Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The news media are full of obituaries and assessments of the life and influence of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His place in the history of South Africa and of Christianity at the turn of the twentieth and twenty first centuries is assured.

Reading some of this took me back to when I heard snd met him in Oxford in early 1995. By then a very familiar name, and face, and voice he was asked to lead the triennial Oxford University Mission organised by the College chaplains. The pre-planning seemed a bit slip-shod and last minute from a meeting I attended as a college rep at the Catholic Chaplaincy, but due, I suspect, to Desmond Tutilu’s fame it was a great success. Indeed probably the last such Mission to be really successful, 

I went to hear the Archbishop speak in a full Sheldonian Theatre, but when I went to his last address at the Oxford Union it was so well attended one could not get in to the Debating Chamber. I remember virtually nothing of his Sheldonian speech beyond his introductory joke about the University naming a degree after him - a 2:2. As far as I recall it was a well- thought out reflection drawing upon biblical sources, quieter and reflective which was different from the one-line comments journalists drew out of him in sound bites about the South African situation and the mixture of the forcefully magisterial and the jocular laughter so many have recalled in the past two days,

Those who wished could book to join him one or other morning that week for his private Eucharist in one or other of the college chapels. Those of us from Oriel went with our Chaplain to such a celebration in the then very impressive, if unusual chapel at Mansfield College. I believe this is no longer the chspel but now serves as the hall. In those days this Free Church/URC originating foundation had in its splendid Edwardian neo-perpendicular buildings, a vast chapel, dominated by a central wooden pulpit towering over a small Holy Tsble, and walls supporting statues of worthies such as John Wyclif and stained glass figures including Oliver Cromwell…. Into this stepped a purple cassockef and scull capped Archbishop Tutu to celebrate an Anglican low Mass. All rather bizarre at 8am to be there at such a semi-private moment with so well known a figure. What was striking was his quiet ordered delivery - an inheritance no doubt of that Mirfield CR Anglo-Catholicism which so influenced the Church of the Province of South Africa. Afterwards the congregation met him over coffee in the college.

My memory of him is not the forceful denounciation or quick-witted repartee of the news reports, or of great jocularity but rather of the prayerful pastoral Bishop. I know over the years other ecclesiastics have commented about that and his fidelity to saying the Office, and that is what I sensed in those two encounters.

In recent years his voice had not been silent in denouncing what he saw as political failings in the new South Africa or elsewhere, and that has not always been comfortable for those who were content to cheer him on as the scourge of apartheid. That however is surely the point - he was not a politician but a pastoral prelate, unafraid to speak truth to power, any power. In that he stood in a tradition that stretches back through martyr and confessor Saints to the earliest days of the Church. To do that was not just to be the man at the microphone but also the man of prayer and reflection.

May be rest in peace