21.03.2019
Disestablishment 150 – A Decade of Disestablishment 1868 to 1878
As we prepare to embark on commemorations of the 150th anniversary of disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, this article by the Revd Robert Marshall gives a history of disestablishment. It was first published in the March edition of The Church Review, Dublin & Glendalough’s diocesan magazine.
The Church of Ireland was disestablished by the Irish Church Act of August 1869, an act of the United Kingdom parliament at Westminster. Legally, disestablishment occurred at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1870. It was a traumatic moment for those who professed their Christianity through what was then the united ‘Church of England and Ireland‘.
Disestablishment was about the state, its relationship to the Church, and finance. It was a process rather than an event. The process began when Gladstone won the general election of November 1868 and concluded with the revised Book of Common Prayer published in 1878.
An established church was a state church, intended to provide for the spiritual needs of the entire population who paid for it. In this sense, it was a public institution over which the Crown through government ministers exercised considerable control. The difficulty in Ireland was that the vast majority of the people, including Presbyterians, Methodists, and Roman Catholics, did not seek the ministry of the clergy of the established church or attend its services. In the context of the widened franchise of 1867, there was a moral and intellectual deficit.
The roots of the Church of Ireland prior to disestablishment were Celtic and medieval, adapted in the course of the Tudor Brexit of Henry VIII and by the Act of Union 1800. The functioning structures of the pre disestablished Church of Ireland shaped the structures which emerged following disestablishment. To achieve this, the rules of contract and trusts were pressed into service. They replaced, and to a very great extent restated, the ecclesiastical law which ceased to have effect on 1 January 1871. Little was noticed from the pews. Clergy continued their ministry as trusts (for which the Representative Church Body became the trustee) replaced the dissolved ecclesiastical bodies such as cathedral chapters and incumbencies. At the same time, the satellite charities, missionary societies, clerical and other associations were left unaffected. These were never part of the formal legal structures of the Church.
The 1869 Act separated the churches of England and Ireland. While the English church remained an established church, the act disestablished the temporal structure of the Irish church. It confiscated the assets of the Church vesting them in Church Temporality Commissioners rather than suppressed or reformed the Church. The Church retained its name and the Crown surrendered its rights to make appointments in the Church, principally bishops, cathedral dignitaries and some incumbents. Parliament resiled from control of the liturgies, doctrines, and ceremonies of the Church including the Book of Common Prayer. This created an organizational lacuna by terminating all state and lay involvement in the affairs of the Church. The Act did not incorporate the Church as a legal entity nor seek to establish criteria for determining membership of the Church
The legal restrictions that precluded meetings of clergy and laity were repealed. This enabled the bishops, clergy and lay delegates to meet to plan for new structures that would replace existing parliamentary control.
Promptly, following the enactment, opinion amongst the clergy and laity settled upon the formation of an organising committee to frame a draft constitution and organise a convention. The convention was summoned by the Archbishops to meet in February 1870 to adopt a Constitution. The legal problem was to propose a structure that would replicate on a consensual basis the relationships with which church members were familiar but without the support or force of ecclesiastical law. The approach adopted drew upon developments of the expanding Anglican Church in North America and the colonies.
After some contentious debate at Spring and Autumn sessions in the Ancient Concert Rooms beside St Mark’s Church on what is now Pearse Street, Dublin, the constitution was adopted by the Convention.
This constitution established the structures of the Church which we recognise today. It regulated the relationship between the different orders and their members who made up the Church. The declaration prefixed to the constitution affirmed and continued the episcopal, clerical, and lay orders within the Church and gave the General Synod ‘chief legislative power therein, and such administrative power as may be necessary for the Church, and consistent with its Episcopal Constitution.’
Aside from general and diocesan synods, the constitution provided a court of the general synod and diocesan courts. In these the clergy and lay members of the church were represented. The courts so established were, and remain, the consensual tribunals of a private institution, not inferior public courts of the State. These tribunals could have no power of coercion and their jurisdiction extended to the bishops, clergy, and laity of the Church.
Reflecting the right to vote at the time, only the male laity who were of full age were embraced as participants in the structures of the Church. Female members and those male members of the church who had not attained their majority were ineligible to participate in these new temporal structures. Echoing the Test Acts of the eighteenth century, individual acknowledgements of communicant membership of the Church were a pre–requisite to lay participation in its structures. Strangely, membership was never defined and no register of membership established either by the 1869 Act or later decisions of the general synod. As Archbishop Gregg subsequently opined: ‘a person is a member of the Church of Ireland who says he is.’
After the Act of Union 1800, the ecclesiastical law of Ireland was English. The Convention had no authority to alter the Ecclesiastical law. That authority would pass from the State to the General Synod on 1 January 1871 when ecclesiastical law ceased to be enforceable before the state courts. Consequently, the Convention in the Preamble to the Constitution could only receive and approve the Thirty–nine Articles (of Religion) of 1634, the Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal of 1662. Subsequently, the General Synod adopted canons ecclesiastical in 1871 and revised the Book of Common Prayer 1873–78, so providing formularies and rites enforceable as matters of discipline within the Church. The 1869 Act gave clergy ordained before disestablishment the right to dissent from the revised prayer book but few did so effectively.
The Crown was authorised by the 1869 Act to incorporate a representative body to hold property on behalf of the Church. Following a resolution by the Convention, a petition was presented to the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin to exercise this authority and the Representative Church Body was established. In due course over 1,600 churches requested by the Church for its use, were transferred to the RCB while the remaining buildings such as the Rock of Cashel and the ecclesiastical complex at Glendalough were vested in the Commissioners of Public Works. Separately, glebes were purchased at favourable prices. This different approach to glebes and glebe land continues to be reflected in the difference between the trusts affecting churches and parochial houses.
A complex scheme was included in the 1869 Act to compensate office holders in the Church for the abolition of their positions. Those included were not only bishops and clergy but also vicars choral and sextons. The technicalities of this scheme led to some disputes being resolved by formal hearings before the Church Temporalities Commissioners. The compensation was paid by way of annuities. Many clergy commuted their annuities to a capital sum which was paid by the State to the Representative Church Body. This body then paid the annuities to the clergy, and became entitled to any surplus. The security of the clergy was thus provided and the actuarial surplus available for the benefit of the Church. The last annuitant died in 1939.
The disestablishment of the Church was simply accomplished and while many in 1870 feared it was the first step in dissolving the Union with Great Britain, disestablishment removed the Church from an increasingly untenable position as the official state church. That decision meant that however difficult the subsequent seventy years might be, the issue was removed from the debates over home rule, partition and the establishment of the Irish Free State.
The Reverend Robert Marshall is auxiliary curate at Stillorgan and Blackrock and deputy diocesan and provincial registrar of Dublin & Glendalough.
You can find out more about our commemorations of Disestablishment here.
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