KATHERINE Bowyer notices the glances from fellow diners at Nagisa Japanese restaurant at Honeysuckle. Perhaps it’s due to the Herald photographer snapping her, but it could also be the cross and clerical collar she’s wearing that provoke interest.
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“They’re trying to work out who this celebrity clergyperson is,” I offer.
“That’s right, it’s the Vicar of Dibley,” she replies, before bursting into a joy-filled laugh. That laugh, so welcoming and down-to-earth, so Newcastle, almost seems at odds with the seriousness of her recently acquired title. The Very Reverend Katherine Bowyer was installed as the Anglican church’s 16th Dean of Newcastle in October.
In the process, she became part of history, as the first female Dean of Newcastle, and the first person born in the diocese to be elected to the position.
“It say a lot about where we’ve come as a diocese and as a church that women and men share equally in leadership roles,” muses Dean Katherine, “and, yes, this is significant that I’m a woman, but I’d like people to think that, ‘Katherine is the best person for the job, regardless of gender’.”
Dean Katherine orders spicy pork ramen and drinks only water (“when you wear a lot of basic black on a hot day, water is good!”). She faces out, looking at the working harbour. It is a fine view. But the outlook from Dean Katherine’s new home on The Hill, not far from her workplace, Christ Church Cathedral, is even more expansive.
“I pinch myself,” she says. “I can see Nobbys from our bedroom window. My goodness, for a Novocastrian girl, could I live anywhere better?”
From the house, Katherine Bowyer can see how far she has come, and how close she has remained to home. She can almost see where her life began.
Born in 1967 at the Mater Hospital, Dean Katherine is the daughter of a retired Anglican clergyman. The Reverend Wilf Redden was the assistant priest at Mayfield at the time, “so I like to say I was born in the shadow of the smoke stacks at the BHP”.
“The city, the harbour, the nightscape of the city are some of my strongest memories as a child; it’s just beautiful,” she recalls.
Living in a working-class city, Dean Katherine muses, shaped her view and beliefs as surely as growing up in a church household did. The hard-work ethic, the sense of community and care for equality and justice, she says, is “part of the DNA of our city, it’s a part of who we are as Novocastrians”.
By the end of high school, Katherine Redden was considering becoming a journalist, or perhaps a lawyer. She was also fascinated by the science of exploring what is out there, astronomy.
Yet while studying history at the University of Sydney and writing her thesis on William Tyrrell, the first Anglican Bishop of Newcastle, she was “really wrestling with this sense of the call of God, this sense of being called to be a priest”.
Katherine Redden knew this was not an easy calling. For one thing, she had learnt a lot in her home.
“Despite the myth that clergy work only on Sundays, and even then only on Sunday mornings, I knew the reality,” she says.
On a broader scale, she was keenly observing the roles – or lack of them – for women in the Anglican church in Australia. When she was a girl, there were no female priests locally, and it was a hotly debated subject. As Dean Katherine points out, women were first ordained as priests in the Newcastle diocese only 25 years ago.
“It was a real live issue in the Anglican church, and something I had more than a passing interest in,” she says.
Even her own father was not in favour of the ordination of women. But he changed his view, Dean Katherine explains, not because of his daughter’s choice of vocation; he just came to believe it was right.
Dean Katherine shows me a photograph from 2002. She is giving her father her first blessing as a priest. You can’t see his face, but even so, you get the sense this is an enormous moment for him.
“By the time I was ordained, he was 100 per cent supportive [of women being ordained],” says Dean Katherine.
Yet her path to the church was circuitous.
While still studying, Katherine Redden met a teacher, fellow history lover and book collector, David Bowyer, at a church in Gosford.
They married in 1992 and had their first child, Thomas, in 1994. Thomas has recently achieved first class honours in physics at the University of Newcastle. Their second child, Elizabeth, was born in 1997. She is studying history at Macquarie University.
The year after Thomas was born, Katherine Bowyer had settled into motherhood and all was well, which was why she wondered, “Why do I have this sense of inner turmoil?”
“I went and saw my then-parish priest and said, ‘I think God’s calling me to be a priest’, and he said, ‘What’s taken you so long to come and see me?’,” she says.
Katherine Bowyer began studying theology part-time in 1996 and continued her training at the theological college in Morpeth from 2000.
