There was a remarkable thread of unruffled consistency which ran through the life of Fr Thomas - consistency in faith, consistency in standards, consistency in thoroughness, consistency in the determination to finish every job he undertook and to complete every sentence he began. His gifts as a scientist, as an administrator and as a teacher were outstanding, although he was never demonstrative in displaying them; he simply got on with whatever job was in hand until it was finished to the high standard he always set himself in anything he did; then, he moved to the next one in a way that was quite unhurried but excluded any hint of idleness. To begin with, as he emerged from University with the highest honours and the finest prospects, it looked as though he was on the way to a career of high academic achievement, but instead he became a Benedictine monk at Ampleforth; he never looked backwards towards any other option. He applied himself to whatever he was given to do. He began in accounts and administration at Ampleforth; then came some parochial work, then the new foundation in St Louis where his brilliance as a teacher blossomed, then an interlude as pioneering evangeliser in Alaska. He ended with twenty years of marvellous pastoral work in our parish at Brindle and he died on a great occasion in the Cathedral at Liverpool.
Wilfrid was Fr Thomas' baptismal name and he was born in Liverpool on 22 July 1910. His secondary education was with the Christian Brothers at St Edward's College in Liverpool from which he moved to Liverpool University to read Chemistry. He won first class honours and went on to a DPhil in Physics and Biochemistry. Later he became an Associate of the Royal Institute of Chemistry and a Fellow of the Chemical Society. But his potential career as a Chemist was changed when he responded to the call of grace and received the Benedictine habit from Abbot Matthews in 1933. The contact which brought Fr Thomas to Ampleforth was his parish of St Anne's in Liverpool which we served at that time. He often said that it was the wonderful standard of liturgy and the sense of prayer he found in the parish which attracted him to the Benedictine life in which the monks who served that parish had themselves been formed.
After theology at Ampleforth Fr Thomas was ordained priest in 1940, but he had already been working for five years in the Procurator's Office. He was put to work there to sort out the accounts with Fr Gerard Sitwell, another natural scholar. One day, as they sat there doing the work of a junior clerk, they fell into uncontrollable laughter as they thought of the extreme oddity of using their combined gifts and qualifications in that way. The laughter, they found, helped them to preserve their balance and sanity. Combining accounts with theology was hard for Fr Thomas; he felt the deprivation of any opportunity for deeper study in theology. He might later on have been given the chance of putting that right but the war came and with increasing demands on the community and problems about manning our commitments. He was given the parish of Kirkbymoorside to combine with his increasing load in the Procurator's Office. This load was increased in 1948 when he was made Estate Manager. In this capacity (apart from keeping everything going) he had to deal with the first shoring up of the Old House to avert imminent collapse and with the restoration of the panelling in the Great Chamber in Gilling Castle and the replanting of the Gilling avenue after the great gale that destroyed it. At this period he was greatly over-worked. But he made a vital contribution to keeping the whole place in operation during the war and post-war periods. He did nearly everything, except of course teaching. It is, perhaps, the strangest thing about Fr Thomas' early years as a priest that, brilliant teacher though he later proved to be, he never taught anyone in the school here. But then, in the days when everything had to he done by monks who could have kept the place going, if Fr Thomas had gone into the School?
Fr Thomas was in need of a change and was sent to St Alban's as Assistant in 1952. He settled down in happy commitment to pastoral work on our parishes for the next five years. Then came an unexpected thunderbolt in 1957 when the Abbot wrote and asked him to go to the new foundation, not yet one year old, in St Louis. He read the letter in disbelief, wondered for a moment about the Abbot's sanity, and then wrote back to say that, if that was what the Abbot wanted, then Fr Thomas was willing and ready. At the time the four original monks who had been sent to make the foundation were there. Now for the second year of the Priory Fr Thomas arrived with Fr Bede Burge. Fr Thomas noted that Canon Law at the time demanded six monks for a foundation, decided that the foundation was not valid until he had arrived and ever after claimed that, because he had made up the canonically essential number, he was a foundation member of St Louis.
