Bishop selling £1m mansion to live with 'ordinary people' of diocese

A bishop is selling off his opulent mansion with its one-acre garden and waiting staff to live among the "ordinary people" of his diocese.

Once the sale goes through Patrick O'Donoghue, Roman Catholic Bishop of Lancaster, will swap his 16-room official home, where he has lived since last July, for a modest three-room flat in his cathedral.

The 68-year-old bishop announced the change in a Whit Sunday pastoral letter addressed to the diocese's 116,000 Catholics last weekend.

In his new humbler life, he will travel around his diocese, which stretches from the river Ribble to the Scottish border, live with his priests in presbyteries and tend to the needs of the poor. "I will be something of a travelling bishop. I want to send a sign the Church does care for its people," he said.

The bishop, who has served as a member of the clergy for 35 years, said he would donate much of the estimated £1m proceeds from the sale to the homeless, to asylum-seekers and inter-faith projects.

He said he had been deeply involved with the dispossessed in the community, especially in his nine-year appointment as auxiliary Bishop of Westminster, when he helped to set up two homeless centres.

"The Church is the voice of the poor. If she is not, she has no other meaning. The message behind my decision is that more important than status and having a house is service," said Bishop O'Donoghue, who grew up on a farm in Co Cork in the Republic of Ireland.

He felt he would be doing the "outreach" work on behalf of the Church to show the public, especially those on housing estates and the young, that the Church was in touch with modern life. Change was needed within the Christian community, including ditching of status symbols that separated the clergy from the public at large.