How 1950s law change averted crisis in Anglican Communion
by Charles Moore and Gordon Rayner, Telegraph:
The discovery that the Archbishop of Canterbury had been born illegitimately caused a certain amount of anxiety among his staff, who worried that if a bishop was of illegitimate birth his consecration would, according to canon law, be invalid.
Had that been the case, it would have meant that Justin Welby would never, in the eyes of the Church, have been a bishop at all, and, therefore, not an archbishop either. All his acts in that role would thus have been nullified, precipitating a crisis in the Anglican Communion.
There was a time when that would have been the case, but Lambeth’s legal experts were quickly able to establish that the old rule against illegitimacy had been abolished in the Fifties.
The Church of England’s canon law had been largely unchanged since 1604. That was the year when the Convocation of Canterbury approved the Book of Canons, written in Latin, which had governed the Church of England ever since.
Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1945 to 1961, spent a considerable amount of energy during his time at Lambeth Palace revising the laws.
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