St Teresa's in the Past

Even in the darkest period of its history in England, the Catholic faith continued to survive in the area now covered by the parish of St.Teresa’s, Charlbury which covers some 40 square miles of west Oxfordshire. This survival is owed to the presence of the Browne family of Kiddington Hall who owned property in this part of the county from the end of the 16th century. The family built a chapel at the Hall and had their own missionary priest - one of the earliest being the Benedictine Dom Bennet Smith who died in 1636.The chapel at Kiddington Hall was closed when the Browne-Mostyn family eventually left Kiddington, but Mr Browne-Mostyn made provision for the building of a new mission in the village of Radford, where the Pugin-designed church was opened in 1840 by Bishop (later Cardinal) Wiseman. There was a presbytery and school together with a convent belonging to the Sisters of Charity on an adjoining site. The Radford mission flourished with the help of the Jesuit fathers from Heythrop and Mass was also said in an inn at Enstone and at Charlbury. In 1931 an old Primitive Methodist chapel in Charlbury, built in 1854, and which had also served as a Salvation Army Citadel and a laundry, was bought for the sum of £100 and now became the church of St.Teresa of Lisieux, a daughter church of Holy Trinity, Radford, where the priest resided. In 1970, the Radford church and presbytery having been sold, St. Teresa’s became the parish church. Father Robert Bulbeck, a Jesuit priest who had trained at Heythrop, became parish priest serving until August 1997, when Monsignor Vaughan Morgan was appointed.
In December 2007 Canon David Evans became Parish Priest.