Life of Father Ignatius of St. Paul, Passionist (The Hon. & Rev. George Spencer).

by Pius a Sp. Sancto

At 11 o'clock on Thursday, October 5th, the Office of the Dead commenced. A requiem mass was celebrated, and the funeral oration preached by the Right Rev. Dr. Ullathorne, Lord Bishop of Birmingham, and particular friend of the deceased. We give the following extracts from an account of the funeral as given by the Northern Press; the Bishop's sermon is taken from the Weekly Register.

At eleven o'clock the solemn ceremonies commenced. The church, which was crowded, was draped in black, and the coffin (on which were the stole and cap of the deceased nobleman) reclined on a raised catafalque immediately outside the sanctuary rails. On each side of the coffin were three wax-lights, and around were ranged seats for the clergy in attendance. Solemn Office for the Dead was first chanted, and amongst the assembled clerics were the following: The Right Rev. Dr. Ullathorne (Lord Bishop of Birmingham); Benedictines: Right Rev. Dr. Burchall (Lord Abbot of Westminster), Very Rev. R. B. Vaughan (Prior of St. Michael's, Hereford), Very Rev. T. Cuthbert Smith (Prior of St. George's, Downside), Very Rev. P. P. Anderson (Prior of St. Laurence's, Ampleforth); the Revds. P. A. Glassbrooke, R. A. Guy, J. P. Hall, and Bradshaw (Redemptorists); the Very Rev. Canon Wallwork, the Rev. Fathers Walmsley, Grimstone, Costello, Kernane (Rainhill), M. Duggan, M.R. (St. Joseph's, Liverpool), S. Walsh (of the new mission of St. John the Evangelist, Bootle); Father Dougall; Father Fisher, of Appleton; Father O'Flynn, of Blackbrook, near St. Helen's; and the priests and religious of the Order of Passionists, who were represented by members of the order from France, Ireland, and England. A number of nuns of the convent of the Holy Cross, Sutton, occupied seats beside the altar of the Blessed Virgin, and with them were about twenty young girls apparelled in white dresses and veils, with black bands round the head, and wearing also black scarfs. When the Office for the Dead had concluded, a solemn Requiem Mass was begun. His Lordship the Bishop of Birmingham occupied a seat on a raised dais at the Gospel side of the altar; and the priests who celebrated the Sacred Mysteries were:—Celebrant— the Very Rev. Father Ignatius (Paoli), Provincial of the Order of Passionists in England and Ireland; Deacon— the Very Rev. Father Eugene, First Provincial Consulter; Sub-deacon—the Very Rev. Father Bernard, Second Provincial Consulter; Master of the Ceremonies—the Very Rev. Father Salvian, rector of St. Saviour's Retreat, Broadway, Worcestershire. The mass sung was the Gregorian Requiem, and the choir was under the direction of the Rev. Father Bernardine (of Harold's Cross Retreat, Dublin, and formerly of Sutton). Immediately after the conclusion of the Holy Sacrifice, the Right Rev. Dr. Ullathorne ascended the pulpit (which was hung in black) and preached the funeral sermon.

His Lordship, who was deeply affected, said:— The wailings of the chant have gone into silence, the cry of prayer is hushed into secret aspiration, and stillness reigns, whilst I lift my solitary voice, feeling, nevertheless, that it would be better for me to weep over my own soul than to essay to speak the character of him who is gone from the midst of us. A certain oppression weighs upon my heart, and yet there rises through it a spring of consolation when I think upon that strength of holiness which has borne him to his end; who, if I am a Religious, was my brother; if a Priest, he was of the Holy Order of Priesthood; but he was also, what I am not, a mortified member of an institute devoted to the Passion of our Lord, who bore conspicuously upon him the character of the meekness and the sufferings of his Divine Master.

My text lies beneath that pall. For there is all that Death will ever claim of victory from him. The silver cord is broken, and the bowl of life is in fragments; and yet this death is but the rending of the mortal frame that through the open door the soul may go forth to its eternity; upon the brink of which we stand, gazing after with our faith, and trembling for ourselves whilst we gain a glimpse of the Throne of Majesty, on which sits the God of infinite purity, whose insufferable light searches our frailty through.

I will not venture to recount a life which would ask days of speech or volumes of writing, but I will endeavour at least to point to some of those principles which animated that life, and were its stay as well as guidance. For principles are like the luminaries of Heaven, or like the eyes that cover the wings of the Cherubs that sustain the Chariot of God in the vision of Ezechiel. They are luminous points planted in the midst of our life, which enable us to see whatever we look upon in a new light, and to enhance the scene of our existence. Listen, then, dearly beloved, and hang your attention on my voice, whilst I speak of him who was once called in the world the Honourable and Rev. George Spencer, a scion of one of the noblest houses of the nobility of this land, but who himself preferred to be called Father Ignatius of St. Paul, of the Congregation of Regular Clerics of our most Holy Redeemer's Passion, a name by which he was loved by tens of thousands of the poor of these countries, and known to the Catholics of all lands.

