MICHAEL Hare Duke is a mixture of ecclesiastical entrepreneur,
think-tank, pastor and politician. Officially he is a bishop, or to be
exact the Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane in the Scottish
Episcopal Church. He has held that office for exactly 20 years and this
weekend in Perth, friends and colleagues will gather to celebrate the
event with a wine reception and a Eucharist followed by picnic.
The style of these events owes something to the man. The Holy
Communion will be distributed by women and the service will involve more
laity than clergy. As he puts it: ''I will still wear pompous clothes,
but we've set out to do some new things and make the point
liturgically.''
Michael Hare Duke was consecrated a bishop on September 16, 1969, and
has managed more than most to retain the liberal and optimistic spirit
of the sixties. As senior bishop he must be favourite to become the new
Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and will relish the post for
its influence rather than its power.
He thinks it is sad when Churches put all their energies into fighting
over liturgies or forms of government. He jokes that in Latin American
dictatorships, bishops command high prices for assassination and are
''carriers of mission and aggression''. ''You can't get huffy about the
aggro that goes with the job. The year before I came here there was a
film of Becket which sticks in my mind because it showed that they
dressed him up in order to disbelieve in his humanity. That way they
don't recognise vulnerability.''
Hare Duke extends that principle to the debate over whether divorcees
can be clergymen in the Anglican Church. ''It is a bad day for the
Gospel when the Church is seen as charged with maintaining standards
rather than healing wounds.'' Michael Hare Duke will be 64 this month
and was 16 years a Church of England vicar before coming north. He says
he is probably in Scotland for life but has not lost the pukka accent
which echoes his days in the Navy during the war or at Oxford after it.
He has something of the look of a pixie king and usually refers to his
own Church as ''the Piscies''. ''We're small, vulnerable and a bit of a
joke, but we're influential not least upon the Church of England in
Church reforms and in exporting Archbishops of Canterbury to England
(four in the last century)''.
Nationality, he says, is not about ''tartan genes'' or playing the
Covenant game, but about culture. His own roots can be traced to a
Church of Ireland grandfather who sired 10 children and was less
ecumenical than the Bishop of St Andrews. ''I'd love to see the day when
we're part of the Kirk and I'm sorry that unity is seen so much in terms
of bishops. Our contribution has been mainly liturgical and we have
several distinctive things to offer the Church in Scotland, which we'll
never do if we keep looking over our shoulder to England.''
Hare Duke's own contribution to that innovative role is considerable.
He regularily fires off articles to newspapers about situations in parts
of the world he has visited. ''There is a terrible violence in the world
and the Church cannot be like a cruise liner going through it and
occasionally noticing that a corpse floats past the porthole. We
desperately need a peace and reconciliation role.''
He has just made a video expounding his views on justice, peace and
the integrity of creation. His stance has evolved on nuclear arms from
unilateralist (''we're all unilateralists at one time'') to a more
subtle stance. His recent article in the magazine of the Voluntary
Euthanasia Society is typically thoughtful and provocative (''If I do
not know who I am, if I become an intolerable burden upon those who care
about me or for me, would it not be better if I went on my way? I cannot
conceive of a God who would say 'no, it's better for you to be
around'.''
He was chairman of the Scottish Association of Mental Health before he
led it into the Scottish Institute for Human Relations, but despite that
and many other hats and mitres he wears, the diocese is his bread and
wine. The bishop is proud that in his 20 years while the Piscy Church
has declined more than 30% to 36,000 communicants, his diocese has lost
less than a sixth of its flock. It stretches from the nuclear subs of
Rosyth to the sheep moors of Rannoch. As he tears around in his car from
his eyrie beneath Kinnoull Hill by Perth, the bishop does not waste a
moment and is busy dictating a letter or article into a ''squawk-box''
device. Recently he had a wheel change and went into the customer
cubicle with his device to the laughter of the mechanics who knew him
well. ''They thought it was a pit stop,'' says the peripatetic Piscy.
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