Michael Winter RIP and funeral details

Michael Winters

Martin Pendergast writes:

Michael Winter has died. It is with great sadness that I received news this morning from Alison, Michael's wife, that Michael died last night, Saturday, 22 April 2023, aged 93. He had been in hospital for six weeks, and then got Covid on the ward. Michael Winter was ordained as a secular priest in 1955, following a conventional Catholic education and seminary training. The next 20 years consisted of a mixture of parish work, seminary teaching, and further studies in the universities of London, Cambridge and Fribourg. In 1968 he was summarily dismissed from a teaching post at the Beda College in Rome on account of this opposition to the birth control encyclical 'Humanae Vitae'.

In 1975 he became chaplain to London University, and then Dean of St Edmund's College, Cambridge. In 1986 he resigned from the clergy, and worked from then on with 'Pax Christi', and in university teaching.

He was married to Alison, a solicitor, they had two sons, and lived in north London. He was a prolific author including 'Mission or Maintenance' (1973), Mission Resumed, which suggested structural changes the Roman Catholic Church needs to make to become a missionary body in England, written as a successor to his book, Mission or Maintenance, for the National Pastoral Congress in 1980, The Atonement (Problems in Theology) (1994), providing an explanation of the Atonement which avoids metaphor and myth and the pitfalls of the theory of placating an angry God, and offers an intellectual solution which is compatible with the scriptures and tradition, as well as being acceptable to the reasonable expectations of the modern world, 'Misguided Morality' (2002/2022), Catholicism Retrieved (2011), and Recovering Catholicism - an overview review of the Catholic Church (2014), and Atonement by the Resurrection, with a Forward by Cardinal Vincent Nichols (2017).

He was a former Chairperson of the Movement for a Married Clergy. Until physical frailty prevented him, he regularly attended St Joseph's Catholic Church, Bunhill Row, which he saw as embodying much of what a Church in the 21st Century could be. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

Michael's Funeral will take place on Thursday, 4 May, 11am, in the Chapel of St Edmunds's College, Mount Pleasant, Cambridge, CB3 0BN, where he was Dean some years ago.