John Goddard see his life as a pilgrimage. It has taken him into Anglican orders, first as an Anglo-Catholic priest and as the Anglican Bishop of Burnley. Then in May 2021 his pilgrimage took a more radical, albeit logical, course.
Unable personally to resolve questions about the exercise of authority within the Church of England, he became a Roman Catholic, and was received into the church in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool at the hands of Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Williams.
This month, the same bishop is due to ordain him a Catholic priest. For Goddard that moment is a culmination of his lifelong pilgrimage to full communion with the See of Peter as well as the start of a new chapter in a lifetime of Christian ministry – but this time as a Catholic priest.
Speaking to the Catholic Herald as he prepared, he said the hardest part of these latest steps of his journey to Christian fulfilment was learning to live with an ardent “longing to say Mass”.
“It’s almost painful,” he says. “Being a person called to priesthood has been a core of my life, the character that I have been called by Christ under his authority to exercise. Of course, it’s me, it’s part of my being.”
It is a conviction which was also recognised by Archbishop Malcolm McMahon of Liverpool when they discussed his future.
“He said, ‘You have always been a Catholic in the sense of what you believe and I would like to see the ordination as moving onward to the fullness of the Catholic priesthood’,” recalls Fr Goddard. “It is a fulfilment.”
He is a bright-eyed and affable man of 74 years, with a deeply pastoral heart who looks forward to immersing himself in parish ministry, “where my love is”.
“I cannot think of a greater joy in life than serving as a parish priest,” he adds. “It is perhaps the greatest gift for an ordained person.”
As the Herald went to press, the married father-of-two was still waiting to learn of how the archdiocese would like to see him exercise such ministry. Ideally, for him, it would be in an active parish under the mentorship and authority of an experienced priest.
Yet there can be little doubt that a man of his holiness, dedication and pastoral experience will be of great benefit to whichever setting he is assigned. Like generations of former Anglicans before him, he is likely to enrich the life of the Catholic Church with the talents he has developed over decades.
The Archdiocese of Liverpool is not the only English diocese to benefit from the arrival of a highly talented former Anglican bishop such as Fr Goddard.
The Archdiocese of Westminster has wasted no time in putting Fr Jonathan Goodall, also a married father-of-two, to work as parish priest of St William of York in Stanmore, a church in the London borough of Harrow, after his ordination in Westminster Cathedral on 12 March.
Fr Goodall’s ordination came just six months after he announced he was stepping down as the Anglican Bishop of Ebbsfleet to become a Catholic following a long period of prayer he described as being “among the most testing periods of my life”.
The ordination of Fr Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, came about within a shorter time span: there was just a month between him being received into the Catholic Church at the end of September to his ordination as a priest of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham on 30 October.
Dr Peter Forster, the former Anglican Bishop of Chester, has emerged as a fourth bishop to be received into the Catholic faith in 2021. He has retired to Scotland and has yet to reveal if he has any plans to exercise priestly ministry within the Catholic Church.
Many reasons have been cited for the recent influx of senior Anglicans. Each individual will have his own story to tell.
Fr Goddard sees his own journey as a “culmination of many years”, which found its final expression after deep reflection on “how decisions are made within the Church and the basis for those decisions”.
He says he would not be surprised if other Anglicans, both in the Anglo-Catholic and the Evangelical wings of the Church of England, were also making their own personal pilgrimages toward full communion with Rome after similar reflections. But he acknowledges that many have “all sorts of difficulties before them” and, although they may think of themselves as Catholics in their beliefs, feel it is not the right time for them to make “a big break”.
He points out that even within Anglicanism, the faithful migrate between wings and factions internally as they attempt to discern what God is calling them to do.
Fr Nazir-Ali likewise has a nuanced view of recent developments. He plays down, for instance, the significance of the fact that he and Dr Forster were the first former diocesan Anglican bishops to be received into the Catholic Church since Bishop Graham Leonard of London and Bishop Richard Rutt of Leicester crossed the Tiber in 1994.
Nor does he attach too much meaning to the fact that it is also far more uncommon for Evangelical Anglican bishops to become Catholics than those from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England.
“These distinctions are quite often artificial,” he said. “I have for a long time described myself as a Catholic Evangelical.
“In the Ordinariate in this country, and also in the United States, there are many people of Evangelical backgrounds and Jeffrey Steenson [the first ordinary of the US Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter] was definitely from that background.
“The questions of concern are not so much about ritual and sacraments as questions of authority and where there is authentic authority – not so much about what has happened but how decisions have been made.”
<em>This article first appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of the </em>Catholic Herald<em>. <strong><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/">Subscribe today.</a></strong></em>
