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Beyond the “Marble Arch”? Archbishop J.A.F. Gregg, the Church of Ireland, and the Second World War, 1935–1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2022
Abstract
J.A.F. Gregg, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, played an important role in religious life across the island of Ireland for half of the twentieth century. He has been portrayed by historians as the “Marble Arch,” a leader who reigned over one Church across two states. This article reevaluates that interpretation: by using the period of the Second World War as a case study, it suggests that the historiographical portrayal of Gregg has neglected other significant aspects of his character and career. This article contends that, in addition to being a dominant leader, he was a British patriot, a pastor, and a scholar. Gregg navigated a course that recognized both states and their differing positions regarding the conflict; and he contributed to post-war desires for unity among Irish Anglicans across those states during a period of increased division on the island. The article, by bringing fresh attention to Gregg, discusses an under-examined figure in the history of the Church of Ireland and explores a hitherto neglected period in that historiography. By contextualizing Gregg's wartime rhetoric with that of Anglican churchmen in England, the study also addresses lacunae both in the historiography of religion and the Second World War and in that of Irish and Northern Irish experiences of the conflict.
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References
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15 This biographical sketch is based on Seaver, Gregg.
16 R.B. McDowell, The Church of Ireland 1869–1969 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 131.
17 Alan Acheson, A History of the Church of Ireland, 1691–2001 (Blackrock: Columba, 2002), 230.
18 Cited in Alan Meghaey, The Irish Protestant Churches in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 120.
19 “Reunion,” September 1943, Gregg Papers, G.490.
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21 Frederick Jeffery, “Anglican-Methodist Relations,” in Hurley, Irish Anglicanism 1869–1969, 90. Indicative of contemporary desires for church unity, English denominations engaged with the “Sword of the Spirit,” a Roman Catholic-initiated endeavor to emphasize Christian opposition to fascism. See Philip Williamson, “Archbishops and the Monarchy: Leadership in British Religion, 1900–2021,” in The Church of England and British Politics since 1900, ed. Tom Rodger, Philip Williamson, and Matthew Grimley (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), 71.
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23 Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 56–61.
24 Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, 88–9; “The Lambeth Conference Resolutions Archive from 1930,” Resolutions 25–30, accessed May 30, 2020, http://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/127734/1930.pdf.
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27 Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust, 57.
28 Belfast News-Letter, November 15, 1935, 3.
29 Journal of Proceedings of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland (Dublin, 1936), lix–lxi.
30 Religious interpretations of Nazism are noted, but not examined, in Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2. More detail is evident in Tom Lawson, “The Anglican Understanding of Nazism 1933–1945: Placing the Church of England's Response to the Holocaust in Context,” Twentieth Century British History 14, no. 2 (January 2003): 136.
31 J.F. MacNeice, Some Northern Churchmen and Some Notes on the Church in Belfast (Belfast, 1934), 5–6.
32 Chandler, “Munich and Morality,” 79–87.
33 Belfast News-Letter, October 27, 1937, 10.
34 Chandler, “Munich and Morality,” 79–87.
35 Belfast News–Letter, October 3, 1938, 11.
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37 Journal of Proceedings of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland (Dublin, 1939), lxxv–lxxvi.
38 Hoover, God, Britain and Hitler, 16–17.
39 Witness, September 15, 1939, 6.
40 “The War (Things Temporal and Eternal),” September 1939, Gregg Papers, G.367.
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42 Cyril Alington, The Last Crusade (Oxford, 1940).
43 “Good Friday,” March 1940, Gregg Papers, G.367.
44 “Armagh Dicoesan Synod,” October 29, 1940, Gregg Papers, G.358.
45 It wavered, to some extent in England, when the Soviet Union joined the Allies following the German invasion of June 1941. See S.J.D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change c. 1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 176.
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48 Williamson, “National Days of Prayer,” 353–354.
49 “Thanksgiving, Armagh Cathedral,” May 13, 1945, Gregg Papers, G.373.
50 “End of First Year of War,” September 8, 1940, Gregg Papers, G.368.
51 “Belfast Clerical Union Quarterly Meeting,” February 13, 1941, Gregg Papers, G.369.
52 “Address to General Synod,” May 27, 1941, Gregg Papers, G.369.
53 Parker, “Reinvigorating Christian Britain,” 66.
54 Evidence of church leaders’ role as moral guardians in Northern Ireland is seen in McCormick, Regulating Sexuality, 207.
55 Andrew Chandler, ed., Brethren in Adversity: Bishop George Bell, the Church of England and the Crisis of German Protestantism, 1933–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), 5.
56 “Day of National Prayer,” May 26, 1940, Gregg Papers, G.368.
57 “National Day of Prayer and Third Year of War,” September 7, 1941, Gregg Papers, G.369.