After her ordination in 2002, she served in parishes in Singleton, Telarah-Rutherford, and then Cardiff, where she had been for just over four years.
Then on a winter’s evening this year, she received an unexpected call from Dr Peter Stuart, the diocese’s Bishop Administrator.
“THIS year has not been the year we’ve been expecting, in so many ways,” says Dean Katherine.
She did know this was to be a year of landmarks: her 50th birthday, her husband’s 60th birthday, their 25th wedding anniversary, her 15th year since being ordained. So the family had big plans.
But as the Yiddish proverb intones, “Man plans and God laughs”.
Katherine and David Bowyer had planned a European holiday to celebrate their anniversary. But that plan fell apart, when David required triple bypass surgery on his heart. Dean Katherine says as her husband was being wheeled off to the operating theatre, “I gave him a kiss and I got a bit teary”.
“The nurse said, ‘He’s going to be fine,’ and one of the kids said, ‘It’s their 25th wedding anniversary today’.”
David had been home from hospital for just one day, when Katherine Bowyer received the phone call from Bishop Peter Stuart, telling her she had been elected as Dean of Newcastle.
“I was struck dumb,” she recalls. “Our livelihood is words, I’m used to talking. Bishop Peter, who phoned me, said, ‘Are you still there?’, because there was silence. He’s not used to hearing me be silent.”
Katherine Bowyer finally replied she needed to pray and think before giving an answer. She asked of herself, “Is this the right thing for me to do?”.
After a night spent thinking, she answered ‘yes’. She arrived at that answer, Dean Katherine explains, because she felt a strong sense of “remaining in Newcastle, being part of seeing the changes happening in the church, and being part of that change was the right thing for me to do”.
What’s more, she felt honoured that both clergy and lay people had voted for her to be Dean of Newcastle: “I guess that’s part of the ‘yes’ too. ‘If collectively you think this is something that I’m called to, if you think I’m the right person at this time, ok, yes’.”
I ask Dean Katherine what makes her the right person at this time.
She pauses before replying.
“There’s lots of brokenness and need for healing in the church, and part of what I’ve done all through my ministry is be a person who seeks to be an agent of healing.
“I think, being a Novocastrian, I know the wider Newcastle story, I have a deep, deep love for the city, the cathedral, and a deep, deep love for God and the church, and a desire that we be the very best we can be. And it hasn’t always been the case. Very, very sadly.”
AS Katherine Bowyer said, words are her livelihood, but when our conversation turns to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, she admits, “I don’t have the words to express just how deeply this distresses me”.
But she finds the words, recounting her reaction to hearing the allegations and revelations of crimes committed, including by members of the Anglican clergy in the diocese, against children.
“It’s an absolute betrayal of trust,” Dean Katherine says. “When we’re ordained, our hands are anointed and the Bishop says something along the lines of ‘Remember, what you touch is holy, so it’s holiness entrusted in your care’. For me, for someone to abuse people, it’s like desecration.”
For the victims, Dean Katherine says, “Just ...” Another long pause. “I’m absolutely heartbroken. Literally. Heartbroken for them to have been betrayed by people they should have been able to trust.”
She also feels betrayed, saying she knew a number of those charged or named as perpetrators, and she finds it hard to reconcile that “I never saw the shadow side … and rocking the sense of what I believed to be true isn’t true”.
Despite that experience, Dean Katherine says she can, and does, still trust. After all, it’s essential to her job. And she points out abuse survivors have extended trust to her.
“When survivors share their stories with me, I just think, ‘Wow, you’re trusting me with this. The institution that betrayed you, that hurt you, and yet you feel you can trust me with your story’. I want to make sure that story gets heard, and that change happens that means no one will ever experience that again.
“What’s really important for us, for me, is that we don’t ever forget this part of our story. It’s a shameful part of the story… But it informs the shape we take as we go on.”
As Dean Katherine prepares for a busy season at Christ Church Cathedral, her first Christmas at the historic landmark looming over the city, I ask her what she hopes Santa will bring her.
“The kids would say I always ask for a quiet life,” she laughs. “But then they say, ‘You shouldn’t have been a priest, Mum!’.
“What I hope Santa brings me? Compassion and strength.”
