To Bath on a Sunday evening, to JA Hansom’s magnificent church of St John the Evangelist, just around the corner from the station on South Parade. A journey made many times before, but never for the lively student Mass at 6.30 – which seems quite a sensible time in a busy university city.
I wasn’t there for the ambience, but rather to bid a fond farewell to Canon Tony Harding, the former archivist of Clifton diocese, whose body had been received into church that afternoon. As I was going to be unable to make the funeral Mass the next day, it was the least I could do – for I adored Tony and owed him much.
Years ago Tony was the guardian of the main stash of papers from which I wrote my doctorate, and eased considerably a gruelling exercise in endurance. On my first visit to his archives he insisted on collecting me at Temple Meads Station, so that I would know where I was going.
I found a small elderly man with thick white hair, in clericals and a dark blue raincoat down to his ankles; he had a warm and firm handshake and just a hint of west-country burr. His Mini was well known locally; we made our way with a few near misses and the sounding of horns, to which he seemed entirely oblivious.
The white-knuckle transport continued until Tony apologised: “I won’t be able to pick you up next week – I’m having my cataracts done.”
His guardian angel had a full time job; in his 80s he fell downstairs at Bath Station, broke his neck and went into cardiac arrest. He was back at the altar six weeks later.
Tony went to Rome in 1947 to train for the priesthood at the Venerable English College. As was then the custom he returned home once, four years later. The next time he saw his parents was after Luigi Cardinal Traglia, the Vicegerent of Rome, ordained him to the diaconate in Dodeci Apostoli in 1954.
I constantly asked for and lapped up Tony’s stories of Rome in the days of Pius XII; he was always happy to oblige.
In his time the students at the Venerabile still wore their distinctive black habit and hat; it once gave them the advantage over the more easily-spotted purple-and-red Scots College boys in a huge snowball fight in St Peter’s Square.
When the hot water failed for the umpteenth time a deputation of students went to protest to the Rector, only to be met with “it was good enough for the Martyrs” – apparently it was a catch-all and invariably ungainsayable response. There was no venturing out alone, either; the seminarians ran errands in fours, or not at all.
Things that I had long regarded as history had, once upon a time, still been in Tony’s future. He was in St Peter’s Square for the definition of the Assumption in 1950; he spent seven years as a priest before the Second Vatican Council had even been convoked by John XXIII, and his formation never left him.
Although unfussy his hands were always immaculate; after I gave him dinner at Bath’s grand Empire Hotel he quite unconsciously folded up his large linen napkin as if it were a corporal.
At another regular pasta-and-pizza haunt he always insisted on speaking Italian to the long-suffering waiters, who were obviously Greek.
In 2015 a group of Tony’s friends colluded to produce a festschrift edition of the Downside Review in honour of his diamond jubilee of priesthood. I edited it, and we sprung it on him at the thanksgiving Mass at St John’s, where he ministered in retirement. He was surprised and delighted, and it was a joy to see.
Tony’s first years of parish work were entirely Tridentine, but he was not sentimental about it, and was quite at home in the Novus Ordo. Nevertheless, the rich pastoral experience of nearly 70 years of priesthood – he was 91 when he died – led him to a few dispassionate observations of his own.
They were just that – observations – but three have never left me. The first, on High Mass: “all these subdeacons who aren’t subdeacons. I am, of course.”
The second, on Communion in the hand: “I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing; I’m just saying that I’d never touched a Host with my fingers until I consecrated one at my First Mass.”
The third has considerably more wisdom in it than I realised at the time, and perhaps especially comes into its own at a moment when the liturgical pax Benedicti of the last 15 years seems about to be obliterated.
Reflecting on the changes that he had seen, Tony often recalled the saying of a distinguished prelate (I think it may have been Cardinal Heenan) who simply mused that “the Church of The Garden of the Soul was not entirely full of weeds”.
Tony was a good and holy priest with a twinkle in his eye. May he rest in peace.
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