Sir Patrick Maitland, Baronet, 17th Earl of Lauderdale

Fr John Salter writes:

Patrick Lauderdale belonged to that almost vanished breed the aristocratic Anglo-Catholic layman, of whom Viscount Halifax one of the initiators of the Malines Conversations, to explore Anglican/Roman Catholic Unity, was the best known example. Patrick Lauderdale was a keen promoter of the cause of Christian Unity and a devout Anglican in the High Church and Episcopal Church of Scotland tradition, and from a family which gave some of its sons to the Anglican Ministry. His father was the Vicar of St. Mary’s, Palfrey, Walsall, a leading Anglo-Catholic church in the “Biretta Belt” of the West Midlands, who had also been Rector of Ingestre and chaplain to the Earl of Shrewsbury. Patrick inherited the earldom from his brother the 16th Earl, the Revd. and Honble. Sydney Maitland; and his own younger son the Revd. and Honble. Sydney Maitland is a priest in the Episcopal Church of Scotland.

Patrick had a keen interest in the Orthodox Churches and married a Serbian Orthodox lady – Stanka Lozanitch. He worked for some years as President of the Church Union, an Anglo-Catholic society, which had once had Lord Halifax as its patron. In 1955 he was invited by the College of Guardians of the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, which housed an Orthodox chapel, to become a Guardian and Treasurer. He continued as a Guardian until 1982, when he was made a Guardian Emeritus.

At the suggestion of the Master of the College of Guardians, Father Alfred Hope Patten, Patrick restored, in the Lauderdale aisle of the Presbyterian Kirk in Haddington, the mediaeval shrine of Our Lady of the Three Kings. Patrick set about making it an ecumenical shrine and it attracted many pilgrims from the Church of Scotland, the Episcopal Church of Scotland, the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and Anglicans from the British Isles, and it became a centre for spiritual and physical healing. Fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable that a shrine to the Mother of God would find a home in the Scottish Kirk, but due to Patrick’s drive and charm and ecumenical contacts, and the feeling that here was a Christian who could be trusted, it became a reality, and will remain his permanent memorial.