Remembering Bishop Maurice Taylor

Bishop Emeritus Maurice Taylor, the retired bishop of Galloway, Scotland, and the oldest Catholic bishop in Great Britain, has died at the age of 97.

He grew up in Lanarkshire and served in the Army Medical Corps at the end of the Second World War, was ordained in 1950, thus having served as a priest for well over 70 years. He was Rector of the Scots College in Valladolid, Spain, from 1965 to 1974. Later, he was ordained Bishop of Galloway in 1981, retiring in 2004, after which he authored four books, including the one mentioned below.

Bishop Taylor served on the Episcopal Board of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) for over a decade, and was its chairman from 1997-2002. During this time and in his role as chair of ICEL he was subjected to the appalling, even rude, behavior of the late Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez during the time that the latter was the Pro-Prefect and then the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship. Cardinal Medina was also responsible for the promulgation of the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam (2001). Under his leadership, the Congregation effectively dismantled and reconstituted ICEL, an act which continues to have unfortunate repercussions in the life of the English-speaking Church even today. The inside story of this whole unsavory episode is to be found in Bishop Taylor’s book It’s the Eucharist, Thank God, still in print. (https://www.decanimusic.co.uk/product/its-the-eucharist-thank-god/)

Bishop Taylor no doubt rejoiced that not only was he ordained four years before the Cardinal but he also outlived him by two years. May they both rest in peace.

Paul Inwood

Paul Inwood is an internationally-known liturgist, author, speaker, organist and composer. He was NPM's 2009 Pastoral Musician of the Year, ACP's Distinguished Catholic Composer of the year 2022, and in 2015 won the Vatican competition for the official Hymn for the Holy Year of Mercy, His work is found in journals, blogs and hymnals across the English-speaking world and beyond.

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7 responses to “Remembering Bishop Maurice Taylor”

  1. Dr.Cajetan Coelho

    Respectful farewell to Bishop Emeritus Maurice Taylor. In Paradisum Deducant te Angeli.

    Reply
  2. Lee Bacchi

    So sorry to hear about his passing,may he resit in peace. I truly enjoyed his book, and wish I hadn’t given it away to someone to read. I’ll have to get another copy. Thank you, Bishop, for all your work on behalf of the Church’s liturgy.

    Reply
  3. Rita Ferrone Avatar
    Rita Ferrone

    I’d like to add a biographical note, and a couple of personal remembrances. Independent Catholic News noted his volunteer work in Latin America: “With his fluent command of Spanish and initiated by an invitation from the Catholic Institute for International Relations, Bishop Taylor became a regular visitor to Central America, raising awareness of poverty and other suffering experienced by the peoples of Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica. On several occasions, he served for short periods in Central American parishes, an association which he described as one of the most enriching experiences of his life.”

    I never met him in person, but I got to know Bishop Taylor via email, in the period around 2017 when Pope Francis was contemplating his motu proprio on translation, Magnum principium. This initiative returning oversight to the bishops’ conferences as envisioned by Sacrosanctum Concilium was a move we both had actively supported behind the scenes. In connection with this effort, he once called me “a bonnie fechter” — an intrepid fighter — for truth and right. I treasure this honor!

    Around that time, I was also enduring a very painful eye affliction and he got to know about it. He was most kind and solicitous. He shared with me that he himself had lost sight in one eye, and so had a special sympathy for what I was going through. This created another bond. In 2019, when he was having some health problems, I promised him I would pray for him every day of Holy Week while preparing the pastiera — an Italian Easter confection that takes a week to make if you do it all from scratch. On Easter Sunday I sent him a picture of the finished pastiera, with paschal greetings, and he replied that it looked like the rising sun!

    Praise God who upheld him for another four years despite the frailty of his advancing years. Rest in peace, dear Bishop Taylor. Your good works live on in memory, as the sun of eternal joy rises for you now in heaven.

    Reply
  4. Paul F. Ford

    What wonderful memories, Rita. Thank you.

    Reply
  5. John Page

    In the early 1990s Bishop Taylor received permission from the Congregation for Bishops to work for three months in a remote parish in El Salvador. In other years he spent a few weeks in parishes in Central America instead of taking a summer holiday.

    As chairman of ICEL he was treated by Rome like an errant school boy, nay far worse. The 1998 revised Sacramentary could have been saved if dialogue had been allowed between the Roman authorities and the bishops who represented their conferences on ICEL. All of the conferences that participated in ICEL had voted in favor of the revised Missal. But bishops from two of the eleven member conferences who were unhappy with the favorable vote of their conferences went to Rome to encourage the Congregation’s negative view of the revision. In the summer of 2002 the ICEL founded in 1963, at the heart of the Council. was no more. A few months later Rome with unaccustomed swiftness established Vox Clara under the direction of one of these dissenters, George Pell, archbishop of Sydney. He was named a cardinal a year later.

    Reply
  6. Fr. Jack Feehily

    This turn of events, in my view, was one of the most shameful in my lifetime. The amount of work done by ICEL on this new translation spanned more than 15 years and involved consultations all the way down to the parish level. The reform of the reform advocates found themselves in power and crushed the work begun at Vatican II. The translation affirmed by all the English speaking bishops, built on the due diligence of people like Bishop Taylor, John Page, and many others was rejected by the reactionaries who seized upon the rapidly dwindling health of Pope John Paul II to achieve their coup. I have a copy of that proposed new translation and find it greatly superior to the one that replaced it in 2011.

    Reply
  7. John Page

    Thank you, Father Feehily. The Roman rejection of the revised Sacramentary was scandalous in the most exacting theological sense of that word.

    Reply

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