FABER, FREDERICK WILLIAM. — Oratorian ascetical theologian, born at Calverley (Yorkshire) on 28 June 1814, died in London on 26 September 1863.
He spent his childhood in Westmorland. From Harrow School he went in 1852 to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1835 he won a scholarship and in 1837 a Yellow scholarship at University College, Oxford. In 1836 he won the Newdigate Prize with his poem The Knights of St. John. Other volumes of verse (from 1840 to 1843) earned him a reputation as a Wordsworthian. An ardent disciple of Newman, he received Anglican ordination in 1839. In 1841 he made several journeys in Europe with a pupil, which he described felicitously in Sights and thoughts in Foreign Churches and among foreign peoples (1842), dedicated to Wordsworth, whom he greatly admired. On his return, he became the Anglican rector of Elton (Huntingdonshire).
In 1842 he visited Rome, where Cardinal Acton secured for him a private audience with Gregory XVI, who, with affectionate frankness, urged him not to wait for others to take action, but to consider his own salvation. His Catholic tendencies were evident, and his Life of st. Wilfred alarmed Protestants. Newman’s conversion (9 October 1843) decided him, and on 17 November 1845 he was received into the Church by Bishop Wareing at Northampton. A small community of converts was formed at Birmingham, soon known as the “Wilfridians”; it moved to Cotton Hall, Cheadle (Staffordshire), in 1846, and F. was elected its superior. In 1847 he was ordained a priest. In 1849 the Wilfridians became Oratorians at Maryvale and settled in Birmingham. Newman sent part of the enlarged community to London, where he founded an Oratory in King William Street; it moved to Brompton in 1854. F. remained its superior until his death. He returned to Rome in 1846 and 1852.
F. exercised a wide influence at home and abroad as a writer, preacher, theologian, and spiritual director, through his books, which were translated into many languages. Besides various translations, among which that of the masterpiece of St. Grignion de Montfort (1863) is noteworthy, he wrote 49 biographies of saints for the Oratorian hagiographical collection (1847–56). Famous are his eight principal works of spiritual theology, still widely read today: All for Jesus (1853), Growth in holiness (1854), The Blessed Sacrament (1885), The foot of the Cross and The Creator and the Creature (1858), Spiritual conferences (1859), The Precious Blood a Bethlehem (1860). The excellent Italian translation by Card. L. Mussa (8 vols., Turin 1860–81) has gone through many reprints (Tutto per Gesù, I progressi dell’anima, Il S. Sacramento, Il piede della Croce, etc.).
Among the English Oratorians, F. ranks immediately after Newman, with whom, despite certain differences of opinion, his relations were always affectionate. F. was an Ultramontane like Manning and Veuillot, which Newman was not; he had little sympathy for “Cisalpine” and “liberal” Catholics such as Lord Acton. His devotion to Pius IX was exemplary. His defect was a certain narrowness of judgment, which led him to impose Italian devotional forms that needlessly provoked English resentment, as well as a certain tendency toward rigorism (for example, in Progressi dell’anima). On the whole, F. was certainly a great servant of God.