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Monsignor Graham Leonard obituary Bishop of London who turned to Catholicism after showing strong opposition to the ordination of womenMonsignor Graham Leonard, successively bishop of Willesden, Truro and London, who has died aged 88, was third in the Church of England hierarchy and one of its leading bishops. He evoked strong support in many parishes and among Anglo-Catholic clergy, and was widely influential. He was chairman of many church bodies, including the Board of Education and the BBC and IBA Central Religious Advisory Committee. As bishop of London, he was a privy counsellor and a member of the House of Lords, was frequently involved in reunion discussions and visits to other parts of the Anglican communion, and was a representative at the World Council of Churches.However, in 1994, three years after his retirement from London, and after conversations with the Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster, his friend Cardinal Basil Hume, he was received into the Roman Catholic church and was ordained priest sub conditione. At Leonard's own consecration in 1964, an Old Catholic bishop from the small churches that have separated from the Roman Catholic church, but are in full communion with the Church of England, had joined the bishops who consecrated him. This eased his reception into the Roman Catholic church, and he was made a monsignor.Leonard was brought up in his father's evangelical parish and at Monkton Combe, Somerset, a school which then emphasised individual conscience, a literal interpretation of the Bible and male leadership in the church. At Oxford, like his wife, Priscilla, whom he married in 1943, Leonard read botany. He served in the forces from 1941 to 1945. He reacted against the evangelicalism of his home and school and against the mainstream Anglicanism of the William Temple mission to Oxford that he attended. He warmed to Anglo-Catholic worship, remembered the processions and incense that he witnessed in a south London mission when he was 11, "and knew that was right for me".During his time at Westcott House theological college in Cambridge, he turned away from the theology of the faculty and from the more catholic Anglicanism of Sir Edwin Hoskyns and later Michael Ramsey. Leonard relied on the earlier, pre-critical works of the Right Rev Charles Gore as his standard authority. The disciplines of New Testament study and the history of the development of doctrine never attracted him. He was unsympathetic with the English reformers, and with Bunyan and Wesley.Leonard's career in the 1950s and 60s as curate, incumbent, director of church schools and archdeacon was exemplary. He was energetic, efficient, caring and prepared to face down the "Sir Humphreys" in Whitehall, among the church commissioners and in the town halls. He was assiduous in visiting and publishing devotional books, urging frequent communion. He used to say, "you don't kiss your wife once a week, do you?", with the implication that the Eucharist should be attended daily. He produced a new parish communion book of his own devising.Older priests occasionally found the former adjutant slightly laughable and questioned his assumption that his way to holiness was the only way. But he was young and enthusiastic, and so they forgave him as much nicer than some pompous ecclesiastics. He was greatly admired by Anglo-Catholics for his stress on "objective revelation".As bishop of Willesden (1964-73), Leonard became involved in church politics, especially the ecumenical plans suggested by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, the most catholic archbishop the church had seen that century. Their minds did not fuse. Perhaps the stress on literalness and individualism that Leonard had imbibed in his evangelical days made it hard for him to get alongside his archbishop, eccentric, learned and wise. Leonard was urged by some of his followers to defeat the ecumenism of the archbishop, casting Leonard in the role of "Athanasius contra mundum". To be Catholic in their eyes was to take no risks in befriending Protestants and to adopt a narrowly defensive stance.Many Anglo-Catholics who were hoping for rapid reunion with Rome hailed Leonard's form of leadership. He was a beacon for priests who longed for the authority of Rome and distrusted historical and theological research, which they viewed as weak liberalism. Leonard also welcomed support from conservative evangelicals. His refusal to moderate his fixed positions was respected by many. He had no fear of being in a minority. The difficulty for the archbishops of his time and for his episcopal colleagues was that he claimed that his views were "absolutes" and that reunion with Methodists, covenanting with the free churches or ordaining women would damage the church. He opposed the admission of divorced women to the Mothers' Union.His individuality showed in his clothes: he had a strong sense of theatre. As a curate, he startled the Cambridge parishioners of St Andrew's, Chesterton, by bicycling in a cassock and a biretta, though eventually the bicycle chain chewed up the cassock. As diocesan education secretary, he raised eyebrows at the "ministry" (as it then was) in Curzon Street, central London, by appearing in a black, Spanish-style, broad-brimmed priest's hat. In Truro (1973-81), full of firm Methodists and Atlantic storms, he might appear at an ordination attired in mitre, ceremonial gloves and gremial (a silk apron-like covering for the lap of bishops). He was deeply disappointed during his tenure at Truro not to be nominated for Canterbury. He was never comfortable with the practice of shared responsibility in the Church of England.As bishop of London (1981-91), Leonard was an unwise picker of men as suffragan bishops and canons. Against Archbishop Robert Runcie's advice, he went to take a confirmation service at a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, no longer recognised by the Episcopal church, enraging American bishops, not least because the bishop of London seemed to