State elected bishops may not be odd

WE would surely think it very odd if President Mary McAleese, after consultation with the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, was empowered to appoint Bishops of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Mind you, were we to have such a process, the quality of episcopal appointments might improve considerably, but that must remain a purely speculative matter.

It used to be claimed by the late Dr Noel Browne, among others that the Ireland of the 1950s was a theocracy, a society in which the real power is exercised by bishops and priests. In defence of Dr Browne, it should be said that some high clerics and a few low clerics lectured the populace at large and generally behaved as though we did indeed live in a theocracy.

Whatever about the validity of that claim and it isn't entirely baseless (the Mother-and-Child controversy of the 1950s is proof enough of that) we never had an established church in this country since Independence. Some might wish we did, and it is true the 1937 Constitution accorded special recognition to the Catholic Church, but that was abolished by popular mandate in 1973.

This apart, it may still be that our Constitution bears too keen an imprint of Catholicism and Catholic values for the age in which we live. Be that as it may (and the case can be argued pro and contra on another day here), we are light years away from the situation that pertains across the water in the Church of England.

If you substitute Queen Elizabeth for President McAleese, and Tony Blair for Bertie Ahern, then you have a precise picture of the episcopal appointments mechanism for that Church. There is a penultimate mechanism known as the Crown Appointments Commission. This has 14 members, including the two Archbishops of the Church of England, the Archbishop of York and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The latter, Dr George Carey, is retiring, and the process of selecting his successor has been underway for some time. According to one leak from 10 Downing Street, the name of the next Archbishop is already known, though the decision has not gone through all formal procedures. We'll get to the name in a moment, but it is the peculiar procedures central to which are the Prime Minister and the Queen that I want to focus on.

For quite some time now these procedures have caused intense disquiet in some quarters. One distinguished commentator declared this week it "absurd" that a politician should choose the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The favourite all along, and the man who has already been named, is Rowan Williams, an intellectual who heads the Anglican Church in Wales. The second favourite with the bookies was Richard Chartres, who is the Bishop of London.

The Rev George Austin, a former Archdeacon of York, has opined that any Archbishop of Canterbury is "discredited by the manner in which he is appointed". Yet earlier this week the General Synod of the Church of England voted heavily in favour of allowing the Prime Minister and the Queen to continue having the ultimate say in choosing its bishops.

By the way, back in the 16th century, a Swiss theologian named Thomas Erastus wrote a book in which he outlined the doctrine of the ascendancy of the State over the Church in ecclesiastical matters. The doctrine ever since known as Erastianism still lives on in the Church of England, as least so far as episcopal appointments are concerned. In the light of recent clerical scandals in this country, perhaps we should give some thought to adopting the doctrine in Ireland.