Thanks to Susan’s note, I found this at St. Dunstan’s Priory, about Bede Griffiths, about whom I had not heard before, who they commemorate May 13 (my father’s birthday):

Bede Griffiths (17 December 1906 – 13 May 1993), born Alan Richard Griffiths and also known as Swami Dayananda (Bliss of Compassion), was a British-born Benedictine monk who lived in ashrams in South India. He was born at Walton-on-Thames, England and studied literature at Magdalen College, Oxford under professor and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, who became a lifelong friend. Griffiths recounts the story of his conversion in 1931 to Roman Catholicism while a student at Oxford in his autobiography The Golden String.

In December 1932, Griffiths joined the Benedictine monastery of Prinknash Abbey, where he was ordained to the priesthood in 1940. He spent some time in the sister abbey in Scotland  but, after two decades of community life, moved to Kengeri in Bangalore, India in 1955 with the goal of building a monastery there. That project was unsuccessful.
In 1958, he helped Francis Acharya to establish Kristiya Sanyasa Samaj, Kurisumala Ashram (Mountain of the Cross), a Syriac rite monastery of Syro-Malankara Catholic Church in Kerala. In 1968 he moved to the Shantivanam (Forest of Peace) Ashram in Tamil Nadu, the ashram had been founded by the French Benedictine monk Br. Henri le Saux OSB, Abhishiktananda,  in 1950. Although he remained a Catholic monk he adopted the trappings of Hindu monastic life and entered into dialogue with Hinduism. Griffiths wrote twelve books on Hindu-Christian dialogue. Griffiths’s form of Vedanta-inspired Christianity is called Wisdom Christianity.

Griffiths was a proponent of integral thought, which attempts to harmonize scientific and spiritual world views. In a 1983 interview he stated,
   

 “We’re now being challenged to create a theology which would use the findings of modern science and eastern mysticism which, as you know, coincide so much, and to evolve from that a new theology which would be much more adequate.”
Griffiths died at Shantivanam in 1993, aged 86. The archives of the Bede Griffiths Trust are located at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.

Posted by Br. Cuthbert at 4:00 AM