Frederick George Lee (6 January 1832 in Thame, Oxfordshire – 22 January 1902 at Lambeth, London) was a priest of the Church of England and a religious author. He co-founded the Order of Corporate Reunion.

Biography

Lee was trained in Cuddesdon Theological College and ordained to priesthood in 1856 by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. Lee became, together with Ambrose de Lisle and others, a co-founder of the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom (APUC) in 1857. In Aberdeen, he had difficulties with the bishop concerning his ritualistic practices; he later became vicar of All Saints' Lambeth, London. In 1874, Lee, John Thomas Seccombe, and Thomas Wimberley Mossman founded a clandestine Anglo-Papalist society, the Order of Corporate Reunion, to continue the work of the APUC and to restore an apostolic succession recognised by the Roman Catholic Church through reordinations, as a means for reunion. Lee is believed to have been secretly consecrated as a bishop by some Roman Catholic prelates whose names were kept secret until 2000. Lee styled himself Bishop of Dorchester for a while and performed some ordinations, but later became disillusioned and believed that he made a mistake. In the late 1880s, Lee was a member of the Order of the White Rose, the club that sparked the Neo-Jacobite Revival in the United Kingdom. On 11 December 1901, Lee was received into the Roman Catholic Church, shortly before his death. In addition to his published sermons, books, and literary work, Lee edited numerous periodicals during his career, including The Union Newspaper (1856-1862), The Scottish Miscellany (1860-1861), The Union Review (1863-1869), The Church News (1867-1869), The Church Herald (1870), The Lambeth Review (1872), The Reunion Magazine (1877-1879, four numbers issued irregularly).

Works