Dear Friends

Earlier this year I became a member of SSC so I want to tell you a little about it.

The Society of the Holy Cross (Societas Sanctae Crucis, SSC) was founded at the House of Charity, Soho, London on February 28th 1855 by Fr Charles Lowder and five other priests of the Church of England (CofE). Its membership is comprised of Bishops and Priests who desire to bear witness to the Cross of Christ in their vocation and ministry within the Church and their whole lives. Its principal objectives are: to strengthen and consolidate the spiritual life of its members according to Catholic belief and practice; to maintain and extend the Catholic Faith and discipline, and to defend Truth against error; and to unite its members in a special bond of mutual charity arising from their common faith.

Members of the Society live under a Rule and attend chapters of which there are a number throughout England & Scotland. SSC is also represented in Wales, the Americas, Australasia, and other parts of the world.

CHARLES FUGE LOWDER, the greatest of the ritualist slum priests of the nineteenth century, was born in June 1820 in Bath. His father was a director of a small independent bank. Lowder was educated at Kings College School, in those days still sited in the Strand. He was thus, by the standard of the times, a gentleman from the mercantile classes. In 1840 he went up to Exeter College, Oxford. While at Oxford he attended St Mary’s, where, like the best of his generation, he fell under the spell of the vicar, John Henry Newman, whose sermons guided him to the priesthood.

He desired to work in a parish with an advanced and catholic pattern of worship, he became a curate at the famous ritualist centre of St Barnabas, Pimlico. He was caught up in a legal battle and was for a short time suspended and went to France.

Founding of SSC. On his return to England he called a meeting of Anglo-Catholic clergy, hand-picked as the most trustworthy. The group of six came together at the House of Charity, Soho, where on the 28th February 1855 they formed themselves into the Society of the Holy Cross and dedicated themselves to lives of self-disciplined service, first of the poor, and the extension of the Catholic faith. Membership required obedience to a rule of life, Mr Lowder adopted the white rule, the strictest, requiring celibacy.

In August 1856 Mr Lowder moved to Wapping. In 1866 Lowder completed work on the new parish church of St Peter’s London Docks.

The next twenty years followed the Anglo-Catholic slum parish pattern, clubs, schools, confessions, daily masses, a growing church with many children. By 1880 Father Lowder was exhausted, and died on 9th September.

Lowder was the first and greatest of the East End slum-priests, the greatest of his breed. His Society of the Holy Cross now numbers over a thousand priests. The work of Charles Fuge Lowder lives today because what he founded, SSC, the school, the parish, still proclaim the same Catholic truth and Catholic vision, and they, like his story are eternal truths.

My prayers and best wishes,

Fr. Philip Edge - Vicar