Richard Challoner 1691-1781

Early life

For the greater part of the C18th the leading figure of English Catholicism was Richard Challoner who served for forty years as Vicar Apostolic of the London District. He was born in 1691 just a few years before the execution in 1697 of Nicholas Postgate the last Catholic priest to be martyred. His father was a Protestant wine-cooper, who died early in Challoner’s life after which, his mother took a job as housekeeper to the Catholic Gage family in Sussex. Whether or not she was a Catholic is unclear, but Challoner was thirteen before he was received into the church at Warkworth Northamptonshire, the home of the Catholic Holman family. Their chaplain was John Gother, a leading Catholic controversialist and writer. He taught the young Challoner Catholic Doctrine and helped prepare him for his entry into the seminary at Douai in 1705. It was twenty-years later that Challoner left Douai after being a student, a professor and finally Vice-President. Challoner arrived at Douai at an inauspicious period of its history, as it was enmeshed in accusations of Jansenism amongst its senior members, a controversy which dominated his first ten years there.  He was so gifted that he completed the twelve-year preparation course in eight and in 1708 took the college oath that he would return to England to serve on the mission field when called to do so. He was ordained priest in 1716 at the age of twenty-five and graduated from the University of Douai in 1719.  His success as a teacher lay in his gift of being able to enforce the spiritual realities of the doctrines he was teaching. The experience he gained at Douai helped him as bishop to adopt a practice of Cardinal Archbishop Charles Borromeo of Milan (died 1584) by hosting weekly conferences for the priests.  These were designed to help them keep the habits of theological study and also provide a forum for discussion about issues of conscience that had arisen in the confessional.

In England

In 1730, Challoner received the long-awaited call to serve on the English mission and travelled to London where he served as a missioner until 1741. Though the Penal Laws were no longer enforced with any severity, it was still a difficult time for Catholic priests. Challoner, like most priests at this time, dressed as a layman and would celebrate Mass in obscure temporary chapels often above alehouses or other places where Catholics could meet without attracting attention. It should be noted however, that the choice of venue was more a sign of the impoverished and improvised nature of the London mission in areas away from the Embassy chapels and their respectable congregations.

The Georgian Catholic Church has been unfairly characterised as being in decline most notably by John Henry Newman in his Second Spring Address in1852, but there were, in fact signs of growth by the middle of the century. London itself had a Catholic population of around 20,000 and encompassed the whole gamut of society. The wealthy aristocrats worshipped at the Embassy chapels, particularly the Sardinian chapel, which was considered to be the equivalent of a Catholic cathedral. Its liturgy approached the Baroque splendour of post Tridentine worship with music that attracted non-Catholic visitors. Alongside the aristocrats was a middle-class bourgeoisie made up of professional people, merchants and tradesmen who were either born in London or found their way there from the shires or abroad. Finally, there was a working-class stream ranging from weavers and dock workers to the Irish poor particularly found in the East End areas of London living in Dickensian-type poverty. Mullet points out that by 1780 there were already 4000 Irish in Wapping and Bossy states the social profile of Georgian Metropolitan Catholicism laid the foundation of opportunities and challenges for a priestly apostolate in the urban Victorian Britain of the C19th.[1]

Challoner as Bishop

In 1741 Challoner was consecrated bishop of Debra in partibus fidelium[2] and coadjutor to Bishop Petre, the Vicar Apostolic of the London District. Shortly after this, Bishop Petre retired to his family’s estates leaving Challoner in charge of the District, which he took over formally in 1757 after the death of Petre. Challoner’s first priority was a visitation of the district, the first methodical visitation of which there is any record. The district included ten counties, besides the Channel Islands and the British possessions in America–chiefly Maryland and Pennsylvania and some West Indian islands. Obviously, the foreign missions could not be visited, and even the home counties took nearly three years. An important part of the Visitation was administration of the sacrament of Confirmation, which had fallen into abeyance during the early stage of the Penal Age.

Challoner had problems with the Regular clergy who served on the Mission field, for they owed their allegiance to their Superior rather than the bishop. These problems were especially acute in relation to the Jesuit Order who were very independent minded and whom Challoner had treated with some suspicion since his time in Douai. One approach derived from ch XIV of the Council of Trent which placed delinquent members under episcopal control. Challoner was also worried about the quality of education students were receiving at the English College in Rome (the Venerabile) insisting that it was to be  of the highest quality and in 1759 petitioned Rome to end the Venerabile’s control by the Jesuits. A third problem lay in oversight of the Ambassadorial chapels as there were diplomatic exemptions to episcopal authority. Both the Portuguese and Bavarian embassies were served by Jesuit and Capuchin priests, which compounded the problems as they claimed they were autonomous and did not need episcopal permission to hear confessions. In 1753 Challoner and the other Vicars Apostolic won papal backing by means of the Papal Bull Apostolicum Ministerium which enabled them to overcome the challenges to their episcopal rule and confirmed the scope of a bishop’s jurisdiction as set out in the documents of the Council of Trent.

Challoner had high expectations of his priests, which he himself led by example, and looked back to the disciplinarianism of the Council of Trent. Mention has already been made of the weekly conference, but alongside that the priests were set seven more tasks to fulfil in their work. Regarding their spiritual life, they were expected to spend part of each day in meditative prayer, attend an annual retreat and spend the evenings at home so people would know where to find them. Additionally, they were told to catechise children, hear confessions, preach at every service with a congregation and minister to the poor per gratis. For his role as bishop, Challoner also looked to the Tridentine documents and strove to be apostolic, vigilant, diligent, resident and exemplarily austere. To sum up his episcopate it can be described as paternally solicitous and pastoral towards both his priests and his people.

