The Right Rev Anselm Genders, CR, was a member of the Community of the Resurrection, often known as the Mirfield Fathers or even more simply CR, for all of his ministry. He was also one of the last “colonial bishops”. For a century from about 1,860 bishops were sent from Britain to run dioceses in the far-flung parts of the British Empire. Although this practice largely ended in the 1960s, Genders was sent to the tiny colony and diocese of Bermuda in 1977 after many years’ service in the West Indies and southern Africa.

Like that of many of his brethren in the Community, Genders’s ministry was marked by a series of appointments far from Mirfield, the Yorkshire industrial mill town to which CR moved at the end of the 19th century. Apart from Genders’s five years in Bermuda, priests whom he helped to prepare for the priesthood in the West Indies as well as England learnt much from his clear example and practical guidance. Parishes, church schools and dioceses in Zimbabwe and Malawi had him to thank for a pastoral ministry that could best be described as no-nonsense, particularly where finance was concerned.

In later life he was a firm friend to Anglican parishes and clergy both in Britain and North America that could not in conscience accept the ministry of women priests and the bishops who ordained them. He was an uncompromising traditionalist in his beliefs, his preaching and his disciplined prayer life, although, in contrast to one strand of AngloCatholicism, he combined this with an abiding high Tory approach to politics.

Roger Marson Genders was born on the Feast of the Assumption in 1919 in Birmingham. He went to King Edward’s School just before the school moved to Edgbaston from New Street. As such he was one of the last boys to be taught Latin and Greek in Charles Barry’s neo-Gothic Big School where the Victorian scholar bishops Benson, Lightfoot and Westcott had been taught before him. He also grew up at St Alban’s Highgate, perhaps the most beautiful and famous of Birmingham’s Anglo-Catholic churches, which stood up to the modernist Bishop Barnes by insisting on reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. He went as a scholar to Brasenose College, Oxford, to read Greats although service in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve intervened, and it was not until after the war that he finally took his degree. Pusey House was an important influence. He was a server at the Mass that marked its diamond jubilee in 1946 and it was little surprise to Genders’s friends when he went to Mirfield in 1948, to train for the priesthood and to test his religious vocation.

Genders was professed and ordained in 1952, taking the name Anselm. (He had added the name Alban during the war.) Initially the Superior set him to teach in the theological college that the community runs in the grounds of the monastery. This led to his being sent to Barbados in 1955 where Mirfield had agreed to take on the running of Codrington College. Despite being the oldest theological college in the Caribbean, Codrington was at a low point in its history. By the time Mirfield handed on the baton some years later it was a thriving institution producing first-class priests for the West Indies. In monastic fashion, perhaps aided by the fact that the first three priests sent to Barbados had all been naval officers, the Mirfield Fathers mucked in. Genders was first vice-principal and then principal and threw himself into the practical tasks around the grand old house in addition to lecturing and leading the life of the chapel. By 1971 the college had been transformed and it continues to flourish.

After a year back in England, in 1966 Genders was sent to the community’s large and busy priory at Penhalonga in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). This vast mission complex included several schools and training courses and this experience stood him in good stead when he became Archdeacon of Manicaland in 1970 at the request of Bishop Paul Burroughs. Mirfield’s experience in South Africa, most famously described by Fr Trevor Huddleston, inspired a hard-line approach on the part of many members of the community to Ian Smith’s UDI Government. The new Superior of CR preached a powerfully critical sermon in 1966

that caused a furore. Somewhat controversially, while never denying the need for change, Genders and Burroughs took a rather more moderate line.

The call to the episcopate came in 1977. The Anglican Church has a little-known tradition of monastic bishops. Two of Mirfield’s first six brethren — Charles Gore and Walter Frere — became bishops and there have been several appointed subsequently. Donald Coggan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, persuaded Genders to go to Bermuda. Although he enjoyed working with successive governors of this tiny colony and is remembered with affection by parishioners, these were not altogether happy years and his retirement in 1982 was no great sorrow.

Back at Mirfield, Genders slotted back into the routines of a religious community. He wore the simple cassock and scapular of the community and would take his turn on the rotas for celebrating Mass and doing the numerous little chores of everyday life. However, he never lost an air of natural authority and people meeting him for the first time were seldom surprised to be told that he was a bishop. He assisted in his local diocese, Wakefield, for several years. He enjoyed the dramatic side of preaching, confirming and celebrating Mass for Anglo-Catholic parishes and organisations such as Ecclesia, but he could be equally at home in less exotic settings and would pull out a relatively humble Anglican prayer book to say his Office as he took the train home. In the years after the vote on women’s ordination in 1992 he was often invited farther afield.

His preaching and retreat addresses were clear and direct, often laced with humour and delivered in a patrician, somewhat military-sounding voice.

The Right Rev Anselm Genders, CR, Bishop of Bermuda, 1977-82, was born on August 15, 1919. He died on June 19, 2008, aged 88