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1832 – 1903
Herbert Alfred Vaughan was born in Gloucester on the 15th April 1832, the eldest son of Colonel John Vaughan and Eliza Vaughan, née Rolls. The Vaughans were a large landed family of English Roman Catholic recusant stock, whose estate was situated at Courtfield, near the English-Welsh border. His parents instilled in their sons and daughters a
deep love of God and neighbour, and a desire to be of service to those in need. His mother, a Catholic convert from The Hendre, Monmouthshire, Wales, was intensely religious; it was her habit to spend an hour every day in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, begging of God that He would call her children to serve Him in the choir or in the sanctuary. Subsequently, all five of the Vaughan family's daughters became nuns, while six of the eight sons became priests, three of them becoming bishops: Roger became the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Australia in 1873, and John became the titular bishop of Sebastopolis and auxiliary bishop in Salford in 1909.
In the spring of 1841, at the age of nine, Herbert entered the Jesuit College at Stonyhurst and remained there till the summer of 1847. From there, he went on to the Jesuit College at Brugelette in Belgium for another three years.
From an early age his thoughts had been turned to the priesthood. His mother, writing when he was only fourteen, said she was confident that he would be a priest. His father's dearest wish was to see him win distinction as an English soldier, but when he was only sixteen he had made up his mind to give himself to the Church. It was a decision his mother heard of as an answer to her prayers, and that his father accepted with good grace and considerable pain.
The vision of the priesthood that formed part of Herbert’s decision was specifically missionary, with a clear focus on the spiritual needs of Wales on the border of which he had been born and bred, and where a 17th century ancestor, Fr. Thomas Vaughan, had risked his life in ministering to the people. Herbert’s wish to devote himself to the study of Welsh failed to win the support of Bishop Joseph Brown OSB, the Vicar Apostolic of the Welsh District and former Prior of Downside, and in 1850 he was sent to the school at Downside where he lived for a year within the Benedictine monastic community, wearing clerical attire and studying theology.
In the autumn of 1851, in the high spirits of a nineteen years old, Herbert left for Rome to enroll as a student at the Collegio Romano, the forerunner of the Gregorian University, and there for a time he shared lodgings with the poet, Aubrey de Vere. The following year he took up residence in the nearby Pontificia Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici.
In Rome, Herbert established what was to be long if sometimes shaky friendship with Henry Edward Manning, who had been received into the Church in 1851 and who would become the second Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster following the Restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy in 1850. Life as a student in Rome was largely an experience of mental fatigue, made all the worse by indifferent health and self-reproach. In the intimate diary which he kept at this time he constantly reproaches himself for his excessive impetuosity in speech and action.
Herbert’s mother died in 1853 when Herbert was just twenty-one. It has a devastating effect on all the family and he returned home to be with his father. However, he returned to Rome to continue his studies and was ordained on 28 October 1854, at Lucca in Tuscany by the Archbishop Giulio Arrigoni, at the age of twenty-two. He said his first Mass in Florence at the Church of the Annunziata on the following day. His generally fragile health had led teachers and colleagues to press the Holy See for the ordination should he not reach canonical age for the priesthood.
During all his student years he had hoped to be a missioner in Wales, but at Cardinal Wiseman's call he now accepted the position of vice-president at St. Edmund’s College, Ware, at that time, the chief seminary for candidates for the priesthood in the south of England. With his post in view, he embarked on a voyage of discovery among the seminaries of Italy, France, and Germany to acquaint himself with the current views concerning the formation of secular clergy and found himself impressed by the College of Propaganda in Rome. He arrived in Ware in the autumn of 1855, and though not yet at the canonical age for the priesthood, and younger than some of the students, he was already vice-president at St. Edmund's.
At this time, Cardinal Wiseman was also granting permission to Msgr. Henry E. Manning to establish the Congregation of the Oblates, whose work with the poor Vaughan was especially interested in. In 1857 he became an Oblate, which placed him in an awkward position at St. Edmund's, for Manning was widely suspected of wanting to bring all ecclesiastical education for southern England under the Oblates. The subsequent controversy went to Rome where the Pope ordered the Oblates to withdraw from St. Edmund's and Vaughan saw no recourse but to follow suit.
Vaughan looked back upon his work at St. Edmund's with a sad sense of frustration. The disappointment worked in two ways. He began to look for external work in the immediate present and, for the future, he dreamed dreams. He collected money and built a church in the county town, Hertford, and founded a mission at Enfield. But he wanted to do something great for God. Since he was a boy his constant prayer had been that whatever else was withheld he might live an intense life. He resolved to consecrate himself to the service of the Foreign Missions. Blessed Peter Claver was his ideal hero and saint, and his first purpose was to go himself to Africa or Japan.
In the 1860s, the British Empire was expanding; British influence was spreading wider. Other European countries like France, Germany, Holland, Belgium all had major overseas possessions scattered across the globe and vied with one another to ensure ‘a place in the sun’. Herbert noted the energy and enthusiasm that many people expended on exploration, on trading, on establishing new colonies. They took great risks, they established heroic feats - hoping to become rich and famous. Herbert felt that Catholics ought to show comparable energy and enthusiasm for God's Kingdom. He wasn't a man just to have dreams; he was a man of action. By temperament unable to do nothing, and feeling reproached by the expanding missionary outreach of Protestant missionary societies as well as continental Catholics, Vaughan set off on another tour, this time in search of a model of a mission-sending seminary that could be transplanted in England.
