The Right Reverend Kenneth Newing OSB, who has died aged 95, was suffragan Bishop of Plymouth from 1982 to 1988.

He was unusual among bishops inasmuch as he rose to episcopal leadership in the same diocese in which he was ordained, and never left. This was tribute to his loyalty to Exeter and its successive diocesan bishops, but even more to the trust that his outstanding pastoral gifts engendered among clergy and laity of every tradition.

As an undoubted Anglo-Catholic he fitted well into the Exeter tradition of his time and it was not altogether surprising that when he retired from his bishopric he became a Benedictine monk. His training for the priesthood had been completed at the theological college run by the Anglican monastic Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in Yorkshire.

His pastoral approach was warm and generous, but his personal life was meticulously disciplined. His sermons, based on the Bible readings appointed for the Sundays and saints’ days of the Christian calendar, were carefully filed away and reused year after year. He had apparently not changed his mind on any doctrine and during his Cambridge years he may have heard F A Simpson, a legendary Fellow of Trinity, declare: “It is better to hear a good sermon twice rather than a bad one once.”

None the less, Newing’s sermons were invariably worth hearing – sound traditional teaching with social implications, but nothing speculative or over-controversial. The marks of a Mirfield-trained priest were indelible.

Kenneth Albert Newing was born in Kent on August 29 1923. He attended Dover Grammar School and in 1943 went straight into the wartime Army.

As a captain in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps he crossed to Normandy shortly after D-Day and saw action in Europe until the end of the war. The disciplines of Army life suited him well and he stayed on for an extra couple of peacetime years.