Eternal Memory: Canon Roger Greenacre

Fr John Salter, Chairman, writes in Chrysostom, for Pascha 2012:


It was at the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham that I first met Roger Greenacre in 1959. Roger was in between jobs and shortly afterwards he went to Belgium to study at the Catholic University of Louvain. From there he went on to become the rector of the Anglican church of St. George in the Rue Auguste Vacquerie in Paris. Here he succeeded the well-known ecumenist Father Henry Brandreth of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd. Roger continued the ecumenical contacts of Brandreth, but with a lighter touch.
In Paris he made it his work to present the best of the Pietas Anglicana to the Catholic Church in France. His dress was strictly in keeping with the norms of the Anglican Alcuin Club and the fashion plates of the Reverend Dr. Percy Dearmer's guide to matters sartorial and millinery - The Parson’s Handbook. Roger never wore the Latin biretta, until I persuaded him that as a Canon of Gibraltar Cathedral he could sport a purple pompom, although I warned him that purists might take it that Elaeazar had eaten swine's flesh!

His ministry in Paris saw the re-building of St. George's physically and spiritually. He returned to England to minister at Chichester Cathedral and to work in the Order of St. Lazarus, under the protection of Patriarch Gregorios III of Antioch of the Melkites.

Roger Greenacre would have made an excellent leader of the Anglican Ordinariate (despite the purple pom-pom!), as he was an exponent of all that was of the Anglican Patrimony liturgically and spiritually.