Former Anglican Bishop of Chester Dr Peter Forster was received into the Catholic Church in 2021, it was confirmed last week.
Dr Forster, who retired with his wife to the Scottish Borders in 2019, was received in the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh.
He was the fourth Church of England bishop to become a Catholic last year, following the high-profile receptions of Fr Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester, John Goddard, former Bishop of Burnley, and Jonathan Goodall, former Bishop of Ebbsfleet. Fr Nazir-Ali now ministers as a priest in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, but it is not known whether Dr Forster will seek to become a Catholic priest.
Dr Forster was a consistent supporter of the ordination of women and their elevation to the episcopacy: Chester was the first diocese to have a female bishop when Libby Lane became suffragan Bishop of Stockport in 2015. However, he had recently been critical of its effects on ecumenism. He was a member of the English Anglican-Roman Catholic Committee from 2001 to 2010, and said he regretted the change in ecumenical relations “from a vision of full visible unity to an essentially debased vision of reconciled diversity”.
He was Bishop of Chester for 22 years, during which time he oversaw the establishment of the University of Chester as an independent institution and was an active member of the House of Lords. As a Lord Spiritual, he opposed the legalisation of same-sex marriage, and in 2003 was one of nine bishops who opposed the nomination of the Anglican cleric Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading. In 2015 Dr Forster called the papal encyclical Laudato Si’ a “naïve” document, publishing The Papal Encyclical: A critical Christian response with the Labour peer Bernard Donoghue.
In 2019 Dr Forster was criticised by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse for his handling of safeguarding matters in 2009, and had delegated all responsibility for safeguarding in the diocese by the time of his retirement that year.
As a former diocesan bishop, rather than a suffragan, Dr Forster’s reception into the Catholic Church will be treated as particularly significant. Alongside Dr Nazir-Ali, he is the most senior Anglican clergyman to be received since Graham Leonard, the former Bishop of London, in 1994.
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