MANCHESTER (CNS): The former Anglican bishop of Chester, Peter Forster England, has joined the Catholic Church.
The 71-year-old is the fourth Anglican bishop to be received into the Catholic faith in less than a year and the fifth to become a Catholic in the past two years.
He was bishop of Chester for 22 years until his retirement in 2019 and was received into the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, Scotland, where he now lives with his wife, Elizabeth. The private ceremony was understood to have taken place late last year, but Forster did not wish to make his move public.
The Church Times, a London-based Anglican newspaper, learned about his decision and ran a story on February 4. Forster, when approached on February 6 by Catholic News Service, declined to comment.
Gavin Ashenden, a former traditionalist Anglican bishop and chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, said Forster’s reception was significant.
Writing in the Catholic Herald, he said that a decade ago, “people would have laughed” at the suggestion that high-profile Evangelical Anglican bishops would be joining the Catholic Church. Most bishops joining the Catholic Church have come from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England.
But an “entirely new reconfiguration of spiritual and theological fault lines is developing,” Ashenden said in his February 5 article. He said many other Anglicans are recognising that “the power and vivacity of lived Catholic tradition has become the antidote to the perversity of progressive political ambition.”
Ashenden, who became a Catholic in 2019, said, “The flow of Anglican refugees has only just begun.”
Although Forster was a supporter of women’s ordination, he strongly opposed the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples.