Mid-nineteenth century England was hardly the ideal place or time to make such a beginning. Catholics were largely a poor minority, most of them immigrants from Ireland - crowded into the bustling industrial towns and cities, into the mining villages. Priests were needed to minister to these people. The Hierarchy had been restored only recently in England and Wales. In Ireland too the Church was still in the process of recovery from centuries of persecution. The ravages of the Great Famine and mass emigration added to the Church's problems.
Disappointed and frustrated, Vaughan endured some months of indecision before resolving to devote his life to foreign missionary work. He envisioned a great college that would send out missionaries worldwide. Vaughan went with some trepidation to put his proposal to his superior, Cardinal Wiseman. In the summer of 1861, while on a visit to the Isle of Wight with Cardinal Wiseman, Vaughan finally voiced the question that had long been in his mind – Did the Cardinal feel any need to do something for the foreign missions? To his surprise the Cardinal warmly supported the proposal. It was an answer to a long-cherished hope. Wiseman confided in Vaughan that, at the outset of his life as a bishop, he had been counseled by Vincent Palloti (now a canonized saint) that he would never know spiritual peace he was seeking until he had established a college for the foreign missions in England. Thus encouraged, Vaughan left for home and for days prayed at the tomb of his mother, asking her guidance on how he was to begin. An answer came to him with the force of a revelation: “Begin very humbly and very quietly”.
At Easter in 1862 Vaughan took the step of submitting to Manning, his Oblate superior, a written proposal for the establishment of a seminary for the foreign missions, a proposal that Manning agreed to implement as soon as possible, only to see it rejected by a chapter of the Oblates. Soon after, Vaughan’s uncertain health took him to Spain where, at Seville, he sought spiritual direction and received encouragement from the Jesuit Joaquim Medina. Later, on retreat at Puerto de Santa Maria near Cadiz, he was advised by Victorio Medrano SJ to resubmit his plan to Manning. It was at this point that Vaughan made his personal resolution to do everything that was humanly possible to found a college for the training of missionaries. Manning’s first response, an order that Vaughan should devote himself exclusively to this work as an Oratorian, was followed quickly by a directive that he should instead make every effort to collect the funds that would be needed to even begin such a venture, and that, having begun, he should be devoted to it.
On the advice of the Farm Street Jesuits, Vaughan now approached Cardinal Wiseman asking that his plan should be presented for approval to the English hierarchy. At Wiseman’s invitation the young priest himself addressed the bishops at Oscott in July 1863. Even if they offered no material support, all except the Bishop of Liverpool, gave their blessing. Once more at the invitation of Wiseman, Vaughan presented his project to the assembly of continental Catholics at the Congress of Malines which passed a resolution offering moral support.
An enthusiastic effort followed to acquire letters of introduction that would serve him on a fund-raising tour of the Americas, an undertaking to which the Oblates gave their assent. Wiseman, who had spent the first few years of his life in Seville, supplied him with letters composed in Spanish, including introductions to the presidents of Bolivia, Guatemala and Venezuela. Then it was on to Rome where the pioneer received the apostolic blessing from Pope Pius IX on 9 November. The Prefect of Propaganda, Cardinal Barnabo, contributed a letter to church leaders introducing Vaughan as an Oblate of St. Charles, commissioned by his community and by Cardinal Wiseman to found a college that would train priests for the evangelisation of non-Christians in areas of the British Empire, and urging them to assist his efforts in fund-raising. Thus equipped, Vaughan prepared to sail from Southampton on 17 December 1863.
Landing at Colon, he crossed the Isthmus of Panama, then part of New Granada. Vaughan arrived in Panama amidst a conflict between church and government - the latter demanding the renunciation by the former of civil powers. The clergy were forbidden to say mass or to administer the sacraments until they had taken an oath to accept the Constitution, which required what was regarded as an acknowledgement of the supremacy of the civil power in spiritual matters. Churches had been closed by the government and though hundreds of people were dying of small-pox, they were left to die without the help of a priest. Vaughan immediately set about providing services despite government warnings. Eventually, after ignoring a direct warning from the president, Vaughan gave Viaticum to a dying woman, and was arrested and required to post bail. Realizing that no more could be done in Panama for the time, Vaughan jumped bail and at once went on board a United States steamer and sailed for San Francisco.
On 1st February 1864, Vaughan arrived to a cool reception from the Dominican Archbishop. Here, in spite of the limitations put to his appeals for money, during a stay of five months he succeeded in collecting $25,000. From California he went back to Panama, intending to beg his way through Peru and Chile, then ride across the Andes into Brazil and thence to sail for home or for Australia. In Peru he collected $15,000, and nearly twice as much in Chile. In March, 1865, he left the cities of the Pacific but, instead of crossing the Cordilleras, he sailed round the Horn in "H.M.S. Charybdis". A month later, he arrived in Rio. The high point of this final stop on his South American tour was the offer on the part of Emperor Pedro II and his Empress to become patrons of his project and their gift of a thousand Brazilian dollars. During the ensuing tours through California, back to Panama, Peru, Chili, and Brazil, Vaughan raised over $40,000.