58 Lawson, “The Anglican Understanding of Nazism,” 134–136.
59 Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust, 86; J.M. Snoek, The Grey Book: A Collection of Protests Against Anti-Semitism and the Persecution of Jews Issued by Non-Roman Catholic Churches and Church Leaders During Hitler's Rule (New York: Humanities, 1970), 251.
60 “Protest Meeting Against Persecution of Minorities,” March 18, 1943, Gregg Papers, G.251.
61 Cited in Hoover, God, Britain and Hitler, 122.
62 “Armagh Cathedral, VE Day Thanksgiving,” May 8, 1945, Gregg Papers, G.373.
63 P. M. Coupland, “Anglican Peace Aims and the Christendom Group, 1939–1945,” in Parker and Lawson, God and War, 99–100.
64 Hoover, God, Britain and Hitler, 122–126; Matthew Grimley, “Anglicans, Reconstruction and Democracy: The Cripps Circle, 1939–52,” in Rodger, Williamson and Grimley, The Church of England, 161–180.
65 “The Ministry of the Clergy in War-Time, Belfast Clerical Union Quarterly Meeting,” February 13, 1941, Gregg Papers, G.369.
66 “General Synod,” May 1943, Gregg Papers, G.228.
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74 Church of Ireland Gazette, May 12, 1944, 196.
75 Church of Ireland Gazette, May 17, 1940, 247.
76 Church of Ireland Gazette, May 8, 1942, 175.
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78 Church of Ireland Gazette, May 18, 1945, 9–10.
79 Acheson, A History of the Church of Ireland, 224.
80 Donal Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland 1939–1945: Neutrality, Politics and Society (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 232–233.
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82 Church of Ireland Gazette, August 30, 1940, 438.
83 Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict (Dublin: Penguin, 2006), 60.
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87 Church of Ireland Gazette, March 14, 1941, 114.
88 Bernard Share, The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939–45 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978), 7.
89 Moffitt, “This ‘rotten little Republic,’” 72–74.
90 Geoffrey Roberts, “Neutrality, Identity and the Challenge of the ‘Irish Volunteers,’” in Keogh and O'Driscoll, Ireland in World War Two, 279–280.
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92 Seaver, Gregg, 258; Ó Drisceoil, Censorship, 164. Gregg's son, John, died on 29 August 1943 when, as a prisoner on a Japanese ship, the vessel was sunk, with no survivors, by an American submarine.
93 Steven O'Connor, “Irish Identity and Integration within the British Armed Forces, 1939–45,” Irish Historical Studies 39, no. 115 (May 2015): 432.
94 “Address to General Synod,” May 27, 1941, Gregg Papers, G.369.
95 “Armagh Diocesan Synod,” October 28, 1941, Gregg Papers, G.369.
96 “Address to General Synod,” May 1946, Gregg Papers, G. 374.
97 Fisk, In Time of War, 544.
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99 Graham Walker, “Northern Ireland, British-Irish Relations and American Concerns, 1942–56,” Twentieth Century British History 18, no. 2 (January 2007): 205–206.
100 This paragraph draws on Seaver, Gregg.
101 Miriam Moffitt, “W.A. Phillips, History of the Church of Ireland (1933–4): A Missed Opportunity,” in Empey, Ford, and Moffitt, The Church of Ireland and its Past, 178–193.
102 Seaver, Gregg, 42–59, 252.
103 Seaver, Gregg, 38.
104 Andrew R. Holmes, The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 211.
105 David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1999), 2–17. Although the usefulness of Bebbington's “quadrilateral” has been disputed, it remains, at least in this case, a helpful measure of theological identity.
106 Seaver, Gregg, 61–64.
107 David Fitzpatrick, Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories Since 1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 79; Brian Barton, “Northern Ireland, 1925–39,” in A New History of Ireland, VII: Ireland, 1921–84, ed. J.R. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 201.
108 Ó Corráin, “‘If a house be divided,’” 93.
109 David Fitzpatrick, “Solitary and Wild”: Frederick MacNeice and the Salvation of Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput, 2012), 71, 171, 216.
110 Seaver, Gregg, 334.
111 Keith Robbins, England, Ireland Scotland, Wales: the Christian Church 1900–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 307–308; Hoover, God, Britain and Hitler, 127.
112 Julia Stapleton, “Ecclesiastical Conservatism: Hensley Henson and Lord Hugh Cecil on Church, State, and Nation, c. 1900–4,” in Rodger, Williamson, and Grimley, The Church of England, 81–82.
113 Pastoral Letter of the Bishop of Down and Connor, February 1945, 6–7, MacRory Papers, Armagh Diocesan Library, ARCH/11/2/2.
114 “Address to Armagh Diocesan Synod,” October 1943, Gregg Papers, G.230.