FABER, FREDERICK WILLIAM. - Oratorian ascetical theologian, b. at Calverley (Yorkshire) on 28 June 1814, d. in London on 26 Sept. 1863.
He spent his childhood in Westmorland. From Harrow School he passed 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, with a pupil, happy journeys in Europe, described in Sights and thoughts in Foreign Churches and among foreign peoples (1842), dedicated to Wordsworth, whom he greatly admired. On his return, he became Anglican rector of Elton (Huntingdonshire).
In 1842 he visited Rome, where Card. Acton obtained for him a private audience with Gregory XVI, who, with loving frankness, urged him not to wait for others in order to move, but to consider his own salvation. His Catholic tendencies were evident, and his Life of st. Wilfred alarmed the Protestants. Newman's conversion (9 Oct. 1843) decided him, and on 17 Nov. 1845 he was received into the Church by Bishop Wareing at Northampton. A small community of converts formed, soon known as the "Wilfridians," at Birmingham, which moved to Cotton Hall, Cheadle (Staffordshire), in 1846; F. was elected its superior. In 1847 he was ordained priest. In 1849 the Wilfridians became Oratorians at Maryvale, and settled at Birmingham. Newman sent part of the increased community to London, where he founded an oratory in King William Street, from which 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 the translation of the masterpiece of St. Grignion de Montfort (1863) is notable, he wrote 49 biographies of saints in the Oratorian hagiographic collection (1847-56). Famous are his 8 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 and Bethlehem (1860). The excellent Italian translation by Canon L. Mussa (8 vols., Turin 1860-81) has had many reprints (Tutto per Gesù, I progressi dell'anima, Il S. Sacramento, Il piede della Croce, etc.).
Among the English Oratorians F. comes immediately after Newman, with whom, despite certain differences of views, his relations were always full of affection. F. was an ultramontane like Manning and Veuillot, which Newman was not; he had little sympathy for the "cisalpine" and "liberal" Catholics such as Lord Acton. His devotion to Pius IX was exemplary. His defect was a certain narrowness of judgment, by which he imposed Italian devotional forms that needlessly provoked English resentments, and a certain tendency to rigorism (e.g., in Progressi dell'anima). On the whole, F. was certainly a great servant of God.
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Enrico E. G. Rope