While at Rio, he received news that Cardinal Wiseman had died. He also received news that the Oblates were planning to establish a seminary of their own in Rome so he began to seriously think about a separate missionary college of his own. In May 1865 in Rio de Janeiro, Vaughan made his decision: with the approval of Manning he would start at once by renting a house in or near London.
In June his campaign was brought to an abrupt close by a letter of recall from Manning, who had just been appointed Archbishop of Westminster, and Vaughan sailed for England in June, 1865. He put his plans together on the journey home. His college would be called ‘College for Foreign Missions under the patronage of the Sacred Heart of Jesus’. His Congregation would be one of secular priests bound together by a common rule, and with an obligation to leave Europe. The Holy See would be petitioned to assign a mission not already established, hopefully part of Japan, and his missionaries would be sent out under the Bishop of that place.
Vaughan arrived in Bordeaux in the last week of July 1865 and set off for England via Paris where he prayed at Notre Dame des Victoires. At Kensington, Archbishop Manning received him kindly and encouraged him to devote all his energies to the foundation of a missionary college.
Once back in England, Vaughan began to look for suitable property for his college. His friend, William George Ward and his wife, Frances Wingfield proved invaluable collaborators in financial support and house-hunting. While Mrs. Ward searched for a suitable building, Vaughan went to Ireland in search of candidates. In the autumn of 1865, Mrs. Ward was able to report that she had found the ideal place, Holcombe House in Mill Hill, a hay-producing area eleven miles from London.
Ho
wever, the house was not for sale and in the face of opposition, Vaughan began a novena to Saint Joseph. He reinforced his prayers, however, with a ‘spiritual prank’. Knowing he was unwelcome, he called at Holcombe House and, before being ejected, and giving the householder no chance to refuse, asked if he might leave a parcel to be collected later. The parcel contained a statue of Saint Joseph. On the last day of
the novena, Vaughan received news that the leasehold would be transferred to him. The new lease having been signed, it was found that a clause forbade the use of the house as a seminary, upon which Vaughan attempted, unsuccessfully, to buy the freehold. Undeterred, and quite illegally, he prepared to open his missionary college.
On 5 February 1866, the feast of the Martyrs of Japan, Herbert Vaughan published a letter to the Catholics of England entitled A Statement on Behalf of the College for Foreign Missions. In it he appealed for young men of any nationality with generous apostolic hearts who would work in mission areas until a good native clergy was established. He urged the struggling English Church that sacrifice for the foreign missions would not go unrewarded.
On 28 February 1866, Vaughan with another Oblate and his first student, Henry Osmond arrived at Holcombe House. Two weeks later, the freehold was sold to Vaughan for the sum of five thousand pounds. On 19 March 1866, Archbishop Manning of Westminster declared that St. Joseph’s College of the Sacred Heart had now opened.
As the workload increased, and no additional help from the Oblates was forthcoming, Vaughan began to petition other societies to accept the task of training his candidates. His efforts proved fruitless so that by 1869 it had become clear to him that his newborn company of missionaries would have to provide for itself.
The charitable and missionary activities in which Vaughan became involved from 1866 onwards owed much of their success to his partnership with Lady Mary Elizabeth Herbert, widow of Lord Sidney Herbert of Lea, who was directed to the College by Archbishop Manning.
On the Feast of St. Joseph 1868, Archbishop Manning was again at Holcombe House for the blessing of a new chapel. On his way from London he had conceived the idea of organizing a public meeting in support of the college, and with Vaughan’s agreement he announced the same in the course of his sermon. The meeting took place at St. James Hall, Piccadilly on 24 April 1868 with ten bishops, distinguished laymen and a great crowd of Catholics attending. Manning reminded them, as members of the British Empire and English speakers, of the unique advantage they had for the spreading of the faith. Vaughan, in his turn, emphasized the American generosity that had founded the college at Holcombe House and appealed for English generosity to promote its success. What was needed was a sum of six thousand pounds for a new building that would be called St. Joseph’s College of the Sacred Heart for Foreign Missions. The meeting was followed by the publication of a pamphlet that was distributed in the British Isles and abroad, and the formation of an organization, ‘St. Joseph’s Society of the Sacred Heart for Foreign Missions’, that enabled the active cooperation of the laity in missionary work.
On the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, 29 June 1869, Archbishop Manning blessed the foundation stone of the new College, on Hill Field adjacent to Holcombe House. In the procession were twelve students bearing statues of the Apostles and members of the nobility and gentry with images of Our Lady and Saint Joseph, followed by clergy and bishops.
Vaughan employed the architect George Goldie for the design of the College, and for the building which began in August, the Dutch contractor James Bueyssen with his team of twenty-seven Dutch bricklayers, carpenters and painters.
