Given his dislike of labels, it is hard to categorise John Challenor, who was a founder member of the Catholic Renewal Movement, later Catholics for a Changing Church (CCC). For many years he was a priest of the Birmingham Oratory and was employed by them as a teacher in St Philip’s Grammar School for Catholic boys next door to the church. The historian Eamon Duffy was just one of Challenor’s appreciative pupils and wrote about him in his book Faith of Our Fathers. The other “exceptionally gifted man” who taught Duffy was Hamish Swanston, later professor of theology at the University of Kent, who died last year.John Challenor was my mentor. I first met him at St Philip’s in 1966 and he guided my reading for the two years that I was an Oratorian philosophy stu