Father Ignatius was born in the last month of the last year of the last century; at the time when his father was First Lord of the Admiralty. Brought up in the lap of luxury, and encircled with those social splendours that belong to our great families, he was educated as most of our noble youths are; sent early to Eton, and thence to Cambridge. I will not stay to trace his early life. In his twenty-second year he received Anglican orders, and was inducted into the living that adjoined the mansion of his fathers, where, for seven years, he toiled to disseminate to those around him what light of truth had entered his own mind. He himself has recorded that he had about 800 souls committed to his care. And here we begin to see the opening of that genuine purity and earnestness in his character which he developed with time to such perfection. His simplicity of soul and passionate love of truth enabled him to see some of the leading characteristics of truth in its objective nature. He saw that truth was one, and that the Church, which is the depository and the voice of truth, must of necessity be one. He found his parish divided by the presence of the sects of Unitarians, Anabaptists, and Wesleyans. These he sought out, conversed with them, and discussed with them the unity of truth and the authority of the Church. But the more he urged them with his arguments the more he found that they threw him back upon himself, forcing him to see, by the aid of his own sincerity and love of truth, that he stood upon something like the self-same grounds which he assailed in them. The very sincerity with which he read the Gospel; the sincerity with which he prayed; the sincerity with which he strove to penetrate into those duties and responsibilities which then appeared to him to be laid upon his conscience; and his sincere love of souls, drew his own soul gradually and gently towards the one broad horizon of truth and the one authority. He had already, from reading the Gospel, determined on leading a life of celibacy as the most pure and perfect, and to keep himself from the world for the service of his Divine Master. And what effect that resolve had in humbling his heart and bringing down the light and grace of God into his spirit, he himself has told us in that narrative of his conversion which he drew up at the request of a venerable Italian bishop, soon after his conversion. The results, I say, he has told us; he presumes not to point to any cause as in himself.

But whilst yet perplexed between the new light he was receiving, and the resistance of the old opinion which he had inherited, he received a letter from an unknown hand, inviting him to examine the foundations of his faith; this led to correspondence, and so to contact with members of the Church, and the errors which had encompassed him from his birth dispersed by degrees, until at last the daylight dawned upon him, and grew on even to mid-day, and he hesitated not, even for one week, but closed his ministry, and entered into the Church of God and the fulness of peace. Then it was he found that the correspondent who had awakened him to inquire was a lady, who, converted before himself, was then dying in a convent in Paris which she had but recently entered; and he hoped, as he said, to have an intercessor in heaven in one who had so fervently prayed for him on earth.

No sooner had Father Ignatius entered the Church than he put himself with all simplicity and obedience under the guidance of the venerable prelate, my predecessor, Bishop Walsh, who sent him to Rome, there to enter on a course of ecclesiastical studies. In 1830, there we find him in the holy city, imbibing that Apostolic light, and bending himself over the written laws of that truth which was to fit him, not only for the priesthood, but also for a singular call and an unprecedented vocation. Father Ignatius was marked out by the Providence of God for a special apostleship, and he had something about him of the spirit of the prophet and of the eye of the seer. He pierced in advance into the work to which God called him, and there were holy souls who instinctively looked to him as an instrument for the fulfilling of their own anticipations. There was in Italy a Passionist Father, who from his youth had had written in his heart the work of England's conversion. It had been the object of all his thoughts, and prayers, and hopes. Father Dominic had moved all the souls he could with kindred ardour for this work. And before they had ever beheld each other, the hearts of those two men were sweetly drawn together. Let us hear what Father Dominic writes to an English gentleman, himself a convert, ardent for the conversion of his country, on the day of Mr. Spencer's first sermon in Rome, after being ordained deacon:—"On this day," he writes, "on this day, the feast of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, Mr. Spencer begins in Rome his apostolic ministry; to-day, he makes his first sermon to the Roman people in the church of the English. Oh what a fortunate commencement! Certainly that ought to be salutary which commences in the name of the Saviour. Oh, how great are my expectations! God, without doubt, has not shed so many graces on that soul to serve for his own profit alone. I rather believe He has done it in order that he might carry the Holy Name of Jesus before kings, and nations, and the sons of Israel. Most sweet Name of Jesus, be thou in his mouth as oil poured out, which may softly and efficaciously penetrate the hardest marble."

This was written by a man who had never stepped on English soil, about one whom he had never seen in the flesh, but whom he felt to have one common object in one common spirit with himself. But it was written by a man in whose heart God had written in grace the words—England's Conversion.