Monsignor Augustine Hoey
Remarkable Anglican priest who worked in parish missions and eventually became a Roman Catholic
MONSIGNOR AUGUSTINE HOEY, who has died aged 101, came close to death repeatedly, exemplified Benedictine stability but moved from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic priesthood aged 79, and combined an aversion to dust with a resolute asceticism.
Prone to pneumonia as a child, he was not expected to live long. People gathered round his bed when he was three as he “seemed to come out of myself and hover above them”. He saw his mother “bending lower and lower over me, willing me not to die, and gradually she pulled me back into my body”.
On holiday at Filey aged 14 he got stuck climbing the high cliffs, and “always believed it was my guardian angel who rescued me from certain death”.
As a clergyman at Hackney one day in 1944 he heard the engine of a V1 flying bomb cut out. The next thing he knew he was being dug out of a pile of rubble. A row of houses had blown into the churchyard, but, while workmen spent the night digging the dead from the debris, Hoey had suffered only a cut that needed four stitches. Again he thought it the work of his guardian angel. His escape made the front page of the Daily Express.
While he was preaching one day at Elmshall in Yorkshire, a great stone came down from above a pillar and he felt the draught of it as it passed his face. He went on preaching, though his legs trembled.
He was born Kenneth Thomas Hoey at Beeston, a suburb of Leeds, on December 22 1915, the son of a shoe manufacturer. Being delicate, he was seldom allowed to go to school till noon. He went to Cockburn’s, a co-educational school in Leeds.
As a boy he wanted a crucifix. His mother said: “Crucifixes are only for Catholics.” At length he was allowed one, provided he kept it in his bedroom. “I used to look at it,” he recalled, “not with formal prayer, but thinking how marvellous it must be to love as much as that.”
Aged 12, Kenneth persuaded his parents to attend Christ Church, Meadow Lane, an Anglican slum parish that put on a full High Mass. There he had another out-of-body experience convincing him of the presence of Christ in the reserved Eucharist.
He went up to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1935 to read History, but devoted more time to the college drama society and spiritual reading. He served Mass at Pusey House, which used the Tridentine Missal translated into English.
With JND Kelly, the patristics scholar, he visited Walsingham. At first he found the shrine too theatrical. But he was soon carried away there into prayer of intercession.
Hoey went on to Cuddesdon theological college. By this time he had 30 suits to choose from, made by a tailor out of friendship. The stole he wore at his ordination was designed by Norman Hartnell.
At his ordination retreat in 1940, Geoffrey Fisher, the Bishop of London, addressed the ordinands: “Pacifists, step forward! Go next door. I’ll deal with you later.”
Hoey served his curacy at St Mary of Eton, Hackney Wick, where he got to know clergy of the Community of the Resurrection. He was ordained priest in the crypt of St Paul’s in 1941.
One day, after a Corpus Christi procession, Mother Millicent of the Will of God, foundress of the Society of the Precious Blood, summoned him. “I was observing you in the procession,” she said. “I think I should tell you that you should dedicate your life to prayer.”
In 1945 he joined the Community at Mirfield, taking the name in religion of Augustine. After a year he returned to parish work, but within three weeks realised that was a mistake. In 1948 he began all over again in the novitiate at Mirfield. He showed a penchant for dusting that never left him.
By the 1950s Hoey had gained renown as an organiser of missions to industrialised towns. He would prepare the parish for a year with monthly days of prayer and visits to every household.
For Holy Week missions, there would be Stations of the Cross with tableaux around the parish. He planned the route carefully. “I think the women of Jerusalem should come out of that pub there,” he would tell the local incumbent. It all seemed to have impact, but looking back decades later, the more contemplative Hoey’s judgment was: “It was a complete waste of time.”
One day in 1958, his superior, Raymond Raynes, sent for him and asked: “Is there any family or particular reason why you should not go to South Africa?” Hoey could not say there was.
Africa was a shock. “I became very anti-white and was considered pro-black.” But he found it frustrating to preach sometimes with interpreters putting his words into three languages.
Hoey promoted the cause of the martyr Manche Masemola, killed by her parents in 1928 for seeking baptism. She was to be one of the 14 20thcentury martyrs whose statues were placed over the great West door of Westminster Abbey.
In 1961 he was called home to be Prior at Mirfield. One of his changes was to employ cleaning women. “The place was filthy.”
In 1968, the Royal Foundation of St Katharine in the East End of London was entrusted to the Community, and Hoey became Prior. With the agreement of the Patron, the Queen Mother, Hoey made space available for social meetings of homosexual men (affected by the decriminalisation of private homosexual acts in 1967).
Hoey felt a yearning for prayer and silence. In 1973 he started a House of Prayer that he called Emmaus in a flat in a housing estate in Hulme, Manchester, known for violence, crime and prostitution. “On one side my neighbours were professional thieves,” he remembered. “On the other side lived a faded, African prostitute.” Hoey’s day of monastic offices and intercessory prayer began at 3am. In December 1974 he developed bronchitis. But his Emmaus project continued in 1976 in Sunderland.
Exhausted by his life at Emmaus, he returned in 1980 to Mirfield. In 1984 he returned to St Katharine’s, where he was much sought as a confessor.
Hoey could not accept women as priests and with the vote of the General Synod in 1992 was aghast to find that he must leave the Church of England. In his late seventies, he had no expectation of service as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, into which he was received in April 1994.
A scheme to continue living at Mirfield foundered, as did another, put in train by the Queen Mother, to live at the Charterhouse in London. But Cardinal Basil Hume saw the need for continuity with Hoey’s Benedictine spirituality. He sent him to the Benedictines at Cockfosters, to be prepared for ordination, which took place soon, on February 20 1995.
He was invited to live with the clergy at Westminster Cathedral where he became a familiar figure with his long overcoat over a cassock and his soup-plate hat. He stopped dyeing his hair.
Aged 97 Hoey decided: “I would like to die in Walsingham.” A friend bought a small house there for him to live in. He called Walsingham “The Devil’s Playground”, visibly divided as it was between Anglicans and Catholics. Aged 99 he was given the title of Monsignor. A memoir, Trembling on the Edge of Eternity, by Antony Pinchin and Graeme Jolly, was published in 2015.
Hoey saw his mission as prayer of intercession – and of reparation for Christian disunity. At Walsingham, his days began at 5am and he attended monastic hours at the Anglican and Catholic shrines and the Orthodox chapel.
Monsignor Augustine Hoey, born December 22 1915, died September 26 2017