Meet the English bishop who taught Marx
Bishop William Kenney talks to Luke Coppen about his working-class boyhood, Swedish academic life and dodging bullets in East Timor

4 December

Bishop Kenney, left pictured outside St Chad's Birmingham, with Bishop David McGough and Archbishop Nichols Peter Jennings

Bishop William Kenney has the strangest episcopal CV in Britain, possibly the world.

He has ducked bullets in East Timor, studied the Moonies, organised one of John Paul II's longest foreign trips and taught theoretical Marxism to university students. In Swedish.

Oh, and after the Berlin Wall fell he led the largest voluntary sector federation in Europe. He has visited every European territory except Gibraltar, understands German, French, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch and Italian, and was ordained bishop at 41.

Not bad for a boy who grew up in Gravelly Hill, the Birmingham suburb now home to Spaghetti Junction, recently voted the "scariest" road system in Britain. I meet Bishop Kenney at Archbishop's House, Birmingham, where he has served as diocesan administrator since May. On Tuesday, December 8, he will hand over the archdiocese to Bernard Longley, the new Archbishop of Birmingham. Our conversation provides a break in the bishop's punishing schedule, and he sits at a relaxed angle in his armchair with the white plastic strip slipped out of his clerical collar. I ask him to explain how he made the 63-year journey from Gravelly Hill to Archbishop's House (via Stockholm, Dili and London).

He came from a "very typical working-class Catholic background". His grandfather was a machine blacksmith, his father a caretaker in local Catholic school and his mother variously a shop assistant and cleaner. One of the most important memories of his childhood is of a "very large" mendicant Passionist lay brother, dressed as a cleric, who used to call regularly at the family home. The Kenneys would give him a warm meal and two and sixpence.

"He left an impression on me, even as a little boy, as someone who cared," Bishop Kenney recalls. "That stayed with me all my life."

It's probably what prompted him to join the Passionists after he had gone "all the way through the Catholic school system". Following studies at Heythrop (then based in Oxfordshire), he was ordained at St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham, in 1969. His superiors sent him to the Passionist mission in Sweden. And because of his academic ability they asked him to enrol at university there.

Bishop Kenney sees that posting as proof of "the irony of the Lord". "I didn't fancy going abroad and I didn't fancy a life as an academic," he says. "And, of course, I ended up abroad working as an academic."

But first he had to master Swedish, a North Germanic language which, according to Wikipedia, is notable for its "voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative". "I did four months of the language when I got there," he says. "I finished that on Friday and began on Monday to do a degree in Sociology and Psychology. That first term was one of the hardest of my life. I understood nothing, absolutely nothing, and was still expected to do examinations."

Remarkably, he passed and went on to earn a Fil Kand (equivalent to a BA), becoming the first member of his family to gain a degree. In 1977 he returned to England to pursue a doctorate in the Sociology of Religion at the London School of Economics. He describes this as "one of the great experiences of my life". He served as senior research assistant to Professor Eileen Barker on her ground-breaking study of the Unification Church (better known as the Moonies) and prepared a doctoral essay on the impact of Catholic social teaching in England and Wales after 1945. He concluded that the Church had failed to promote its social teaching in the post-war years. But he believes that failure had deeper historical roots.

"By the end of the 1800s Manning had created a situation where the working class was very pro-Catholic Church," he explains. "I mean some of his stuff was even more Left-wing than Karl Marx would have dreamt of.

"There's a lecture he gives to the Trades Union Congress in Manchester where he says: 'Capital has no rights. Only labour has rights.' Think of what that means. The Church has said that, but never as brutally as Manning.

"I'm afraid that after Manning [Cardinal Herbert] Vaughan gave away that inheritance. He had no understanding of what Manning was passing on to him. There's a famous exchange in the Times. Vaughan at this time is Bishop of Salford. Manning is in London. It's the time of the dock strikes and Vaughan writes something to the effect of:_'I hope the country will forgive Cardinal Manning for behaving in this way, but he's obviously going senile.'

The next day there is a letter from Manning, which I can almost quote by heart, which says: 'Sir, there is no doubt that Bishop Vaughan is a good Catholic, but if he were to sit at the feet of General Booth [Salvation Army] he might also learn to be a good Christian.' "Manning would have felt very much at home in the modern Church: theologically conservative and socially so radical it's disappearing into the Left-wing distance."

Bishop Kenney apologises for the long anecdote, explaining that Catholic social teaching is one of his "hobby horses". If he hadn't become a priest he thinks he might have been a politician.

"Given my background, it would have been in Labour somewhere," he says. Many of his heroes, including Kofi Annan, Angela Merkel, Nelson Mandela and Robert Schuman, are politicians. But he prefers to describe them as "statesmen".

"A statesman is someone who has a vision of where the world can go," he explains. "A politician - and we need them, by the way - is someone who makes that vision practical."

Fr Kenney was making good progress on his PhD when he was offered a post at the University of Gothenburg. In 1987, a decade after he began his doctorate, he arranged a sabbatical to finally finish it, but was abruptly appointed auxiliary bishop in Stockholm. Eventually the university took pity and awarded him an honorary doctorate.

In 1989 Bishop Kenney was asked to coordinate John Paul II's visit to Scandinavia. "It was the longest visit he ever made anywhere, with the exception of the trips to Poland," he says. "We were 10 days on the road with him because of the sheer distances."

The Swedish bishops advised the Pope that an outright denunciation of abortion would be counter-productive. "What he talked about was 'the human rights of the unborn child'. Now that was brilliant because, particularly in Scandinavia, you cannot be against human rights. So that left the pro-abortion lobby absolutely floored. They didn't know what to say."

Bishop Kenney tries to adopt a similar approach when addressing moral issues.

"Rather than speaking about divorce, I'd rather speak about the virtues of people who are married and remain married despite all the difficulties," he says. "Rather than speaking about euthanasia, I would prefer to speak about the quality of life right until its natural end. I would always want to try to talk about what is positive."

Bishop Kenney was elected president of Caritas Europe in 1991, as the continent was reeling from the collapse of Communism. Throughout the 1990s he whizzed around the world, assessing the needs of refugees, leading retreats, attending synods and pleading with weapons manufacturers (he is a leading figure in the Gothenburg Process, which seeks strict controls on the arms trade). In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI sent him home to Birmingham to serve as an auxiliary.

In his adventurous career Bishop Kenny has had a few near-death experiences, including being fired upon in Lebanon and East Timor.

"Those sorts of things, being shot at, don't frighten me," he says without bravado. Then his face lights up with a pleasing thought. "I know, I could write an autobiography on that: 'Places I Was Shot At'."