A former Bishop of Chester, who served as a Lord Spiritual in Parliament, has left the Church of England to become a Catholic.
Newsroom (07/02/2022 2:15 PM Gaudium Press) Anglican Bishop Peter Forster is the third leading Church of England clergyman to become Catholic in the last year.Forster helped lead the Anglican Diocese of Chester for over 22 years and was the longest-serving Church of England bishop, according to Premier Christian News. His former diocese has some 273 parishes. He retired in September 2019 at age 69 and moved to Scotland with his wife, Elisabeth.
A spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Scotland said that Dr. Forster, 71, had been “received into the Catholic church last year” in the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, which covers the area near the Scottish Borders where he now lives.
The news of Forster’s conversion makes him the third Anglican prelate to have entered the Catholic Church in the last year. Michael Nazir-Ali, former Anglican Bishop of Rochester, was received into the Church in September and was ordained a Catholic priest on Oct. 30. Jonathan Goodall, the Anglican Bishop of Ebbsfleet, resigned in September to enter full communion with the Catholic Church.
Forster had served as a member of the English Anglican-Roman Catholic Committee. He has been critical of a “drift” in ecumenical relations “from a vision of full visible unity to an essentially debased vision of reconciled diversity,” the Church Times said.
The retired Anglican bishop had supported the ordination of women to the Anglican priesthood, and the Chester diocese was the first to have a woman bishop. At the same time, he was critical of the Church of England’s approach to women bishops and how this affected relations with other Christian bodies. He thought it was “astonishing” that the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission had not published anything on the ordination of women.
Forster has been involved in some debates of the day. As an Anglican bishop seated in the House of Lords, he opposed 2013 legislation recognizing same-sex unions as marriages in England and Wales, though Parliament successfully passed the bill.
In 2015, in response to Pope Francis’ encyclical on God’s creation Laudato si’, he co-authored a critical commentary with Bernard Donoughue, a Labour Party member of the House of Lords and a lay Catholic.
Forster and Donoughue said the encyclical struck them as “well-meaning but somewhat naïve.” While the Pope’s “ecological spirituality” recommends much that is “valuable and commendable,” they said, “to regard economic growth as somehow evil, and fossil fuels as pollutants, will only serve to increase the very poverty that he seeks to reduce.”
Their comments were published as a briefing for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a U.K. think tank focused on climate and energy policy. The foundation takes a position skeptical of anti-climate change policies which it says “may be doing more harm than good” both to the environment and to the world’s poor.
Forster has faced scrutiny over his handling of several Anglican clergy reportedly involved in sexual abuse of children. In 2009, Chester diocese priest Gordon Dickenson admitted to Forster that he had sexually abused boys, insisting that he would never abuse again, but the bishop did not pass this confession on to authorities.
Dickenson, who had been involved in a sex abuse scandal in the 1970s, was convicted of eight counts of sexual assault against boys in March 2019. Forster gave up safeguarding duties to another local bishop pending the outcome of an independent review into how he handled the case, Premier Christian News reports.
Compiled by Saju Hasmukh
