Herbert Vaughan - Career

Career

Vaughan received Holy Orders at Lucca in 1854. On his return to England, he became Vice-President of St Edmund's College, at that time the chief seminary in the south of England for candidates for the priesthood. Since childhood, Vaughan had been filled with zeal for foreign missions. He decided to found a great English missionary college to fit young priests for the work of evangelizing non-Christians abroad. With this goal, he made a fund-raising trip to America in 1863, from which he returned with £11,000.

He succeeded in opening St Joseph's Foreign Missionary College, Mill Hill Park, London, in 1869. Vaughan also became proprietor of The Tablet, and used its columns to proclaim his message. In 1871 after the American Civil War, Vaughan led a group of priests to the US to establish a mission society to administer to freedmen in the South. In 1893 the society, based in Baltimore, Maryland, reorganized as an American institution. Among its founders was the first African-American Catholic priest trained and ordained in the US, Charles Uncles.

In 1872 Vaughan was consecrated as the second Bishop of Salford; during his tenure he established St Bede's College. In 1892 Vaughan succeeded Manning as Archbishop of Westminster, receiving the cardinal's hat in 1893.

Vaughan was a man of different type from his predecessor; he had none of the ultramontane Manning's intellectual finesse or his ardor for social reform. Vaughan was an ecclesiastic of remarkably fine presence and aristocratic leanings, intransigent in theological policy, and in personal character simply devout.

It was due to this theological "purity" that Vaughan assisted in scuttling an opportunity for rapprochement between Rome and the Church of England that was put into motion by a high-church Anglican, Charles Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax and a French priest, Ferdinand Portal. Through the efforts of Vaughan and Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson, this early form of ecumenism was put down. It culminated with the condemnation of Anglican Orders by Pope Leo XIII in his bull, Apostolicae Curae.

It was Vaughan's most cherished ambition to see an adequate Westminster Cathedral. He worked untiringly to secure subscriptions for a capital campaign, with the result that the foundation stone for the cathedral was laid in 1895. When Vaughan died in 1903 at the age of 71, the building was so far complete that a Requiem Mass was said there. His body was interred at the cemetery of St. Joseph's College, the headquarters of the Mill Hill Missionaries in North London but it was later moved to the Cathedral.