Richard Challoner

Richard Challoner, bishop and “vicar apostolic for the London District” died this day in 1781. It was he who revised the Douay-Rheims Bible in the edition that is now generally available. His prayer book The Garden of the Soul was the basic prayer book for generations of English-speaking Catholics. These few sentences on his life are from Bowden’s The Mementoes of the Martyrs and Confessors of England and Wales.

“Few men of the penal times are better entitled to the epithet ‘confessor’, in the sense of one who bears witness, than Richard Challoner, who was born at Lewes in Sussex in 1691. He became a Catholic as a boy, soon after the death of his father, who was ‘a rigid Dissenter’ (and a wine-cooper by trade). After ordination at Douay, Richard was engaged for fourteen years as a professor at the college; then for twenty-eight years he worked as a missionary priest and assistant bishop in London, and in 1758 he became vicar apostolic of the London district, and held the office for another twenty-two years. A man ‘notable for learning and piety if there ever was one’, he combined tireless pastoral work with no less tireless writing. . . . .At the very end of his life, this most venerable old man had to be persuaded to take refuge from the Gordon rioters, who had sworn to roast him alive. In 1781, on January 12, he died, at the age of ninety. Bishop Challoner’s body now rests in Westminster Cathedral, where, it is hoped, he will one day be venerated as a canonized saint.”

There is a more complete "Life" here.