Father Ian Ker
Catholic priest and scholar whose biography of Cardinal Newman brought international renown
FATHER IAN KER, who has died aged 80, was the world’s leading authority on the life, work and thought of John Henry Newman, the former Anglican clergyman and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, who sacrificed much to become a Catholic in 1845, and founded the Oratory of St Philip Neri in England.
After a lifetime of misunderstanding Newman was vindicated by being made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII, declared beatus by Benedict XVI, and finally raised to the altars as St John Henry Newman by Pope Francis in 2019.
Ker turned his academic interest in Newman into a publisher’s dream. His output was prodigious and his knowledge unsurpassed. His definitive biography John Henry Newman (1990) was a bestseller.
To an enormous body of work on Newman and associated topics, Ker added a doorstopper biography of GK Chesterton and sundry other titles. At Oxford, Ker taught students who had chosen to focus on Newman as part of degrees in Theology.
His teaching was modelled on Newman’s pedagogical principles, and his annual intake of undergraduates would find a plump and rosy-faced tutor clad in a pastel jumper who came across, not quite by accident, as Newman’s representative on Earth.
He was particularly pleased when his students were Protestants – as he himself once had been, and he was tickled to discover that one year the cohort included a young Ulsterman from the Salvation Army.
Ker rarely taught in clerical garb, so before one tutorial he wrote to the young man, with characteristic impishness: “I have to wear my silly uniform this week, so perhaps you could wear yours.”
The student obliged, and found himself reading out Newman’s hymn “Praise to the Holiest in the Height”, from the closing pages of The Dream of Gerontius. Ker stopped him and insisted that he led the class in singing it instead. The Ulsterman also became a Catholic in the end.
But at a time when liberal Protestantism was in the ascendant in Oxford’s Faculty of Theology and Religion, the presence of an orthodox and sometimes prickly Catholic priest was not universally appreciated; when he retired, the Newman paper was quietly shelved.
Ker remained a Senior Research Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, but less teaching meant that he was able to travel more often and more widely. If the university had lost interest in Newman, the same could hardly be said of the wider Church as the cause for his canonisation intensified. Invitations, plane tickets, and honorary doctorates poured in, and Ker was surprised – but not necessarily displeased – to have become something of an ecclesiastical celebrity in later life.
Inevitably, his international renown drew barbs from some who would have enjoyed the attention themselves; there were also those who felt that certain aspects of Newman’s life were better interpreted by others. Ker took it all in his stride; he was willing, albeit testily, to tolerate challenge if it was intelligent and sincere. Those who sought to impute to Newman motives and predilections for which there was simply no evidence, however, he dismissed with thinly-veiled contempt.
Ker’s apogee came in 2010, when Benedict XVI celebrated mass for Newman’s beatification at Cofton Park in Birmingham. At the end of the offertory procession in the middle of the service, Ker was led to the papal throne. Clad in a simple white vestment he mounted the steps and knelt in front of the Pope, himself a known admirer of Newman. There the two white-haired scholars exchanged a few brief words about the enigmatic man who had brought them together, and whom Ker had made known to the world.
Born in Uttarakhand in northern India on August 30 1942, Ian Turnbull Ker was one of the last sons of the Raj; after Indian Independence the family returned to England. Ian was sent to Shrewsbury, and then progressed to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Classics; four years later he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi to read English.
Research at Cambridge followed, and then a post at York, where he taught Latin and English Literature – but not before he had cast off the Anglicanism of his youth and been received into the Catholic Church.
Ker had been impressed by CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity and its argument, following Origen, that Christ was either who he claimed to be, or a scoundrel. His mother was appalled at his conversion, but in the fullness of time she too would make the same journey. It was not for nothing that Ker’s own apologia of faith was called Mere Catholicism; of all his writing it was the book that he felt mattered most.
At Cambridge and York the young Ker cut a dashing figure among Catholic girls looking for suitable husbands. He was not outwardly pious, despite being a daily mass-goer, and it came as something of a surprise when he decided to train for the priesthood.
He spent some time at the Birmingham Oratory, where Newman had lived and died, before proceeding to the Venerable English College at Rome for formation.
Ker’s intellectual gifts were such that after ordination he was offered, and accepted, a chair in Theology and Philosophy at
St Thomas University in Minnesota. He loved his time in the American mid-west but missed the pastoral elements of priestly life. When he returned to England to care for his ailing parents it was also as Catholic Chaplain to the University of Oxford.
His tenure in this role was brief, however. A couple of sabbatical years followed, from which he was rescued with the more congenial cure of the Catholics of Burford in the Cotswolds. The duties were light enough for him to be able to write, and it was near enough to Oxford for him to continue to teach.
In Burford Ker continued to receive a steady stream of doctoral students. He was an exacting supervisor, but a robust and bruising supervision would be followed by a tactful enquiry about some personal difficulty, with gentle encouragement duly dispensed. Academic meetings frequently turned into walks in the countryside and hearty pub lunches, while he continued to dissect the latest jejune offering and impart advice for improvement. He was loyal to his students, and if one of them later failed to secure an academic post he invariably railed against it as rank injustice.
A burning sense of justice also led him to lend his support the Neocatechumenal Way, a lay-led movement of Catholic renewal whose members had been expelled from a neighbouring diocese by an unsympathetic bishop. He thought the process had been unfair, and the product of an ideologically liberal mindset which he felt was strangling the Church.
At the same time, the fact that his support for them annoyed “exactly the right people” appealed hugely to Ker’s appetite for mischief and his puckish and often outrageous sense of humour.
The “Neocats” did not forget Ker’s kindness when he retired from Burford to Cheltenham, and they cared for him devotedly as his mobility began to fail.
His 80th-birthday dinner at the end of August this year gave him very real joy, and the Festschrift with which he was presented on that occasion, Lead Kindly Light: Essays in Honour of Ian Ker, delighted him.
Always an assiduous correspondent, Ian Ker was plotting long celebratory lunches with contributors to this volume until only a few hours before his death.