Faithful Witness: The Confidential Diaries of Alan Don, Chaplain to the King, the Archbishop and the Speaker, 1931-1946. Edited by Robert Beaken (SPCK)
Catholics in England, if they think much about the Church of England at all, tend to assume that it is straightforwardly a “State” church, run by the government like the Duchy of Lancaster, the Atomic Energy Authority and the Milk Marketing Board. I recall, when I was a vicar in Sevenoaks, the astonishment of the local Catholic parish priest when he learned that I was not in fact paid by “the government”, but apart from £350 a year from the Church Commissioners my congregation had to raise all the money themselves, as his did. The Church of England is not a “State” church, like some of the continental Lutheran ones, and it is not a “concordat” church like the Catholic Church still is in Alsace-Lorraine. But it is an Established church, with a complex and sometimes baffling interweaving with politics, government and the constitution, and this book is an outstanding and often highly amusing account of this nexus before secularisation did for it in the 1960s.
