The Rt Rev Mgr Graham Leonard

From The London Telegraph-

The Right Reverend and Right Honourable Monsignor Graham Leonard, who died on January 6 aged 88, was the most senior Anglican churchman to convert to the Roman Catholic Church since the Reformation.

During 10 years as Bishop of London, the third most senior see in the Church of England, he proved a controversial figure because of his strong conservative views on most aspects of faith, morals and Church order at a time when there were proposals for many changes in all Churches.

With considerable skill in the realm of Church politics, he also led an effective assault in the House of Lords on the 1988 Education Reform Bill, which secured the strengthening of the place of religious education in schools. He checked plans to unite the Church of England and the Methodists, and ensured that the formal ban on divorced people being remarried in church was maintained.

As the representative of a minority, he succeeded in these efforts by the careful organisation of votes rather than by powerful advocacy in debate; and he acted in a mood of increasing exasperation with what he saw as Archbishop Robert Runcie's efforts to hold the Church of England together at the expense of doctrinal considerations.

Unlike one of his suffragans, Leonard agreed to ordain women deacons – a decision about which he was to remain uneasy. But he could not avoid forever his Waterloo, in the form of women priests. As the issue loomed at the Lambeth conference of 1988, he was sufficiently concerned one night to ask Cardinal Cardinale, the former apostolic nuncio, who was in London, to come to see him; Cardinale calmly told him to remain where he was, for the sake of ecumenicism.

The rest is here-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/6943119/The-Rt-Rev-Mgr-Graham-Leonard.html