Richard Challoner

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A bishop who could not be addressed as one, governing churches that could not be called churches, in a city where the Mass he offered was a crime — this was the ordinary condition of Richard Challoner’s working life, and he made of it a half-century of patient administration that left almost no public trace and nearly every English Catholic in his debt. Born in Lewes in 1691, the son of a Presbyterian wine-cooper who died while the boy was small, he was raised in the households of the Protestant and Catholic gentry, received into the Roman communion as a child, and shaped by an education in exile. From these beginnings he became the steadying hand of a community that had survived the Reformation only by going to ground, and his two most lasting works — a prayer book and a Bible — are read still, often by people who could not name the man who gave them their words.

Portrait of Bishop Richard Challoner (1691–1781), unknown artist — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Formation in exile

Challoner’s early years carried him across the seam that ran through English religious life. After his father’s death his mother took service in recusant houses; the boy passed into the orbit of Catholic gentry families — among them the household of George Holman at Warkworth in Northamptonshire — and there, by the standard accounts, was reconciled to the Catholic Church around the age of thirteen, under the influence of the resident chaplain John Gother, a controversial writer whose plain, unpolemical devotional prose would mark Challoner’s own.

In 1705 he crossed to the English College at Douai, in the Spanish Netherlands — the seminary founded in 1568 by William Allen to train priests for a mission that, on English soil, had become a capital offense. The town and its college formed him over two decades. He was ordained priest in 1716, took his doctorate in divinity, and was appointed professor of theology and later vice-president of the college, a teacher of the men who would slip back across the Channel to serve in barns, attics, and embassy chapels. He returned to the English mission and settled in London around 1730, into a Catholic body without public worship, without resident bishops bearing their sees, and without legal standing of any kind. The penal statutes — the recusancy fines, the bar on office and inheritance, the price on a priest’s head for saying Mass — were by then enforced erratically rather than ferociously, but they remained the law, and the whole architecture of English Catholic life was built around their shadow.

The English College at Douai, founded in 1568 to train priests for the English mission — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In this church without a public face, oversight was exercised by vicars apostolic: bishops consecrated to titular sees in lands long lost to Islam or schism, so that they governed real territory under the name of a phantom one. In 1741 Challoner was consecrated titular Bishop of Debra — a see that existed only on the map of an older Christendom — to serve as coadjutor to Benjamin Petre, vicar apostolic of the London District. On Petre’s death in 1758 he succeeded to the office itself, and held it until he died. For forty years, then, he was a bishop in the full sacramental sense who could not process, could not preach from a cathedral, could not be addressed in the street by his title without inviting the law — a shepherd of a flock forbidden to acknowledge that it had one.

The Garden of the Soul

The work that carried his name furthest was a book of private devotion. The Garden of the Soul: or, A Manual of Spiritual Exercises and Instructions for Christians who, living in the World, aspire to Devotion, first printed in 1740, was a manual of prayers, instructions, and examinations of conscience written for exactly the people Challoner served: lay Catholics with no parish, no public liturgy, and often no priest within a day’s reach. It assumed a faith practiced at home — a room set aside, a family at its devotions, frequently a woman leading them in the absence of a clergyman. Drawing on the gentle, world-affirming piety of Francis de Sales (Challoner reproduced ten meditations from the Introduction to the Devout Life), it was plain, practical, and unpolemical, asking less for ecstasy than for steadiness: morning and evening prayer, attendance at Mass where Mass could be had, regular self-examination, and the patient cultivation of the interior life under conditions that gave it no outward support.

The title’s image — the soul as an enclosed garden to be tended — names the temper the book instilled. Historians of English Catholicism took the phrase and made it a category: “Garden of the Soul Catholicism,” the sober, interior, undemonstrative strain that characterized the recusant community before the Irish immigration and the Italianate, ultramontane devotions of the nineteenth century reshaped it. The term is most associated with the historian John Bossy, whose study The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (1975) treated this domestic, gentry-rooted piety as the distinctive achievement of the penal centuries; later Victorian critics, by contrast, would look back on it as devotionally thin, too restrained for an age that wanted candles, processions, and the Sacred Heart. Both verdicts are later, contested readings laid over the same small book. What is not in dispute is its reach: The Garden of the Soul stayed in print, in revision after revision (eventually so altered by later editors that Challoner’s original was nearly buried under them), well into the twentieth century — the prayer book of English-speaking Catholics for the better part of two hundred years.

The Bible of two centuries

Challoner is equally remembered for the Bible the English-speaking Catholic world read until living memory. The Douay-Rheims version — the New Testament rendered at Rheims in 1582, the Old Testament at Douai in 1609–1610, by exiles working from the Latin Vulgate that Jerome had given Western Christendom in late antiquity — was a deliberately literal, heavily Latinate translation, and by the eighteenth century its diction had grown remote to the point of obscurity. Between 1749 and 1752 Challoner issued a thorough revision: the New Testament in editions of 1749, 1750, and 1752, the Old Testament in 1750, the whole “newly revised and corrected according to the Clementine edition of the Scriptures.” He modernized the vocabulary and syntax, smoothed the Latinisms, and — the point most debated then and since — quietly drew the wording closer to the cadences of the King James Bible his readers heard all around them in Protestant England.