There were already four nationalities represented in the student body, and while the building got underway, Vaughan traveled through Belgium, France, Alsace, Switzerland, Tyrol and the Netherlands, appealing for seminaries for missionary candidates and for professors to teach them.
On 27 December 1869, the first missionary priest from St. Joseph’s College, Cornelius Dowling from Fermoy in County Cork, was ordained at St. Thomas’ Seminary in Hammersmith by Bishop William Morris.
On 1 March 1871, the completed portion of St. Joseph’s College was opened free from debt with a community of thirty-four students, among them refugees from the seminary of the Congregation of African Missions in Lyons. A statue of St. Joseph was carried for the blessing of each room, and mass was offered in the temporary chapel at an altar donated by Lady Herbert and dedicated to St. Francis Xavier. Holcombe House was then occupied by the Dutch builders.
So successful were appeals on behalf of St. Joseph’s College that the foundation stone for a memorial chapel in honour of St. Joseph was laid on 19 March 1871 by Archbishop Manning in the presence of a great crowd that included the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. The building of the church was an expression of thanks from English Catholics for the intercession of St. Joseph, and on the tower Vaughan planned a statue of ‘the first foreign missionary’ with the Child Jesus displaying his heart to the world.
While he continued to announce the existence of his missionary college at Mill Hill and to search for recruits, Herbert Vaughan did not know as yet where he might send them. Cornelius Dowling and three more new priests were still cooling their heels. In May 1970 the founder was in Rome, presenting himself daily at the office of the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda who finally asked him to consider Labuan and Borneo as a field for his missionaries. Vaughan was inclined to hold out for part of Japan.
It was finally the needs of the American Church that determined the assignment of the first missionaries. For years the Archbishop of Baltimore had been appealing to Rome to consider the needs of the millions of people then being released from slavery and had more recently made his appeal to Herbert Vaughan. Vaughan continued to petition the Pope for a mission field, mentioning, though not volunteering for, the African-American apostolate. The matter was settled when he read the words of the missionary founder, Francois Libermann, that the salvation of African people depended on priests filled with the Spirit of the Lord.
In the autumn of 1871, Pius IX assigned Vaughan’s missionaries to Baltimore in Maryland and granted the founder and his men the title of “Apostolic Missionaries’. The pioneers were Cornelius Dowling, James Noonan, Joseph Gore and Charles Vigneront.
Archbishop Manning came to the College on 17 November 1871 to preside at the departure ceremony. Al those present, including the Dutch builders, kissed the feet and faces of the men about to depart in procession to Mill Hill railway station. The following day the founder and his four missionaries boarded the SS Berlin at Southampton. On 5 December they arrived in Baltimore, Maryland and were received officially by the Archbishop Martin John Spalding some days later at St. Francis Xavier Church which was to be their home. As the new year began, Vaughan consecrated the mission to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and named his missionaries ‘Josephites’. Father Dowling was appointed the first American provincial of the Josephite mission, and pastor of St. Francis Xavier church. The church was originally bought by Michael O'Connor (a former bishop of Pittsburgh and Erie) to serve the African-American community. The building was owned by the Jesuits, which ultimately led to a conflict. The church was heavily in debt supporting, in addition, an orphanage, school, and African-American sisterhood. The Jesuits agreed to permit the Josephites to assume management of everything including the debt. Moreover, the former would retain the right to reclaim and sell the property without conditions. This state of affairs was highly unsatisfactory to Vaughan, and, unfortunately, Bishop Spalding died in February 1872, before anything could be resolved.
A mission to Africa itself, however, was not far from Vaughan’s mind. Now he dreamt of founding in the post-Civil War United States a missionary college that would train African Americans to lead the evangelisation of the continent from which they had been exiled. In the meantime he set off on a tour of the southern states, inspecting places where his men might be called to work, appealing for funds and looking out for candidates. He was away seven months, and in that time he visited Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Charleston, Savannah, Richmond, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans. Eventually, Josephite missions would be established in Louisville, Charleston, and upper Marlborough, Maryland. Having noted the possibilities and difficulties in the apostolate he had undertaken, he left for New York to appeal in its principal churches for the African-American mission and for students’ burses. There he met the twenty-one year old New Yorker John Slattery who would be ordained five years later at Mill Hill, and would eventually lead the independent society of American Josephites. Before returning to England, Vaughan went to sow the missionary seed in Canada.
When Vaughan set sail for England in June 1872, in Baltimore there was already a chapel, a school, a home for the aged poor, the beginnings of an industrial school and an inter-racial brotherhood. The death of the well-disposed Archbishop Spalding shortly after the missionaries’ arrival had been a setback, though less serious than the loss of the leader Cornelius Dowling from typhoid fever after seven months on the mission. Father Dowling was to die of typhoid in August 1872. Vaughan then appointed James Noonan as his successor. Never happy with this commitment, Noonan was to endure as the mission's second provincial until October 1877, when Vaughan finally granted his release.
Vaughan would make a second visit to the U.S. in January 1875, bringing with him a group of new priests, including Canon Benoit, William Hooman, Frederick Schmitz, John Greene, and Richard Gore, brother of James Gore, as well as Brother Edward Murphy. At this time, Vaughan consolidated connections between the American mission and Mill Hill by drawing up official rules for the Josephite missionaries to live and work by.
