The Span of the Cross

Christian Religion and Society in Wales 1914-2000

D. Densil Morgan

• Editore: University of Wales Press
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786830784
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Théologie et religion
• Categoria: Histoire du Christianisme

This is the first full-length history of 20th-century Christianity in Wales. Beginning with a description of religion and its place in society in 1914, it assesses the effect which the Great War made on people's spiritual convictions and on religious opinion and practise. It proceeds to analyse the state of the disestablished church in Wales, an increasingly confident Catholicism and the growing inter-war crisis of Nonconformity. Liberal Theology and the Social Gospel, the fundamentalist impulse and the churches response to economic dislocation and political change are discussed, as is the much less traumatic effect of the Second World War.

~ 1 ~

The state of religion in 1914

Roman Catholicism

In 1914 the oldest of the Nonconformist traditions was the one which the majority of Welsh Dissenters suspected the most: it was ‘the Old Faith’ or the Catholicism of the Church of Rome. The thought that popery had anything in common with the other Christian communions which had dissented from the Church of England would have been incomprehensible to most chapel people, and the suggestion that the very word ‘chapel’ had anything but purely Protestant connotations would have been perplexing in the extreme. But the fact remained that, despite its claim to historic continuity with the most primitive Welsh Christianity, Catholicism’s minority status and its perception as being something strange, foreign and markedly non-Anglican placed it squarely within the Nonconformist fold. Not all Welsh Nonconformists in 1914 were Protestant Nonconformists.

The proclamation of a Catholic vicariate in Wales had been made by Pope Leo XIII in 1895. Formerly annexed to the diocese of Shrewsbury, the six counties of north Wales and five in the south (excluding populous and industrialized Monmouthshire and Glamorgan), became a separate ecclesiastical area under the jurisdiction of the Westminster diocese with its own vicar apostolic. The choice for that office could hardly have been more propitious. Francis Edward Mostyn (1860–1939), the fourth son of Sir Pyers Mostyn, the eighth baron of Talacre, Flint, represented not only indigenous Welsh Catholicism in its landed guise but also a long family commitment to Wales and its culture. On his father’s side the family had been Catholic since the eighteenth century, whereas through his mother, the Hon. Frances Georgina Fraser, daughter of Lord Lovat, the vicar apostolic could claim descent from at least three recusant martyrs. Within three years the vicariate had become an independent diocese designated by the ancient title of Menevia, while Glamorgan, Monmouthshire and over-the-border Hereford were established as the new see of Newport. Mostyn’s appointment in 1898 as first bishop of Menevia was welcomed by the faithful, and for the next twenty-three years he would prove himself an exemplary leader of his flock.

Though shrewd and intelligent, the youthful Mostyn was little concerned with intellectual matters. His colleague at Newport, however, was his antithesis. John Cuthbert Hedley OSB (1837–1915), bishop of the see of Newport and Menevia since 1881 and of Newport alone following the reorganization of the dioceses in 1898, was the outstanding British Catholic bishop of his generation. A Northumbrian from Morpeth, John Hedley was educated by the Benedictines at Ampleforth and joined their order in 1855, taking ‘Cuthbert’ as his monastic name. Ordained priest in 1862, he was soon appointed instructor at the Benedictine study house at Belmont Priory, Hereford. His ascent within the diocese, and the order, was steady; from canon theologian he became auxiliary bishop in 1873 and bishop eight years later. He had a consuming interest in public affairs and in the years following the Vatican Council of 1870 he was cast in the role of apologist for the Church as well as being one of its most erudite pastoral teachers. An accomplished author, patristic scholar and theologian, this onetime editor of The Dublin Review brought rare intellectual distinction to the Welsh Catholic community. The balance between Francis Mostyn’s effortless leadership qualities, his rootedness in Wales and its recusant past and a commitment to the success of his diocese, and John Cuthbert Hedley’s experience, his Benedictine spirituality and intellectual acumen, served the Catholic Church in Wales well during the first decade or so of the twentieth century.

