What is The Father Coleridge Reader?
Father Henry James Coleridge SJ was a nineteenth century English Jesuit priest, and a forgotten hero.
The Father Coleridge Reader is the gateway to his spiritual writings on Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Gospels, and the life of each Christian today.
Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel
His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible
He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ and all its stages.
If more Catholics knew about works like Fr Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality, or dubious private revelations, would be far less attractive.
At the 1908 Eucharistic Congress in England, Cardinal Gibbons referred to Fr Coleridge in his sermon at Westminster Cathedral:
“The Church in the United States has another bond of union with the Church in Great Britain, and that is your Catholic literature. Not to mention the classical writers of England whose domain is as wide as the British Empire, the authors who flourished among you in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are household names among us.
“Our clergy and educated laity are almost as familiar as you are writings of Bishop Hay, Bishop Challoner, and Dr, Alban Butler and Dr Lingard, of Father Faber and Father Coleridge, and of the three illustrious cardinals who an unfading lustre on the Church in England by the labours as well as by their apostolic lives—I refer to the immortal triumviri, Wiseman, Newman, and Manning.”1
Commenting on this praise, The Irish Monthly wrote:
“Here we have the American Cardinal on a solemn in the pulpit of what some consider the grandest ecclesiastical edifice of modern times, counting up the men who have done the most eminent service for the Catholic Church in England, especially by the pen, during the last century and a half; and he names only ten—the three great cardinals, Wiseman and Manning; three great bishops, Challoner, Hay, a two secular priests, Alban Butler and Dr. Lingard; and then an Oratorian and a Jesuit, Frederick William Faber and Henry James Coleridge. How great a glory to be recognised by such an authority as one of ten such men!”2
Fr Coleridge was related to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great poet. He entered the Roman Catholic Church from the Church of England (Anglicanism) and became one of the finest writers in English Catholic history.
As well as his many written works, he was the editor of The Month and responsible for The Quarterly Series, a great example of “the apostleship of good books.”
Here’s what was written in his initial obituary in The Month:
The Quarterly Series […] successfully carried on down to the 78th volume of the Series, and of this number a very large proportion were the product of his pen.
Besides such valuable biographies as those of St. Francis Xavier and St. Teresa, the Life of Our Lord in twenty volumes is at once a monument of his patient and loving industry, an exhibition of intense personal devotion to the Sacred Humanity and Divinity of Jesus Christ, and an invaluable treasury of judicious exegesis and practical comment upon His words and works.
This work, had it been his only gift to them, should make Father Coleridge’s memory dear to English Catholics. It has thrown a flood of light on the true principles of the Harmony of the Gospels, on their internal structure, and above all on the providential plan followed in the onward march of the manifestations of Our Lord, in the unfolding of His moral, doctrinal, and ascetical teaching, in the gradual training of His Apostles, and the development of what, with all reverence, may be called His policy in the establishment of His Father’s Kingdom.
By nearly half a century of patient labour, never losing sight of his purpose, though compelled to intermit from time to time the work of actual composition, Father Coleridge succeeded in bringing out elements of [an] intelligent estimate of Our Lord’s Life which do not lie on the surface, but form an illuminating background to the pictures drawn for us by each of the four Evangelists.
When to this really great work of Father Coleridge we add the supplementary volumes which, like so many satellites, attend upon and revolve around it, we find that he has indeed not lived or laboured in vain, but has bequeathed to all English-speaking Catholics a system of teaching concerning Our Lord, the records of His Life, and the theological and devotional contemplation of the Divine plan realized therein, which does not merely contain treasures of devotion and doctrine, but adds indefinitely to their value by his careful and critical arrangement of the time and order of events.
From The Month, Vol. LXXVIII, May 1983, pp 1-3
This is to say nothing for the quiet and exhausting labour he undertook for souls at the Jesuit church at Farm Street, London.
This website exists to promote his memory and legacy, as well as starting to make his works available in audio format for subscribers.
Subscribe now to support this project, and to ensure that you receive regular extracts from his work going forward:
The Father Coleridge Reader is a project of The WM Review. As Amazon Associates, we earn from qualifying purchases through our Amazon links. See below for The WM Review’s Father Coleridge Archive:
‘Henry James Coleridge, Priest of the Society of Jesus’: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 39, No. 460 (Oct., 1911), pp. 541-2; Irish Jesuit Province. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20503082. pp 541-2.
Ibid 542.