His impact was, in its own way, revolutionary. He was made Head of Science. At last the scientist and teacher in him came into its own after the long fallow period of neglect since 1933. By 1960 he had designed the Science wing for the new and growing school on the foundation and he was elected a member of Sigma Xl. He began to be recognised as an outstanding scientist and teacher outside the school campus. From 1964 he was made a member of the St Louis McDonnell Planetarium Commission and Chairman of it from 1967 to 1973. In 1965 his Science Department received a citation by the American Association of Physics Teachers. In 1970 he received the award as outstanding Chemistry teacher from the Chemical Industries Council and another award from the Science Teachers of Missouri. In 1973 he received the Mayor of St Louis' citation for contribution to Science Education. From 1970 to '72 he was Chairman of a National Space Authority Youth Congress and was twice a guest at NASA for launches of Apollo spacecraft. There were other achievements but the most important of all was that his pupils began to scale the heights of their scientific professions and it was not surprising that ten years after he returned to England they subscribed $100,000 to endow a Loughlin Chair of Science at St Louis Abbey School. That record seems to suggest that his time was well filled in those years of classroom teaching; but he still found time to be Procurator for a year in 1970.
The record makes it clear that those fifteen years of teaching in St Louis represent a professional triumph. He won the admiration and affection of several generations of boys and their parents, but they didn't succeed in changing him into an American. Of the English who go to the USA some give themselves with generosity in response to the generosity with which they are welcomed. They tend to become Americanised to a greater or lesser degree. Others maintain a reserve and resist Americanisation. There is a third and rare type who give all they have to give and identify with the milieu in which they work but remain utterly English. That was Fr Thomas' way. Despite all his American involvement and achievement he remained always just what he had been in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The flow of his speech was the same; his manner was unchanged, even though important aspects of his thinking had changed quite radically to meet demands and challenges beyond anything in his previous experience.
When independence came for the St Louis foundation in 1973 Fr Thomas was given the choice and decided to return to England; but first he was given a year off. Since 1971 he had spent his vacations on supply to the mission at Delta in North Alaska. He had even worked with the University of Alaska on Tundra research. Now in his year off he decided to work for the bishop in Alaska at Bethel and at a village called Marshall on the Yukon river. He cherished in later years a whole world of experience and memory of Alaska. It was a formative experience and one part of him would have loved to spend more of his life there. Although his time there had been brief, Alaska competed with St Louis in the memories Fr Thomas brought back to Lancashire from beyond the Atlantic.
On his return the Abbot appointed him to Brindle as parish priest. But he hadn't come back to stagnate: nowhere could that have been a possibility for him. In the twenty years of his life as a parish priest he built a Primary School, converted the old school into a Parish Hall, saved the Brindle Church by a radical reconstruction and re-organisation and built a link between the house and adjacent cottages to provide much needed facilities for parish development. With all that work as parish priest he never for a moment lost his zest for Catholic education. He was Chairman of the Governors of Brownedge St Mary's High School. He was a governor also of Newman VI Form College in Preston. He was active and effective in both roles. He felt it an essential aspect of his Benedictine vocation to promote Catholic schools and get the best possible staff for them. His fellow governors cherished the memory of his reply to a representative of the LEA who had rashly challenged Fr Thomas' professional right to assess educationally a candidate under consideration for a teaching post. In his reply the steady and inexorable recital of his experience and qualification in scientific education on both sides of the Atlantic was never forgotten and never challenged again. But it was not only in education that Fr Thomas was well known in the archdiocese. For a year he was on the Council of Clergy and for three years a delegate on the Liverpool Pastoral Council. It was wholly typical of his involvement and loyalty that his life ended as he processed into the Cathedral in Liverpool for the Archbishop's Jubilee Mass with all the diocesan clergy. As he had lived, he died in complete involvement in the Church.
The consistency of Fr Thomas' character, which I noted at the beginning, and the firmness of his unwavering commitment to his vocation could be deceptive. He was not unresponsive to new ideas, nor averse to change and development. When he returned to England and came onto the Abbot's Council at Ampleforth he was forward looking and supported developments - even quite radical ones. There were times when his comment was that he had proposed that to Abbot Byrne forty years ago. In three broad and unmistakable challenges that he faced in life he came out as adaptable, inventive and creative.
The first was his move to America. Many who knew him could be forgiven for expecting failure. His was not the pro-American type. His manner was the antithesis of what we thought we knew of America. No one could have expected that as a teacher he would make such a conquest of youth in St Louis or achieve such honours in the teaching profession. Yet he did that and acquired a reputation that still lasts.
The second was his dedication, as a means of recreation, to evangelisation in Alaska. Nothing in his past suggested the role. But in three or four visits he made a real impact there and is remembered with affection and gratitude.