The outbreak of war and its aftermath weighed heavily on Bishop Hedley. He died, aged seventy-nine, in November 1915. His death opened the way for a closer union between the two dioceses, a move which had been contemplated for some time crystallizing in discussions at the National Catholic Congress which had been held in Cardiff during the previous July. Pope Benedict XV’s response to the overtures from the diocesan authorities was contained in his apostolic letter Cambria Celtica of 7 February 1916. Affirming the historic particularity of the Welsh nation, Benedict announced that henceforth Menevia and Newport would be freed from the province of Birmingham (under whose jurisdiction they had been transferred in 1909) and established as a separate archiepiscopal province. The Newport diocese, now called Cardiff, would become the metropolitan while the name Menevia would be retained as Cardiff’s suffragan. Herefordshire would also remain part of the new archdiocese, its Benedictine priory church at Belmont being promoted to full cathedral status. This rather curious arrangement of having two cathedrals in the one archdiocese, St David’s in Cardiff which was staffed by secular clergy and Belmont by Benedictine regulars, lasted until 1919 when the status of the Hereford establishment lapsed. The cathedral of the north and west Wales diocese would remain at Wrexham.

There was much surprise that the archiepiscopate did not go immediately to Bishop Mostyn, ostensibly the strongest contender for the office. Instead James Romanus Bilsborrow OSB (1862–1931), a little-known prelate whose links with Wales had been confined to the few months he had spent as assistant at the mission at Maesteg two decades earlier, was appointed to the see. A Lancastrian from Preston, Bilsborrow’s principal field of service had been in Mauritius where he had been both vicar general and bishop. Educated at Douai, he had become a Benedictine novice at Belmont. It was this connection with the province that had been influential in his being appointed first archbishop. The stresses of presiding over a province in wartime, however, along with bouts of severe ill health did not augur well for Archbishop Bilsborrow’s success, and in 1920 he relinquished his office. It was in the postwar years that the Catholic Church began to make a real impact in Wales, though the institutional foundations for that success were laid in 1916.

For the majority of the Welsh population Catholics were at best an oddity, usually feared or distrusted and often despised. There was nothing in Wales corresponding to the strong indigenous working-class tradition of Lancashire, the North Riding of Yorkshire and Durham. By the nineteenth century the few pockets of residual Welsh Catholicism which had once flourished around Abergavenny and in the Holywell area of Flintshire had all but disappeared, while there were only a handful of landed families left to perpetuate the recusant tradition of Tory aristocracy: the Mostyns, the Vaughans of Courtfield and the Herberts of Llanarth, Gwent. Despite Bishop Francis Mostyn’s (admittedly limited) knowledge of Welsh, the tiny band of hereditary and landed Welsh Catholics was virtually indistinguishable from its Anglican counterparts. To the extent that Protestant Nonconformity was conscious of their existence at all, the indigenous Welsh Catholics were seen as remote, Anglicized and alien.

And then there were the Irish. Forced to emigrate initially by the appalling potato blight of the 1840s, by the last decades of the nineteenth century these poverty-stricken Irishmen and their families had arrived in their thousands finding employment in the lowliest of jobs: as labourers, navvies and dockhands. Although present in the valleys, in Merthyr especially, they were mostly attracted to the dock areas of Newport, Cardiff, Barry and later Swansea where their presence became considerable. For the most part they were poor, rural, uneducated and incontrovertibly Catholic. For Welsh chapelgoers they represented everything which Protestant evangelicalism existed to counter: clericalism, a sacramentalism so primitive as to be superstitious and a morality impervious to the blandishments of teetotalism and the keeping of the sabbath. Theirs was a religion of ritual and form: Friday abstinence, the confessional, non-participatory attendance at Mass or Benediction and a mystifying devotion to the Mother of Jesus. For churchmen and chapelgoers brought up on the Word, this was unreformed religion at its most reprehensible. If the Welsh Catholic community as a whole was perceived as being suspect, the considerable Irish element within it put it virtually beyond the pale. Such was the strength of prejudice in 1914 that the ancient Christianity of the Church of Rome was seen by many of the Welsh to be worldly and unregenerate if not, indeed, wholly reprobate.

Notwithstanding its reputation as being foreign, the Catholic Church saw itself increasingly as being attuned to the national aspirations of Wales. Its presence in the Welsh-speaking areas was sparse: within the diocese of Menevia there were twenty-seven churches and eighteen mission centres, seven in Caernarfonshire, six in Denbighshire, three each in Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire, two on Anglesey and only one in Merioneth. In more Anglicized Brecon and Radnor there was one apiece, there were two in Montgomeryshire, six in Pembrokeshire and as many as thirteen in the old northern heartland of Flintshire. Eighty-seven priests, sixty of whom belonged to monastic orders, served 9,987 communicants out of a total population of some 900,000. In the Cardiff archdiocese ninety-two priests, forty-three secular and forty-nine regular, manned sixty-seven churches. There were 59,890 communicants from among a population of 1,631,109.¹ The main aim of the Church was the effective pastoral care of the faithful rather than proselytizing or evangelism, and with its staff of priests, secular and religious, most of whom were Benedictines (though there were Jesuits at Holywell, Passionists at Carmarthen and Capuchin Franciscans at Pantasaph to say nothing of the representatives of ten separate female orders), that aim was certainly achieved. From small beginnings the presence of the Catholic Church would become both substantial and significant during the decades which were to follow.

