Henry Edward George Rope (23 October 18801 March 1978) was a writer, poet, and Catholic priest. He was the eldest brother of Margaret Agnes Rope, stained-glass artist, nephew of Ellen Mary Rope, sculptor, and George Thomas Rope, painter and naturalist as well as cousin of M. E. Aldrich Rope, another stained-glass artist. Due to his writings and his work as archivist at the Venerable English College, Rome, he was well known in his lifetime, particularly within Church circles but as a radical traditionalist he has been forgotten in modern times.

Life Baptised 20 November 1880,Shrewsbury: St Mary's Church: Register of Baptisms 1871-1901 (Shropshire Archives ref P257/A/2/4 : Page 115) eldest child of Henry John Rope, M.D., surgeon (18471899) and Agnes Maud (née Burd: 18571948) and grandson of George Rope of Grove Farm, Blaxhall, Suffolk (18141912) and his wife Anne (née Pope) (18211882), he was brought up an Anglo-Catholic but joined the Roman Catholic churchRoads to Rome: A Guide to Notable Converts from Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to the Present Day by John Beaumont, (St. Augustines Press, 2010 ) after the premature death of his father and in the wake of the conversion of his mother and four of his five siblings. After Shrewsbury School, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, University of Oxford in 1898 to read English as a Careswell Exhibitioner. He was on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1903 to 1905 and again 1908–10.The Catholic World (Paulist Press) Vol 119(1924)p.702 "Our Contributors" Between those dates (1905–07), he was a lector in English at Breslau University,Chronik der Königlichen Universität zu Breslau, Jahrgang 20 (vom April 1905 bis 31 März 1906), p.6 then part of Germany. He entered the Catholic Church on 6 January 1907 and in 1912 enrolled at the Pontifical Beda College in Rome to train for the priesthood. Immediately prior to that, he had been a novice at the German Benedictine Beuronese Congregation then in exile at Erdington Abbey, Birmingham.Census of England and Wales, 1911, Schedule 328 He was ordained at St John Lateran, Rome on 27 February 1915. He served in the Shrewsbury Diocese up until 1937, in which year, on 30 October, he took up the position of Archivist to the Venerable English College, Rome. His positions as a priest included Chester St Werburgh 1915–17, Crewe 1917–18, Plowden, Shropshire 1918–24, Market Drayton 1924–25, chaplain Mawley Hall (near Cleobury Mortimer) 1925–37.Shrewsbury Diocese Archive His tenure in Rome was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served as chaplain at Albrighton Hall, Shrewsbury 1940–44 to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, evacuated from Tunbridge Wells. He rejoined the English College in exile and, on return to Rome after the war in 1946, again served as Archivist, until 30 December 1957. Back in England, he settled at the Carmelite Monastery, Quidenham, Norfolk, where his sister Margaret Agnes Rope, stained-glass artist had died some four years previously. By then a man in his late seventies and eighties, he served as chaplain at Pallotti Hall, Siddington, Cheshire 1959–69, before returning to Quidenham. Finally, in 1975, he transferred to the Catholic Nursing Institute, 80 Lambeth Road, London S.E.1. where he died three years later.‘A Family Recorded in Glass: The Windows of Margaret Rope in Shrewsbury Cathedral’ by Peter Phillips (Midland Catholic History Bulletin 2009, No 16)

Works

Rope was a scholar, a linguist and a prolific writer, of poems, articles and books. A man of strong traditionalist opinions, an advocate of Distributism, an enemy of mechanisation and, above all, the motor car, his writings are a prolonged elegy for the ways of the past, and an elevation of time-honoured forms of Catholic faith and worship."Forgotten England" Heath Cranton, London 1931, pp. 11-14: preface by D. B. Wyndham Lewis He edited The Catholic Review quarterly in succession to its founder Benedict Williamson, a fellow convert from Anglicanism. He took the opportunity to include poems of his own, which also appeared in several collections, detailed below. He also wrote a number of books and well as articles in a number of Catholic publications, including The Month, Ampleforth Journal,Vol.XXIV July 1918 pp.11-15 "A Mediaevalist in Rome" The Cross and the Plough, G. K.'s Weekly, The Weekly Review, The Dublin Review, The Irish Monthly and The Catholic World and Venerabile.