be harking back to colonial days when London was bishop to all American churches. Although the English House of Bishops did not formally rebuke him, they did not endorse his action. Mainstream Anglicans in London felt that their bishop was unsympathetic and his sermons detached from their real problems.Politically, he was fortunate in Margaret Thatcher. She was in the habit of saying, rather loudly, that Leonard was the only man in the Church of England who made the kind of sense she was looking for. He had shrewd political judgment and was an excellent negotiator. Whereas Lord (William) Whitelaw, who was losing influence in government circles, was a friend of Runcie, Thatcher felt she could do business with Leonard. She had been astute in appointing him to London instead of the Right Rev John Habgood, archbishop of York, whom many had hoped could be a mediator to calm the divisions in the diocese.Leonard's attitude to ecumenism was sympathetic to Rome, but critical of the churches of the Reformation. He would not co-operate with Methodists in London. Early in his ministry, in 1952 at Ardleigh, Essex, his parish was preparing for the customary remembrance service with the Methodist minister preaching. In the words of the local British Legion chairman: "Graham Leonard put a peremptory stop to all that. To him, the Methodists were dissenters from the form of worship practised in the church." Leonard argued that only the reordination of Methodist ministers would give them validity. By rejecting the proposed service of reconciliation, he humiliated both his own archbishop and the Methodists. He led the opposition of those who defeated both reunion with Methodists and the covenanting proposals.The crisis of his career began in 1984 when the General Synod, after decades of discussion, started to legislate to ordain female priests. Leonard had been admirable in his pastoral concern for female staff at Church House. He had an unusual number of female workers in parishes in his diocese. He was notably honourable in ordaining 71 women as deacons at St Paul's Cathedral on 22 March 1987. This ordination weakened the arguments against the ordination of women as priests, but he went ahead. Still, he was hesitant about allowing women to exercise authority. He appointed an area bishop to Kensington who directed that no woman should be in the sanctuary when he was celebrating, even though Kensington had many female deacons and female servers. Leonard once used the law of trespass to prevent 100 men and women accepting the ministration of a female priest ordained abroad. After his retirement, when the London ordinations of female priests finally took place in St Paul's in 1994, more than 5,000 worshippers crammed the cathedral. Instead of acting as a focus of unity, he left the diocese of London with an unhappy, unreconciled minority.Leonard was a compassionate and painstaking confessor and adviser. He would spend time with the victims of injustice or misfortune. Before and after services and on parish occasions, he was warm, friendly and good-humoured.It was his misfortune to be summoned to London, the diocese of which he had dreamed, just when two opportunities – a new ecumenism and a new status for women – were opening to Christianity in England. His childhood and early education had led him to believe profoundly that to make changes in favour of women would be to compromise the gospel. Had he been able to engage in open-minded dialogue and research, he would have been a leader who could have greatly enriched the Church of England – such was the strength of his inner convictions and his commitment to be a bishop.Leonard retired to Witney, Oxfordshire, celebrating mass as a Roman Catholic parish priest and helping out wherever needed. He also did a great deal of retreat work, leading conferences, giving lectures and engaging in spiritual direction.He is survived by Priscilla and two sons.• Graham Douglas Leonard, Anglican bishop and Roman Catholic priest, born 8 May 1921; died 6 January 2010• Alan Webster died in 2007AnglicanismReligionCatholicismguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Let's keep Cabinda in the spotlight | Lara Pawson The attack on the Togolese team in Angola has brought attention to a region rife with repression, conflict and oil exploitationAfter many years of being completely ignored by the international media, Cabinda, the sliver of Angolan territory that sits between Africa's two Congos, has made it into the headlines. Suddenly, everyone wants to know about the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (Flec), in reality a seriously depleted rebel movement: even the Sun reported Friday's attack on the Togolese team at the start of the African Cup of Nations.It is amazing what football can do for a tiny corner of the world that years of repression, conflict and oil exploitation cannot. Of course the three deaths on Friday are a tragedy, but the fact is that Cabindans have been living with a great deal of misery and hardship for a very long time. Some writers have suggested that the war in Cabinda was always forgotten, but hardly anyone I know has even heard of Cabinda, let alone got round to forgetting the place. Yet it has much to make it famous, or infamous. Oil, for example.Angola currently produces almost 1.9m barrels of oil per day (bpd), and about a third of that comes from Cabinda, which has been producing oil for nearly half a century. The Cabinda Gulf Oil Company (Cabgoc), then a subsidiary of US-based Gulf Oil, began explorations in 1958 and was pumping by 1969. Even when Angola gained independence in 1975, and the socialist-style Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) took power, Cabgoc carried on operating. Production was not even affected by the US government's support for Unita rebels; and at one point, in one of the lesser known ironies of the cold war, the Cuban military protected the US company's Cabinda operations from potential attack. Today, Cabgoc (now a subsidiary of ChevronTexaco) is still in Cabinda, where offshore oil installations