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No 164 - 2001
3 Fr Adrian Hastings 1929 - 2001
PROFESSOR Adrian Hastings, who died on May 30, 2001, was certainly the most influential and distinguished former pupil of Douai School of his generation. Although born in Kuala Lumpar, his family moved to the Douai parish of Great Malvern when he was two. Two Benedictine influences upon his life were the parish priest, Fr Bernard Buggins OSB, and his grandmother who was a nun at Stanbrook Abbey, having entered the community after the death of her husband, and whom he only ever met through the grill. At the age of eight, shortly after receiving first communion at Stanbrook, he decided to become a priest. He was sent to Douai School from 1943 till 1946. After leaving Douai at the age of sixteen he was accepted at Worcester College, Oxford to read History. During his final year, he went on retreat to Caldey Island and discerned that he was being called to be a missionary priest in Africa, and, after talking it over with his former headmaster at Douai, Fr Ignatius Rice OSB, he joined the White Fathers. Later he came to see he could best serve the church in Africa if he became part of it, so he left the White Fathers and was incardinated into the diocese of Masaka, Uganda, by Bishop Joseph Kirwanuka, at the time the only black bishop in Africa. He studied theology at the College of Propaganda in Rome; and after ordination in 1955 and the completion of his doctorate with a thesis on Anglican ecclesiology in 1958, he travelled to Uganda.
Throughout his novitiate and philosophical studies with the White Fathers, and theological studies in Rome, he found increasing tensions arising between the anti-intellectual ‘text book’ theology being taught and the theological thinking and practice being promulgated by contemporary theologians such as de Lubac and Congar, as well as between the narrower life style demanded and that freedom which is an essential of Christianity. He did not find this tension improved when he arrived in Africa; in fact the situation grew worse, as he found deeply conservative attitudes entrenched in the church in Africa. While the Second Vatican Council was taking place he was working first as a curate and then teaching History, Literature and Scripture, preparing Africans for an English examination system in a minor seminary and producing Shakespeare plays. He was the librarian but he found the censorship by the college authorities oppressive, especially when it came to cutting pictures and pages out of books, so briefly he went back to parish work. However, several bishops realising that the Council had been barely noticed in Africa, asked Fr Hastings to prepare notes on the various documents of the council in order to educate the clergy. These notes were sent to over seventy dioceses in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. and were eventually published in England in two volumes by John Todd.
Fr Hastings’ study of the teaching of Vatican II led him to see the ongoing contradiction between that teaching and its implications and the reactionary practice of the Roman curia who were continuing to work with a pre-conciliar model of church.
One of the biggest problems in the African churches was the fewness of native priests. As European missionaries declined, there was no corresponding growth in African vocations. A major cause of this, was, according to Hastings, the Roman insistence on celibacy. As early as 1966 he had written in his Church and Mission in Modern Africa "To save the Church in Africa today we have more than anything else to declericalise her ... finally, and most difficult of all, we have to declericalise the ministry."
Eventually the contradiction between essential church teaching, that every Catholic community should have Sunday Mass, and ecclesiastical policy insisting on mandatory celibacy for priests, coupled with frequent bouts of malaria, led Fr Hastings to see that there was no point in his remaining in Africa. So he returned to Britain, and was in the fortunate position of not being tied to a local ecclesiastical superior. In 1966 he was invited by Mgr, later Cardinal, Willebrands to serve on the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Preparatory Commission, along with Benedictine theologian Bishop Christopher Butler, under the chairmanship of Cardinal Bea. The commission held three meetings at Gazzada, Huntercombe and Malta, and Fr Hastings made a major contribution to the final report. This proved to be a turning point in Fr Hastings’ life, as it brought him in touch for the first time with international theology and engendered in him a commitment to work for Anglican Catholic unity.
No Catholic institution seemed able to offer Fr Hastings employment, especially as he was one of the many who had dissented publically from Humanae Vitae, but the Anglicans came up with a job. He was commissioned to prepare a report Christian Marriage in Africa, which he found a stimulating task. Various visiting lectureships came his way; he became a research officer at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies on a study of Christianity in independent Africa, and in 1972 he was invited to join the staff at the College of the Ascension on the ecumenical campus of Selly Oak, Birmingham. In 1976 he was appointed to the theology faculty in Aberdeen University.
Meanwhile, the question of clerical celibacy continued to occupy him. As early as 1964 he had written in the African Ecclesiastical Review of the need for the Church to change its discipline in this matter. It was another fifteen years before it became a personal matter for him. In 1978 he wrote,"After much thought and prayer I have come to the decision that I am free as a Catholic priest to marry. I have come to this after long years of wrestling with myself and pondering both the pastoral and missionary needs of the Church and the basic nature of the Christian priesthood, marriage and freedom." The following year he married Ann Spence in the College Chapel at Selly Oak, without seeing any need to ask ecclesiastical permission to exercise this basic human right. He made his pre-marriage retreat at Douai.
Because he had no ecclesiastical superior in Britain, he was never formally excommunicated, although technically he had excommunicated himself. He was never barred from communion, and indeed celebrated Mass from time to time when invited.
His academic advancement continued: in 1982 he returned to Africa as Professor of Religious Studies in newly independent Zimbabwe, and in 1985 he was appointed Professor of Theology at Leeds University, the first Catholic to hold the post. His predecessor there was the well-known David Jenkins, who had just become Bishop of Durham. Fr Hastings remained at Leeds until retirement in 1996.
