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.

Read more about this topic:  Herbert Vaughan

Famous quotes containing the word career:

    What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.
    Arlie Hochschild (20th century)

    They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.
    Anne Roiphe (20th century)

    He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)