The smaller Protestant bodies

The Catholic Church had stood aloof from what had been the most wide-ranging survey of religious practice ever undertaken within Wales. The Royal Commission on the Church of England and other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouthshire had been convened in 1906 and published its report in eight exhaustive foolscap tomes four years later. In many respects the report was deeply flawed. Rather than contributing to the resolution of tensions between Anglican and Dissenter it merely added to them: the waspish condescension of its chairman, the Rt Hon. Sir Roland Vaughan-Williams, towards those who had volunteered as witnesses was often little short of scandalous. Whatever its weaknesses, however, it does contain invaluable statistical evidence to the state of religion during the years immediately prior to 1914. The report divided Protestant Dissent into two groups: ‘the four great Nonconformist denominations’, namely the Calvinistic Methodists, the Congregationalists, the Baptists and the Wesleyans, and ‘the smaller denominations’. For the commissioners greatness was defined numerically. The lesser bodies, however, like the Catholic Church, had their own unique contribution to make to the rich religious mix which was Edwardian Christianity in Wales.

The oldest of the lesser denominations, and by this time among the smallest, was the Society of Friends. Pristine Quaker radicalism had long descended into a domesticated humanitarianism, and few Welsh people in 1914 would have related the pacifist gentility of contemporary Friends to the abrasive militancy of a John ap John, a Francis Gawler or a Dorcas Erbury 250 years earlier. The Quakers were the absolute antithesis of the Roman Catholics: their faith was egalitarian, anti-clerical and unsacramental, their only authority being that of ‘the inner light’ or divine conviction of the individual soul. They allowed full equality to women in the worship and government of the congregations and took pride in upholding ‘the ancient testimony of the Society against all war’. Before the First World War there existed just eight Welsh Quaker congregations comprising of some 250 attendant members with another two score scattered abroad. Four of the meetings were in mid-Wales, at Aberystwyth and inland at Llandrindod, Pen-y-bont and Llanbadarn (Radnorshire); there were three in south Wales, at Swansea, Neath and Cardiff, and just one in north Wales at Colwyn Bay. Although each congregation was self-governing, there was a connexional link through the Western Quarterly Meeting and all Friends were invited to the Yearly Meeting which provided a platform for each congregation throughout England and Wales.² Despite the small size of their movement, Friends still maintained a distinctive witness through humanitarian and educational work and their well-known stand against war.

If the Quakers had emerged from among the left-wing sectaries of the Commonwealth period, the Unitarians’ roots were in the much more sober soil of Puritan Presbyterianism. The Presbyterians had been the least radical of the seventeenth-century Puritans who had left the Church of England at the Restoration not through choice but compulsion. Their emphasis on sobriety, morality and a learned ministry had made them much more doctrinally minded than the Quakers. It was in the early eighteenth century that a section of the Welsh Presbyterian movement, then merged with the Congregationalists, voiced doubts concerning the prevailing Dissenting orthodoxy, and a century later a full-orbed though small Unitarian movement had developed with its centre in Cardiganshire. ‘The changes in the form of doctrine’, related the Revd Rees Jenkin Jones, ‘have been from Calvinism … to Arminianism, from Arminianism to Arianism, from Arianism to a kind of Unitarianism.’³ Fifteen of the movement’s thirty-four churches were situated along the Aeron and the Teifi between Lampeter and Llandysul, the remainder being in Glamorgan with one, Cefncoedycymer, just north of Merthyr in Brecknock. The churches, all of which were congregationally governed, met together either in the South Wales Unitarian Association which conducted its business in Welsh, or the English-speaking South-East Wales Association. The movement’s 3,000 members were served by eighteen ministers nearly all of whom had been educated at the Presbyterian College in Carmarthen. The most liberal of the Nonconformist denominations (including the Quakers), the Unitarians partook of all the mores of Welsh Dissent, its puritanism and Bible-centred worship, though its rejection of evangelical belief was total.

