Fr LAURENCE SAMUEL GERALD VANN

Born at St Marys Cray in Kent on 24 August 1906, he was taken as a baby by his mother to Woodchester, where she had been brought up, to be offered to God according to his will. He was educated in the apostolic school at Hawkesyard and received the habit at Woodchester at the age of seventeen and made his profession on 30 September 1924. He began his studies at Hawkesyard and then was a member of the original community at Oxford, being ordained priest on 11 June 1929, three weeks after the reopening of Oxford as a priory.

After obtaining his lectorate at the Angelicum in Rome he read English at Oxford and obtained a first class honours degree in 1934. For the next eighteen years he taught at Laxton and was headmaster from 1948 to 1952. Thereafter he was assigned to Cambridge, Edinburgh and finally Newcastle, where after a long illness during which he was nursed with love and care by the brethren he died on 14 July 1963, aged 56, with 38 years of profession and 34 of priesthood.

The panegyric preached at his funeral by Fr Sebastian Bullough OP was published the same year. His difficulties in life were a source of great sympathy for those suffering or in trouble of any kind; he was enormously hardworking and while a schoolmaster had also been engaged in lecturing, broadcasting and writing; and he had travelled to America where he had a great reputation and where his books were still being republished thirty years after his death.

Apart from articles his published works are as follows:

• De SS. Trinitatis Mysterio Humanae Vitae Archetypo (1931),
• On Being Human (1933),
• Morals Makyth Man (1937; repr. as Morals and Man, 1960),
• Morality and War (1939),
• Of his Fullness (1939),
• Saint Thomas Aquinas (1940),
• The Heart of Man (1944),
• The Divine Pity (1945; repr. 1946),
• Eve and the Gryphon (1946),
• His Will is our Peace (1947),
• The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God (1947),
• Awake in Heaven (1948), The Two Trees (1948),
• The Seven Swords (1950),
• The High Green Hill (1951),
• The Wisdom of Boethius (1950),
• The Water and the Fire (1953),
• Stones or Bread (1957),
• The Paradise Tree (1959),
• The Sons Course (1959),
• Blackfriars School, 1659-1959 [1959],
• To Heaven with Diana (1960),
• The Eagles Word (1961),
• The Missal Step by Step.
• A First Mass Book (with D. A. Young and P. Quail, illustrator, 1963),
• Moral Dilemmas (1963).