The third was his response to Vatican II. You might have expected a conservative negativity. In fact he proved alert to the whole significance of the Council and very positive in adopting and developing a new approach to liturgy and to pastoral work and to ecumenism. In Alaska and at Brindle he showed that he had greeted the Council with a readiness to learn. He developed and put into practice an elaborate scheme for involving laity in parish work and responsibility. He published his plan on paper with the sort of diagram that looks too good to be true; but, as one of the neighbouring clergy said once in an awed whisper, it actually does happen in the parish. His response to the Council revealed, like the other two instances I have given, a mind and heart incomparably more lively, receptive and creative than his rather staid appearance and manner might suggest. He was never tempted to the abandon of charismatic zealots; his pace was measured as always and every move was thought out; but he was receptive and he did move with the Council. He was a good deal younger in mind than many much younger in age.
There was a gradual and inexorable deterioration in Fr Thomas's health during the last few years of his life. He came well out of a hip replacement and observers thought he was probably the only such patient who never varied by a centimetre from the exact length of step prescribed for recovery. He suffered from diabetes. But he kept going with great determination. Reluctantly he agreed in his 84th year that the time had come for his retirement from responsibility for the parish, but not, he added, from work. Shortly before the time came he died in dramatic peace and fitting consummation of his life.
Wilfrid Thomas LOUGHLIN
1910 Jly 22 b. Liverpool
1921 -1927 St Edward's College Liverpool
1927 -1933 Liverpool University
1930 -[1932] Vice Pres Guild of Undergraduates
1930 B Sc (Chemistry) 1st class honours
1933 D Phil (Physical & Biochemistry)
1949 Associate of Royal Institute of Chemistry
Fellow of Chemical Society
1933 Sept 25 Habit Ampleforth Abbot Matthews
1934 Sept 26 Simple Vows
1937 Sept 26 Solemn Vows
1938 Apr Tonsure & Minor Orders
Jly 17 Subdeacon Bishop Shine
1939 Jly 23 Deacon
1940 Jan 7 Priest
1940 -1952 PP Kirkbymoorside
1935 -1948 Assistant Procurator
1948 -1952 Estate Manager
Gilling Avenue, Oswaldkirk woods
shoring of Old House, Gilling panelling
1950 -1957 Sub-Economus
1952 -1957 St Alban's Warrington Assistant
1957 -1973 St Louis Priory USA. Head of Science.
(Joining with Fr Bede Burge the four original members
and so claiming to be founder member by making up
the canonically essential six)
1960 designed science wing St Louis
Elected member of Sigma XI
1964 -1967 Member St Louis McDonnell Planetarium Commission
1967 -1973 Chairman Planetarium Committee
1971 -1973 Member McDonnell Planetarium Commission
1973 -Citation from Mayor of St Louis for contribution
to Science Education.
1965 Sc Dept cited by American Assn of Physics Teachers
1970 -1971 Procurator of St Louis
1970 Outstanding Chem Teacher Awrd. Chem Indust Council.
Missouri Sci. Educator Award - Science Teachers MO.
Students gain 1st p1 Chem & Zool. Int. Sci. Fair.
1970 -1972 Chairman NSTA -NASA Regional Youth Science Congresses
at Marshall Space Flight Cen. Huntsville, Alabama.
1972 American Chem Soc Mid-West Regional Award in High
School Chemistry Teaching.
1969, 1971 Guest NASA at launches Apollo XII & XV to moon.
1982 $100,000 subscribed to endow Loughin Chair of Science
at St Louis Priory School
1971 - 1972 Supplied in vacations at Delta, N. Alaska
Worked with Univ of Alaska Sci on Tundra Research
1973 Supplied at Bethel Alaska & Eskimo village of Marshall
on Yukon River.
1974 Feb returned to England
Bamber Bridge Assistant
Mar Brindle Administrator ‘
Aug PP Brindle.
1975 Built Primary School
Converted old school to Parish Hall
1974 -1975 Liverpool Archdiocesan Council of Clergy
1974 -1986 Foundation GovernorBrownedge High School
1986 - Chairman of Gov. Brownedge High School
1974 -1993 Foundation Governor & helped plan Newman VI Form Coll Preston
1983 Central Lancs Prov Chaplain Knights of St Columba
1985 -1993 Priest Delegate Liverpool Pastoral Council
1986 -1987 Restored Brindle St Joseph's Church
Publications
1932 -1933 Five papers in Biochemical Journal (England)
1971 Articles in 'The Science Teacher' & 'Chemistry' (USA)
1963 -1967 Chemistry Adviser for McGraw-Hill Book Co series
'Experiences in Science' by Tannenbaum.& Stillman
1974 Revised 'Britannica's College Entrance Examination
Guide to Chemistry' for new ed of Encyclopaedia
Britannica
1974 - Articles in Ampleforth Journal.