My brother John Prior, who has died aged 75, trained as a Roman Catholic priest in the UK before spending most of his life on the island of Flores in Indonesia, working within parishes, then as an academic theologian, and always as a man passionate about social justice.
John was born in Ipswich, one of the six children of Vincent Prior, a printing compositor, and Kathleen (nee Mansford), a hairdresser. He went to the Roman Catholic St Joseph’s College school in Ipswich and by his early teens had already decided that the priesthood should be his vocation, after one Sunday at mass he heard a talk by a visiting priest from the Society of the Divine Word (SVD).