Like the Quakers and Unitarians, the Scotch Baptists could trace their indirect lineage to the religious upheavals of the seventeenth century. The Baptists established a presence in Wales in 1649 but it was only in 1779, under the influence of the Evangelical Revival, that they began to make inroads into the north. If the revival attracted many it repelled a few, and among those who reacted against its emphases was the Merionethshire Baptist leader, J. R. Jones. Following the lead of the Scots Dissenters, Robert Sandeman and John Glas, Jones severed his links with the mainline denomination in 1795 and formed a new connexion of ‘Scotch’ Baptists with branches in many parts of north Wales. Doctrinally Calvinist and congregationalist in structure, Jones’s churches strove to restore New Testament Christianity in its purity. Communion was held each Sunday and the idea of a salaried ministry was rejected. This restorationist ideal was renewed in the mid-nineteenth century when some half of the churches joined fellowship with the Scots-American Alexander Campbell’s ‘Churches [or ‘Disciples’] of Christ’ in ‘discarding all formal creeds and all practices and methods of church order for which no justifying precept or example could be found in the New Testament’. The best known of the Campbellite churches was Berea, Criccieth, where Lloyd George’s brother, William, was an elder and where the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself had been raised and baptized. By then there were twenty-four Scotch Baptist or Campbellite congregations all of which were confined to north Wales, chiefly in the Ardudwy area of Merioneth, parts of Caernarfonshire and around Rhosllannerchrugog in Denbighshire. Their total membership was 1,075. Despite their sectarian beginnings, both the Scotch Baptists and the ‘Disciples’ were on increasingly good terms with their fellow Nonconformists, particularly the regular Baptists; indeed, the Criccieth church would merge with the latter in the 1920s. Their original ideal, though, remained valid. As William George had stated to the Royal Commission, ‘I regard the position taken up by the Churches of Christ as a standing protest against creeds and priestism in all its forms’.⁴

‘If they could be a little more democratic, there would be one Methodist body soon.’⁵ It would be some time before this complaint against the Wesleyans, voiced in April 1907 by the Revd E. C. Bartlett, Bible Christian minister in Swansea, would be rectified, but even then plans were underway to create a more unified Methodist witness in the land. By 1914 the Bible Christians along with two other smaller denominations, the New Connexion and the United Methodist Free Churches, had become the United Methodist Church, a Methodist body whose only disagreement with both the parent body, the Wesleyans, and the influential though less numerous Primitive Methodists, was not about doctrine but about polity. All of the Methodist groups combined Arminian theology with a strong evangelistic thrust, but whereas the Wesleyan Conference vested authority in the hands of the preachers, and the United Methodists granted equal authority to ministers and laypeople, the Primitives, as the most consistently working class of all the Methodist bodies, retained a proletarian scepticism towards the professional ministry as a whole. ‘Our ministry’, according to the secretary of their South Wales District, ‘is very largely a lay ministry.’⁶

All of the smaller Methodist groups in Wales were English in tone and derivation. The strength of the Bible Christians had been in the valleys of south-east Wales and as far to the west as Neath and Swansea where they had ministered almost exclusively to West Country folk who had flocked there in the late nineteenth century seeking work in the mines and tinplate mills.⁷ The New Connexion’s presence had been confined to east Flintshire and the Cheshire border while the original United Methodists, though retaining a few Welsh-speaking congregations on Anglesey, mostly served the population of the north-east.⁸ If, at the time of their amalgamation, the United Methodist Church’s combined Welsh membership figure was 4,146 communicants in sixty-five congregations, the Primitive Methodists possessed 147 churches with a membership of 8,308.⁹ They too catered for the immigrant workforce of north-east Wales, the valleys and the large industrial conurbations of the south, as well as the indigenous Anglo-Welsh population of south Pembrokeshire and the border lands of mid-Wales.

When at its most uncompromising, evangelical religion had always posited a gulf between converted and unconverted or the saved and the lost, and it was among the smaller nonconforming sects that this juxtaposition was most readily manifested. ‘We stand in a great measure separate from the ordinary Christian work of the district’ confessed Mr Henry George Lloyd of Newport, Monmouthshire, on behalf of those Christians, ‘sometimes known as Brethren’, who shunned not only the world but a worldly church in order to maintain the purity of ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Second Edition (2011)
• Introduction: a faith for the third millennium
• 1. The state of religion in 1914
• 2. Christianity and the First World War, 1914–1918
• 3. Anglicanism and Catholicism, 1920–1945
• 4. Nonconformity 1920–1945: confessing the faith
• 5. Nonconformity 1920–1945: responding to the secular challenge
• 6. Reconstruction and crisis, 1945–1962
• 7. Uncharted waters, 1962–1979
• 8. Towards the new Wales, 1979–2000
• Notes