John Gother

John Gother (died 1704), also known as John Goter, was an English Roman Catholic convert, priest and controversialist.

Born at Southampton, England, Gother was educated a strict Presbyterian, but part at least of his mother's family were Catholics. Gother himself was converted to Catholicism as a boy and on 10 January 1668 entered the English College at Lisbon, a seminary for the formation of Catholic clergy.

Ordained priest in 1676, he returned to England in 1681 to work on the mission in London, where at least from 1685 he began to devote time to controversial writings. Gother was something of an eirenicist, trying to present in clear language the tenets of the Christian faith as belonging to Catholicism, with a view to convincing Protestants that (at very least) Catholic doctrine was not a hotch-potch of unscriptural superstititions; and by often emphasizing prayer and spiritual experience. Naturally, he worked in the hope of encouraging conversions to the Catholic Church. In later life he wrote many works of a devotional character, which were popular for well over a century and important in keeping up Catholic spirits in the grey years after 1688.

Later, at an unknown date (possibly 1688), Gother became chaplain to the recusant family of George Holman of Warkworth, Northamptonshire, at the Castle or Manor. It was there that he instructed and received into the Catholic Church a boy called Richard Challoner, son of the housekeeper, who was later to become a Bishop and Vicar Apostolic of the London District. Challoner, one of the most impressive characters of the period of English persecution of Catholics, made his own not a few aspects of Gother's eirenicism and programme of spiritual promotion.

Gother is said to have been put forward as a possible successor to Bishop Philip Michael Ellis (OSB), who had been appointed the first Vicar Apostolic of the Western District in 1688, but almost immediately imprisoned by the Revolution and then forced to take refuge first at Saint-Germain and afterwards in Rome, resigning the post as Vicar Apostolic in 1704. However that may be, Gother was sent in 1704 to be President of the College at Lisbon.

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