Hastings, Adrian.

Adrian Christopher Hastings, Catholic priest and theologian, was born in Kuala Lumpur on 23 June 1929 where his father was a lawyer. He was raised in Worcestershire from the age of two. Hastings was brought up a Roman Catholic but his family had a long tradition of Anglicanism and throughout his life he was a strong supporter of ecumenicism. He was educated at Benedictine Douai Abbey School and read history at Worcester College, Oxford, graduating in 1949. From an early age Hastings had wanted to work with the church and in his third year at Oxford he had joined the White Fathers with a view to going to Africa as a missionary. It soon became clear to him that to be a missionary would be inadequate and that he should go to Africa as a priest.

Hastings managed to secure a post under the only African Catholic bishop at the time, Joseph Kiwanuka of Masaka, Uganda, went to Rome for his training, and was ordained 1955. Three years later he finally left for Masaka where he acted as a curate and taught in the seminary. After the culmination of the Second Vatican Council, Hastings was made responsible for disseminating its finding to the region's clergy, which he did from a base in Tanzania between 1966 and 1968. Throughout the 1960s he was involved in forging links with the wider church in Africa and with Anglican communities in particular, and from 1968-1970 was on the staff of the Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation in Zambia. Ill health and his uncertainty about his ability to contribute as a white British theologian to the new independent African churches led Hastings to return to Britain in 1970.

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