The scholar priest

Charles A. Coulombe remembers linguist and adventurer Adrian Fortescue

Amongst both Latin-Mass going Catholics and very high Anglo-Catholics there is a book that for many decades has been the bible for Masters of Ceremonies: The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described, or else simply “Fortescue,” after its author.

Given its high erudition and specialisation, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that the writer was a cloistered monk, or perhaps a scholar sequestered in some Oxbridge library. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality, Fr Adrian Fortescue (1874-1923) led such an exciting life that he is often described as an “adventurer” by biographers. In her 1939 book, There’s Rosemary… There’s Rue, British writer Rosemary Fortescue told of an incident regarding Fr Adrian. A friend had told her husband, historian Sir John Fortescue, that the fascinating priest was not in fact related to them. On hearing about this rumour, Fr Fortescue wrote Sir John: “We were cousins in the 14th century. Mine is the elder but undistinguished branch. It did remain however loyal to its King and Faith which is more than yours did."

Lady Fortescue went on to comment that “We discovered him to be, in spite of his early middle age, a man of immense learning. He was a marvelous linguist, and enjoyed learning abstruse and difficult tongues and dialects. He knew and loved the desert tribes; had traveled in the east disguised as an Arab and once had to kill a man in selfdefence. He was an expert on old church music, on the liturgy, ritual and vestments of the Roman Catholic Church of which he was an ordained priest; a very good watercolour artist besides being an erudite scholar with a comprehensive knowledge of the classics; he appeared to read every book that was written from abstruse scientific works to trashy novels, which, when sleepless, he devoured at a rate of three a night.”

A direct descendant of Bl Sir Adrian Fortescue, the Knight of Malta and Dominican Tertiary martyred under Henry VIII in 1539, Fortescue came from an ancient gentry family with noble branches. His parents were Edward Fortescue, a famous Anglo-Catholic cleric, and Gertrude Martha Robins, granddaughter of the 8th Earl of Thanet. At the time they met, Fr Fortescue’s parents were both based in Dundee, Scotland – the already widowed Edward as Canon of the Anglican Cathedral, and Gertrude as an Anglican nun. There they met, and their mutual interest in Catholicism grew alongside their interest in one another. They converted to Catholicism and married two years before Adrian was born. Having been received as a layman into the Catholic Church, Edward became a school administrator. Five years later, he died.

But these formative Scots influences upon young Adrian not only sent him to the Scots College in Rome in 1891, they made him a Jacobite. So it was that he prayed most devoutly while in Rome at the tomb of the three last Stuart Kings in St Peter’s. A decade later, at Queen Victoria’s death, he jotted down in Latin in his diary her demise as that of “an elderly lady commonly taken to be the Queen of England.”

In 1894, having finished at Rome, he was sent to the University of Innsbruck, being ordained in Brixen in 1898 – and receiving an academic award directly from Kaiser Franz Josef himself. He was in truth an amazing scholar, eventually mastering 11 languages and studying all sort of arcane topics. After getting his doctorate of divinity from Innsbruck in 1905, he travelled through the Near East – learning about the Eastern Churches in and out of Union with Rome, and having the sorts of excitements his distant cousin-by-marriage referred to earlier.

It was at this point that he returned to England. The hierarchy was rather nonplussed as to what to do with him. But in the meantime, the Catholic Church in the British Isles was divided over a number of issues – some of which seem trivial today. The Byzantine architecture of Westminster Cathedral is a lasting memorial to the then incumbent’s refusal to grant victory either to the Gothicists (of whom Fr Fortescue was definitely one) or the Romanisers. Others were more substantive. The Modernist heresy was in full swing; while Fr Fortescue was certainly no Modernist on the one hand, he resented bitterly what he considered St Pius X’s centralising of the Church on the other. Although we may rightly feel shock at his dislike of the Saintly Pontiff, with 20/20 hindsight, we might well wonder in view of current events – to say nothing of the aftermath of the Council – whether his views might not have been entirely unmerited.

At any rate, he was not one to let that sort of thing get in the way of his priestly vocation. In 1907, Fr Fortescue was assigned to build a new church, St Hugh of Lincoln, in an equally new town, Letchworth. At first saying Mass in a shed, he gathered parishioners, the church grew – and at last, he was able to build a fitting home for it. But much of the money for the new structure came from his own pocket – he actually wrote Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described to raise funds for the church. Despite his continuing to pour out various writings, he worked unstintingly for his parishioners, as well as the poor and needy. Much as his letters and diaries show how much he craved the life of the scholar and how wearing pastoral duties (for which he considered himself unfit) were on him, his strong sense of duty never allowed what he wanted to do to get into the way of what was necessary. In time, this ripened into a deep love of his flock that was cordially returned. On top of his pastoral duties, he was also appointed Professor of Church History at St Edmund’s College, Ware (one of the two successors to Douai, Ushaw being the other).

It has been remarked that – as with Mgr Knox – he was wasted. Regardless of the merits of that charge, it is doubtful that he would have shared it. He was diagnosed with cancer shortly before Christmas of 1922 and prepared to meet his end in an extremely edifying manner. He wrote to the President of St Edmund’s before his operation, “So I have been through all the Christmas festivities, the music at Matins, and midnight Mass, the garland, and little presents and cards arriving, with this in front of me all the time…. I should like to think that you will all remember me kindly and say Mass for a soul that has no hope but in the mercy of God.” His final sermon to his flock on 31 December was entitled “Christ our Friend and Comforter.” Therein Fr Fortescue set forth the mysteries of Christmas and the Epiphany, ending the homily with the words “That is all I have to say.” He died after receiving the Sacraments in the cancer hospital at Dollis Hill on 11 February.

His funeral was the largest any parish priest in England had received up to that time. Considered one of the Founding Fathers of Letchworth, the town honoured him after he died, of which effort Michael Davies marvelled: “A memorial exhibition of Adrian Fortescue’s work was organized in the Letchworth Public Library in 1923, and simply to read the catalogue puts one in awe of the man. There are sections listing his books and pamphlets, notes for his lectures, music, writing and illuminations, bookplates, heraldic and other designs, vestments that he designed, drawings, watercolor and pencil sketch books, and letters in many languages. There were, in fact, so many exhibits that they could not all be shown at the same time and needed to be changed frequently.” Both Michael Davies and Fr Aidan Nichols OP have written fascinatingly about him. No label easily fits him, except one: Catholic. None other really needed.