Patrick McLaughlin

Patrick McLaughlin (1909–1988) was an English Roman Catholic lay brother of the Order of Saint Benedict and a Christian writer, as well as a former Anglican priest until he became a Roman Catholic in 1962. While an Anglican priest, he was known in the Anglo-Catholic manner as Father Patrick McLaughlin.

The only child of his parents' marriage, McLaughlin had two older half-sisters, Owyne Salwey McLaughlin (1885–1972) and Margaret Joy Crofton McLaughlin (1887–1972). Their sister, Cecil Urwick McLaughlin, born in 1880, had died in 1896.

McLaughlin's paternal grandparents were the Very Reverend Hubert McLaughlin (1805–1882) and Frederica Crofton (1816–1881), a daughter of Sir Edward Crofton, 3rd Baronet, and of Lady Charlotte Stewart (1785–1842), the youngest of the five daughters of John Stewart, 7th Earl of Galloway. Hubert McLaughlin was Rector of Burford, Shropshire, a rural dean and the Prebendary of Hunderton at Hereford Cathedral. He was the author of Biographical Sketches of Ancient Irish Saints, etc. (1874). Hubert and Frederica Crofton had no fewer than eight sons and four daughters. Of their sons, one became a major general, one a judge, one agent to the Earl of Feversham, and two (including Patrick McLaughlin's father Alfred) clergymen of the Church of England, while Patrick McLaughlin's aunts included the nurses Louisa Elisabeth McLaughlin and Sophia Charlotte McLaughlin.

One of McLaughlin's first cousins was a namesake who became Rear-Admiral Patrick McLaughlin CB DSO RN. In 1945, as vice-admiral commanding the 4th Cruiser Squadron of the British Pacific Fleet, he took the surrender of the Japanese forces in Hong Kong.

Education

McLaughlin was educated at Bromsgrove School and then at Worcester College, Oxford.

Marriage and descendants In 1932, McLaughlin married Olive Marion McConnell (1906–73), a daughter of William Haydn McConnell, organist and music teacher. then T. S. Eliot the second. The location of St Anne's, near to the theatres, colleges and restaurants around Bloomsbury and also to the Inns of Court, was ideal for such an intellectual outreach programme, Others who contributed to it from time to time included John Betjeman, Iris Murdoch, Lord David Cecil, Rebecca West and Christopher Dawson. Macaulay described McLaughlin as a "many-sided kind of priest, whom I like".

Returning in his last years to London, McLaughlin became a Brother of Charterhouse at Sutton's Hospital when he was not travelling the world. When he died in 1988, he was buried with his wife in a graveyard belonging to Charterhouse at St Mary's, Little Hallingbury, Essex. shows him as an ecumenist decades before ecumenism became fashionable.

Distinctions Knight of the Patriarchal Order of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church