WHITTY, ROBERT. - Jesuit, b. at Pouldarrig on 7 Jan. 1817, d. on 1 Sept. 1895.
Ordained priest in 1840, he was one of the most active and zealous members of the British clergy, so much so that the future Card. Wiseman soon wanted him at his side and made him his vicar general when, following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850, he became the first Archbishop of Westminster and Primate. Wiseman entrusted to him a large part of the drafting of the celebrated pastoral letter From the Flaminian Gate of 7 Oct. 1850, in which the great event of the rebirth of the Catholic episcopate beyond the Channel was announced to the English people: a pastoral letter which—as is well known—aroused stormy reactions among the “anti-papists.” W. fearlessly withstood the storm alongside his cardinal and effectively collaborated with him in organizing the reconstituted Church of England. But seven years later, when the battle seemed by then won, renouncing the episcopal see which the Primate had requested for him from the Holy See, he entered the Society of Jesus at the age of forty. Having spent his novitiate in Verona and made his religious profession, he returned to England to teach canon law at the Jesuit College of St. Beunos in North Wales. Subsequently he was superior of the Scottish province and was finally summoned to Rome, to the General Curia, as Assistant for England.