Fr. Basil Maturin’s Letter to Bishop Amigo

The NINS Digital Collections contains one letter from Father Basil Maturin to Bishop Amigo discussing his attendance at Father Tyrrell’s funeral.

Father Maturin was born February 15, 1847 at All Saints Vicarage, Grangegorman, Co. Dublin, the third of ten children of the Rev. William Maturin. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and originally took Anglican Orders in 1870.

Travelling to England, he served first at Petersstow, Hertfordshire, but in February 1873 he entered the noviciate with the Oxford Crowley Fathers. In 1876 Father Maturin was sent to America to establish a new parish for them in Philadelphia, and in 1881 became rector of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church.

By the late 1880s he was having doubts about the Protestant church, and in 1888 he returned to Oxford. In 1889 he spent time in Cape Town, South Africa, then again came back to Oxford. In 1889 he returned to America to serve in Baltimore, Maryland, but his superiors accused him of “Romish Practices.” Resigning his parish, he joined the Catholic Church in 1897 and went to Rome where he was ordained a priest in 1898 by Cardinal Herbert Vaughan.

Initially living and working with Cardinal Vaughan in Westminster, he then became a parish priest at Pimlico. In 1910 he tried his vocation in monastic life with the Benedictines at Downside Abbey and was clothed in 1912 but then resigned and became chaplain to the University of Oxford in 1913.

In 1915 he undertook a lengthy preaching tour of the USA and had just completed the Lenten sermons in New York when he was recalled to England. In May of 1915 he boarded the Cunard liner, RMS Lusitania for the transatlantic crossing, however the ship was torpedoed enroute by the Germany Navy, with the loss of 1,193 passengers and crew, including the 68-year-old priest.

The sinking, which killed hundreds of US citizens, would become one of the key events that bought the USA into the First World War.