Shortly after his return to England his direct supervision of St. Joseph's College was brought to an end by his appointment as Bishop of Salford on 22 October, 1872. This necessitated his relinquishing direct management of the college at Mill Hill. He then appointed his secretary, Canon Peter Ludovico Benoit as rector (1872-1892). Benoit had become the first Flemish missionary to England in 1847
and was well known to Vaughan through his relatives in Lancashire. Benoit gave up his title on his acceptance, but continued to be addressed in honorary form as canon throughout his life. Benoit was to remain at St. Joseph’s College for almost twenty years, earning from Vaughan the titles of ‘the true founder of this house’, and ‘the second founder’ of St. Joseph’s Missionary Society. But though St. Joseph's now had its local superior, Vaughan, to the end of his life, was the head of the Missionary Society. He may have done more conspicuous and important work in his life, but there was none that was dearer to his heart than the founding of this great college, which is still doing the things he planned.
In those early days, aspiring missionaries who had not completed their secondary education were boarded out at existing apostolic schools, until Vaughan and Benoit recognized the need to establish their own preparatory seminary. Beginning at Coedangred on Monmouthshire in 1880, the satellite community moved to Kelvedon in Essex in 1883 and finally settled at Freshfield, near Liverpool, in 1884. Bishop Vaughan dedicated the minor seminary to St. Peter, the ‘fisher of men’, and called the young students ‘Peter Boys’.
From the beginning, Vaughan was aware that his young society could not rely on the relatively sparse Catholic population of England to supply candidates in sufficient numbers for the missionary apostolate he had in mind. Before leaving Mill Hill for Salford, he made a tour of seminaries in Holland to make the existence of his society known and hopefully ‘land some fish’. Canon Benoit made similar efforts to recruit Dutch candidates, and Vaughan, as Bishop of Salford, visited Holland a second time in 1876 and had lengthy conversations with local bishops. As a result, numbers of candidates began to offer themselves for the missionary apostolate, and a seminary was established in 1890 at Roosendaal in North Brabant.
Even before the new seminary had opened in Holland, Vaughan had set his sights on the Austrian Tyrol which he had visited in 1855 as a guest of the Schonberg family at Castle Pallus near Brixen. In 1890, on his way to Rome, he interrupted his journey to meet the Bishop of Brixen as well as the Governor of Tyrol, both of whom encouraged his enterprise. In May 1891 a seminary was opened in rented accommodation near the Brixen railway station, the forerunner of the purpose built Missionshaus that began in the year of the Founder’s death.
Among the results of Vaughan's first visit to the United States must be reckoned a new appreciation of the power of the Press. He came back resolved to own a paper of his own, and eventually bought "The Tablet". It proved a fortunate investment from every point of view. During the time of the great controversy which preceded the definition of papal infallibility, under the direct editorship of Herbert Vaughan "The Tablet", for services to the Catholic cause, received the special thanks of the Holy See.
As bishop, Vaughan worked tirelessly to further the Catholic cause in England. Vaughan’s first concern was for ecclesiastical education and the proper supply of priests for the diocese. The seminarians were scattered about in different colleges, some in England and some abroad. When they had completed their theological studies at Ushaw, or in Rome, Paris, Valladolid, or Lisbon, they returned to the diocese almost as strangers to each other and to their bishop. Bishop Vaughan proposed to establish a transitional pastoral seminary. It was to be attached to his own house, and when clerical students came from Ushaw or seminaries abroad, they were to live with him for a year and, while continuing their ecclesiastical studies, were to be trained by experienced priests in the practical work of a parish. The bishop explained that he had no money for building but his personal enthusiasm for this project was sufficient to win both moral and financial support from laity and clergy alike and it was not long before Cardinal Manning was laying the foundation stone of the Pastoral Seminary.
The support Vaughan’s experimental seminary attracted was a testimony to its good sense. The parishes, however, began to call more and more on the services of young priests who had not completed their pastoral training, making it increasingly difficult to guarantee the seminary’s future. One of the final actions of Vaughan as Bishop was to bring the experiment to a formal end.
He next considered how best to secure a regular supply of candidates for Holy orders. He knew that among the poorer classes there were always boys who, having all the required dispositions for the clerical state, lacked the funds necessary for their education. To meet the difficulty, the bishop endeavoured to secure the foundation of a number of burses for the education of ecclesiastical students. In the case of students whose parents were in easy circumstances the difficulty seemed to take another form. With the principal Catholic secondary schools in Lancashire in the hands of the religious orders, an undue proportion of those youths who had vocations for the priesthood would join the regulars and so lessen the ranks of the secular clergy. The bishop thought this difficulty was incidentally met when he had made up his mind to open a commercial college in Manchester.
