Former chaplain to the Queen to be confirmed into Catholic church in Shrewsbury

The Right Reverend Dr Gavin Ashenden is to be received into the Catholic Church during Mass in Shrewsbury Cathedral.

The Right Reverend Mark Davies, the Bishop of Shrewsbury, will confirm Dr Ashenden in the Catholic faith on the fourth Sunday of Advent.

His reception into the Catholic Church means that his Anglican orders will be suspended and he will become a lay Catholic theologian.

Helen Ashenden, his wife of 23 years, became a Catholic in the Shrewsbury diocese about two years ago. Dr Ashenden served as a chaplain to Her Majesty from 2008-2017 but resigned from his post in objection to the reading of a chapter from the Koran at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Glasgow, Scotland, which explicitly denied the divinity of Jesus.

Soon afterwards, he was ordained as a missionary bishop of the Christian Episcopal Church, a traditional Anglican jurisdiction founded in 1992.

Dr Ashenden said he was becoming a Catholic partly because he believed the Roman Catholic Church has the deep capacity to remain faithful to “the integrity and insight of biblical, apostolic and patristic values at a time when powerful social and cultural challenges threaten to deny and extinguish them”.

Integrity

Bishop Mark said: “It has been a special joy to accompany Gavin Ashenden in the last steps of a long journey to be at home in the Catholic Church.

“I am conscious of the witness which Gavin Ashenden has given in the public square to the historic faith and values on which our society has been built.”

He added: “I pray that this witness will continue to be an encouragement to many.”

Dr Ashenden, pictured, said: “In my judgement, at this point in history, only the Roman Catholic and Orthodox expression churches have the capacity to defend the faith as our circumstances require.

"Having come to believe that the claims and expression of the Catholic faith are the most profound and potent expression of apostolic and patristic belief, and to accept the primacy of the Petrine tradition, I am grateful to the Bishop of Shrewsbury and the Catholic community in his diocese for the opportunity to mend 500 years of fractured history and be reconciled to the Church that gave birth to my earlier tradition.

“The Church of England is inclined to be rooted in secularised culture rather than the integrity and insight of biblical, apostolic and patristic values.”