PATRICK McLAUGHLIN, MA (1909-98), a charming wit and powerful Christian thinker, chose to be called Father Patrick when he was a priest of the Church of England. This photograph was taken in 1977 when he was invested as Knight Commander of the Order of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem.

Patrick was educated at Worcester College, Oxford, where he cut his dramatic teeth in the University Dramatic Society, in the company of such as George Devine, who later founded the English Stage Company at London's Royal Court Theatre. Because Patrick had beautiful looks he was cast in female roles.

"The Profession" was not considered respectable in his day, so Patrick compensated by being ordained and performing the most elaborate of Anglo-Catholic rituals. He had three priests officiating at his marriage in 1932 to Olive Marion (1906-73) portrayed below left. Her father, William Haydn McConnell, was an organist and music teacher noted for making sure his children could take a piano apart and put it back together. Olive was an Associate of the Royal College of Music who played the piano, viola and oboe. She gave birth to three sons and two daughters.

Alfred (seen right in a brown study) was 59 when his only son arrived on earth. Although Patrick was born nine years after my mother, he belonged to the same generation as my grandfather, sired at the age of 21 by Edward, who was 14 years senior to his brother Alfred.

Father Patrick was the Vicar of St. Thomas's Church, Regent Street, London, where he encouraged notable young playwrights, including Christopher Fry, Charles Williams and Ronald Duncan, by staging their latest works, until the censors of the Lord Chamberlain's Department advised him to stop. He was also Warden of St. Anne's House, Soho, where he sponsored a dance performance featuring MusiColour - an invention of my friend Gordon Pask.

While I was a Daily Mirror subeditor, a reporter invented a story about St. Anne's providing a haunt for prostitutes. I threatened to walk off the job immediately if the story was printed. It was spiked.

His book The necessity of worship (London: Dacre Press, 1940. 118p) shows that Father Patrick was an ecumenist decades before that became acceptable. He introduced into Britain the basilican mode, in which the priest faces his congregation instead of turning his back on them while at the altar - it took 20 more years before this liturgical innovation was adopted by the rest of the Church.

From its inception in 1942 Patrick directed the Society of St Anne's, which promoted links between the Church and the world of literature. Dorothy L. Sayers gave the new Society's first course of lectures, ansd T. S. Eliot the second. Other members included C. S. Lewis, Agatha Christie, Charles Williams, Arnold Bennett, and Rose Macaulay, who described Patrick as a 'many-sided kind of priest, whom I like,' but she may have been caricaturing him in her novel The Towers of Trebizond as the hilariously awful bigot Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. John Betjeman, Lord David Cecil, Christopher Dawson, Iris Murdoch, and Rebecca West also contributed to the Society from time to time.

After Dorothy Sayers died, Patrick conducted the ceremony at which her ashes were intered under the tower of St Anne's church in 1958. Later that year the Society of St Anne's ceased activities.

Patrick was like a new man after he shook off the shackles of the then Bishop of London, Robert Stopford, by resigning his Anglican orders in 1962 and moving to Rome, where he entered into communion with its Bishop and worked as a translator for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Patrick's ecumenism, not to mention his taste for vestments, is illustrated by his having been invested while in Rome by the Order of Saint Benedict as a lay brother, and by the Melkite Greek Catholic Church as a knight of the Patriarchal Order of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem.

Patrick spent his last years in London as a Brother of Charterhouse at the historic Sutton's Hospital when he was not globetrotting to see old friends. He visited Liliane and me: his six weeks stay seemed far too short because he was such a fine raconteur. Patrick and Olive lie buried together adjacent to St Mary's, Little Hallingbury, Essex, in the small graveyard belonging to Charterhouse. Olive had declared that she had a hard time keeping track of her spouse in this life, so she wanted to be sure of finding him on resurrection day.

© 2006 G. Harry McLaughlin.
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