The Venerable George Austin
Outspoken scourge of Church of England liberals who declared Prince Charles unfit to be king
THE VENERABLE GEORGE AUSTIN, who has died aged 87, was Archdeacon of York from 1988 to 1999 and enjoyed a national reputation as the most outspoken and most frequently quoted critic of what he believed to be an heretical liberalising tendency in the Church of England and a marked decline in the morality of the nation as a whole.
In 1993, when the Prince and Princess of Wales announced that they were to live apart, he declared on the BBC’S Today programme that the Prince was unfit to take the throne. “Having almost immediately broken his wedding vows, how would he be able to go into Westminster Abbey and make Coronation vows?”, he asked. Later, in a newspaper article on the same subject, he suggested that many of the clergy would find it impossible to make to such a king the customary oath of allegiance on their appointment to a new post.
In 1991, three years after his appointment as Archdeacon of York, Austin delivered from the pulpit of York Minster what was described at the time as the fiercest attack in living memory on the Church’s liberals. The division between the liberals and the orthodox traditionalists was now so wide, he asserted, that it was necessary for them to part company and henceforth do no more than coexist as separate entities within the Church of England.
This sermon attracted widespread publicity and an unusual rebuke from the Archbishop of York, Dr John Habgood, who said the Archdeacon reminded him of the Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers who wanted to make people’s flesh creep. It was a telling, but by no means courteous, analogy inasmuch as Austin was a fat man and had a boyish face.
The decision to ordain women to the priesthood caused him great distress and led to many angry outbursts. It was, he believed, impossible for a woman to be ordained priest, therefore no woman could ever genuinely feel called to the priesthood. What is more, women’s ordination was linked to other parts of a “liberal package”, which included homosexual liberation, single-sex marriages, the abandonment of other aspects of Christian ethics and a general diminution of the concept of sin: “Our fight against women in the priesthood is therefore but part of the continuing battle against the onslaught of the powers and principalities of the darkness of this world. And sometimes against spiritual wickedness in very high places indeed.”
This was strong stuff even for those who generally supported his traditionalist views, but it was meat and drink to the media, and his name and telephone number were always to hand in newsrooms. Whenever an archbishop or council of the Church made a new proposal, the Archdeacon of York could be relied on for a critical comment, letter to the editor or sharply worded article.
In the end, however, his criticisms became too frequent and too predictable to be influential, though they gave comfort to many conservative Anglican lay people unhappy about the pace of change in the Church.
George Bernard Austin was born at Bury, Lancashire, on July 16 1931. His father had a tobacconist’s shop and for young George home life was marred by the presence of a domineering grandmother. He attended the local church school, then won a scholarship to the High School, which he left in 1949 to join the Royal Air Force.
It was his intention to make a career as a pilot, but within a few days of his enlisting it was discovered that at some time in the past he had suffered a concealed form of tuberculosis. He was immediately discharged on medical grounds.
He thereupon decided to seek ordination. As a child he had been taken to the local Baptist church, but his father eventually migrated to the Church of England. As a teenager George accompanied him to Evensong and in due course was confirmed. At St David’s College, Lampeter, he took a degree in Philosophy and, having come under Anglo-catholic influence, went to Chichester Theological College to prepare for Holy Orders.
From 1955 to 1957 Austin was a curate at St Peter’s Church, Chorley, in the Blackburn diocese, but he did not see eye to eye with the vicar and escaped as soon as possible to another curacy, at St Clement’s Church in the Notting Hill district of London.
In this multiracial parish he found himself ministering in the thick of the 1958 Notting Hill riots, and a request from the Church Times for an article on his work there marked the beginning of what soon became a substantial involvement in journalism and broadcasting. He was a regular contributor to the BBC’S Prayer for the Day slot and a member of a small team producing live broadcasts of The Epilogue for independent television.
In 1960, by which time he was becoming well-known, he was made a chaplain at London University. This involved living in the East End, where he served Queen Mary College and was also responsible for the chaplaincies at the London School of Economics and at a number of medical schools.
He enjoyed this form of ministry and thought he was doing it rather well, but after only a year, and to his great chagrin, he was summarily dismissed by the brilliant but somewhat erratic senior chaplain of the university. No explanation, apart from the fact that his face did not fit, was ever forthcoming, though by this time a holiday visit to Sweden had aroused in him deep anxieties about the women priests who had been ordained there and other liberal tendencies in the Swedish Church.
Stranded in London without a job, Austin was rescued by the offer of a curacy at Dunstable Priory, where he spent three happy years effectively involved in the worship and pastoral work of a large, flourishing parish. In 1964 he was appointed Vicar of Eaton Bray, a small farming community in Bedfordshire. This was not an easy assignment, since there was among the lay leaders a long history of resistance to change and, although Austin himself was becoming increasingly conservative, he favoured revision of forms of worship and renewal of other aspects of parish life.
During his six years there he achieved a good deal, particularly in the development of lay leadership, and on the strength of this success he was appointed Vicar of the much larger parish of St Peter’s, Bushey Heath, in Hertfordshire. He remained there for the next 18 years, and during this time not only exercised a highly effective and much-valued parish ministry, but became increasingly involved in the affairs of St Albans diocese and in the central government of the Church of England.
He was elected to the General Synod in 1970 and soon became a leading spokesman for its Anglo-catholic element, then fighting what was to be a long rearguard action against proposals for change. His interventions were always eloquent, and he was a formidable debater, but his aggressive style and ability to locate liberals beneath every uncomfortable bed reduced his influence and earned the frequent response “It’s old George again.” Nevertheless, he became a Church Commissioner in 1978, was elected to the influential Standing Committee in 1985, and later to the Crown Appointments Commission responsible for the choice of diocesan bishops.
Back in St Albans he had become an Honorary Canon of the Cathedral in 1978, and he served on many diocesan committees. In the end, however, he crossed swords with one of the archdeacons, and after 18 years at Bushey Heath he not only felt the need for a change, but was led to believe that his contribution to the life of the Church had earned him some substantial preferment. When this was not forthcoming, he was unable to conceal his disappointment and became firmly convinced that he had been passed over because of his denunciations of liberalism and strong opposition to the ordination of women.
In 1988 the Bishop of St Albans invited Austin to move to a much smaller parish, and sweetened what he knew was bound to be a bitter pill with the offer of greater freedom to write and speak. Austin saw through this, but felt that he had no alternative but to accept, and his appointment was announced.
But then out of the blue came a letter from the Archbishop of York inviting him to become Archdeacon of York and a Canon of York Minster. Just what lay behind this turnabout in Austin’s fortunes has never been disclosed, but the most likely explanation is that senior figures in the General Synod complained about the neglect of his gifts and experience and that the liberal-minded Archbishop Habgood magnanimously decided to make amends.
Certainly it was a generous offer, for only a short time before it was made Austin had said in the course of a television interview that Habgood was totally unsuited for translation from York to Canterbury. And, having accepted the offer, the Archdeacon was often sharply critical of the Archbishop’s views. But it was to the credit of both men that public differences never adversely affected their personal friendship.
What had not been foreseen was the extent to which the appointment would increase Austin’s value to the media. Although the Archdeaconry of York is not essentially different from any other archdeaconry and carries no seniority, the title has a certain ring about it which suggests a position of special significance. Thus Austin’s public exposure increased dramatically and during his 11 years at York neither friend nor foe could escape his opinions.
He greatly enjoyed the actual work of an Archdeacon and was diligent in visiting the parishes and facilitating the pastoral work of the clergy. But in the end the extreme character of his opinions began to get in the way and he noted ruefully that the number of invitations to parishes was noticeably reduced and that there were many Sundays when he had nothing to do. The two other archdeacons in the diocese also decided that he could not represent their views in the General Synod and that one of them must take his place. This was a blow.
In February 1999 he announced that he intended to “retire and shut up”. Which he did later that year, though letters from him appeared in newspapers from time to time when he considered himself unduly provoked. His was a faithful and courageous ministry, and although he was often filled with doom and gloom he had an abiding hope that the Church of England – which he never had the slightest intention of leaving – would one day recover its vocation and vitality through adherence to the one, true, Catholic faith.
His wife Bobbie, whom he married in 1962, died in 2016 and he is survived by a son, Jeremy.
The Venerable George Austin, born July 16 1931, died January 30 2019