How far the revision went is a genuinely contested point. The changes were extensive enough that John Henry Newman, assessing them in 1859, judged that Challoner’s labors on the Old Testament issued in little short of a new translation — neither resting on the old Douai nor on the Protestant version, but standing somewhere between. The 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia went further, noting uneasily how near the result had come to the Anglican Authorized text. There is an irony historians have not failed to mark: the original Rheims New Testament of 1582 had itself been one of the English versions the King James translators consulted in 1611, so that by Challoner’s day the influence had turned full circle and the Catholic Bible was being revised toward the wording of a book it had partly fathered. The result — strictly a revision, universally called simply the Douay-Rheims — became the standard Catholic Bible in English, the text of catechism, liturgy, and private reading, for roughly two hundred years, until the Knox version of the 1940s and the Jerusalem and other versions of the 1960s at last displaced it.

The martyrology and the controversies

He wrote a great deal else, and the range of it maps the pressures on his church. There were works of controversy answering Protestant divines from his earliest years in London — The Catholic Christian Instructed (1737), whose preface attacked the Anglican scholar Conyers Middleton and drew Challoner into open dispute; The Grounds of the Old Religion (1742); a string of shorter apologetic tracts. There were catechetical and meditative books — Think Well On’t (1728), Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1753) — built for a laity that had to be its own teacher. And there was Britannia Sancta (1745), a collection of the lives of British, English, Scottish, and Irish saints, an attempt to give a persecuted minority a usable native sanctity.

The most ambitious of these documentary projects was Memoirs of Missionary Priests, as well Secular as Regular; and of other Catholics of both Sexes, that have suffered Death in England on religious accounts — published in two volumes in 1741–42, gathering the accounts of more than two hundred priests and laypeople executed under the Tudor and Stuart penal laws between 1577 and 1684. It was at once devotional and archival: a martyrology that asked its readers to venerate the condemned, and a deliberate effort to keep a suppressed history from being lost under the official Protestant memory of those reigns — a Catholic answer, in effect, to the long shadow of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Challoner had no intention of letting the people his predecessors at Douai had trained, and who had died for that training, pass out of remembrance. Many of the figures he recorded would in the twentieth century be formally beatified or canonized by Rome among the English Martyrs; his Memoirs remained, into the modern era, a principal source for their stories.

The Gordon Riots and the long afterward

The shadow of the penal world reached almost to the end of his life. The first Catholic Relief Act of 1778, easing a few of the harshest disabilities, provoked a furious Protestant reaction; in June 1780 the agitation of Lord George Gordon’s Protestant Association erupted into nearly a week of rioting across London. Mobs burned Catholic chapels and houses — including the embassy chapels that had been among the few places Mass could lawfully be said — and went looking, by several accounts, for the old bishop himself, then nearly ninety. Challoner was moved out of the city to safety. He survived the riots, but the strain of them is commonly said to have hastened his decline. He suffered a paralytic seizure on 10 January 1781 and died two days later, on 12 January, at eighty-nine.

The burning of Newgate during the Gordon Riots of June 1780, from Cassell’s Illustrated History of England (1861) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

His burial measured the church he had served. Interred in the family vault of his friend Bryan Barrett at Milton, in Berkshire, the bishop of London’s Catholics was laid to rest with the Anglican burial service read over him by the parish clergyman, as the law required — a final, quiet enactment of the predicament his whole episcopate had managed. Only in 1946 were his remains translated to a Catholic resting place, the Chapel of St Gregory and St Augustine in Westminster Cathedral, by which time the community he had nursed through illegality had become a public church with cathedrals of its own. He is honored as Venerable: the cause for his canonization is open, and devotion within the English church has long accorded him the title, though he has not been beatified.

Modern scholarship treats him less as a theologian of system than as the organizer and steady voice of a community surviving in legal shadow — the bishop who, denied every public instrument of his office, governed through the printed page and the household altar. The measure of his reach is indirect, and lies in exactly that: generations of English Catholics learned to pray in the cadences he set down and read scripture in the version he revised, the prayer book on the shelf and the Bible on the table doing the work of the parish church they were not allowed to build — and the name on neither was the one most of them ever thought to ask.

Sources and scholarship

The standard contemporary life is The Life of the Venerable and Right Reverend Richard Challoner, D.D. (1784) by his disciple James Barnard, written by a man who had known him; it remains the wellspring for most later accounts, though it is hagiographic in cast. The fullest modern biography is Edwin H. Burton’s two-volume The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner (1691–1781) (London, 1909), which set the documentary record on a critical footing. The article in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia gives a compact, well-sourced summary of his career and a near-complete catalog of his writings, and the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography supplies the secular biographical frame.

For the wider community Challoner shepherded, John Bossy’s The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (1975) is the foundational social history and the source of the “Garden of the Soul Catholicism” usage; Eamon Duffy’s work on English Catholic devotion situates Challoner’s manual within the long history of recusant piety. The textual history of his Bible revision is treated by scholars of the Douay-Rheims tradition, including the documentary survey by the Bishops’ Conference and the critical literature on the relationship between the 1582 Rheims New Testament and the King James Version. His own books are their own best witness: The Garden of the Soul, the Memoirs of Missionary Priests, and the Challoner Douay-Rheims have been printed and reprinted without interruption since the eighteenth century, so that the reader who wants the man can simply open what he wrote and find the plain, patient voice the whole episcopate was built around.

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