Oh, not again! Please, dear Lord, not again! That was all I could think when the priest of my local Catholic church announced last week that he would be gone by the weekend. That’s the fourth in seven years and two lasted only a year.
When I began going to the Church of the Holy Spirit in Bovey Tracey, the priest was Fr George Carrick, who retired two years later. Then we had Fr Seamus Flynn who was patently ill when he arrived and was gone after a year. Next we had the wonderful Mgr George Hay, who valiantly filled the post for two years despite being by then in his 80s, and who knew the parish well from a previous stint as its priest.
Then came Fr Guy de Gaynesford, who is neither elderly nor ill, and I thought here at last was going to be a period of stability. His sermons are wonderful but so is his intellect and he was already doubling up as head of the School of the Annunciation at Buckfast Abbey.
I should have seen it coming. He has been snapped up by Buckfast Abbey to be the full-time head of the aforesaid school. Darn! In what might be described almost as a straight swap we are getting a monk from Buckfast in his place.
It is very good of Fr James to give up his monastic life and come to live in the presbytery as a parish priest, but the point is that he is a monk. Nobody becomes a monk by accident and so we may assume that he wants to be a monk and that he will at some point return to being just that. How long have we got this time?
Cardinal Basil Hume always wanted to return to Ampleforth. He was not a career churchman and accepted the Archdiocese of Westminster “under obedience”. He was doing too magnificent a job for the Vatican ever to agree to it, but lesser mortals can reasonably expect to be able to return to their monasteries.
I was brought up in a strong Anglican family which regularly breeds vicars. My uncle was vicar of the quaintly named Yetminster and Ryme Intrinseca for decades and my brother was parish priest in the same church for 47 years. Before anybody says that times have changed, my nephew has been vicar of his church for 10 years. When I was growing up, a new vicar’s arrival in a parish was a big event. Every week from when I was 10, the Rev Reggie Evans thundered from the pulpit of St John the Baptist, Batheaston that we brought nothing into this world and would take nothing out. He was still uttering this dire warning from the same pulpit when I had left university.
Meanwhile, at my Catholic convent school the priest who said Mass when I first went there was still saying Mass in the school chapel when I left. His assistant priests changed but he didn’t.
In my constituency many of the vicars I first met as a new MP were still there when I retired. I attended their inductions and they attended my leaving events.
Change in itself is not a problem and indeed can inject new life into a parish, but constant change is unsettling and means a priest can never really begin to exert an influence outside his own church. He arrives. He gets to know the faithful. He makes a change here and there. Then he goes.
I know the Church – and by no means only the Catholic Church – has problems with falling numbers of vocations. The Anglicans can no longer supply a priest in every parish and its churches are being deconsecrated and sold off, but there is a good reason why Anglican priests stay in situ: they tend to be married and families like the stability of a regular home life and schools.
Once, married CofE vicars who crossed the Tiber were confined to chaplaincies in prisons, schools, hospitals or the armed services. Then came the exodus of more than 300 priests from the Anglican Church following the 1992 decision to ordain women. It was always going to be the case that eventually some would end up in parishes, given their numbers at a time of declining vocations. The notion caused a televised argument between Peter Stanford and me the night before my own reception.
Somehow Catholics have survived the shock so perhaps those parishes in need of stability of leadership should ask the bishop for a married Anglican or, better still, perhaps the Catholic Church should do what it did for 1,100 years of its history and let its own priests marry. It doesn’t appear to have done St Peter any harm.
Ann Widdecombe is a novelist, broadcaster and former prisons minister
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