But Challoner’s importance in the Georgian church is much more than his purely episcopal duties for he was a born educator, and this is shown in two very different ways. First, although Penal Law forbade Catholic education, Challoner founded three schools in his District, one of which (St Edmund’s Ware) is still operational. More importantly, he was an able writer, and his devotional works in particular were very approachable and long lived. In 1740, he produced what became one of the staple works for a Catholic to buy, namely, The Garden of the Soul. Leo Gooch’s study of Yorkshire Clergy finances reveals that purchase of the book was a common expenditure by priests on arrival at a new mission.[3]  Bishop William Ullathorne, in his autobiography reveals that his copy was in his sea chest when he left Scarborough to go to sea and that his father used it to conduct services for local Catholics in Scarborough when no priest was available to say Mass.[4]   Bossy described it as achieving for the English Catholic a ‘comprehensive devotional structure which maintained the continuity of tradition while it renewed and adapted its data into forms appropriate to the situation.’[5]  Elsewhere, its many readers have been described as ‘strong in the faith, somewhat reticent, solidly instructed and devout with a deep interior piety’.[6]  Although undergoing many revisions, it never lost its basic premise based upon the Salesian spirituality of the way to holiness being found in the ‘bits and pieces’ of everyday life and living them with constant love and the awareness of God’s presence. The manual provided a means for a Catholic to spend the day with God beginning with Morning Prayer and ending with Night Prayer. Instructions and devotions for the laity to perform whilst hearing Mass were provided as well as a translation of the Mass; within the ‘Ordinary Actions of the day and the spirit with which they ought to be performed’ the Catholic was encouraged to work hard: ‘fly idleness as the mother of mischief…that the devil may never find you idle’.[7]   Perhaps the major failing of the manual is that it was a manual for the educated. It required a depth of literacy that increasingly, as its share of the population grew, fewer Catholics in England possessed.  Instead, they embraced the newer forms of devotions that were in essence of a more repetitive and responsorial nature. In this might lay the reason for the oft-cited criticism that Garden-of-the-Soul Catholics were devotionally deficient in the light of the Ultramontane Catholicism of the Victorian period.[8] Challoner’s literary output was designed to promote an English Piety, there were translations of spiritual classics including from St Francis de Sales, whose theology greatly influenced Challoner as noted above. His 1753 book Meditations for every day of the Year was translated into both Italian and French and another work to which Challoner devoted much time and energy was preparing a revised version of the Douai Bible and Rheims New Testament. He excised obscure and literal translation of the Latin and any obsolete words and arranged the verses to be printed separately. The first edition of the New Testament appeared in 1749 and the Old Testament with a second edition of the New Testament was published in 1750. A later even more revised edition was published in 1753. Duffy claims that this work was designed to persuade English Catholics to read more scripture, but it failed.[9] He also prepared a version of the Catechism of Catholic Doctrine for his people to use.

When Challoner became Vicar Apostolic in 1758, he was nearly seventy years old and in ill health. He applied to Rome for his own coadjutor which was granted. The younger man was able to take over the Visitations while Challoner stayed in London and continued to write and administer the large district. In 1778, the first Catholic Relief Act was passed by Parliament which brought to an end the fear of priests being imprisoned for saying Mass. However, it also fuelled violence two years later when the Gordon Riots broke out and the mob searched for Challoner with the intention of dragging him through the streets. Fortunately, Challoner was able to escape to Finchley where he remained for the week it took the riots to die down, but he never fully recovered from the shock. Six months later after a series of strokes, he died aged eighty-nine and was buried in the vault of a friend in Milton Berkshire. In 1946 his body was transferred to Westminster Cathedral. 

Challoner was a man who displayed a somewhat narrowness of view; he had no interests outside religion and, unable to think imaginatively in a situation he would stick to the rules or ask for guidance from Rome. His daily routine never varied following the same path he laid down for the priests in his district. As Duffy says, to Challoner truth was old, only error was new.[10] Therefore, he preached the old religion to new hearers and embodied a priesthood taught by wise men. He translated the works of the saints into English for the benefit of the people. He brought nothing new to the recusant church but fulfilled its aspirations. To quote Duffy again, Challoner was ‘a perfect model of a Missionary Priest’.[11]

Dr Margaret Turnham

The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory, Warwick Street, expresses its grateful thanks to Dr Margaret Turnham and the English Catholic History Association for their kind permission to host this biography on our website.

Sources

 Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850

Challoner, R., The Garden of the Soul

Duffy E., (Ed) Challoner and his Church (DLT 1981)

Heimann, Mary Catholic Devotion in Victorian England

Mullet, Michael  Catholics in Britain and Ireland 1558-1829 (MacMillan 1998)

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[1] Mullet, Michael  Catholics in Britain and Ireland 1558-1829 (MacMillan 1998) 152ff  Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850  ( DLT 1975) 310;

[2] In partibus fidelium , which means in the regions of the infidels was used in a bishop’s title after the name of a diocese conquered by a power of another faith.

[3] Leo Gooch, Paid at Sundry Times: Yorkshire Clergy Finances in the Eighteenth Century (Ampleforth 1997).

[4] A. Drane (ed.), The Autobiography of Archbishop Ullathorne with Selections from his Letters (London 1891) 13, 30.

[5] Bossy, English Catholic Community 364.

[6] [6]J.D. Crichton, ‘Richard Challoner; Catechist and Spiritual Writer’ Clergy Review, 66 (1981) 269

[7] Richard Challoner, The Garden of the Soul (Belfast 1860 edition) 182.

[8] Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England 5-17.

[9] Duffy E., (Ed) Challoner and his Church (DLT 1981) 21

[10] Op cit 26

[11] Ibid.