John Douglas Woodruff (1897–1978) was the editor of the Tablet and later chairman of the Catholic publishers Burns & Oates.
[2] Oxford don Maurice Bowra suspected that at college Woodruff already “a Roman Catholic of the proselytizing kind, who therefore represented an immediate threat to his own flock".
[4] From 1936 to 1967 he was the editor of the Tablet, making the periodical the leading voice of English Catholicism, and from 1948 to 1962 he was the chairman of the Catholic publishers Burns & Oates.
[5] Woodruff was part of the Catholic right-wing, and, according to Martin Redfern, one of his employees at the Tablet, he wanted a clear separation between politics and religion.
[6] In Pope Paul's New Mass, Michael Davies introduced him as "probably England's most erudite layman".