Professor Hastings’ writings were prolific; he wrote over forty books, and they covered a wide field, from his first book which was a study of the teaching of St Luke, to A History of English Christianity, 1920 - 1985, in which he gives recognition to Abbot Sylvester Mooney, Abbot of Douai 1929-1969, to The Church in Africa, 1450-1950, to The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. He was editor of The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought published in 2000. His last book, a biography of Oliver Tomkins, Bishop of Bristol, an ecumenical pioneer and a man after Hastings’ own heart, was published posthumously.
Another aspect of Fr Hasting’s life was his political activity. This came to the fore in 1973. He was a member of Catholic Institute for International Relations and by chance came across information about the massacres that the Portuguese army was carrying out at Wiriyamu and elsewhere in Mozambique. It so happened that the Portuguese Prime Minister, Marcello Caetano was to visit London to celebrate six centuries of Anglo-Portuguese alliance and to cement closer relations between Portugal, South Africa and Rhodesia. It was agreed that the report about the massacres would have greatest effect if it were published just before that visit. Fr Hastings sent it to The Times and it appeared on the front page a few days before Caetano’s arrival. The next ten days took Fr Hastings to the United Nations where he had a private interview with Secretary General Waldheim, and to several counties in Europe, as well as requiring many newspaper and television interviews. The international storm about the massacres, helped bring about the subsequent overthrow of Caetano’s government in Lisbon and independence for Mozambique.
Following this, Fr Hastings became involved in international politics wherever there was injustice: Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo. Many letters and articles appeared in The Tablet, The Times and elsewhere on these topics. One can imagine what he would have said about the American bombing in Afghanistan had he lived long enough. One of his last appearances about a month before his death was at the London School of Economics in March 2001 at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, at which he presented a paper Holy Lands and their Political Consequences. The focus of the paper was the development of a conception of the importance of a territorial basis for God’s people, firstly for Jews in the Old Testament and then for Christians in the Middle Ages. He showed how these conceptions shaped the narratives of belief, i.e. with exaggerated tales of battles in the Old Testament and myths in the Church of saints’ birthplaces and travels. Hastings gave a new perspective on Jerusalem, which was insightful and thought provoking. In looking over Fr Hastings’ life one sees someone who had complete intellectual honesty, and would always speak out against injustice and hypocrisy wherever he saw it. He was never afraid of speaking out, even when those in authority, whether in church or state, would have preferred he keep silence. He was never afraid of rocking the boat when it needed to be rocked. His sureness or judgement and fearlessness of comment was based on absolute Christian faith, that never confused belief with superstition, and never saw docility as a Christian virtue. Such a sureness of faith was in line with his Benedictine formation in parish and school and his sure judgment due to his historical training, which began under the tutelage of Oliver Welch, an appreciation of whom was one of the last things he wrote (see next article). In Welch he appreciated one who ‘had a notably free and liberal mind’ and who although ‘untypical of the English Catholicism of his time yet spent his life in a Catholic environment shaped by Benedictines’ and who combined ‘liberalism and traditional loyalties’. Welch was Hastings’ mentor; he wrote "My great support and befriender at Douai was one of the only laymen on the staff, Oliver Welch, the History Master ... For me, history was really the only subject worth studying, and Oliver was a wonderful teacher who could fan out all my own interests"1. Indeed the pupil far outshone the master. From his Benedictine heritage he went forth to become a sound historian, one who was careful in searching the evidence and sound in making judgments, without prejudice. In his study of theology he saw the intellectual inadaquacy of Catholic theology as taught in seminaries before Vatican II, and the futility of the life styles insisted upon in Catholic clerical institutions, whether in England, Rome or Africa. He refused to accept these inadaquacies, just as he rejected the hypocritical practices of Catholic church authorities after Vatican II. Christianity to be alive must be concerned with people, so he was led into international affairs, where he refused to say what was politic, but insisted on truth being known and acted upon. All his political efforts were faith inspired.
Adrian Hastings life was summed up in obituary in The Times May 31, 2001, 'In private as in public Hastings was erudite, brilliant and a superb organiser. He was generous in giving praise, if scathing in rebuke, and never held a grudge. Many younger scholars benefited from his enthusiastic support.'
Just before his death he learned that he had been proposed to be elected to Fellowship of the Bristish Academy which gave him great pleasure, but unfortunately he died too soon for the formalities to be completed. Fr Adrian Hastings has had enormous influence for good, and will continue to do so through the many pupils and others he has reached through his lectures, seminars and writings. ‡
1 Adrian Hastings In filial disobedience Great Wakering 1978 page 31.
Index
Douai Society Dinner, May 18 2001 Extracts from a speech by Abbot Geoffrey Scott OSB
Pre-Vatican II Catholic: The Case of Oliver Welch by Adrian Hastings
Indian Interfaith Encounters by Fr Peter Bowe OSB
Impressions of El Salvador January 2002 by Fr Alexander Austin OSB
Music at Douai March 2001 - February 2002 by Fr Oliver Holt OSB
St Mary's Parish Studley by Fr Paul Gunter OSB
New Mass Setting: Roxanna Panufik's Douai Missa Brevis by John Rowntree
Go to index of Douai Newsletter.