Fr Thomas Byles, who grew up in Lancashire, was described by Pope Pius X as a ‘martyr for the Church’.
This year, as the centenary is kept of the “unsinkable” liner’s collision with an iceberg in the Atlantic, and as we remember and pray for its 1,500 or more victims, there is another hero of the Titanic who merits our attention: a parish priest from Essex who went down with the ship and whose selfless actions were recalled by some of the survivors of the disaster.
Roussel Davids Byles (he took the name “Thomas” only upon his conversion to Catholicism) was born in Leeds in 1870, the grandson of the founder of The Yorkshire Observer, son of the city’s leading Congregationalist minister and the nephew of a Liberal MP. He was educated at Rossall School, Lancashire, and in 1889 went up to Balliol College, Oxford. Having decided to embrace Anglicanism, rather than the Nonconformity of his childhood, he read Theology with the intention of taking Holy Orders. But in 1892 his younger brother William became a Catholic, an event that greatly influenced his own reception on the feast of Corpus Christi, May 24 1894 (hence the adoption of the name Thomas after St Thomas Aquinas). When he took his examinations in Theology he did so as a Catholic – probably becoming the first to do so at Oxford under Anglican examiners.
He then acted as a tutor to a German prince, returning to Yorkshire in 1895 and offering himself to Cardinal Vaughan of Westminster as a student for the priesthood. He was sent to Oscott College, but his health failed. For the next three years he taught at St Edmund’s College, Ware. In 1899 he entered the Beda College in Rome and was ordained as a priest in 1902.
Fr Byles was among the founders of the Catholic Missionary Society, with which he worked from 1903 to 1904.
Continue reading: The priest who prayed the rosary and heard Confessions as the Titanic sank
Image: Catholic Herald
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