Morris was born in Ootacamund, Tamil Nadu, then under the British Raj. He was a son of John Carnac Morris, FRS, an official of the East India Company who was also a noted scholar of Telugu, and of his wife, Rosanna Curtis. He was educated partly in India, partly at Harrow School, partly in reading for Cambridge with Dean Alford, the New Testament scholar. Under him a great change passed over Morris's ideas. Giving up the thought of taking the law as his profession, he became enthusiastic for ecclesiastical antiquities, took a deep interest in the Tractarian movement, and resolved to become an Anglican clergyman.
Going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1845,[1] Morris became the friend, and then the pupil of F. A. Paley, grandson of the well-known divine, and already one of the leading Greek scholars of the university. The conversion to Catholicism of John Henry Newman, followed by many others, impressed him, and he was converted by Bishop Wareing, 20 May 1846.
A storm followed, beginning in The Times, which made itself felt even in Parliament. Paley had to leave Cambridge (which led to his subsequently joining the Catholic Church), while Morris was practically cast off by his family. He then went to the English College, Rome, under Dr. Thomas Grant, and was there during the Revolutions of 1848. He was ordained a Catholic priest the following year, and returned to England.
Morris went to Belgium where he was admitted to the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Louvain, and professed simple vows in 1869. He was then assigned to the Jesuit community in Roehampton, and became the first Superior of the Jesuit Mission in Oxford. He taught Church History from 1873 to 1874 at the College of St. Beuno, in Tremeirchion, Wales; he was the founding Rector of St. Ignatius of Loyola College in Luqa, Malta, in 1877. He returned to England in 1880 to serve as the Master of novices for the newly established English Jesuit Province, serving in that position until 1886. It was he who first asked Mother Mary Loyola to write a book about making first communion.[2] It became an international bestseller, and she went on to publish at least 27 more books translated into multiple languages and sold around the world. He was named a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1889 and in 1891 he became the director of the staff of Jesuit writers at the Immaculate Conception Church, Farm Street, operated by the Jesuits in Mayfair.[1]
Morris retired to Wimbledon, London, in 1893. He died there while preaching in the pulpit, uttering the words, "Render to God the things that are God's."
Works
Morris's major works were:
The Life and Martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket (London, 1859 and 1885);
The Life of Father John Gerard (London, 1881), translated into French, German, Spanish, and Polish;
Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers (3 vols., London, 1872–1877);
^"Mary Loyola". www.goodreads.com. Retrieved 10 March 2024.
Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "John Morris". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. The entry cites:
