Mary Kenny
Dr Gavin Ashendon Dr Gavin Ashenden, honorary chaplain to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II from 2008 to 2017, was received into the Catholic Church in December 2019. He recently gave a talk to ‘The Keys’ (the Catholic Writers’ Guild of England and Wales) about his journey.
At the Church of England synod of 2008, liberals ‘squeezed out conservatives’ from the Anglican Communion”
A merry-faced man aged 67, he had a distinguished academic record before being ordained in the Church of England in 1980. As an Anglican he had an active life, in a parish in Southwark, south London, as a chaplain and lecturer at the University of Sussex, and a canon at Chichester Cathedral. Then, doing post-graduate research at Heythrop College brought a Jesuit influence into his life, which “greatly impressed” him. His other studies included researching the psychologist Carl Jung – “mainly as an antidote to Freud” – and the Greek Orthodox traditions.
Yet the year he was appointed Chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, 2008, he now regards as “the year Anglicanism died”. At the Church of England synod of 2008, liberals “squeezed out conservatives” from the Anglican Communion. An Anglo-Catholic friend told him that 2008 was “the end of a 500-year experiment”.
He has long thought that the absence of a Magisterium was a grave disadvantage to the Anglican community”
Among other measures, the 2008 synod admitted women to the episcopacy. “I have no problem with strong women – my mother was one of those powerful Celtic females,” he said, although he does think the current wave of feminism is “diabolical” (he considers previous female emancipation movements admirable). His main critique is that his former denomination has submitted itself to the “progressive narcissistic relativism” that is characteristic of modern culture. There is a deep loss of the sense of the sacred. He has long thought that the absence of a Magisterium was a grave disadvantage to the Anglican community.
Dr Ashenden is married (his wife subsequently also ‘crossed the Tiber’) and he felt he had to resign from royal service when his teenage daughter felt “embarrassed” when his critical opinions were constantly quoted in the media. So, he either had to shut or up step down – and he did the latter.
I asked him what Queen Elizabeth thought of his theological ideas – and ‘Tiber-crossing’. “HM is two people,” he replied. “She is the queen – in which position she has no views. And she is Elizabeth Windsor – only expressing her views rarely. But I’d be very surprised if Elizabeth Windsor wasn’t saddened by what has happened to the Church of England. I suspect she shares the dismay at contemporary values of people of her age.”
Experiences
Dr Ashenden has had several mystical and near-death experiences which have brought him to a devotion to the Rosary and to Our Lady of Garabandal.
The fruits of brutality
I had a journalistic colleague in London who had been a member of the Parachute Regiment (when military service was obligatory for British males). “We were trained killers,” he admitted. He chose such a tough regiment for somewhat perverse reasons: his father had been a Christian pacifist, opposed to all war, and Chris hadn’t been allowed play with toy soldiers as a child.
Another case: my late brother Carlos was a boozing pal of Robert ‘Paddy’ Blair Mayne, the highly decorated Newtownards-born soldier and founder member of the SAS (whose statue stands in Newtownards town centre). Blair Mayne used to spend weekends in Dublin in the 1950s to escape what was then a very dour Belfast, and my brother first met him when they were hitting every pub in town. Blair Mayne told Carlos that during World War II he had eagerly killed Germans with his bare hands. He was so aggressive in combat that Mr Churchill controversially denied him the Victoria Cross.
You don’t have to be a military expert to grasp the fact that certain regiments are trained, and the men selected, to be ruthless: and that the Paratroopers should never have been let next, nigh or near Derry in 1972, when the terrible events of Bloody Sunday occurred.
Families have spent 50 years mourning, and are now deeply disappointed at not getting justice for those they lost: the North’s Public Prosecution Service have told relatives they will discontinue the prosecution of ‘Soldier F’, and will not start proceedings against ‘Soldier B’, of the Paras, who opened fire on the crowd.
It is very hard for the relatives, but it’s probable that the British authorities have decided more on grounds of protecting the military from a precedent than on grounds of justice.
Yet it must be a terrible thing to carry on your conscience, for 50 years, the knowledge that you have taken an entirely innocent life.
Blair Mayne drank to forget and ended his life in a self-destructive fatal car crash.