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Biography

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Ignatius Spencer was born George Spencer on 21 December 1799 at Admiralty House in London, the youngest son of George Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer, and Lady Lavinia Bingham. He belonged to the aristocratic Spencer family of Althorp in Northamptonshire. Raised in the Church of England, he was educated at Eton College and at Trinity College, Cambridge. As a younger son of the nobility he took holy orders in the established church and became rector of the family living of Brington, near Althorp, in the mid-1820s. In that Anglican ministry he was noted for seriousness of life and for a growing interest in the Fathers of the Church and in the question of Christian unity.

Theological study and personal searching led him to conclude that the Roman Catholic Church was the authentic continuation of the apostolic Church. He was received into the Catholic Church in January 1830, a conversion that attracted public notice because of his rank. After further formation at the English College in Rome he was ordained a Catholic priest in 1832. He then served on the Catholic mission in the industrial Midlands of England, including the area around West Bromwich, in the years immediately after Catholic Emancipation. He worked among a still small and often poor Catholic population and became associated with other leading figures of the English Catholic revival, among them the Italian Passionist Dominic Barberi and the convert layman Ambrose Lisle March Phillipps.

In January 1847 he entered the Congregation of the Passion at Aston Hall in Staffordshire, taking the religious name Ignatius of Saint Paul; he made his profession the following year. Thereafter he combined the Passionist life of prayer and penance with extensive itinerant preaching, parish missions, and retreats in Britain and Ireland and on the Continent. He was a leading promoter of a union of prayer for the conversion of England and of efforts toward reunion between Anglicans and Catholics. He also held positions of responsibility among the Passionists in England and was known for austerity, zeal, and concern for those outside the visible communion of the Catholic Church as well as for the poor.

Spencer died suddenly of a heart attack on 1 October 1864 at Carstairs railway station in Scotland while travelling. He was buried at the Passionist house of St Anne's, Sutton, at St Helens in Lancashire. A reputation for holiness continued after his death, and a cause for his canonization was in due course introduced. In 2021 Pope Francis recognized his heroic virtues and declared him Venerable. He remains a significant figure of the nineteenth-century English Catholic revival and a member of the Spencer family of Althorp.

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