"Unworthy Servants": The Rhetoric of Resignation at Canterbury, 1070–1170

Medieval attempts to resign episcopal office hold many complexities: legal issues, religious ramifications, and the personal motivations behind such acts. Taken at face value, appeals to resign appear direct and explicit; bishops desire release from an office they feel unworthy to hold, or in which they feel they have accomplished little. On closer scrutiny, however, many of these texts reveal purposes quite apart from resignation. Indeed, the attempts of three archbishops of Canterbury to resign office in the eleventh and twelfth centuries reveal strikingly similar rhetorical devices that indicate less a desire to leave office than to bolster the archbishops' spiritual authority. The requests of Lanfranc, Anselm, and Thomas Becket employ language designed to reinforce episcopal centrality at times when kings and even popes dis-regarded its importance, at least in the eyes of these archbishops. Despite the differ-ing circumstances that gave rise to each appeal for resignation, the stylized discourse in all of them suggests a need to make specific points that would rouse support for or bolster the perception of the requestor's episcopal status. All three archbishops, as well as their chroniclers or biographers, saw issues of Canterbury's leadership in the spiritual life of England at stake, and resignation became the means to pro-mote and advance the episcopal cause. By bringing repeated phrases of unworthiness or lack of accomplishment into their appeals for resignation, each man sought a response that would reassure him of his worthiness and ability to lead Canterbury.     

Containing "Contamination": Cardinal Moran and Fin de Siècle Australian National Identity, 1888–1911

Cardinal Patrick Moran, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney 1884–1911, believed that Australian Catholicism would flourish with the emergence of the new nation through Federation in 1901, provided that Australians turned away from foreign influences, including anarchism and nihilism. Moran also sought to use Australia to "Christianise" the enormous population of China, and believed that Chinese immigration could make a useful contribution to nation building. As the nineteenth century closed, Moran's aims were also complicated by the more insidious threats represented by a challenge to religious faith by fin de siècle ideas — a modernism manifesting as both a general challenge and a specific doctrinal relativism that might erode the Church's authority, and the threat Moran felt was posed to the development of the liberal Australian state and the Catholic Church by radical political alternatives. Concern that a mood of religious apostasy and secularisation might spread to the Catholic community also influenced Moran's support for the fledgling Australian Labor Party, which Moran believed could develop as an instrument to reinforce a moral and inclusive sense of Australian identity for the Catholic working class. Like his pro-Chinese views, Moran's advocacy of "the rights and duties of labour" was defined by an imagined alliance of evangelism and nation building, stimulated by the fear, as he expressed in 1891, of "an unchristianized world."     

"A Dogged Inch-by-Inch Affair": The Church of the Nazarene in Australia 1945–1958

The Church of the Nazarene began work in Australia in 1945 at the instigation of a handful of disaffected Australian evangelicals, marginalized from more orthodox believers in their holiness radicalism. They were often looked upon as holy rollers and sinless perfectionists, purveyors of a brand of religion thought to be populist, coarse, and theologically suspect. In America in the 1940s, the holiness movement churches had moved much further toward the traditional mainstream than was the case in Australia. The early Australian Nazarenes saw a decline in the religious fervour of other evangelical bodies, and saw themselves as raised up to champion a return to the apostolic fire of early Methodism. They were, perhaps naively, unaware of the lowering of religious tension in their own mother church. Differences between the ecclesiastical culture of Australian and American Christianity were to prove internal challenges to be added to the challenge of external opposition.