Mr Peter McQuirk, one-time founder of our ESBVM Rome Branch, died last Wednesday, 24th October 2012 at St. Peter’s Residential home in at 2a Meadow Road, VAUXHALL, London SW8 1QH where the funeral will be take place on Friday 2nd November at 11 am. May he rest in peace.

Please pray for the eternal happiness of The Reverend Dom Alberic Stacpoole, Monk of Ampleforth Abbey, who died on 30th September 2012 in the 82nd year of his age, the 53rd of his monastic life and the 43rd of priesthood.

Fr Bill McLoughlin OSM, Honorary General Secretary of ESBVM, had spoken by phone with The Abbot on Friday to offer prayers and good wishes to Fr Alberic and the Community from the ESBVM. ESBVM now offers to Fr Abbot and the Ampleforth Community deepest sympathy and also to all members of the ESBVM in our loss and prayer of thanks for one who always offered the society such powerful and wise support.

May Fr Alberic come to that full share in the Resurrection in the hope of which we all live and may he rest in Peace.

Provisional Funeral Arrangements
Fr Alberic’s funeral Mass will take place at Ampleforth Abbey on Thursday 11th October at 11.30am, followed by burial in the vault in the Monks’ Wood, and a buffet lunch at about 1.30pm in the Main Hall.

Revd Prebendary Norman Wallwork’s neat and lovely summing up of Reverend Gerald Tedcastle’s importance in a range of ways was the first to speak of our sadness at learning of the death on 9th September 2012 of Gerald at his home on The Wirral in his 80th year.

Norman observed that “Gerald delighted in being a keen supporter and Patron of the ESBVM. He was a formerly Deputy Chair of the Liverpool Methodist District, an Assistant Minister at Wesley’s Chapel in London, a Chaplain to the City University and a Freeman of the City of London. Throughout his life he was a staunch defender of the Wesleyan Catholic tradition. May he rest in peace and rise with Christ in glory”.

One of our distinguished Methodist Patrons, Revd Dr.John Newton O.B.E. conveyed his deepest sympathy via Mrs Rachel Newton to Gerald’s family and to the ESBVM.

As Hon Gen Sec, Father Bill, OSM had spoken by phone with Gerald about a month before his death and had written a brief note to him following on from that to offer prayers and good wishes from the ESBVM. On behalf of the whole ESBVM he now offers “deepest sympathy to all members of the ESBVM in our loss for the Society is the poorer for his passing as well as the Methodist community and his own family. Prayer of thanks is offered for one who always offered the society such a gentle and wise support.”

Father Victor Cassam from the Anglican tradition in the Church of England within the ESBVM acknowledging the sad news of “Ted’s passing” said “We met only rarely but always got on very well at a personal level when we did. He represented all that was best in the Methodist tradition and is a great loss to the Society as well as to his Church and family….It is a salutary reminder of the passing years to note that he and I are the same age!”

Revd William Ritchie from the Anglican tradition in the Church of Ireland within the ESBVM expressed sadness at the death of this good friend.

The entire ESBVM Council wishes to express the sympathy of the ESBVM to Gerald’s family.

Mike Russell of the ESBVM North-West branch advised us that the funeral arrangements are on Thursday, 27th September at noon, in the Shrewsbury Crematorium where his mother and sister Diana both had their funerals from Shrewsbury and Mike hopes to be able to attend and has been asked to represent both the North-West branch and the whole society and it is sincerely hoped others might manage to be there. Norman Wallwork advises us that a Memorial Service for Revd Gerald Tedcastle will take place at Trinity with Palm Grove URC/Methodist Church, Birkenhead on Saturday 3rd November at 3 p.m. at which Revd Prebendary Norman Wallwork has kindly agreed to represent the ESBVM Council and our society.

May Gerald come to that full share in the Resurrection in the hope of which we all live and may he rest in Peace.

An obituary of Joe Farrelly written by Amanda C. Dickie, Honorary Press Secretary of ESBVM, has appeared here on the Independent Catholic News web site.

