Other visions

Fr Hans Küng is pictured in his office in Tübingen, Germany. Photo: CNS/Harald Oppitz, KNA

Penelope Middelboe

My grandmother was a surprising person. She received an MBE for helping young Kenyan women in the 1950s and 1960s; became an ardent campaigner for recycling 35 years before it became compulsory in the UK; and mastered a crude, early word processor to write her last book, at the age of 81.

For more than 60 years she’d banged out books and articles on a typewriter, cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth. I remember her being particularly taken with the way the word processor, unlike a typewriter, could justify text (give the text straight edges on both sides of the paragraph). On one visit she suggested it might also ‘justify’ the existence of God to my atheist first husband.

My grandmother was a Catholic convert with some distinguished Anglican clergymen in her family. She was not afraid to see things differently from other people. She believed that women priests would be accepted, but not in her lifetime, and that this would come before married priests because the Church wouldn’t be able to afford partners of priests.