Edward Pugin and English Catholic Identity: The New Church of the Venerable English College in Rome

In 1864 Edward Welby Pugin (eldest son of A.W.N. Pugin) was invited to submit plans for a new church for the English hospice and seminary in Rome, the Venerable English College. The project soon failed because the Victorian churches fashionable in the United Kingdom and in the north of Europe were judged to be inappropriate in Rome. In “Edward Pugin and English Catholic Identity: the New Church of the Venerable English College in Rome,” Carol M. Richardson uses previously unpublished documents and drawings to explore the conflict of identity between Old English Catholics and Ultramontanes, that was exposed by attempts to build a high Victorian Gothic church in Rome. Although in the 1850s senior members of the Catholic hierarchy in England argued that architectural style was unimportant, this case study demonstrates that the style in which new English Roman Catholic churches were built mattered a great deal