, the article considers factors underlying this which both reflected wider tensions over child migration in the post-war period as well as those specific to the council.
This essay examines the political and religious impetus behind Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis's recognition of Anglican orders in 1922. The furore surrounding recognition, the events that led up to it and the fall-out that followed shed light on the many difficulties faced by religious leaders in the post-war Orthodox world, difficulties that led to fierce jockeying among Orthodox clerics as they tried to establish themselves in relation to their coreligionists and to the larger Christian world. The controversy also offers insight into the problems inherent when a ‘comprehensive’ Church such as the Church of England enters into discussions with a more uniformly dogmatic confession such as Orthodoxy.
The creation in North America of the first overseas diocese of the Church of England was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable and unlikely of the changes in British colonial policy which resulted from the American Revolution. Before the war, the Anglican campaign for the appointment of colonial bishops had been a major reason for the colonial fear of British tyranny; many Americans, particularly Nonconformists, vigorously protested against a scheme which they saw as a bid to recreate a Laudian ecclesiastical tyranny. But the post-war colonial policy envisaged the colonial bishop as a focus of political stability and loyalty. The new prestige and political responsibility accorded by the government to the Church was equally remarkable in view of the government's Erastian suppression of Convocation since 1715 and its politic responsiveness to Dissenting sensibilities. Despite occasional outbreaks of clerical frustration at the Church's inability to act independently, the Church of England had been unable to escape this political domination. This paper will attempt to explain why, given the government's prior hostility to the design, ministries in the 1780s should have decided to extend the church hierarchy to the colonies.
During the period in which these papers were given, there were great achievements on the ecumenical scene, as the quest to restore the Church’s unity was pursued enthusiastically by all the major Christiandenominations. The Papal visit of John Paul II to England in 1982 witnessed a warmth in relationships between the Church of England and the Catholic Church that had not been experienced since the early 16th century Reformation in England to which More fell victim. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission was achieving considerable doctrinal consensus and revisionist scholarship was encouraging an historical review by which the faithful Catholic and the confessing Protestant could look upon each other respectfully and appreciatively. It is to this ecumenical theme that James McConica turns in his contribution.
The Church of England Advisory Council of Empire Settlement and Post-War Child Migration to Australia