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Obituaries from The Glastonbury Bulletin

The Glastonbury Bulletin was the official organ of the Catholicate of the West as led by Mar Georgius I, Metropolitan of Glastonbury (Hugh George de Willmott-Newman (1905-79)) between 1944 and his death. As such, it was not only the record of British Orthodoxy at that time but also to a large extent the record of the ISM.

Mar Georgius, through repeated subconditional consecrations, succeeded in unifying in his person all the then-extant Apostolic lines that had passed into the independent movement's various churches. Although he himself was broadly Orthodox in polity, he accepted consecration from, and in turn ordained and consecrated, men of the widest imaginable range of churchmanship, ranging from Traditional Catholics to esotericists such as +W.B. Crow and +J.S.M. Ward. Such was the umbrella that the Catholicate of the West provided as a source of unification for the ISM of its time.

Some have described Mar Georgius, perhaps with justice, as not the easiest of men to work with, and more than a few prelates found either that the objections of their consciences compelled them to resign from the Catholicate, or had that decision made for them via the frequent excommunications that Mar Georgius felt himself obliged to issue. Nevertheless, for those who saw eye to eye with him, his energy, encouragement and spiritual leadership were a source of strength and unity during a period marked by considerable external hostility towards the independent movement.

As the 1970s approached, Mar Georgius' health deteriorated and more and more of the burden of administration devolved upon his second cousin William Henry Hugo Newman-Norton, whom he consecrated in 1977. It was he, as Metropolitan Seraphim of Glastonbury, who was to be Mar Georgius' chosen successor upon the latter's death in 1979.

The Glastonbury Bulletin, which was in time renamed the Glastonbury Review, was during and for some time after Mar Georgius' tenure virtually the house journal of the British ISM, with obituaries of all significant figures appearing alongside scholarly articles of various kinds. These obituaries were published anonymously.

From the 1970s, Metropolitan Seraphim set in place changes that were in keeping with his wish to seek union with mainstream Orthodoxy and acceptance for what was now known as the Orthodox Church of the British Isles, later to become the British Orthodox Church, as a mainstream Orthodox community in its own right, echoing the mission of Mar Julius of Iona in 1866. These changes affected the OCBI and indeed the Glastonbury Review fundamentally, imposing an ecclesiastical viewpoint of conformity to hierarchy and establishment that, while integral to all mainstream expressions of Orthodoxy, nevertheless stood at odds with the positions of a number of the clergy whom Mar Georgius had brought into the OCBI fold. Mar Georgius had himself formally repudiated the very Free Catholic movement to which he owed his orders as he drew closer to Orthodoxy in the later 1960s, and so it is to some extent paradoxical that writing on the ISM was being generated from a source that, although intimately involved with it, stood at a remove from it characterised by some degree of hostility.

Such developments in the 1960s and 1970s were to set the stage for the watershed of 1994, when Metropolitan Seraphim was consecrated within the Coptic Orthodox Church and led the OCBI into union with that body. An account of these events is provided from the perspective of the BOC here.

The reception of the OCBI into union with the Coptic Orthodox Church left a number of clergy with significant interest in the OCBI feeling bereft and isolated by such a move. The essential conflict was between Metropolitan Seraphim's unstinting commitment to the essentials of mainstream Orthodoxy, which demanded complete submission and obedience of the individual to the wider Church, and the opposing commitment of some of his clergy to independent ministry as an expression of individual conscience and spiritual freedom. The gap between these two positions was, as might have been anticipated, unbridgeable.

Of course, alternative jurisdictions became available to those who left the OCBI in the wake of these events, but sadly the most prominent of these to have emerged, the Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain (1975 branch) and the Independent Catholic Church of Great Britain (1993), offered only false prophecy in the place of sanctuary. These matters are addressed in more detail in other sections of the Mathew Center's repository.

From 1994, in keeping with the revised nature of what was now the BOC, the Glastonbury Review became largely a chronicle of the Coptic and other mainstream Orthodox denominations, and ceased to be concerned with the ISM per se, even inasmuch as that concern had always merely been a by-product of the extraordinary outreach of the ministry of Mar Georgius. Since that time it has continued to maintain its high standards of scholarship and to contain material that is of interest to all who are drawn to the expression of Orthodoxy as that term is understood in the mainstream of church affairs. Recent past issues are available on the website of the BOC.

Obituaries from the Glastonbury Bulletin

>>+Geoffrey Paget-King
>>+Morris Frank Saville [with further notes by +John Kersey]
>>+Charles Leslie Saul