Kenneth Kirk - Bishop of Oxford

Bishop of Oxford

Kirk was enthroned as Bishop of Oxford at Christ Church Cathedral on 9 December 1937. He began his episcopacy by re-organizing the large, rural diocese and moving the episcopal offices to the city of Oxford. Kirk issued a temporary seal as the function of Chancellor of the Garter was dissociated from the See of Oxford in the wake of the Abdication crisis. In piety as well as scholarship, Kirk followed in the tradition of the Oxford Movement, emphasizing the sacramental nature of the Catholic Church and apostolic succession. As a result, at the time of the independence of the Anglican Church in India from the Church of England, Kirk was a leader of the Anglo-Catholic party at Lambeth in 1948 that warned the Church from compromising its catholicity by adopting intercommunion too quickly, when not all of the clergy of the United Church of South India would have received episcopal ordination. He worked with the Archbishops of Canterbury, William Temple and his successor Geoffrey Fisher, and with George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, however, in devising a compromise solution, and in May, 1950 a resolution was passed in the English Convocation allowing for limited intercommunion. Kirk died on 8 June 1954, before the resolution was passed in July, 1955, formally inaugurating the communion of the two churches.

The title of his last published work, Beauty and Bands, is that of a sermon he gave at the episcopal consecration of Glyn Simon in Brecon Cathedral.