By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press Writer

LONDON

Monsignor Graham Leonard, the former Anglican bishop of London who left the Church of England after it decided in 1992 to ordain women as priests, has died. He was 88.

Leonard, who was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1994 and was ordained as a priest, died Wednesday, the Archdiocese of Westminister announced. The cause of death was not disclosed.

Ordained in the Church of England in 1947, Leonard was appointed bishop of Truro in 1973 and was promoted to London in 1981, serving for 10 years in the church's third-highest post before retiring.

Leonard led opposition as the Church of England's governing General Synod debated the role of women. He also opposed moves toward reconciliation with the Methodist Church.

The Church of England's decision to ordain women was the reason of his decision to convert to Rome, the most prominent clergyman to do so since John Henry Newman, later Cardinal Newman, defected in the 19th century. Leonard was received into the Catholic Church in 1994, and ordained as a priest.

He had sought to move to Rome with his followers in a breakaway church formed under the authority of Pope John Paul II, while retaining some Anglican characteristics such as the liturgy and its own bishops.

Though rebuffed at the time, that structure was adopted by Pope Benedict XVI last year in a gesture to Anglo-Catholics who disagree with trends in the Anglican Communion.

"As a member of the Anglican church I was very concerned that increasingly greater importance was given to private, individual interpretations of the faith _ interpretations that depended on the situation, the environment, on what the church felt should be decided or commented on at any given moment," Leonard said in an interview with the Zenit News Agency in Madrid in 2000.

The ordination of women, he said in a lecture in 1992, "questions the wisdom of God in creating us male and female, equal but different; it questions his choice of the time and place of the incarnation with its particular culture; it questions the adequacy of Christ's humanity if both male and female are necessary to represent humanity; it questions the authority of our Lord in the choice of the apostles; it questions the role of the priesthood.

"That list is not exhaustive," he added.

Leonard is survived by his wife Priscilla and two sons.