Charles Fuge Lowder, Priest
9 September -- Commemoration
If celebrated as a Lesser Festival,
Common of Pastors, page 483
Charles Lowder was born in 1820 and came under the influence
of the Oxford Movement during his studies at
Exeter College in
the early 1840s. After ordination, he became increasingly
drawn to a Tractarian and ritualist expression of the faith,
especially after his move to London in 1851, despite the
fierce opposition such Catholic spirituality faced within
the Church. As a curate in Pimlico and Stepney, and then as
the first Vicar of St Peter's, London Docks, Lowder came to
epitomise the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic 'slum
priest'. Dedicated to the poor and destitute, he was
tireless in his parish work. His health gave way and he
died at the age of sixty on this day in 1880.