Herbert Alfred Henry Joseph Thomas Vaughan (15 April 1832 – 19 June 1903) was an English prelate of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Westminster from 1892 until his death in 1903, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1893. He was the founder in 1866 of St Joseph's Foreign Missionary Society, known best as the Mill Hill Missionaries. He also founded the Catholic Truth Society and St. Bede's College, Manchester. As Archbishop of Westminster, he led the capital campaign and construction of Westminster Cathedral.
In 1871 Vaughan sent a group of Mill Hill priests to the United States to minister to freedmen. In 1893, the American branch of the society spun off, with Vaughan's permission, to form the Society of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, whose members are known as Josephites.
Early life and education
Herbert Vaughan was born at Gloucester, the eldest son of Lieutenant-Colonel John Francis Vaughan, of an old recusant (Catholic) family, the Vaughans of Courtfield, Herefordshire. His mother, Eliza Rolls from The Hendre, Monmouthshire, was a Catholic convert and intensely religious. All five of the Vaughan daughters became nuns, while six of the eight sons received Holy Orders and became priests. Two were later called as bishops in addition to Herbert: Roger became Archbishop of Sydney, Australia following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in Great Britain in 1850.
Career
Vaughan received Holy Orders at Lucca in 1854. On his return to England, he became Vice-President of St Edmund's College, at that time the chief seminary in the south of England for candidates for the priesthood. Since childhood, Vaughan had been filled with zeal for foreign missions. He convinced Cardinal Wiseman and the bishops to agree to a proposal to build a seminary in England that would train priests to serve on missions throughout the British Empire. With this goal, he made a fund-raising trip to America in 1863,
He succeeded in opening St Joseph's Foreign Missionary College, Mill Hill Park, London, in 1869. That same year, the Tenth Provincial Council of Baltimore passed a decree exhorting all bishops to establish missions and schools in their dioceses for African Americans. Subsequently, the Council Fathers wrote a letter requesting clergy for that purpose to Vaughan, superior general at Mill Hill. In 1871, Vaughan led a group of priests to the US to establish a mission society to minister to freedmen in the South.
In 1872 Vaughan was consecrated as the second Bishop of Salford, receiving the cardinal's hat in 1893 as Cardinal-Priest of Santi Andrea e Gregorio al Monte Celio.
thumb|Caricature of Archbishop Vaughan by [[Leslie Ward on 7 January 1893 edition of Vanity Fair (British magazine)]]
Vaughan was a man of different type from his predecessor; he had none of the ultramontane Manning's intellectual finesse or his ardor for social reform. Vaughan did however have a more open attitude to women's enfranchisement, reported as saying, "I believe that the extension of the Parliamentary Franchise to women upon the same conditions as it is held by men would be a just and beneficial measure, tending to raise rather than to lower the course of national legislation." Vaughan was an ecclesiastic of remarkably fine presence and aristocratic leanings, intransigent in theological policy, and in personal character simply devout.
In 1893 the US Mill Hill mission, based in Baltimore, Maryland, reorganised with Vaughan's blessing as an independent institution, known as Society of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart. Among its founders was the first African-American Catholic priest trained and ordained in the United States, Charles Uncles.
It was due to this theological "purity" that Vaughan assisted in scuttling an opportunity for rapprochement between Rome and the Church of England that was put into motion by a high-church Anglican, Charles Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax and a French priest, Ferdinand Portal. Through the efforts of Vaughan and Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson, this early form of ecumenism was put down. It culminated with the condemnation of Anglican Orders by Pope Leo XIII in his bull, Apostolicae curae.
thumb|right|Cardinal Vaughan's tomb in the Chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury, [[Westminster Cathedral]]
It was Vaughan's most cherished ambition to see an adequate Westminster Cathedral. He worked untiringly to secure subscriptions for a capital campaign, with the result that the foundation stone for the cathedral was laid in 1895. When Vaughan died in 1903 at the age of 71, the building was so far complete that a Requiem Mass was said there.