| Description | Fr John Heenan (later Archbishop of Westminster) recommended that there should be a joint committee set up to link the Catholic Sword of the Spirit with its non-Catholic counterpart, Religion and Life. This was the first time an ecumenical committee representing all the Christian bodies had been established in the UK.
Among those representing the Church of England were the Bishop of London, Dr Geoffrey Fisher (later to become Archbishop of Canterbury), George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, and the poet, T S Eliot. All the Free Church representatives were clergy, but, with the exception of Fr John Murray SJ, all the Catholic members were lay, namely Christopher Dawson, Richard O'Sullivan, A C F Beales, Douglas Woodruff and Barbara Ward.
The Sword of the Spirit wanted to expand Christian co-operation [ecumenism] and establish joint statements of principles that would lead to a "new world order" after the War. However, the Joint Committee of the Sword of the Spirit and Religion and Life was hampered in achieving these aims by a number of different factors.
Some of the leading figures in the movement - Cardinal Hinsley, William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury), and William Paton (Secretary of the World Council of Churches) - died within a year or so of each other. Cardinal Hinsley's successor, Bernard Griffin, did not share the same views on Christian co-operation as the rest of the Joint Committee, particularly over the Statement on Religious Freedom that they planned to make.
As numbers attending started to dwindle, with the Bishop of Lancaster withdrawing altogether, Joint Committee meetings began to be cancelled. Those that did take place were somewhat disorganised and ill-prepared. As progress faltered, it seemed that the Sword of the Spirit would not survive.
AFC Beales was facing his own difficulties at this time as he tried and failed to get two books published, one on Cardinal Hinsley and one on Christian Co-operation. He was also dealing with widespread ill-feeling in the UK towards the Vatican, in particular a speech by Dr Henry Townsend, Moderator of the Free Church, following the publication of a letter by the Pope complaining about American bombing raids on Rome in 1943
The most significant achievement of the Joint Committee was a statement of common Christian ideals presented at a press conference at the Waldorf Hotel on 28 March 1942, in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Hinsley.
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