Reflecting on the extraordinary life of Fr Ignatius Spencer CP

What’s it like to have the responsibility for promoting one of your congregational predecessors as a potential saint?

By Fr Ben Lodge CP

Over the past several months, I do not think I have heard an excuse which did not include the word “pandemic”. This includes excuses, or explanations, from Rome. Let me explain: I am the postulator or “campaign manager” for the Cause of Beatification of Fr. Ignatius Spencer. For many years I have dealt with the Congregation of Saints in this role, and finally was told last year that the Cause of Ignatius would take a big step forward in February 2020. Recently I have been told this will not happen until September 2021, because during the pandemic the Congregation of Saints is focussing on canonisations.

Ignatius Spencer was born in 1799 into one of the wealthiest families in England; the family homes included Althorp House where Princess Diana is buried; Spencer House – across the lawn from Buckingham Palace; a house in Wimbledon – now home of the Lawn Tennis Association; a house on the Isle of Wight next to Osborne House; Oh and three London boroughs!

After Eton and Trinity College Cambridge, Ignatius, as the youngest son in the family, was ordained in the Church of England and became parish priest on the Althorp estate; it was assumed a Bishopric would soon follow. He was unusual in that he spent most of his time working with the poor, often denying himself even basic foodstuffs – the family thought he was eccentric! Increasingly in his reading and conversations with fellow clergymen, he began to question the basis of the 39 Articles; in this he shows a very similar pattern to that followed by John Henry Newman.

In 1830 he was received into the Church and went to Rome to study at the English College under Nicholas Wiseman. While there he met some Passionists including Blessed Dominic Barberi, who would become a good friend and colleague. Returning to England he worked as parish priest in the Black Country, commenting that his time hunting rabbits on the Althorp estate was not wasted as he now had to hunt out so many of the Irish living in caves dug into the side of slag heaps. He succumbed to TB and so was moved as Spiritual Director to Oscott College, where among other things he taught the students the finer aspects of playing cricket – his “mania”. In the summer vacation he went to Ireland for six weeks – begging for prayers for the conversion of England; this was to mark the beginning of his lifelong “Crusade of Prayer” for the conversion of England.

By 1847 he had decided to enter the Passionists; during his novitiate he had to minister in the workhouse and so contracted fever which left him on the point of death, but he survived. He made his vows at the feet of Blessed Dominic. Two years later Dominic died and Ignatius was appointed Provincial. He was the only Englishman in the community and so had to divide his time between translating, teaching, and formation work – in addition to preaching missions, and because of his celebrity status he was frequently asked to preach at the opening of new churches, including Mount St. Bernard Abbey. Sermons frequently lasted more than an hour.

He made several tours of Europe begging for prayers, be it from Emperors and Dukes, or beggars in asylums, but his main, and favourite, place to work was in Ireland. There he argued that the Irish should pray for their enemy – the English – and then God would listen to their prayers and convert the English! Interestingly, in one letter to a nephew who was Lord Lieutenant in Ireland he complains about how the Irish are being starved to death during the potato famine; the nephew agrees it is a pity but says it is the only way to subdue Ireland – it clearly suggests a policy of what today is called “ethnic cleansing.”

Several times in his Diary Ignatius refers to outbreaks of typhus, cholera and “fever”, and he comments that when he journeyed to Rome he had to go into a state-imposed quarantine at Civitavecchia. However, he equally went into towns where death was a reality among the clergy, often reporting alarming death rates. But the sense of service was so great that well-founded fear of contagion was simply set aside.

On one occasion Ignatius was to preach at the opening of a church, but instead remained through the night by the bedside of a woman who was dying in Birmingham.

Ignatius lived in the middle of the Industrial Revolution at a time when society was moving from a rural to an urban setting. Typhus and cholera were common, and people lived in real fear of contagion. When Dominic Barberi  (the Passionist priest who received Blessed John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church in 1845) was taken ill on a train from London where there was an outbreak of cholera, people in Reading would not allow him to be taken into their home, convinced that he had the disease; in fact, he was suffering a massive heart attack.

The killer diseases of the 19th century had no cure, but many people instinctively tried to isolate themselves from others. One cannot help but see parallels with Covid 19 today; maybe the “new normal” is not so “new” after all.

Footnote:

St John Henry Newman:

In January 1840, Fr Spencer visited  John Henry Newman at Oriel College, Oxford, to ask Newman to join him in prayer for "unity in truth". Newman sent Spencer away and refused even to see him, but later apologised for this in his Apologia;

"This feeling led me into the excess of being very rude to that zealous and most charitable man, Mr. Spencer, when he came to Oxford in January, 1840, to get Anglicans to set about praying for Unity. I myself then, or soon after, drew up such prayers; it was one of the first thoughts which came upon me after my shock, but I was too much annoyed with the political action of the members of the Roman Church in England to wish to have anything to do with them personally. So glad in my heart was I to see him when he came to my rooms, whither Mr. Palmer of Magdalen brought him, that I could have laughed for joy; I think I did; but I was very rude to him, I would not meet him at dinner, and that, (though I did not say so,) because I considered him " in loco apostatx " from the Anglican Church, and I hereby beg his pardon for it."

Fr Spencer’s body is entombed in the Church of St Anne and Blessed Dominic Barberi in Sutton in St Helens, Merseyside.

He lies beside Blessed Dominic Barberi and Mother Elizabeth Prout, the founder of the Passionist Sisters.