Fr. Andrew
‘Father Andrew was born Henry Ernest Hardy, the fourth son of Colonel Edmund Armitage Hardy and Grace Maxwell Aiken, on January 7, 1869, in Kausali, India. After spending his early life in India, the Hardy family moved back to their English home where he was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, followed by Keble College in Oxford, and finally received his training for the priesthood at Ely Theological College. He had a life-long love of art…; he was an accomplished playwright and poet; he wrote hymns, at least one of which is still commonly heard echoing through English cathedrals; he co-founded the Society of the Divine Compassion on January 20, 1894, the first male Franciscan order in England since the time of the Reformation; he was highly sought after as a confessor and spiritual director, as well as a leader of retreats; he worked with those suffering from smallpox and other infectious diseases in London’s East End; and for all but one year in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), his fifty-two years of service as a parish priest and friar was spent in Plaistow, London. Father Andrew was truly a spiritual giant, a master of prayer. It could be said of him, as it was of Saint Benedict, “the holy man could not teach otherwise than as he himself lived.”’
Some additional stuff:
The hymn referred to in the foreword above is called ‘O dearest Lord, thy sacred head’ and is still a beloved Lenten hymn in England
The mother house of the SDC was called the House of the Divine Compassion at 42 Balaam Street in Plaistow, London, and to this day is still owned and occupied by The Sociey of Saint Francis (which absorbed what remained of the SDC back in the 1950s).
Father Andrew, through his mother’s line, was a direct descendent of Nicholas Ferrar who in 1626 had established a religious community with his siblings and their extended families at Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire. Little Gidding was popularized in the 20th century by a poem from T.S. Eliot of the same name.