Jack O'Sullivan profiles the new Professor of Theology at Leeds University

In filial disobedience
WHEN Adrian Hastings was sixteen years of age, he decided to become a priest. Half a century later, he has no regrets about that decision. He considers himself a full blooded Catholic priest and is proud of it.
There is just one problem; he is married. Entering the seventh year of happy wedlock, he has no desire to be laicised and extricate himself from his selfstyled state of "filial disobedience".
His words and lifestyle continue to proclaim that the Church is theologically unsound and pastorally ill advised to make bedfellows of celibacy and the priesthood.
This week's announcement that this controversial figure is to become Professor of Theology at Leeds University, succeeding no less contentious a character than Dr David Jenkins, now Bishop of Durham, is bound to resurrect argument surrounding Professor Hastings, which many thought had been gently laid to rest when he left Britain in 1982 for a three-year secondment to the University of Zimbabwe.
Labelled one of the most original thinkers of his priestly generation by admirers and considered, at best, idiosyncratic by his critics, Adrian Hastings has never been conventional. A laconic manner belies a restless energy, a provocative temperament and a keen mind.
His background was unusual. His grandmother, widowed and a convert, joined a contemplative order at the turn of the century when her only child was just five. Another side of the family could claim a dynastic hold on an Anglican living in Worcestershire spanning 160 years.
Educated at Douai, Hastings proceeded to study history at Oxford in the immediate postwar years, stimulated by the intellectualism of the Catholicism he found there.
He did not feel the same way about the pre-Vatican H rigours of the White Fathers novitiate, which he left after four years in 1953, after deciding that he should be ordained into an African diocese under an African bishop rather than belong to a European missionary society. It was a highly unusual stance at the time.
Bernard Shaw said that if one scratches an Englishman one will find a Protestant, but if one gets under Adrian Hastings' skin, one finds a latterday Galilean — a man devoted to the Catholicity of the Church in the sense of its universality, but deeply suspicious of its Roman centralisation and bureaucracy.
Five years in Rome may have retarded this development, but departure to his diocese in Uganda, three years after ordination with his PhD completed, in 1958, soon taught him the destructive tension between what he sees as a Rome fearful of losing control and an Africa struggling to find Christ incarnate in a very different cultural environment from Europe.
"Rome does not understand the needs of the Catholic Church in Africa. It has completely failed to be even interested", he told me this week at his mother's home in Oxford.
Much greater toleration and sensitivity to culture was needed. After all, he quipped, "if Christian missionaries from elsewhere came here today, they might forbid their Christian converts to watch Dallas or Dynasty".
Having spent the 1960s in a priest-starved Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, teaching in a series of minor seminaries, Hastings also became convinced of the need to ordain married men, a belief which thrust him theologically into the public eye. The stance was increasingly to challenge his personal celibacy, eventually leading, in 1978, to his dramatic announcement that he was prepared to marry.
"If marriage is a sacrament and is one of the most used biblical symbols for the relationship of God and man and of the Church and Christ, it makes absolutely no sense to say that all the people that are committed to teaching about the mystery of God and Man must be outside it", he explained to me.
St Paul had said that bishops should be married argued Profesior Hastings. A married clergy was crucial for ecumenism, he said, improved the stability of often desperately lonely priests, and was crucial if the clergy were to have credibility in speaking about personal morality. He argued that with some priests' lack of personal experience of marriage, "more and more the credible teachers are lay people".
He stresses that he seeks no public confrontation with the Church. He does not celebrate Mass openly but refuses to be drawn on what he may or may not do in private. He attends Mass every Sunday and is a regular communicant, although technically debarred by Canon Law from receiving the sacraments.
As the first Catholic to take the chair of theology at Leeds. Professor Hastings joins a growing band of Catholics who have penetrated over the past few years the previously Protestant strongholds of university theology departments. Such appointments have, he argues, injected a greater Catholic emphasis on systematic theology into an academic system biased towards scriptural study. On a personal level, he hopes to add an African dimension to the department, as he did during his previous six year readership at Aberdeen University.
lie has little in common with the previous incumbent at Leeds, now the Bishop of Durham. Professor Hastings holds orthodox views on the Eucharist and the Incarnation and would find much fault with this predecessors views 'concerning the empty tomb.
"The Church", he explained, "has got to be faithful to the core of its Gospel tradition, but extraordinarily flexible and open in its relation to the world".