Former Anglican seminary head Canon Robin Ward was received into the Catholic Church in England this month.
Ward, 60, previously headed one of the Church of England’s main theological colleges, St. Stephen’s House in Oxford, for 19 years before stepping down last year. He announced on the social media platform X on Feb. 14 that he had been received into the Catholic Church at St. Michael’s Benedictine Abbey, Farnborough, by Benedictine Dom Cuthbert Brogan.
“Signo te signo crucis, et confirmo te chrismate salutis — with nine words, I received the seal of the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of confirmation and the seal to complete a journey I began some 40 years ago in the city of Oxford, where I have spent most of my adult life,” Ward told the National Catholic Register on Feb. 18.
“I have been tremendously encouraged by the kindness of so many,” he said, adding that he rejoices “without regret or hesitation to find myself in this place.”
Ward studied medieval English at Magdalen College, Oxford, becoming a prominent Anglo-Catholic clergyman and scholar. He later earned a doctorate from King’s College London with a dissertation on “The Schism at Antioch in the Fourth Century.”
Ward is a married father of two and was ordained in the Church of England in 1992, serving in various parishes as an assistant curate, parish vicar, and chaplain of a health service trust.
In 2004 he was made an honorary canon of Rochester Cathedral and represented that diocese in the General Synod, the governing body of the Church of England. He was appointed principal of St. Stephen’s House in 2006.
Path to the Catholic Church
Reflecting on his path to the Catholic Church, Ward told the Register that he was raised “in the habits of low-church Anglicanism that barely exists anymore: using the Book of Common Prayer, liturgical without ceremony, earnest and lengthy in its preaching, sacramental but Protestant.”
While studying at Oxford, Ward “discovered the rarified and recondite world of Anglo-Catholicism,” he said. He was inspired by the “surviving fusion of 19th-century theology and romantic ritualism” that “cannot but appear eccentric and marginal” to those outside it “and especially perhaps to Catholics.”
During his time teaching at St. Stephen’s House, a “variety of developments seemed to occlude what I held most dear,” Ward said. To run a seminary means to propose to students three questions — “Who is Jesus Christ? What is a priest? What is the church?” he said.
Ward said the answer to the last question was becoming “less and less satisfactory and that this was becoming more apparent not only to me but to my students, past and present.”
Another influence in his conversion came from being in “close proximity with the energy and charity of Catholic life in Oxford: the Dominicans at Blackfriars, the Jesuits at Campion Hall, the Oratorians at St. Aloysius,” Ward said.
The “constant presence of John Henry Newman” also served as an influence for Ward. When Newman began to be rediscovered in the 1980s, Ward said he was still “someone to whom justice had not been done.”
“As we have learned to understand him better, so I have learned to see through his distinctive charism, so close to the Oxford I have known and loved for so long, the way into the one fold of the Redeemer,” Ward said. The saint had such a large influence on Ward, he took John Henry as his confirmation name.
Ward cited Newman’s hymn “Lead, Kindly Light,” as he shared his future plans in the Catholic Church. “I now need to learn how to live within the household and to trust in God’s providence for the work and vocation he intends for me: ‘One step enough for me,’” he said.
A ‘signal’ for others
Ward’s Catholic conversion “will undoubtedly be taken as a signal for many that this is the only way of expressing a Catholic spirituality and ecclesial commitment, now that the modernist and feminist revolution within Anglicanism has shown it is no longer willing to compromise in any meaningful way with those who sought to retain an element of Catholic identity and loyalty,” said Gavin Ashenden, another prominent former Anglican who was received into the Church in 2019.
Ward’s reception follows several other high-profile Anglican conversions over the past five years including former Church of England bishops Monsignor Michael Nazir‑Ali, Jonathan Goodall, John Goddard, Peter Forster, Richard Pain, and John Ford. Since 1992, around 700 Anglican clergy and religious in Britain have been received into the Catholic Church.
