Msgr Antony Conlon

IN PREPARING these notes the same response was given by many of Dr Antony Conlon’s friends – “I’ve got lots of stories, but they’re not really suitable for an obituary”. This is in itself an obituary, as it sums up Antony Conlon’s profound sense of fun and friendship; without ever being in the slightest scandalous, yet often hilarious, anecdotes of him are intensely personal. One of his informal nicknames among many of his friends in conversation (more about the other one later) was ‘our mutual friend’ – one knew immediately who was meant, and it reflects his wonderful ability to bring his friends together; there was nothing solitary about Antony Conlon, he lived through and for people.

This quality of openness, while sometimes misunderstood by those who seek clerical detachment in their priests, was an essential part of his priesthood, one which made him deeply pastoral at all times in the everyday world. There was no ‘off-duty Conlon’, even in his lightest moments the same priestly and paternal respect for others was always there, which, paradoxically, attracted non-Catholics to him so readily. His educated and amusing conversation on the widest spectrum of subjects, rarely ‘churchy’, opened the door to everyone.

As one friend said recently, there was never a telephone call, however serious or sad the initial subject, which at some point did not descend (ascend?) to peals of childlike laughter. Even his well-known indignation and fury with those people and institutions he did not agree with (usually because they were opposed to the traditions of the Church or another firmly-held principle) for all their bluster, and the occasional swear-word, were never unkind, and never quite lost sight of human absurdity.

Antony Francis Maximilian Conlon was born in Dublin on Bastille Day (which date justifiably annoyed him ever after) in 1947. He was adopted as an infant, his father a Farrell and his mother a Cunningham, which fact gave him a large extended family of parents and siblings, whom he rediscovered later in life and to whom, true to his character, he became very close. Where others may have dissembled, he found only joy and pride in equal measure. The ‘chief’ in his coat-of-arms records these origins, two green lions’ heads for Farrell and a shake-fork sable for Cunningham.

He was educated in Ireland, and then came, as a teenager, first to Liverpool and then to London, where he found work in the Economist bookshop while discerning his priestly vocation. This grew week by week at Westminster Cathedral, where serving Mass and Vespers each Sunday, under the paternal encouragement of the Master of Ceremonies, Monsignor Peter Anglim, he made many lifelong friends, who would get together for tea after Vespers, a tradition sadly lost. Among them were Fr David Irwin, then an Anglican clergyman and much later to become a priest, join the Order, and become Principal Chaplain of the Association; and Paul Tobin, who served Mass for many years at our Conventual Church in St John’s Wood. Fr Conlon’s understanding of friendship invariably extended to his friends’ families, and whenever he could he would travel to celebrate weddings, baptisms, and funerals for them. Also among the Cathedral altar servers was a young nobleman, who was to play a great part in his life, as in the Order – Anthony Furness, known to his Cathedral friends as Lord Roly-Poly. They quickly formed a lifelong bond, Viscount Furness first encouraged the young Conlon to join the Order of Malta as a Donat of Devotion (in 1971), and when he finally responded to his vocation, supported him financially as a student for the sacred priesthood at the Royal English College in Valladolid. Conlon was the only seminarian in his day to have a motorcar, the generosity of Lord Furness; an excellent gift, and as every student knows, an instant ticket to fun and popularity.

The accident of age meant that Conlon was to bridge the changes from the old days to the post-Vatican II church while at seminary. In his first year it was strictly cassock every day, when visiting a fellow-student’s room one had to leave one’s biretta on the floor outside, so the Rector knew who was where. Sensible, we might think. By his second year it was jeans and casual shirts. This, as the liturgical changes, left a profound mark on the young historian, who forever regretted the loss of Tradition and the impoverishment of the Church’s culture.

He came back to England and was ordained by George Basil Cardinal Hume on the feast of St Philip Neri 1979. A felicitous date, St Philip’s charism was indeed to colour all of Fr Antony’s priesthood, one of constant joy and hard work among the needy and often neglected. His ordination was the first time he was able publicly to live up to the nickname he was to gain as a student in Rome – ‘Mega’ (short for ‘megaglitz’ a buzzword he frequently used). The procession entered to Parry’s ‘I was glad’, and he was the first man to be ordained in a Roman chasuble (nineteenth century red velvet with heavy gold embroidery) for many years! Start as you mean to carry on.

He had remained in the Order through his seminary years, and was made Chaplain of Magistral Obedience in 1980.