The humble beginnings of a commercial college were made, under the patronage of Saint Bede at the beginning of 1876 to ensure a proper supply of candidates for holy orders. St. Bede’s would provide an appropriate secondary education not only for Catholics aspiring to a commercial career, but also for young men called to the priesthood. The existence of a college administered by diocesan priests would both offer them an alternative to the secondary education provided almost exclusively by religious orders and promote vocations to the secular priesthood. Soon after opening St. Bede's he acquired the Manchester Aquarium, and converted it into a central hall and museum for the college. Four years after this purchase the south wing of the college was opened, and the central block was completed in 1884. St. Bede's has long since taken its place as one of the recognized and permanent centres of Catholic life in England, and at the time of the cardinal’s death 2000 boys already had been educated within its walls.
Towards the end of 1884, Vaughan began to suspect that a considerable number of children were being lost to the Church, not merely through parental neglect, but also from the operation of the workhouse system, and through the proselytizing of non-catholic charitable agencies. A Board of Enquiry was formed at the beginning of 1885 and reported that the so-called ‘leakage’ was more serious than at first suspected. Vaughan reproached himself bitterly for having spent twelve years in Salford without recognizing or remedying the situation. He now threw all the resources of the diocese into a campaign to save its ‘life-blood’. The Bishop ordered his clergy to conduct a census of the diocese that would identify not only ‘practical’ Catholics, but every Catholic family and every child. A house-to-house census of the whole Catholic population of Manchester and Salford was at once undertaken, and every child in every family had to be traced and accounted for, in whatever part of the country it might have migrated. The bishop instructed his clergy to throw aside all other occupations that were not imperative, for the sake of this work. By May, 1886, the census was complete. Out of an estimated Catholic population of 100,000 in Manchester and Salford, 74,000 persons were individually registered. Of the children under sixteen no less than 8445 were reported as in danger of losing their faith, and of these 2653 were described as being in extreme danger. Bishop Vaughan, in a pamphlet entitled The Loss of Our Children, publicized and justified the establishment of the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society.
Then the Rescue and Protection Society was started. The bishop gave 1000 to its funds on the spot, and the episcopal income for the same object, during the time he remained in Salford. His example was contagious and the people gave generously in money and service. At the outset the bishop issued a public challenge to the Protestant philanthropic societies of the city. Their plea for accepting and detaining Catholic children in their institutions was that the children were destitute. Bishop Vaughan himself boldly undertook to maintain every destitute Catholic child in Manchester and Salford. Public opinion instantly sided with the bishop. In some cases, however, the societies were obdurate, and time after time the law courts had to vindicate the right of poor Catholic parents to recover the guardianship of their own children. One by one the Protestant institutions were emptied of their Catholic inmates.
A greater task remained. The whole workhouse system of Lancashire had to be changed. In the year 1886 it was found that there were over 1000 catholic children in the fourteen workhouses of Manchester and the neighborhood and that, on the average, 103 Catholic children left the workhouse schools every year. The bishop's report showed that 80 per cent of these were lost to the Catholic church. It was not part of the duty of the Lancashire guardians when they placed these children out in service to take care that they were placed in Catholic families. The bishop did not blame the guardians. The faith of a workhouse child, always part of a timid minority, was generally weak and was easily lost amid new Protestant surroundings. At that time London was far ahead of Lancashire in the fairness of its treatment of Catholic Poor Law children. In Middlesex it was already the custom to hand over Catholic children to Catholic Certified Homes with an agreed sum for their maintenance. In Lancashire there were no Catholic Certified Homes for the children. To create such homes the bishop knew would require a vast sum, but his faith in the inexhaustible charity of his people was once more justified. Two great homes were quickly provided and in each case the certificate of the Local Government Board was obtained. There remained the task of persuading the Boards of Guardians to utilize the opportunity now brought to their doors. It was a strong card in the bishop's hand that he could promise that every child handed over to a Catholic Home should cost the guardians considerably less than if it stayed in the workhouse. The more economical working of the Catholic Homes was, of course, due to the fact that the members of the religious orders who managed them gave their services without payment. By 1890 seven Catholic Homes, two of them certified schools, had been bought or built. Finally, homes were provided for Catholic waifs and strays of whatever sort, whether they came within the reach of the Poor Law or not. Wealthy friends of the Bishop gave generously, but the poor gave more, both in the annual collection made in all churches and the house-to-house collections made once a month on ‘Rescue Saturday’.
Providential for the success of the Rescue Society was Vaughan’s association with the Franciscan Missionaries of St. Joseph, founded by Alice Ingham of Rochdale. His new role in Salford brought him into contact with a group of women organized by a Lancashire woman, Alice Ingham, attached to the Franciscan monastery at Gorton. The previous bishop of Salford, Turner had imposed a period of probation on Ingham's group which had not expired upon his death; in 1878 Vaughan therefore invited the community, by way of an alternative probation, to take over the management of St Joseph's college. Ingham's women therefore moved to London and in 1883 took vows as Sisters of St Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart of the Third Order Regular of St Francis. As associates of Mill Hill, as St Joseph's came to be known, the Sisters not only not only provided local support for the priesthood, but established their own mission territories, for example, in 1885, five of the Sisters left for the Mill Hill Mission in Borneo and later in Kenya, thus helping to further realise Vaughan's missionary vision.
