Most people in and beyond the Church Of Ireland will remember "Peter" Harvey, who died recently after fruitful retirement years in West Cork, as dean of St Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny from 1970 to 1991. Dean Harvey did much to restore and beautify that loveliest of Ireland's medieval buildings. He played a pioneering role, through Kilkenny Arts Week, in promoting cultural excellence throughout the city. His erudite preaching and attentive pastoral care of the people of Kilkenny are happily remembered there, far beyond the confines of the Church of Ireland.
His handsome bearing in city and close, his completely natural dignity when conducting worship, his beautiful speaking voice, his empathy with the concerns of the young, his utter courtesy - these are qualities which inspired those around him, yet about which he was totally unostentatious. There was an old-fashioned self-discipline about Peter which sometimes made him appear austere, but no one was a finer or more gracious and subtle-witted host. On successive New Year's Eves, hordes of his sons' young friends would invade the deanery to join in the ringing in of the New Year and the dean became almost an undergraduate again.
Brian Harvey's career was richly varied, and perhaps it was his altruistic absence in India during much of his ministry which deprived him of the purple attained by his father, a sometime bishop of Cashel. India was preceded by a very distinguished academic and sporting career in TCD, early experiences of ministry in St George's, Dublin and in Belfast and the co-authorship with Richard Hanson of The Loom of God.
Then, from 1948 he was to spend 15 years serving under the auspices of the Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur and became archdeacon of Hazaribagh. He was committed to the organic unity of the Anglican and other reformed churches in India, a pioneering scheme which bore fruit in what we now call the Church of North India, to whose emerging liturgy he made a distinguished contribution. Leaving a part of his heart in India, Peter returned to Ireland as canon-theologian of Belfast Cathedral and subsequently dean of Ossory. It is a measure of the enduring commitment and humility of the man that in retirement in West Cork Peter founded and taught in a little Sunday school in Rathclaren.
Peter Harvey naturally made his contribution to the wider counsels of the Church of Ireland. A special concern was to identify the circumstances and establish an acceptable discipline by which divorced persons might be remarried in church. His role in this matter was prophetic, compassionate and scholarly, and not always popular - indeed the question was not to be resolved until after his retirement. But Peter's concern for those whose marriages had sadly and irretrievably broken down derived largely from his own wonderfully happy marriage to Honor, whose love and finely-tuned mind brought him such joy.
Peter once said that he became a priest because it mattered supremely to him that people should be enabled to grapple with the great question of the existence of God, with his mercy as well as his glory. In recent weeks countless people in both India and Ireland have given thanks for the pointers to God provided through Peter's teaching, through the loveliness and utter integrity of his priesthood. Such people will be surrounding Honor, Patrick, Christopher and Nicholas with their prayers as they let go from this life of one of the Church of Ireland's finest 20th-century priests. M.B.