A doughty episcopal reformer.
Born in Essex on May 27, 1937, Hugh Christopher Budd was educated by the Salesians at Chertsey before entering the junior seminary at Cotton College. From there he progressed to St Thomas’s Seminary, Grove Park, before completing his studies at the Venerable English College in Rome. He was ordained in July 1962, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council.
Remaining in Rome to pursue doctoral studies, Budd served as tutor in Theology at the Venerabile while the implications of Vatican II began to filter down through the Church. He returned to England to teach Theology at Newman College before moving to the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council. From there he was sent to St John’s Seminary, Wonersh, in 1979, as its Rector.
The upheavals of the post-conciliar Church had seen numbers at Wonersh plummet; the ship had been steadied by the softly-softly approach of Mgr James McConnon but Budd, who had been appointed to lead the seminary with very little pastoral experience, imposed radical change. Among other things, his ban on students wearing cassocks and collars was widely resented. When the 1983 Code of Canon Law established that seminarians were in fact required to wear clerical dress, Budd remained unmoved. Meanwhile the regular amateur dramatics, in which students traditionally sent up their tutors, went to the wall. They were an important valve on the pressure-cooker of seminary life, and at Rome Budd had himself taken part in similar events with gusto.
Other changes at Wonersh, however, included the driving up of academic standards and the introduction of an emphasis on character which developed into what is now the psychological assessment of would-be priests. Budd left Wonersh in 1985 to become Administrator of Brentwood Cathedral, in his home diocese, but was there for only six weeks before John Paul II appointed him Bishop of Plymouth.
Budd stayed at Plymouth for the next 28 years, stepping down two years after the traditional retirement age in 2013. He served as a member of the Social Justice Department of the Bishops’ Conference and chaired its Joint Bioethics Committee; he was also a director of Caritas. Meanwhile his commitment to ecumenism earned him a canonry of the local Anglican cathedral at Truro.
He had succeeded the kindly and traditionally-minded Cyril Restieaux, but as at Wonersh Budd arrived in Plymouth with one eye on change. He sold his predecessors’ residence and moved into a small flat next to the Cathedral of St Mary & St Boniface; with reforming zeal he also embarked on a large-scale reordering of the building, transforming a traditional space into something far more daring.
Budd’s plans for his cathedral – they included a full-immersion font – met with considerable and vocal opposition in the diocese on grounds of cost and further afield on grounds of taste. In the end he was forced to back down on a number of more radical points after bitter arguments in the national press and even appeals for papal intervention.
As the Herald noted at the time, “progressives … argued that it was a minority of hide-bound traditionalists who were obstructing modern worship. In short, the battle over Plymouth Cathedral represented a conflict between liberals and conservatives … and raised fundamental questions about the nature of worship and the changing structures of authority in the whole Church.”
Certainly Budd was a doughty episcopal reformer – the homilist at his funeral compared him to St Charles Borromeo – but whether he was always right in his approach to change remains open to debate. What he was absolutely right about, however, was the scandalous case of Joseph Jordan. In 2000 Budd spoke frankly to the BBC as part of a Panorama investigation into the handling of abuse allegations in the Archdiocese of Cardiff.
Jordan had left formation in the diocese of Plymouth after refusing to undertake the kind of psychological testing that Budd had begun to pioneer at Wonersh. He had later been accepted for training by John Aloysius Ward, who then ordained him to the priesthood. Jordan was later convicted of indecently assaulting a number of children, and duly sent to prison. Budd explained that he had expressed his suspicions about Jordan to Ward, but that his counsel had gone unheeded. In an unusual, but clearly necessary, comment on a brother bishop’s conduct he called Ward’s approach “lax”. He came across as open and straightforward; Ward emerged with his reputation in tatters and resigned shortly afterwards.
Although there were rumours that his name was being considered for Westminster after the death of Cardinal Basil Hume, Budd remained at Plymouth, where he celebrated the silver jubilee of his episcopate in 2011 in the presence of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Lord Lieutenant of Devon and other representatives of church and county.
In retirement Budd enjoyed walking in the Devon countryside and watching cricket; as a young man he had been a fine sportsman. He divided his time between the Scilly Isles and Lyme Regis, before increasingly poor health forced him to reside permanently on the mainland. He died on April 1 at the age of 85, and was laid to rest at Buckfast Abbey.
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