Challoner, RICHARD

Challoner, RICHARD, a learned Roman Catholic prelate, born at Lewes in Sussex, September 29, 1691. Becoming a Roman Catholic, he was sent in 1704 to the English College at Douay, where he became a professor, and remained until 1730. In that year he was sent to labour in London, and here he served as a missionary priest until 1741, when he was raised to the episcopal dignity as Bishop of Debra and coadjutor to Bishop Petre, whom he succeeded as Vicar Apostolic of the London district in 1758. During the 'No Popery' riots of 1780 he was secreted near Highgate, and he died in London, January 12, 1781. Of Challoner's numerous controversial treatises, the best known is his Catholic Christian Instructed, an answer to Conyers Middleton's Letters from Rome. His Garden of the Soul is still the most popular prayer-book with English Catholics, and his revision of the Douay version of the Bible (5 vols. 1750) is substantially the Bible used by them. Of his historical works the most valuable are his memoirs of missionary priests and other Catholics of both sexes who suffered death or imprisonment in England on account of their religion, from the year 1577 till the end of the reign of Charles II. (2 vols. 1741), and his Britannia Sancta (2 vols. 1745), a collection of the lives of British and Irish saints.