He spent his curacies first in the parish of Kingsbury; then at Our Lady of the Rosary, Marylebone, where he made another lifelong friend, Canon Michael Brockie, later Parish Priest of Holy Redeemer Chelsea and Provost of the Cathedral Chapter; and later at Our Lady of Hal in Camden Town. Cardinal Hume then sent him to the Venerable English College in Rome to study for a Licence in Church History at the Pontifical Gregorian University. On his return he was curate at St Mary’s Cadogan Street, comfortably renewing his contact with many Order friends, and then appointed Parish Priest of St Joseph, Bunhill Row on the edge of the City of London.

A ‘good shepherd’ on pilgrimage
in the Holy Land.

The Bunhill Row years allowed him to cement his understanding of the priestly mission, restoring the very dilapidated church building to an Italianate splendour on a shoestring budget, drawing on teams of willing friends, and building up the liturgical and social life of the parish. Our late confrère Sir Harold Hood was then Chairman of the neighbouring Catholic Herald, and his charitable trust was very generous to this project. The presbytery door was always open. A weekly sung (Ordinary Form) Latin Mass with Gregorian chant; Masses in the Old Rite (long before Summorum Pontificum); annual Quarant’ore Devotion; May procession of Our Lady. Over the years an initially somewhat bemused (and mostly very poor) congregation came to rejoice in this restoration of the Faith they had grown up with, and the ceremonies were conducted before a packed church. This in tandem with such traditions as race nights and Irish dancing, the numerous keen young servers forming a bridge between altar and parish hall. He kept in touch with nearly all of them. He put his membership of the Order at the disposal of his parishioners, one year inviting the Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Barbarito, one of our chaplains, to do the Confirmations. His last big event was the Parish centenary, with a Pontifical Mass celebrated by the newly appointed Cardinal Murphy O’Connor in front of 600 people in the local Whitbread Brewery, and Knights of Malta in procession. A video is seemingly now in the Borough archives.

Part of the genius of his priesthood was an uncompromising attachment to Tradition at a period when it was derided in all the higher echelons of the Church, while at the same time remaining part of the mainstream, and active in the Diocese. He was not thick-skinned, but bore the frequent mockery of both his fellow clergy and the bien pensant laity with the fortitude he had, perhaps, learned from studying the Martyrs. He carried the Tridentine banner at a time when few young priests wanted it, and Cardinal Hume asked him to take on the chaplaincy of the Latin Mass Society, a ministry he held for many years. Great was his joy when Pope Benedict issued Summorum Pontificum. Today’s new generation of traditionalists have much to thank Antony Conlon for, as indeed they do; he lived long enough to be fully vindicated.

To illustrate the regard in which he was held by the hierarchy, early in his priesthood he had published a small manual of Eucharistic devotions, and he was asked by the Cardinal to represent the Bishops Conference to the Eucharistic Congress in Seville in 1993, and again in Wrocław in 1997, a role most countries reserve to a bishop. It was there, while at dinner presided over by Pope John Paul II, that Fr Conlon had his heart attack, and was whisked away in the ambulance standing ready for the ailing Pope. Flown back to London, and following a triple heart bypass at the Wellington, he made a full recovery.

On the restoration of the Grand Priory of England in 1993, as Viscount Furness, Regent of the sub-Priory, handed over the reigns to Fra’ Matthew Festing the fifty-fifth Grand Prior, Father Conlon was appointed Chaplain, being thus the first chaplain since the Reformation, a post he held for the remaining twenty-seven years of his life. He was made Grand Cross in 2015. His priestly service to the Order over so many years, through many glorious Masses, innumerable retreats, including the eight years of the Easter Triduum in our Conventual Church, spiritual direction, and learned and insightful meditations, the last wonderful texts as recently as this Holy Week in ‘lockdown’, is as impossible to describe as it is to quantify. He never lost sight of the particular lay character of the Order, and offered a priest’s support to the senior officers and members alike. Having said all this, he was not beyond taking himself seriously when occasion arose. Our confrère Dudley Heathcote’s son Peregrine painted a stately portrait in full chaplain’s purple, which hung in his study and was shown to visitors with a twinkling smile. He also takes centre-stage in the Order’s group portrait of the restored Grand Priory by the former Grand Master’s brother, Andrew Festing.

