GASQUET, FRANCIS NEIL AIDAN

Cardinal, historian, and in his time leading authority on English monasticism; b. London, Oct. 5, 1846; d. Rome, April 4, 1929. The son of a French emigré father and a Scots mother, he was educated at downside abbey, near Bath. In 1866 he entered the Benedictines at Belmont Abbey, Hereford. After his novitiate Gasquet (now Dom Aidan) returned to Downside, where he taught mathematics and history and was ordained in 1874. In 1878 his community elected him prior, but he resigned in 1885 because of ill health. Enforced convalescence led him to historical research, and much of his time was spent in the British Museum and the Public Record Office. His two volumes, entitled Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (1888–89) were welcomed as a vindication of English monks and nuns of the Reformation period and established him as an authority on monastic history in England. His Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer (3d ed., London 1891) won him nomination to the Commission on Anglican Orders set up by Pope Leo XIII. After taking a prominent part in the reorganization of the English monasteries, he was elected (1900) abbot-president of the English Benedictine Congregation. During his term of office, the monasteries of Downside, Ampleforth, and Douai were raised to the ranks of abbeys, and houses of studies were opened in London and Cambridge. The international commission for the revision of the Vulgate had Gasquet as its first president. He raised $10,000 for the project on a lecture tour of the United States.

Pope Pius X, in the last consistory of his pontificate, created Abbot Gasquet a cardinal-deacon with the title of St. George in Velabro. Subsequently, his titular church was changed to Santa Maria in Campitelli, and in 1924 he was promoted to cardinal-priest. At the beginning of World War I (December 1914), the British government, anxious about Austrian and German influence in Roman ecclesiastical circles, secured the acceptance of a special envoy to the Vatican. Cardinal Gasquet was concerned in the establishment of these diplomatic relations. He was a member of the Congregations of Rites, De Propaganda Fide, of Religious, and of the Oriental Church. He became prefect of the Vatican archives in 1917 and, two years later, librarian of the Holy Roman Church. By his own wish, he was buried at Downside Abbey. Gasquet's published works include A History of the Catholic Church in England, 2 v. (London 1897), Parish Life in Medieval England (3d ed. London 1909), Religio religiosi, the Object and Scope of the Religious Life (4th ed. London 1924), and A History of the Venerable English College, Rome (London 1920). Some of his works have been translated into other languages.

Bibliography: e. c. butler, The Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to 1900 (1922–30) 330–332. d. knowles, Cardinal Gasquet as an Historian (London 1957). s. leslie, Cardinal Gasquet: A Memoir (New York 1953). j. c. fowler, "Cardinal Gasquet at Downside," Downside Review 47 (1929) 123–131. b. kuypers, "Cardinal Gasquet in London," ibid. 132–149. u. butler, "Cardinal Gasquet in Rome," ibid. 150–156. a. baer, "The Careers of Cardinal Gasquet," American Benedictine Review 5 (1954) 113–122; A Benedictine Bibliography: An Author-Subject Union List 1:4112a–4212.

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