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.