Garbett was ordained in 1899 as a
deacon and was sent to be a
curate of
St Mary's Church, Portsea, where he was ordained to the priesthood in 1901 and remained until 1919, after 1909 as its vicar. In 1911 he was joined at Portsea by the newly ordained
George Armitage Chase, who would later serve Garbett after his ordination to the episcopate, as examining chaplain.
Tubby Clayton, later to found
Toc H, was his curate from 1910 to 1915. Garbett was consecrated as the
Bishop of Southwark by
Randall Davidson,
Archbishop of Canterbury, at
St Paul's Cathedral on
St Luke's day (18 October) 1919 and remained in this position until his translation as the
Bishop of Winchester in 1932 before, in 1942, becoming the
Archbishop of York.
Archbishop of York Garbett was a popular public figure, especially as a pastoral bishop, famous for trudging the length of his
dioceses with his
walking stick, visiting both clergy and lay people in the towns he passed through. On the other hand, Garbett belonged to the generation which was comfortable with the idea of diversity in the Church of England and had little patience for
High Church versus
Low Church struggles. He was a pioneer of the
Ecumenical Movement and, during and after the
Second World War, travelled extensively, including to
Communist Bloc countries. Although generally perceived as leaning rightwards politically, he was comfortable with the
welfare state which emerged during his archiepiscopate. Garbett's trip to Moscow in September 1943, at the invitation of the
Moscow Patriarchate, was greeted by the newly installed Moscow Patriarch
Sergiy (Stragorodskiy), was used by
Joseph Stalin's propaganda machine to spread falsehoods about religious freedom in the
USSR: on 24 September, the
New York Times quoted Garbett as stating that "he was convinced that there was the fullest freedom of worship in the Soviet Union". However, during the
Cold War, Garbett denounced communism as un-Christian and actively supported the British government line. On 17 April 1944, Garbett appeared on the cover of
Time magazine after he had been persuaded by the British
Ministry of Information to go to the United States to discuss religious freedom in Russia. During this visit, he said that "Marshall Stalin, being a great statesman, has recognised the power of religion." Garbett's visit to
Dublin, where he met President
de Valera, was considered significant. Garbett sat in the
House of Lords for many years as a
Lord Spiritual and, as an
erastian, he took his duties very seriously. In a notable statement made to the House of Lords in 1942, Garbett denounced
Nazi Germany's extermination of Polish Jews, calling it "the deliberate and cold-blooded massacre of a nation". On his retirement, Garbett was offered and accepted a hereditary barony, but he died before this could be legally created. ==Final years==