ESBVM

We are sorry to record the deaths of the following faithful members of the Society.

Mrs Iris Johnson
Mrs Alice Haste
Canon Edward Every
Mr Wilfred Spence
Mrs E. Wilkins
Bishop John Baycroft
Rev David Butler
Mr R.H. Marsden
Rev. M.J. Beasley
Miss Olive Hall
Mr Peter Kenyon
V. Rev. A. Barker
Sister M. Joseph
Dr Avril Bruten
Canon Bede Davis
Rev. Geoffrey Pinnock

The Rev’d David Butler was one of the foremost British Methodist ecumenists of his generation. As a student minister, he was able to study in Rome in the heady years after Vatican II. After ministries in Beckenham and Worcester Park in London, he became a lecturer at Queen’s College, Birmingham, an ecumenical foundation, where he taught church history and ecumenics. During this period, he acted as co-secretary of the British Roman Catholic-Methodist Committee and also served on the international Catholic Methodist Commission from 1986-1991, playing a major role in the production of the one of its most influential dialogue reports, The Apostolic Tradition. A few years later, he devoted his sabbatical to study in Rome, the fruit of which was his immensely scholarly survey of Catholic-Methodist relations, Methodists and Papists. He followed that work up with doctoral research on Bishop Challenor and for that he received the degree of PhD. from the University of Birmingham. His later years were dogged by very considerable ill-health but he continued active in the British Catholic-Methodist Committee and as a consultant to the Association of Interchurch Families. He will be much missed in Methodism, in the Society, and beyond.

Canon Edward Every was sometime a canon of the Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem and one of those Anglicans who particularly looked to Orthodoxy for inspiration. In old age, he lived at Warlingham.

Bishop John Baycroft, a Canadian Anglican bishop, was for some years in charge of the Anglican Centre in Rome.

Dr Avril Bruten was author of one of our early pamphlets, The Courtesy of our Lady: A Medieval View.

Canon Bede Davis was parish priest of St Mary’s, Falmouth for sixteen years and a keen member of our Cornwall Branch.

News has also been received of the death of a Belgian friend of the Society, Fr Pierre Parre, who gave us a paper at the Bristol congress of 1996. Pierre was well known to Joe Farrelly, David Carter and, particularly, to Fr. Mark Woodruff upon whom he had a great influence at a key turning point in his life. Pierre was born in 1925 and ordained in 1949. After Vatican II, Cardinal Suenens asked him to take charge of relationships with Anglicans, a job into which he threw himself with the sheer energy and enthusiasm which were his hallmark. He visited England frequently and encouraged twinnings between Anglican and Belgian Catholic parishes. He set up a small Belgian ARC group to follow the development of ARCIC and masterminded its amazingly detailed papers. His ministry included a spell as chaplain at Louvain and though not a professional academic, he became immensely knowledgeable about ecumenism in general and Anglicanism in particular. Through contacts with the late Neville Ward and , much later, David Carter, he also took an interest in Methodism which he came to esteem with his usual generosity of spirit. Speaking to David Carter of Pierre one day, the former Professor of Liturgy at Louvain-la-Neuve, Andre Haquin, referred to him as ‘a person of very remarkable human qualities’. There can be no finer tribute to a man who was truly a presbyter of the universal church, a man of intensely catholic spirit.