fill half a million barrels of oil each day.One of the beauties of Angola – if you are an oil company anyway – is that oil production has always been offshore, thereby circumventing the kind of problems companies face in Nigeria's Niger Delta region, where militants can carry out attacks on onshore oil installations and cause havoc. In the last few years, however, oil exploration in Angola has come onshore too. This development has coincided with the end of the Angolan war in 2002, and – more pertinent to this story – a peace agreement for Cabinda in 2006.The deal between the Angolan government and Flec – dubbed the Memorandum of Understanding on Peace and National Reconciliation in Cabinda Province – was a sham, despite being welcomed by the US government, which described it as "more than just a document on peace and reconciliation; it is the promise of economic development and increased political influence". What the US did not mention was that the man who signed on behalf of the rebels, António Bento Bembe, had no credibility as a representative of Flec.In 2005, he was arrested by Interpol in Holland for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping of a US citizen, a Cabgoc employee, in Cabinda in 1990. (One of Bembe's former co-rebels, Arthur Tchibassa, was arrested in 2002 and, in 2004, was sentenced to 350 months in a US jail). The Americans wanted to fly Bembe to the US to be tried, but a Dutch court turned down the request. While in detention in Holland, Bembe was visited by intelligence staff from the Angolan ruling elite. Thereon the plot began to twist. Bembe was allowed out on bail and swiftly disappeared. When, a few weeks later, he reappeared in Congo-Brazzaville, he was a reformed man and a friend, believe it or not, of his lifelong enemy, the ruling MPLA. No one seemed to mind – not even the US – when Bembe agreed to the MPLA's peace deal. Only Flec complained, but no one was listening to Flec: the memorandum, which offered little for the people of Cabinda, passed by almost unnoticed beyond Angolan borders.Nice and neatly, a few months after all that, onshore oil explorations got under way in Cabinda. Both ROC oil, an Australian company, and Chevron are now conducting onshore drilling in the troubled province. Meanwhile, Bembe was given a government post of minister without portfolio. A sort of sub-clause of his post puts him in charge of human rights in Cabinda. He has not been doing a very good job.According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, there has been, in Cabinda, a "disturbing pattern of human rights violations by the Angolan armed forces and state intelligence officials. Between September 2007 and March 2009, at least 38 people were arbitrarily arrested by the military in Cabinda and accused of state security crimes. Most were subjected to lengthy incommunicado detention, torture, and cruel or inhumane treatment in military custody and were denied due process rights".Since Friday's attack, Cabindans – including lawyers, members of the church and human rights activists – have expressed concern that human rights abuses will increase. People I have spoken to in the last 48 hours are predicting that an intense security crackdown is likely to be enforced across the small but very resource-rich territory. This would not be difficult for the Angolan authorities to organise: they have one of the most powerful armies in Africa. Moreover, Cabinda is already crawling with government troops that have effectively turned this enclave the size of Yorkshire into an occupied territory. Because of the onshore oil facilities and gold mining ventures in the centre of the province, private and well-armed security firms are also prevalent.To the outside world, it may look as if Cabinda is a Niger Delta in the making. There are many Angolans who would agree, and who predict that the government's failure to invest in the enclave's social and human development will provoke further secessionist activity from Flec rebels and militants. However, it may also be that the Angolan authorities have exploited such a perception in order to launch a pre-emptive strike on the Cabindan resistance. Was Friday's attack really the work of Flec, or was it what you might call "an inside job"?Certainly it does not take a sophisticated and well-equipped army to carry out an ambush. All you need is a few men with guns. Flec has carried out numerous attacks of this kind over the years. However, the octogenarian leader of the movement, N'zita Tiago, has insisted – from his rebel base in Paris – that this was not the work of Flec. Of course, he may be lying. However, it is not so barmy to suggest that the whole fiasco has been the work of Angolan intelligence operatives seeking to show the world that Flec are "terrorists" that pose a threat to oil supplies and stability. Certainly this argument might gain sympathy from western countries like Britain and the US, which are major investors in Angolan oil. But it is not beyond the Angolans to construct, if you like, an excuse for an attack. In 1999, at the height of the civil war with Unita, Zambian officials blamed the MPLA for a series of bomb explosions in Lusaka, one of which went off inside the Angolan embassy leaving one person dead.The real tragedy, of course, is that by the time the next wave of repression is under way in Cabinda, the international media will have forgotten Angola, leaving the government to do what it will with impunity.AngolaOilOil and gas companiesTogoTogoAfrica Cup of NationsGlobal terrorismHuman rightsLara Pawsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Haitians Anxious for U.S. Troops' Aid in Port-au-Prince No store or shop or life is safe as looting and violence rush into the vacuum created by the collapse of the Haitian government after the earthquake feedproxy.google.com |
Oops, art student slips and rips multi-million pound Picasso A woman who was taking an art class at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art accidentally falls into a Picasso painting and damages it. news.bbc.co.uk |