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JOHN FENN, PRIEST - 27 DECEMBER

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN DECEMBER

Saints celebrated on the 27th of December

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JOHN FENN, PRIEST


John Fenn was born at Montacute near Wells in Somersetshire, the eldest brother of James Fenn, the martyr, and Robert Fenn, the confessor. After being a chorister at Wells Cathedral, he went to Winchester School in 1547, and in 1550 to New College, Oxford, of which he was elected fellow in 1552. Next year he became head master of the Bury St Edmunds' grammar-school, but was deprived of this office and also of his fellowship for refusing to take the oath of supremacy under Elizabeth. He thereupon went to Rome where after four years' study he was ordained priest about 1566. Having for a time been chaplain to Sir William Stanley's regiment in Flanders he settled at Louvain, where he lived for forty years. 

A  prolific writer, he also contributed to Father John Gibbons, S.J.'s publication (1583) of the various accounts of the persecution, under the Title Concertatio Ecclesiæ Catholicae in Anglia, which was the groundwork of the invaluable larger collection published by Bridgewater under the same name in 1588. He also collected from old English sources some spiritual treatises for the Bridgettine nuns of Syon. In 1609, when the English Augustinian Canonesses founded St Monica's Priory at Louvain, he became their first chaplain until in 1611 when his sight failed. Even then he continued to live in the priory and the nuns tended him till his death on December 27, 1615.

Source: Edwin Burton, Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913





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