Parish Council Members

I was born in Wigan in 1947 and I went to Junior Seminary (Thistleton Lodge & Underley Hall) at the tender age of eleven years old. On finishing my “O” and “A” levels I was sent to Upholland College to study for the priesthood. On the 28th May 1972, I was ordained to the priesthood at St Cuthbert’s, Blackpool by Bishop Foley. My first appointment as curate was St Benedict’s, Mirehouse, Whitehaven and I was there for four years. From there I was moved to St Augustine’s Preston and there I served for two years before I moved to the Forces.

September 1978 I joined the Royal Navy as a chaplain and did my initial two months acclimatisation at the Royal College of Dartmouth. Over the following twelve years, I served the RN and the Royal Marines at sea and at various places such as Portsmouth, Plymouth, Northern Ireland, Hong Kong, Gibraltar, the Arctic, The Far and the Middle East, and Scotland. While I was stationed in HMS Faslane I met up with the Neo-Catechumenate in Glasgow and this “Way of Conversion” has slowly transformed me and saved my priesthood. In September 1990 I was released from the Forces early so that I could go as an itinerant priest to serve with the Neo-Catechumenate in the USA; and over that year I worked with a couple, and their family, in New Orleans, New York, Washington DC and Boston.

On my return to the Diocese, I served as an assistant priest for a year in Blessed Sacrament, Preston, and then for twelve years at St Patrick’s Barrow Island, Barrow in Furness. I have been here at St Bede’s for over thirteen years and I arrived here in July 2004. Since being here I have been appointed chaplain to the Cumberland Infirmary. Recently (July 2017) the two parishes of St Bede’s and St Edmund’s have been merged into a new parish of “The Cumbrian Martyrs’.