Having become preoccupied with the work of the Rescue Society, it was no long before he appealed to Mother Mary Francis to send Sisters to care for the children of her native diocese. Sister Elizabeth Smith from Liverpool and a young novice, left Mill Hill for Manchester at the end of 1896 to begin the work of Rescue at Ardwick Hall which had been leased by Bishop Vaughan.
In calling on the services of Alice Ingham, Bishop Vaughan chose his collaborator well. Her sisters, the Franciscan Missionaries of St. Joseph, ministered to the community at St. Joseph’s College, Mill Hill for more than a century, as well as in every other Mill Hill seminary established during the life of the Founder and beyond. They worked alongside Mill Hill missionaries in Borneo, Cameroon and Kenya. In Kenya they established a local sisterhood, the Franciscan Sisters of St. Joseph, at Asumbi, and in the Philippines were involved in the formation of the Mensa Domini Sisters, founded by a successor of the Founder, Bishop Cornelio de Wit. To this day, the Sisters are involved in the work of the Rescue.
When Bishop Vaughan first went to Salford he found the diocese comparatively well equipped in regard to its elementary schools, but in most other respects without any sufficient diocesan organization. Long before he left the whole administration was placed on a thorough business footing. Strenuous efforts were made to reduce the burden of debt which weighed upon the diocese. The people were very poor, but they gave generously out of their poverty, and before he left for Westminster the bishop had the satisfaction of knowing that the general debt had been reduced by more than 64,000. The diocesan synods, which formerly had been held every seven years, were made annual. The system of administering the affairs of the diocese through the establishment of deaneries was greatly extended, the dean being made responsible for the proper administration of the missions within the limits of his deanery. A Board of Temporal Administration was formed to advise the bishop on all matters connected with finance.
A new phase of St. Joseph’s Missionary Society’s apostolate had begun in 1875 when four missionaries left St. Joseph’s College, Mill Hill, to serve in the Telugu-speaking districts of the Madras Presidency in southern India. Not long after, in 1879, the Holy See directed Vaughan’s missionaries at Afghanistan to serve as military chaplains to the British forces and to identify opportunities for evangelisation. In 1881, the Prefecture of Kashmir and Kafiristan was entrusted to the Society. In the same year, halfway through Vaughan’s term as Bishop of Salford, a Mill Hill Mission was established in British North Borneo and five years later among the Maori people of New Zealand. In 1894, after detailed negotiations between Cardinal Vaughan, the White Fathers and the Government in London, the Vicariate of the Upper Nile was created by Propaganda Fide and entrusted to St. Joseph’s Society. The White Fathers, who had been in Uganda since 1878, hoped that the arrival of English missionaries would dispel the notion that Catholicism was an essentially French affair.
In 1895, Henry Hanlon was recalled from northern India, ordained Bishop at Rome, and appointed to lead the first band of four Mill Hill missionaries into the African interior. The Uganda pioneers arrived in Kampala on 26September 1895.
Long-distance supervision of the United States mission was always going to be difficult. A breach between the missionaries and Mill Hill became progressively wider, to the point at which it could no longer be healed. In 1892, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore offered to accept the missionaries who wished to be released from Mill Hill, and the following year, Vaughan gave his consent. John Slattery became the superior of the independent St. Joseph’s Society of the Sacred Heart, or ‘Josephites’, dedicated to the service of African-Americans.
Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster
Cardinal Manning died on 14 January 1892. There never was any doubt in the public mind as to who would succeed him. Vaughan faced the prospect with something like dismay. He thought the day of his strength was nearly done, and that at sixty he was too old to be transplanted to the new world of Westminster. He wrote privately to the pope protesting that he was better fitted to be a Lancashire bishop than the English metropolitan. Rome gave no heed to the letter, and Vaughan was appointed Archbishop of Westminster on 29 March, 1892. In May he was enthroned, in 16 August he received the sacred pallium at Brompton Oratory. By December, he was informed that he was also to be made cardinal, and received the red hat from Leo XIII on 9 January, 1893, with the presbyterial title of Sts. Andrew and Gregory on the Caelian.
One of the first works to which the archbishop set his hand was to try to improve the education of the clergy by uniting all the resources in men and money of several dioceses for the support of a central seminary at Oscott. In the autumn of 1894 he took steps to reverse the policy which had sought to prevent Catholic parents from sending their sons to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The bishop's prohibition was being disregarded and evaded, and he thought it better that it should be withdrawn, and steps taken to secure for the Catholic undergraduates such safeguards for their faith in the way of chaplains and special courses of lectures as the circumstances would allow. He lived long enough to be assured that the change for which he was responsible had been completely successful.
During the next few years a great deal of the cardinal’s time and attention was taken up by a controversy which arose out of the movement in favour of corporate reunion associated with the name of Lord Halifax. Representing a small fraction of the Anglican body, Lord Halifax and his friends, warmly encouraged by certain French ecclesiastics, thought the way to reconciliation would be made easier if what they called "a point of contact" could be found which might serve to bring the parties together. It was thought, for instance, that a consideration of the question of Anglican Orders might lead to discussion and then to friendly explanations on both sides. If an understanding could be arrived at in regard to the validity of the orders of the English Church, other conferences might be arranged dealing with more difficult points. The cardinal felt that the subject chosen for discussion was unhappily selected. The validity of Anglican Orders was mainly a question of fact, and was not one which admitted of any sort of compromise. However, he was quite willing that all the facts of the case should be investigated anew—all he insisted on was that the investigation should be as thorough as possible and made by a body of historical experts.
