VAUGHAN, HERBERT

VAUGHAN, HERBERT. – Cardinal, born at Gloucester on 15 April 1832, died at Westminster on 19 June 1903.

Descended from an ancient family that had remained steadfastly 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 foundation of the Mill Hill missionary college and for the purchase of the newspaper Tablet, which under his direction became the representative of the Roman tendency. Appointed, through the influence of Cardinal Manning, bishop of Salford (1872), he sustained long and arduous struggles in defence of his rights, opened numerous shelters, and governed the diocese with great zeal.

Although in Manning’s final years V. cardinal, he nevertheless succeeded him in the see of Westminster (1892) and shortly afterwards received the Roman purple. If, on the one hand, he was liberal in allowing Catholic students, contrary to the dispositions of his predecessor, to attend the Protestant Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, on the other he showed himself a strict conservative, both on the occasion of the new phases of the Oxford movement (v.), determined by Portal and Lord Halifax (v.), and above all in the then Anglican ordinations (v.): through his intervention Leo XIII, after a further examination, issued the bull Apostolicae curae (1896), by which he declared them invalid. Although lacking those intellectual gifts that had made his predecessors, Wiseman (v.) Manning (v.), illustrious, he nevertheless remains in the history of English Catholicism as the builder of the great cathedral of Westminster and as an extraordinarily zealous pastor.