Queen’s former chaplain laments apostasy in Anglicanism

The former chaplain to the late Queen Elizabeth II lamented what he described as the apostasy within the Church of England and noted that Anglicanism in the United Kingdom is swiftly dying.

“It will become hollowed out with nothing at the center, and because they have 6 billion pounds investments and our buildings, they will keep a show going in the more dramatic places,” Gavin Ashenden, who left Anglicanism in 2019 to join the Roman Catholic Church after serving as the queen’s chaplain from 2008 to 2017, told EWTN.

During the interview that marked the celebration of the Catholic Mass earlier this month in Canterbury Cathedral, which was once the seat of the English Reformation, Ashenden laid out the sobering demographics that he believes show the Church of England has withered in its own country.

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“So they’ll do coronations and royal funerals, and they’ll keep the cathedrals ticking over, though they don’t look after them very well. But the life of the parish churches is very close to being defunct already. I mean, I think the average age in Anglican parishes is over 70, and there is no great renewal in the youth, so demographically, it’s simply going to evaporate.”

“I didn’t leave the Anglican Church — it left me.”
My full interview with Dr. Gavin Ashenden, former Anglican bishop and chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, who resigned and became Catholic. @EWTNewspic.twitter.com/WrrZkSUhC3

— Colm Flynn (@colmflynnire) July 21, 2025

Ashenden resigned his role as the queen’s chaplain in 2017 after protesting that St. Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow, marked the feast of the Epiphany that year by reciting verses from the Quran that denied the divinity of Christ. He said at the time that he spoke out because he felt a duty to defend Christianity, according to The Telegraph.

Speaking with EWTN, Ashenden explained how it cost him personally to follow his conscience by converting to Catholicism, noting it “was easy and difficult at the same time.” He said it followed years of gradual and painful realization that his Anglican friends were drifting in a liberal direction he could not follow.

“One of the things [that] happened over the previous 10 years was I’d become increasingly Catholic — ethically, philosophically, spiritually,” he said. “And my Anglican friends had gone in a totally different [direction], so there was this gap widening between us all the time.”

Ashenden said he tried to explain to liberal Anglicans he knew that they were losing the heart of the Christian faith and endangering their own church and culture.

“I would say, ‘Look, you’re going in the wrong direction.’ And as I became more Catholic — more educated, I think, in sort of the theological Catholic mindset — I became more articulate,” he said, adding that he ultimately confronted his Anglican friends by telling them they were “selling out.”

“You’re changing the nature of faith itself,” he told them. “And what’s more, these are the things that lie down the road. You mustn’t go in that direction.”

Ashenden said that when he increasingly expressed his concerns with the Church of England publicly, he received a call from the Lord Chamberlain of the Household, who serves as the most senior officer of the Royal Household of the U.K.

“The general public are under the impression that when you speak, you speak on behalf of the queen, and the difficulty I have is that you might be,” he quoted the Lord Chamberlain as saying. “And the other problem is the general public have the impression that the queen is influenced by your views, and the reason that’s a problem is she might be.”

Ashenden realized that the conversation was effectively an ultimatum: either to stop criticizing the Church of England or to resign. He said his resignation and ultimate conversion to Catholicism shut him out of the palatial parties and society he once enjoyed.

Ashenden, who also serves as an associate editor at the Catholic Herald, has been outspoken about his faith journey, which he told Fox News in 2022 has been laden with personal suffering and touched by the supernatural.

Ashenden told the outlet that he once had a “very strange, mystical encounter” during midnight prayers at a monastery in the 1990s that allowed him to briefly share in the agony of Jesus.

In an episode he said “has never happened before nor since,” Ashenden said he was crying out to God regarding his own suffering when he saw a vision of Jesus on the cross.

After being offered an experiential window into the physical and mental anguish of crucifixion for less than 10 seconds, Ashenden begged God to remove him from the supernatural experience, which he said “recalibrated” his perspective on his own trials.

“Once you’ve discovered God really does love you, and He loves you to the point where He’s willing to get hurt more than you could ever imagine being hurt yourself, it gives a value to your life that you never lose,” he said.

“I could never look at Jesus on the cross again without thinking of what He went through in order to find me, to forgive me, to give me hope, to give me a purpose and to inspire me to stand alongside other people who are also in the dark and got stuck.”

The Church of England has been hemorrhaging members and trust among those in the U.K., according to a YouGov poll released earlier this year following recent abuse scandals. The same poll also showed that 50% of Britons favor the disestablishment of the Church of England, while only 23% prefer to maintain its status.

The office of archbishop of Canterbury has remained vacant since January, when the Rt. Rev. Justin Welby stepped down after an inquiry reported that he failed to promptly alert police about serial abuse by a volunteer at Christian summer camps.

In 2023, conservative Anglican leaders in the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) repudiated Welby’s leadership in a scathing letter after the Church of England voted to offer blessings for same-sex couples that year.