Exclusive interview with the Archbishop of York

The Daily Telegraph

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, was in typically ebullient form last week when I spoke to him at Bishopthorpe, his medieval palace on the banks of the River Ouse near York.

In a wide-ranging interview, he expressed exasperation with aspects of the Government and the Church but also confidence in traditional British values of honesty and fairness.

Dr Sentamu, a former judge who was forced to flee the regime of Idi Amin, was particularly critical of the rising tide of bureaucracy and Government legislation and he questioned moves towards a written constitution.

"Britain has an unwritten constitution which hasn't failed this nation once," he said. "Why is there a clamour for a written constitution?

"Why are people suggesting that writing one would make Britain a better place? I don't believe it."

"The more you write down your laws and have more of them my view is that you are becoming less and less of a free society.

"More regulation implies in the end that you don't actually have confidence that people will act justly.

"And the more laws people pass, it seems to me, that is a society full of fear, of worry, of anxiety....

"I wouldn't want to be a judge in this country. I don't think there is enough time to read the legislation coming out. There is too much of it."

He said he believed that 99 per cent of British people would like to live in peace with their neighbours but there was a "little core that is nasty".

He added: "You can't use legislation to cure a bad minority. It just doesn't work."

A tax for marriage

The Archbishop, who was appointed to York 18 months ago, said that family breakdown was at the root of many problems and more should be done to reinforce marriage.

"The Churches should really try to get properly trained counsellors who could be used to help families in difficulty," he said.

"It would be very good if the Family Division courts could be encouraged to use mediation more.

"But for that to happen greater funding has got to be provided and churches could become centres for mediation.

"I believe that family life and marriage are the bedrock on which a lot of other things are built."

Dr Sentamu advocated a scheme under which married couples on low incomes were paid a "living wage" by the state to allow one of them to stay at home to look after the children and undertake voluntary work.

"I want a kind of taxation which is geared towards those who need it most," he said.

"I wouldn't mind if the Chancellor said to me that in your pay packet we are going to take off one pence in the pound and this is going to go towards marriage. I would gladly do it.

"Because of the cost of living is high, because mortgages are high, when they have their kid, after six months they are back at work. But that child desperately needs to bond with the dad or the mum."

Putting wealth back into the community

Lamenting the levels of poverty that still exist in sections of the country, Dr Sentamu challenged the country's top earners to follow the lead of the Victorian philanthropists and put some of their money back into the community.

"What do you do with big earners?" he asked. "There are those who say tax them more.

"But you tax them more and they shift their business somewhere else and so whatever you thought was going to be your work at home suddenly disappears.

"Your entrepreneurial people may then go overseas so you lose all your industry in the long run. So it is not a simple question.

"In my view, though, if you are earning a lot of money, and you have benefited from what you have got, why don't you go back to the community from where you came and put in some. To me that would be a better way....

"I would love to know, do those who have made their millions ever think I was a working class lad from that estate. I made it.

"Let me go back and find how they are doing. Let me go and put something back in there."

Recapturing a sense of imagination

A fan of the Harry Potter books, Dr Sentamu urged the Church to enthuse people by capturing their imaginations.

"What the Church of England has lost is the art of telling stories," he said. "We have become more monosyllabic. A sense of imagination sometimes isn't around.

"We need to rediscover the greatest story tellers and I have to say, as a Christian, that Jesus was an unbelievable story teller.

"He had the ability of simplifying and then exaggerating and that is what actually happens in Harry Potter."

He continued: "I don't go in for magic, but mystery for me is that which remains when explanation, logic, reasoning have all been exhausted.

"We've gone into the logic, the reasoning, the explanation. Ultimately, when you have done all of that, there is something bigger than that which we call mystery. For me, Jesus is at the heart of this great mystery.

"We've tried hard to explain everything and I don't know where that came from.

"Not all things are explainable. Not all things are solvable. Some things really remain unresolved."

A plea for unity

Inevitably, questions over the future of the worldwide Anglican Communion surfaced, and Dr Sentamu, a close ally of his counterpart at Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, issued a plea for unity.

He warned the leaders of the conservative Global South group that they would be in danger of putting themselves outside the worldwide Church if they carried out their threats to boycott the Lambeth Conference next year.

He said: "The thing that unites all Christians is our faith in the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and what makes us Christians is that we participate in the death and resurrection of Christ.

"The other thing to remember is that we are all sinners in need of God's grace.

"As long as someone does not deny the very basic doctrines of the Church - the creation, the death, the resurrection of Christ and human beings being made in the image of God - then the rest really helps but they are not the core message.

"And I haven't found that in Ecusa or in Canada, where I was recently, they have any doubts in their understanding of God which is very different from anybody. What they have quarrelled about is the nature of sexual ethics."

He nevertheless emphasised that Dr Williams does expect those who attend Lambeth to abide by the decision-making processes of the Anglican Communion.

"The Archbishop of Canterbury is very clear that he still reserves the right to withdraw the invitations and that those who are invited are accepting the Windsor process and accepting the process about the covenant.

"But in another sentence, he said that attending Lambeth is not also a test of orthodoxy.

"Church regulations and Church legislation should not stand in the way of the gospel of love your neighbour.

"You are members of one body and therefore you should listen to one another and find a way out.

"I want to say to both sides, you would do well to come to the Lambeth Conference for us to hammer out our differences.

"It will be no good for either side to say, it doesn't matter now, we can just do anything we like."