Priest-holes – those small spaces in old English houses which sheltered mission priests in the dangerous days of the Elizabethan persecutions – have always occupied a place in the imagination of the history of the Catholic Church in England, for many a priest was dragged from them to torture, trial and Tyburn for his part in keeping the faith alive in desperate times. Michael Hodgetts’s unrivalled expertise on this aspect of English Catholicism turned a softly-spoken schoolmaster into one of the leading recusant historians of his generation.
The eldest of four children, Michael was born on 29 March 1936; he grew up as an altar boy at the Redemptorist parish of Erdington Abbey to the north-east of Birmingham city centre. He might well have followed a different path, for after attending King Edward’s School and Worcester College, Oxford, he went to the Venerable English Collegein Rome. He left a few years later, however, and returned to Birmingham and a teaching career. He and his wife, Barbara, were married in 1969.
During many years as Head of Religious Education at St Thomas More School in Willenhall Michael also served on ICEL – the International Commission for English in the Liturgy. There he helped produce a universal English translation of the liturgy for the use of Catholics across the Anglosphere; the vernacular text of the Good Friday hymn Crux Fidelis is his own translation. On retirement he threw himself wholeheartedly into the historical research that would dominate the rest of his life.
Michael’s remarkable ability to sniff out architectural quirks that had remained hidden for centuries led to Secret Hiding Places, which Veritas brought out in 1989. Many more books, chapters and articles followed, and his last work – the second half of a consideration of the experiences of the recusant community at Little Malvern Court – is due to appear later this year. His expertise, however, was far more than just paper-based, and in 1984 Archbishop Maurice Couve de Murville appointed Michael to the managing committee of Harvington Hall.
The great recusant house at Harvington, in Worcestershire, has particular associations with St John Wall, St Nicholas Owen, Bl Edward Oldcorne and Bl Arthur Bell, all of whom are known to have worked in the area. Over 40 years Michael played a major part in nurturing the property, along with its several priest-holes, back to health and stability. In the course of the work he realised that he was looking at only half of the original building, and renewed his research apace.
Never one to shirk the burden of the importance of preserving and sharing historical knowledge – particularly when it came to that of the Church’s darkest hours in England – Michael sat for years on the Archdiocese of Birmingham’s historical commission, and became chairman of the Midland Catholic History Society when its two predecessors (those of Worcestershire and Staffordshire respectively) prudently merged.
He was editor of Midland Catholic History, and on the international scene also edited Recusant History, the journal of the Catholic Record Society (since rebranded as British Catholic History). Michael also edited the CRS’s important volumes series and was chairman of its trustees; he later accepted a vice-presidency in recognition of his work. Meanwhile, he taught Ecclesiastical History and Philosophy at the Maryvale Institute from its inception; he was made a Reader there in 2002 and later an Honorary Fellow.
Michael was an old-fashioned polymath who was already so widely read by the time he went up to Oxford that his peers frequently mistook him for an English literature student or an historian – when in fact he read for Greats, ie Classics. Not without mischief, his prose might often peppered with references ranging as widely from Aristotle to AA Milne. He was an accomplished musician, too, and served as director of music at St Nicholas’s, Boldmere, his local parish church in Sutton Coldfield.
He also wrote hymns – part of his hymn to the English Martyrs appears at the end of this obituary – and sang with the Newman Singers, sometimes directing them in concerts at St Chad’s Cathedral, where he also worshipped regularly. Away from his work on recusancy, Michael wrote and edited a series of booklets about places and people who had been particularly significant in the history of the Archdiocese of Birmingham,: in which he had been born, lived, taught and raised a family, and to which he was devoted.
In 1990 John Paul II made Michael a Knight of St Gregory the Great; he was the archdiocese’s senior knight in the order when he died on 12 December at the age of 86. At the time of his death a festschrift was being prepared in his honour by a distinguished group of friends and admirers; it is expected to appear in 2023. Michael is survived by his wife, Barbara, their children Paul, Anne, Elizabeth and Rachel, and their eleven grandchildren. May the Martyrs of Harvington now pray for his happy repose.
For what was hidden is revealed: the pear-tree is in flower, And charity has won the field of Tyburn and the Tower.
Michael William Hodgetts KSG 29 March 1936 – 12 December 2022
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