VAUGHAN, HERBERT. - Cardinal, b. at Gloucester on 15 April 1832, d. at Westminster on 19 June 1903.
A descendant of an ancient family that had remained tenaciously faithful to the Catholic Church, at the age of 16 he followed the ecclesiastical vocation; he studied at the Jesuit College of Bruguette (Belgium) and then in Rome at the Gregorian University (1851). Ordained a priest at Lucca (1854) and having returned to England, he overcame great financial difficulties for the founding of the missionary College of Mill Hill and for the purchase of the newspaper Tablet, which under his direction became the exponent of the Roman tendency. Appointed, through the influence of Card. Manning, bishop of Salford (1872), he sustained long and bitter struggles for the defense of his rights, opened numerous asylums, and governed the dioceses with great zeal.
Although in Manning's last years V. was no longer on cordial terms with the old cardinal, nevertheless he succeeded him in the see of Westminster (1892) and shortly afterward received the Roman purple. If on the one hand he was generous, granting, contrary to the dispositions of his predecessor, to Catholic students the right to attend the Protestant Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, on the other hand he showed himself a rigid conservative, both on the occasion of the new phases of the Oxford movement (v.), brought about by Portal and Lord Halifax (v.), and above all in the then much agitated question of Anglican ordinations (v.): through his intervention Leo XIII, after a new examination, issued the bull Apostolicae curae (1896), by which he declared them invalid. Although devoid of those gifts of mind that made his predecessors illustrious, Wiseman (v.) and Manning (v.), nevertheless he remains in the history of English Catholicism as the builder of the great cathedral of Westminster and as an extraordinarily zealous pastor.
Bibliography3 works
Antonio Piolanti