My entry to Chichester Theological College in 1979 to train for the priesthood brought me into contact for the first time with Canon Roger Greenacre. He had been brought to Chichester Cathedral as Canon Residentiary and Chancellor from the chaplaincy of St George’s in Paris in 1975 by Bishop Eric Kemp, an act which must have been one of his first strategic appointments as he had himself only been appointed to the diocese in 1974. Roger lectured in the Theological College from 1975 until 1989, principally, as I recall, in Church History, Liturgy, and the Sacrament of Penance. When almost out of his hearing, we referred to him as Père Roger or, more frivolously, as Gigi, such was our appraisal of him as affecting to be more French than English. How ungenerous we were in our humour! There was indeed French blood in him, but there was also a strong appreciation of France and its relationship with the English world, as well as a desire to be a bridge in his teaching and in his refined ecumenism between the two ecclesiastical cultures represented, French Catholic and Anglican. He himself contributed to this dialogue through membership of the English Anglican-Roman Catholic Committee. His The Catholic Church in France: an Introduction (1996) told the French Church’s story, presenting its character and the history of its relations with the Church of England to Anglican readers.

He was a post-Vatican II ecumenist, ready always as an Anglican to receive what was profitable from the spirit of the Council and to interpret back a broadening and more catholic and sacramental Anglicanism to which he was deeply committed. ARCIC was food and drink to him and he devoted many of his energies to promoting the ecumenical vision of Anglicanism “united but not absorbed” with Rome. Such an inspiration led him eventually to become an oblate of the Benedictine Abbey of Notre Dame du Bec in 1982, the fulfilment of a journey and a sympathy which had begun with his first visit there in 1952.

What began as the relationship between a student and his teacher in 1979 became, over the years, a friendship between colleagues. I never knew him well, I must admit, but we reached a gentle understanding. I returned to the diocese of Chichester in 1986 and held various posts thereafter, but I found myself gradually working more closely with Roger in the ecumenical field on two fronts: first, as one of a team of three diocesan Ecumenical Officers in which Roger had taken the lead as Diocesan Ecumenical Officer from 1975; and, secondly, through my membership of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of which Roger had himself been a member and luminary for many years, serving with distinction on its Council to which he brought theological rigour tempered by real sensitivity as well as characteristic wit. My own interest and involvement with the Society had only just been formed at that time, having been encouraged in it by Geoffrey and Jill Pinnock whilst in my second curacy in Oxford where they were parishioners. I recall a trip south to Chichester with me as driver and Geoffrey and Jill as passengers, the purpose of which was to renew acquaintance with Roger and spend time with him in his delightful home in Vicar’s Close, off Canon Lane, in the precincts of the Cathedral, talking ESBVM.

Arriving in the diocese of Chichester in the autumn of 1986 meant that I was able to be on the spot for the Seventh International Congress of the ESBVM (September 1986) which was being held at Bishop Otter College in Chichester. We were fortunate to be so near to the Cathedral and to be able to have Arundel Cathedral as a sister venue. I found myself amongst the great and the good of British ecumenism: Bishop Eric Kemp of Chichester was one of the Society’s Executive Co-Chairman (with established ecumenical credentials, having been a member of both the Anglican-Methodist Conversations and the Preparatory Commission of ARCIC I), and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor was Bishop of Arundel and Brighton and Co-Chairman of ARCIC II. Needless to say, Roger, a Residentiary Canon, was in the thick of it as he was Chairman of the West Sussex ESBVM (in those days one of the most active of the Society’s branches), and was supported – and regularly hounded – by the indefatigable Molly Corbally who was Branch Secretary and logistical animatrice of the Congress. It was a wonderful occasion and the papers of the Chichester Congress, Mary and the Churches (edited by Dom Alberic Stacpoole, 1987) testify to the breadth of intellectual interest the ESBVM stimulated internationally twenty-five years ago. Roger himself, an ESBVM Council member, was a regular contributor to such gatherings. A paper of his worth revisiting is one he delivered at the Conference at Dromantine College, Newry, in October 1995, and one which well exemplifies both his historical ecumenical interest and the range of his scholarship, The Malines Conversations: a significant milestone in the history of Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue in Mary is for Everyone (edited by William McLoughlin OSM and Jill Pinnock, 1997).

Having reached his seventieth year, Roger retired from Chichester Cathedral in 2000. He was awarded a Lambeth Doctorate of Divinity by the Archbishop of Canterbury the following year in recognition of his extensive and scholarly contribution to ecumenism. Not one to be put out to grass, Roger immediately took up a retirement post as chaplain to St Michael’s, Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. How typical of Roger to find himself such an agreeable posting! Although this time was often one of ill health for him, he certainly felt that he still had a pastoral role to play amongst the English community there as well as continuing to write and to study. He returned to England in 2010 and spent his last year at the London Charterhouse.

Two last occasions come to mind. The first was the celebration of his 50th anniversary of ordination as a priest in Chichester Cathedral in September 2005 at which Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran preached – “surely the first curial cardinal to fly to England from the Vatican to preach at a celebration of Anglican priestly ministry?” comments Dr Colin Podmore, Roger’s literary executor, in another appreciation elsewhere. In this he goes on to remind us of a warm personal greeting from the Archbishop of Canterbury read out at that singular occasion in which he praised Roger as representing “a particular style of Catholic Anglicanism that is deeply rooted in liturgy and personal prayer, critical and generous all at once” (New Directions, September 2011, p.14). The second occasion (and, for my wife and me, the last sight of Roger before he was physically diminished by terminal illness) was Bishop Eric Kemp’s Funeral Mass in Chichester Cathedral in December 2009. Here Roger and others kept vigil before Bishop Eric’s body as it lay before the Shrine of St Richard, a typically prayerful and generous act from one who owed so many debts to his former Father in God, and of whom Roger had been a devoted and loyal supporter through many ups and downs in Anglican Church life.

Roger’s memory was honoured at a Memorial Requiem in Chichester Cathedral on 23rd September at 11.30 am. May the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom Roger honoured in his life and in his work for the unity of her Son’s followers, pray for him as he enters into the peace of God’s saints.

Joe Farrelly had the gift of making amazing warmth and generosity seem quite natural, particularly in ecumenism. I joined the ESBVM about 22 years ago, by word of a friend and invitation from Joe. The same natural warmth and inclusion at its heart held me in the Society at times when it was not quite so easy for one of the first ordained Anglican women. I have always felt enormous gratitude to Joe for this.

Joe had a clear grasp of matters great and small. I remember his talking about the need to be civil to telephoning cold-callers, who are ‘only doing a job’. His perceptiveness was always accompanied by a strong humanity, in turn inspired by deep devotion. He was a Chaucerian ‘verray parfit gentil knyght’.

Joe Farrelly, who died on 31st August, became the second great enabler and inspiration of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, following in the footsteps of Martin Gillett who had founded the Society in 1967. Both were Catholic layman and both had an incredible network of significant contacts on which they could call both inside and outside of their own Christian tradition. Martin Gillett was a English Catholic convert where Joe Farrelly was a cradle Irish Catholic. Beyond his wise and pastoral gifts as a devoted schoolmaster were Joe’s commitments to the cause of the Catholic Marian societies and Catholic agencies dedicated to those in need. Like Martin Gillett, Joe believed that Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Reformed and Methodist theologians and thinkers – clergy and laity alike – could be serious, spiritual and critical together about the place of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the worship, reflection and dialogue of all the mainstream churches. Often graciously and amusingly critical of those inside the leadership of his own tradition it was out of his deep and loyal Catholicism that Joe formed lasting relationships with church leaders and shakers across the Christian spectrum. He had an eye for the deep ecumenists within Orthodoxy, Anglicanism and in the Reformed traditions. He had close friends within British Methodism, and for almost twenty years attended the Annual Low Weekend Conference of the Methodist Sacramental Fellowship. He was above all an encourager who built on the potential he saw in the young – ordained and lay. Joe’s outstanding service to British Roman Catholicism and to the crucial place of Mary in ecumenical devotion and dialogue rightly earned him the recognition of a Papal knighthood. He was never happier than being part of an ecumenical pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi. His anecdotal memory of the unofficial history of more than eight decades of English Catholicism, as he relayed it to Christians of all traditions, was a joy to experience. Joe was totally supported in his life and work by his widow Ann, much loved in a family that has not been without its sorrows and will continue to be held with love in the memory and prayers of his friends.

Norman Wallwork

2nd September 2011

ESBVM learns with sadness of the death earlier today of Joe Farrelly K.C.S.G., longtime and dedicated member of the Society, its Council and Executive. May his soul rest in peace and may Our Lady pray for him.

The funeral is to be at St Elphege [Joe’s parish church], 120 Stafford Road, Wallington, Surrey SM6 9AY. Tel/Fax: 020 8647 5079 on September 22nd 2011 at 10.00am.

ESBVM learns with sadness of the death of Canon Roger Greenacre, longtime friend and member of the Society. May his soul rest in peace and may Our Lady pray for him.

A tribute to Canon Greenacre can be found on the web site of the Diocese of Europe.

ESBVM learns with sadness of the death of Mgr Richard Rutt, longtime member and friend of the Society. May his soul rest in peace and may Our Lady pray for him.