Adrian Hastings

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Adrian Hastings (23 June 1929 – 30 May 2001) was a Church historian and an unorthodox Catholic priest.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Adrian Hastings, a grandson of George Woodyatt Hastings, was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, but his mother moved to England to bring up the children there when he was little more than a baby. He was educated at Douai School (1943-46) and Worcester College, Oxford (1946-49).

In his final year he discerned a missionary vocation. He joined the White Fathers, but left the order to become a secular priest in the diocese of Masaka, Uganda. He studied Theology at the Collegium Urbanum, the college of the Congregation of Propaganda in Rome. He was ordained in 1955 and awarded a doctorate in 1958. His lifelong association with The Tablet dates from this period. In 1958 he also obtained a teaching degree from Christ's College, Cambridge, and in 1959 he took up his priestly functions in Uganda.

[edit] Priestly career

In Uganda he served in both pastoral and teaching functions, and was charged with interpreting the documents of the Second Vatican Council to priests in Africa. His notes on these documents were later published. He also agitated for a relaxation of the discipline of clerical celibacy in the African context, attributing the low numbers of black clergy to the cultural alienness of this requirement.

In 1966, after bouts of malaria, he returned to England and became active in ecumenical dialgoue through the preparatory commission of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. He was also commissioned by a number of Anglican dioceses in Africa to prepare a report on Christian and customary marriage.

From 1972 to 1976 he was on the staff of an interdenominational missionary school, the College of the Ascension in Selly Oak, Birmingham.

In 1973 he brought the massacres carried out by the Portuguese army during the Mozambican War of Independence to world attention, first through The Times and later at the United Nations.

[edit] Academic career

In 1976 Hastings was appointed to a lectureship in the Theology Faculty of the University of Aberdeen.

In 1978 he came to the decision that as a Catholic priest he was free to marry, and the following year he was joined in matrimony to Ann Spence, without seeking ecclesiastical permission or resigning from the priesthood. Although this was a clear breach of canon law he was never formally excommunicated, largely because since leaving Uganda he had not been subject to the oversight of any particular bishop. On occasion he continued to exercise a priestly office after his marriage.

From 1982 to 1985 Hastings was professor of Religious Studies at the University of Zimbabwe, and from 1985 to his retirement in 1996 professor of Theology at the University of Leeds. From 1985 to 2000 he edited the Journal of Religion in Africa.

Late in life he was active in raising awareness of the atrocities accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia and the reassertion of Serbian control over Kosovo. He was a founding member of the Alliance to Defend Bosnia-Herzegovina.

He died in Leeds on 30 May 2001 and was buried at St Mary's Church, East Hendred, Oxfordshire.

[edit] Works

Hastings wrote over forty books, including

  • Church and Mission in Modern Africa. London: Burns & Oates, 1967.
  • A Concise Guide to the Documents of the Second Vatican Council. 2 vols. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1968- 69.
  • Wiriyamu. London: Search Press, 1974. ISBN 0855323388
  • In Filial Disobedience. Great Wakering: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1978. ISBN 0855972491
  • A History of African Christianity, 1950-1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ISBN 0521222125, ISBN 0521293979
  • A History of English Christianity 1920-1985. London: Collins, 1986. ISBN 0002152118, ISBN 0006270417
  • The Church in Africa, 1450-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ISBN 0198263996
  • The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 0521593913

[edit] References