A strong commission was appointed consisting of Father de Augustinis, S.J., M. l'Abbe Duchesne, Mgr. Gasparri, Abbot Gasquet, O.S.B., Rev. David Fleming, O.S.F., Canon Moyes, Rev. Dr. T. Scannell, and Rev. Jose de Llevaneras. The commission held its first conference on 24 March, 1896. When after a series of meetings the process of investigation was finished, the collected evidence was laid before the cardinals of the Holy Office, who delivered judgment on 16 July, 1896, and declared the orders of the Anglican Church to be certainly null and void. This decision was confirmed by the Bull, "Apostolicae Sedis", published on the thirteenth of the following September.
When the Cardinal came to Westminster he came resolved to build a great cathedral. Both Wiseman and Manning had agreed on the necessity of a metropolitan Cathedral to complete the restoration of the Hierarchy but it was left to Vaughan to build it. His predecessor had secured a site, but the site was mortgaged for 20,000, and there was no money for building. Few men ever collected more money than Cardinal Vaughan, though to him it was always "hateful work". In July, 1894, he made his first public appeal for the cathedral. On 29 June of the following year the foundation stone was laid and the cardinal had 75,000 in the bank. It was a cathedral of no mean proportions that he meant to build. The design of John Francis Bentley combined the idea of a Roman basilica with the constructive improvements introduced by the Byzantine architects. A little later the sale of a city church which the shifting of the population had made superfluous enabled the cardinal, after setting aside 20,000 for a new church, to add 48,000 to the credit of the cathedral building fund. In June, 1902, he made his last appeal. He asked for another 16,000, and it came. The cathedral was opened for public worship a year later, and Cardinal Vaughan was there before the high altar in his coffin.
During he last years of his life Cardinal Vaughan suffered from almost continuous ill-health. He laboured strenuously to the last, especially in the cause of the denominational schools. He had fought their fight for a quarter of a century and had the satisfaction of seeing the great Act of 1902 safely on the statute books.
In the summer of 1902, the strain on his heart demanded complete rest. His doctor ordered him to a health spa abroad, and no better when he returned, he sought hospitality from his friends, Lord and Lady Talbot, at Derwent Hall until December 1902. Through the winter, he busied himself with diocesan affairs and grew steadily weaker. On the Feast of St. Joseph, Cardinal Vaughan was anointed at Archbishop’s House as Mass was being celebrated for the first time in the Cathedral’s Lady Chapel. After that, he left Archbishop's House forever. St. Joseph's College, Mill Hill, had been his first love and it was his last; he went there to die and he chose it for his place of burial. He lingered on until 19 June, when the end came a few hours after he had made his public profession of faith in the presence of the Westminster Chapter. He died in his room in the presence of Fr. Christian van den Biesen, one of his Mill Hill missionaries and his nurses, Mr. Young and Mr. Keating. When the body was laid out for burial an iron circlet was found driven into the flesh of the left arm.
In the morning of Saturday, 20 June 1903, the body of the Founder was laid in the chapel of St. Joseph’s College where it was to remain until taken to his cathedral on the Sunday evening. The Cardinal had instructed his executors that his funeral was to be held there without expensive hangings. His body was to be laid in a cheap coffin and taken to Mill Hill in a hearse pulled by only two horses. There were to be no floral tributes.
Out of respect for King Edward VII, whose birthday was to be celebrated on Friday, 26 June, the vigil was shortened by a day, and the solemn requiem was announced for Thursday 25 June. It was the first solemn religious ceremony held in the cathedral. It was celebrated by Vaughan’s auxiliary, Bishop Stanley and the Irish Cardinal, Logue gave the final absolution. Early next morning the funeral procession began its two hour journey to Mill Hill where it was met by the community of St. Joseph’s College and representative of the Diocese of Salford. Fr. Henry, the Rector of the college, celebrated the Requiem after which the students carried the body of the Founder to ‘Calvary’ where some neighbours and schoolchildren
were waiting with Louis Casartelli, future bishop of Salford, the Duchess of Newcastle and Vaughan’s good friends, the Talbots.
In accordance with the Cardinal’s wishes, his tomb was inscribed with the title:
Servulus Perpetuus, Gloriosae et Beatae Mariae Virginis et Sancti Jospehi (Forever the Poor Little Slave of the Glorious and Blessed Virgin Mary and of St. Joseph)
Vaughan’s remains were interred in Westminster Cathedral in a private ceremony on 14 March 2005. On 29 April, solemn Vespers were conducted to commemorate the event.
Cardinal Vaughan was a man of strong vitality, and his energies were devoted, with rare singleness of purpose, to one end—the salvation of souls. He loved directness in thought and speech, and had little taste for speculation or analysis. He knew how to win and to hold the allegiance of men, and the touching extracts from his intimate diary which were published after his death showed him to have been a man of exceptional and unsuspected humility.
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