By PHILIP ENGLISH
Bishop Richard Randerson, outspoken critic of the National Government in the early 1990s, has been named the next dean of Auckland's Holy Trinity Cathedral.
Bishop Randerson, aged 60, will be part-time dean until May 31 while he sits on the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification as its deputy chairman.
He will then take up the cathedral leadership full-time. His appointment by the Bishop of Auckland, the Rt Rev John Paterson, is due to take effect on December 3.
He takes over from the Very Rev Michael O'Connor, a Cambridge-educated Englishman, who fell out with cathedral parishioners over the dismissal of popular choirmaster Indra Hughes in 1998.
Bishop Paterson asked Dean O'Connor to leave in July after three years at the Anglican cathedral.
Bishop Randerson, born and educated in Takapuna and a graduate of Otago University and St John's College in Auckland, returned to New Zealand this year after serving as Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Canberra and Goulbourn since 1994.
As the Anglican Church's social responsibility commissioner from 1990, he regularly challenged the economic and social policies of the Bolger Government.
"My particular beef is that I feel the Governments of the day pursued economic objectives at the expense of social ones and I said continually through that time that we had to pursue both economic and social objectives as an integrated approach.
"It was the lack of integration of the two objectives that was at the heart of what I used to say. I still believe we must pursue both objectives together and I do not believe, either, that they are mutually exclusive," he said yesterday.
Bishop Randerson said he was looking forward immensely to the appointment, even if the position brought with it the cathedral's financial problems and wounds within the parish.
"I expect that if I ever had aspirations, one of them would have been Dean of Auckland. Auckland is my home city."
As a former Auckland industrial chaplain in the 1970s, he said he intended to continue the "community-facing" dimension to his work.
"I am very committed to the Church being out there in the community, rather than just operating as a kind of religious enclave on the side."
He said he hoped to foster reconciliation and find a new unity at the cathedral to heal past wounds, but he added that it would not be an individual effort.
Bishop ready for cathedral
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