A typical article available online is "Martyrs and Markets"The Cross and the Plough, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1946 Articles in The Month included Unfounded Optimism,The Month, 1921 The Fallacy of Reunion,The Month, 1923 ToleranceThe Month, 1920 In Praise of Papal Rome,The Month, 1924 The Balm of Solitude,The Month, 1924 Is Anglo-Catholicism near The Church?,The Month, 1925 La Terre Qui Meurt,The Month, 1926 Compromise no Charity,The Month, 1926 The Limitations of Richard Cobden,The Month, 1927 Elizabethan Continuity: Bishop Tunstall's Confession of the Faith,The Month, 1927 The Theory of Progress,The Month, 1919 Jewel: an Early Exponent of Anglicanism.The Month, 1925 Similarly, in The Irish Monthly "The Real John Donne"The Irish Monthly Vol. 83, No. 970 (Jun., 1954) "An English historian of Ireland"Irish Monthly, xlvii (1919) "Bella Tola, in the Valais (July, 1914)".Irish Monthly Vol. 44, No. 515, May, 1916 Likewise in New Blackfriars "Lourdes and Art",Rope, Henry E. G. "LOURDES AND ART." Blackfriars, vol. 2, no. 20, 1921, pp. 476–480. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43810080. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.New Blackfriars 5 (50) (1924) pp 113-116 "The Staleness of Novelty". Also, in the Irish Quarterly Review, "Epiphanytide" (poem),Rope, Henry E. G. "Epiphanytide, 1921." Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 10, no. 37, 1921, pp. 81–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30084045. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.

In 1940 his biography of Pope Benedict XV was published, having been started in 1938. In prefacing it, Rope stated that he hoped the biography would serve as "small effort in reparation" for the fact that few British Catholics (himself included) had listened to Benedict's message of peace during the Great War. He also noted that, as of 1938, many were now wishing they had listened to the 'Pope of Peace'. As of 2021, Rope's biography is one of a limited number of English-language biographies of Benedict XV - the other notable biography being John F. Pollard's The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV (1914-1922) and the Pursuit of Peace (1999).

A range of his more secular interests is on view in "Forgotten England". On a more piecemeal level, having been on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary in his early adulthood (as a member of Murray's, and, from 1905, Bradley's editorial staff),The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver (OUP 2016) pp 302, 321, 434, 523Treasure-House of the English Language: The Living OED by Charlotte Brewer, pp 134-5,157[Yale University Press, 2007] he continued to be a contributor of material throughout his life. On a campaigning front, he is quoted as being a "leader of the Catholic Land Movement" in 1931.Wiener, Martin J. "England Is the Country: Modernization and the National Self-Image." Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, 1971, pp. 198–211. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4048237. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.

Apart from his writings, his life was enriched by many friendships, which he nurtured with a wealth of correspondence.Shrewsbury Diocesan Yearbook, 1980 Apart from Benedict Williamson, on whom he wrote a two-part monograph,The Irish Monthly Vol. 82, No. 966 (Feb., 1954), pp. 62-67 and Vol. 83, No. 967 (Mar., 1954), pp. 108-112 he is associated with G.K.Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc,"My Memory of Hilaire Belloc," The Irish Monthly, Vol. 81, No. 962, Oct. 1953‘Belloc 70: A Conference to Celebrate the Centenary of the Birth of Hilaire Belloc, ed.SCHROEDER, Louis, 1970, p.38 John Hawes"The Hermit of Cat Island, The Life of Fra Jerome Hawes" by Peter F. Anson, New York, P.F.Kenedy & Sons, 1957, pp.60, 112, 193) and many others."Father H.E.G.Rope: Witness for Continuity" by Ronald Warwick in Christian Order, October 1978, pp. 452-455

Publications Religionis Ancilla, and other poems, [Heath Cranton, London, 1916]The Irish Monthly, vol. 45, no. 524, 1917, pp. 133–133. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20504738. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020. Soul's Belfry and Other Verses [Stretton Press, 1919]C. O'B. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 8, no. 32, 1919, pp. 688–689. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30092855. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020. The City of the Grail [Burns, Oates & Washbourne, London, 1923] The Hills of Home, and other verses [A.H. Stockwell, London, 1925] Matthew Parker's witness against continuity [Burns Oates & Washbourne, London, 1931] Forgotten England and Other Musings [Heath Cranton, London 1931] Round about the Crooked Steeple, A Shropshire Harvest by Simon Evans [Heath Cranton, London, 1931], foreword by H.E.G.Rope Flee to the fields :the faith and works of the Catholic land movement. A symposium [Heath Cranton, London, 1934] Chapter X "Looking Before and After" by H.E.G.Rope Fisher and More [A.Ouseley, London, 1935] Pugin [Pepler & Sewell, Ditchling Hassocks, 1935] Benedict XV, The Pope of Peace [The Catholic Book Club, London, 1940] The Schola Saxonum, the Hospice, and the English College in Rome: a brief account[Scuola Tipografica Miss. Domenicana S. Sisto Vecchio, Rome, 1951] Dream holiday, and other verses [Arthur H. Stockwell, Ilfracombe, 1964] Evolution and the Lunatic Fringe [E.Biddle, Ludlow, Salop, 1964]

External links https://www.vecrome.org/college-life/venerabile http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/kesghf.htm http://archive-uat.catholicherald.co.uk/article/15th-may-1953/2/fr-h-e-g-rope https://public.oed.com/history/oed-editions/contributors/ http://distributist.blogspot.com/2008/10/miscellany-of-distributists.html

References