I was ordained priest in June, 1955, aged 32. My experience of the world of the 1940s as soldier, student and teacher had convinced me that to live a conventional life would be madness. The world needed saving. Humanity was threatened. Statesmen, shocked by the havoc and suffering of a second Thirty Years War in Europe (1914-1945) were taking early steps to European Union; my response was to join the Catholic Church, drawn by reading Lord Acton, Christopher Dawson, Jacques Maritain... To be active in the Church, ordination seemed necessary. I gave up on a girl friend, and on the idea of becoming an academic.
I had joined the Birmingham Oratory. The NoviceMaster was doubtful. ‘Everyone here studied in Rome,’ he said. ‘Even Newman was there for a while – not a happy time for him... But I dare say it will be all right.’ I had studied, so far, in Paris, where as part of the course at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice I had had to give a presentation to fellow-students on some saint or spiritual teacher. I chose Newman, and was drawn to join his bookish community of ten or so priests.
Back from a short holiday after ordination, I passed the Father Superior in the hall. ‘They want you in the School,’ he said. ‘Short of RE. teachers. Not for long – we’ re finding a layman. Just see the boys know the Catechism.’ I was still in the School six months later when a new Superior was elected – the scholarly liberal Stephen Dessain. As Chairman of the Governors he had a vision of raising academic standards and making St Philip’s Grammar School into a sort of Catholic King Edward’s, the foremost Birmingham school. I worked in St Philip’s for twelve years as Head of the RE. Department. with a group of committed teachers that included Hamish Swanston and Duncan Macpherson. We took the Catechism as read, and taught the synoptic gospels to all the boys for O Level, and scripture to a few at A Level. We taught quite a lot of church history, some philosophy, current affairs – the Vatican Council – and we tried to answer questions about the Pill.
For Catholics, the early 1960s seemed good times.
Statistics for church-going were at a peak. Even before the Council opened, Hans Küng’s books were presenting hopeful prospects of what it might do.
When the Council ended, in 1965, we felt we had a wonderful message to communicate. I felt sure I was in the right place.
But in December 1966, the sky darkened. Charles Davis, Britain’s leading dogmatic theologian, left the Church. Cardinal Heenan and the Apostolic Delegate seem to have feared losing control of the runaway Church, and to the great satisfaction of many conservative Catholics who disliked the Council and all its works, they began to apply the brakes. Already, our liberal Superior had been replaced by a conservative. Restrictions were put on my work. The hottest issue was a ‘Parish Open Discussion Group’, which I had started, to talk about the Council. It was accused by traditionalists of being controversial and divisive, and the Oratory community sought to censor its topics and speakers. The group found this unacceptable. Had not the Index just been abolished?
Lacking clerical approval, the group wilted and died – but in several years of fortnightly meetings, much was learnt, including the limits of official tolerance.
The dark side of the story had always been there, of course. I recalled how at St Sulpice the works of Congar had circulated in samizdat form, and how earnest students, described as ‘engagés’ , ‘passionnés’, and even ‘ angoissés,’ who aspired to be priestworkers and missionaries to the de-christianised masses, found their way blocked by ‘Rome’. At the Birmingham Oratory, Superiors became less supportive of the Grammar School; politicians turned against selection, and a party surfaced in the Oratory saying we should be into pastoral work and devotions, not schools and learning. (These men had their way in 1994, when the Sixth Form College, which the Grammar School had become, was closed down.) In the spring of 1968, feeling my work under threat, I appealed to ‘Rome,’ to the Visitor appointed by the Vatican to oversee the Oratories. Early in l969 he sent his judgement, on the whole defending me. ‘It does not seem,’ he wrote ‘that Fr Challenor has gone further, in the matter of the “novelties” complained of than the Church herself, which is advancing with quickening steps.’ My community decided the Visitor had failed to understand the situation.
No Turning Back John Challenor gives an account of his pilgrim’s progress. sof 74 November 2005 And by this time, my crisis had intensified. In August 1968, the Birmingham Evening Mail reported a ‘pray-in’ – in effect a protest – about Humanae Vitae.
There was a photo of me handing out leaflets outside St Chad’s Cathedral. Next day, a Sunday, the Superior mounted the pulpit at all Masses and read out on behalf of the clerical community a declaration of loyalty and obedience to the Holy Father. So I was isolated, and with me an unknown number of lay people. (No one thought of consulting the laity.) Six weeks later, I was one of fifty-five priests who signed a letter to The Times saying we could not agree that artificial contraception is always wrong. After that, I was strongly urged to resign from the Oratory. I refused, and urged my brethren instead to engineer my dismissal. I was left officially unemployed. With nothing to lose, I was in a powerful position, and I admit I used it to make myself a nuisance some of the time.
Not that I wanted to get out. I persevered for four whole years, a self-employed free-lance, writing, taking part in CRM (Catholic Renewal Movement), lecturing in the evenings for the University Continuing Studies Department (where my immediate boss was Michael Goulder, then Staff Tutor in Theology). Eventually, I saw that I must make a new start in life. I resigned in September 1972, when the impasse had solidified, men’s health was suffering, and a day job in a non-catholic College of Education was offered me. I worked as a weekend priest for the diocese for some months, but found that the archbishop – George Patrick Dyer – had instantly summed me up as a delinquent. I felt free.
A young woman, who enrolled for one of my courses from October 1972, aroused my interest. We married a year later in the Church of England, to which she belonged. She had done a degree in theology, and was working as a probation officer.
After we had a child, she moved on to study music and became a singer. I moved too, to be Head of RE in a large multi-faith inner-city comprehensive school, which took in pupils from the Caribbean, from Pakistan, and from India by way of Uganda and Kenya. I worked there for eight years.
For fifteen years, family life and demanding work reduced my input to CRM to subscribing, and reading RENEW. When I read in 1989 that CRM was thinking of closing down, I offered to take an active part again. I put in another fifteen years on the Executive, until last year when age indicated retirement.
The question has been put to me – am I a Catholic now?
After marrying, I was for thirty years a church-going Anglican. At Catholic weddings and funerals, invited to receive the wafer, if in full communion, I usually felt excluded, and refrained. But nor would I claim positively to be an Anglican. After July 2003, when conservative evangelicals pushed Rowan Williams into making Jeffrey John forego his bishopric, I ceased to be an active member of the C of E. To exclude gays from church office seems to me a betrayal of the gospel, analogous with the disgraceful purge of ‘racial’ Jews from office in the German Lutheran Church in 1933-4. So I am perhaps a former Catholic and a lapsed Anglican. Positively, I would describe myself as a Jesus Seminar/Sea of Faith type of Christian, concerned to stand in the prophetic and wisdom traditions.
First published in Renew, June 2005, and reprinted here by kind permission of the current editor.