From his earliest days in the Order he had gone on the Lourdes Pilgrimage, and encouraged many others, and from 1995 to 2002 was Pilgrimage Chaplain. He was always popular with the malades, as he would rightly insist on calling our Lords the Sick, spending a lot of time in the accueil, as well as Masses and frequent confessions, and taking great care of the spiritual welfare of the helpers. Despite a quality that many pilgrims have described as saintly, with his lightness of touch he would still be the life and soul of any gathering, and hold court over a glass in ‘The Bronx’, a friend to all the pilgrims. He never lost sight of the true purpose of pilgrimage: conversion of heart. Later he was to bring all these years’ experience to bear in the Oratory School’s pilgrimage.

In 2001 he accepted the chaplaincy of Cardinal Newman’s Oratory School near Reading, of which our late confrère Jack Eyston was then Chairman of Governors. Mass and supper at Mapledurham were to become a regular feature of this new life, and an opportunity to take schoolboys along to serve Mass and see a passing world they would otherwise never meet. At the School his first act was a Requiem for the victims of 9/11, where several boys had lost friends and family. He very early on restored the old chapel, full of many beautiful old things, reordered the main chapel to be eastward facing, with a new high altar, and installed an Angelus bell. He reinstated the annual Corpus Christi procession, with armed guard of honour from the Combined Cadet Force, and persuaded the Headmaster to convert a Doric cricket pavilion for it, complete with new baroque stone altar designed by a member of the Order. He moved his Religious Studies lessons from a classroom to his sitting room, thereby vastly increasing their appeal and effectiveness, and not content with only the religious life, he also coached football, and was the school’s theatre critic – always hilarious. The annual Sacristans’ dinner would invariably end with flaming Sambucas, and doubtless introduced yet another generation of friends to his (in)famous falsetto rendering of ‘Rule Britannia’. All this beside the daily round of Masses and devotions, so important to the formation of the young; his legacy from the School includes dozens of converts, including many of the boys’ families as well, and one priest (so far), in the Institute of Christ the King.

It was during his time at the Oratory that he celebrated the Silver Jubilee of his ordination. In true ‘Mega’ fashion, there was an Old Rite High Mass at Westminster Cathedral, with two bishops in choir, and a Mass and party at the School to which seemingly half the Order and 35 of his priest friends came.

Through friends in Burgundy, with whom he would often stay, and say Mass in their chapel, as he did indeed in houses of Order friends all around Britain during the long school holidays, he decided in a flight of romanticism to buy a twelfth century house in Meloisey, in the hills above Beaune, ostensibly for a dreamed-of retirement as a curé de campagne. When staying there he would offer his services to the Parish Priest to celebrate Holy Mass in one of the thirteen village churches within the parish. In August 2000, he celebrated a Missa Cantata in the parish church of St Nicolas in Meursault to mark the one-hundredth birthday of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. The French loved it! Later, having moved to Goring, he decided to sell the house in France; the legacy of his brief time there remains an ironwork Maltese cross on a tie-bar on the side of the house.

Like many an Irishman before him, Fr Conlon had a fascination with the English Royal Family, resulting in a large collection of highly dubious commemorative china. This interest was raised to far higher levels, however, and combined with his faith and love of history, in his PhD undertaken at Heythrop College, on the English Marian Restoration, a valuable contribution as already acknowledged by historians of the period including Professor Eamon Duffy. Entitled “What Ceremony Else”, he has not lived to see it published as he intended, but it is hoped this may be done posthumously.

In 2014 he was asked by the Archbishop of Birmingham, Bernard Longley, another old friend from his Rome days, to become parish priest of Goring-on-Thames, a pretty church beside the river. Again, much splendid restoration of the church took place very soon, restoring the high altar to daily use, and himself giving a painted copy of panels of the van Eyck Ghent altarpiece as a reredos. His new parishioners fell in love with him very quickly. He commissioned a new parish hall, badly needed, building work on which had just begun on site a month before he died. A fitting memorial to a very pastoral priest.

Fr Antony Conlon died after several years cheerfully battling cancer, supported by many friends, particularly his near neighbour Susie Buchan, Dame of the Order, a lifelong friend, who also helped him furnish the house in Reading he had just bought with a fellow priest from the Oratory School. He continued working at parish duties until a few days before his death, fortified by the Rites of Holy Mother Church. His funeral was held on the feast of St Pius V and of the English Martyrs (the same day as Grand Master Giacomo dalla Torre del Tempio di Sanguinetto), a happy consolation for being born on Bastille Day. Requiescat in pace.

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