(born Francisco Javier Morgan Osborne,[citation needed] 18 January 1857 – 11 June 1935) was a Spanish and British Catholic priest of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri.
Through his maternal grandmother, Aurora Böhl de Faber, the future priest was the grandnephew of historical novelist Cecilia Böhl de Faber, whose immortal contributions to Spanish literature were concealed behind the male pseudonym "Fernán Caballero" and drew both wide praise and comparisons with the novels of Sir Walter Scott.
[4] As a boy, Francis was sent to England, where he became only the third student to enter the primary school attached to the Birmingham Oratory,[5] where his teachers included Father John Henry Newman.
There he met a widow who had recently converted to Catholicism and who came to the Oratory for spiritual comfort: Mabel Tolkien (née Suffield), along with her children Ronald and Hilary.
By September 1900 Mabel had managed to enrol Ronald at the prestigious King Edward's School in Birmingham, and on Sundays the family attended Mass at the Oratory.
In a 1965 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled the influence of the man whom he always called "Father Francis": "He was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip.
I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the 'liberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about 'Bloody Mary' than the Mother of Jesus—who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.
[2][page needed] Father Francis arranged for her to rent two rooms in a cottage in Rednal, to the south of Birmingham, near the estate where the Oratorians had their cemetery and a retreat house.
[2][page needed] The financial means the late Mrs. Tolkien left for the upbringing of the children were rather meagre, but Father Francis was to supplement them with money from his share of his family's sherry business in El Puerto de Santa Maria.
The library that the priest kept in his cell was frequently used by Ronald, who learned some Castilian Spanish from his guardian, which enabled him to create a language he called "naffarin".
In all probability, thanks to Father Francis' library the young Tolkien had access to the Castilian historical novels of Cecilia Böhl de Faber, the priest's great-aunt, who published under the pseudonym Fernández Caballero.
After three years, the priest realised that Mrs Suffield, widowed and deeply depressed, could not offer the most suitable environment for the Tolkien brothers to grow up in.
[12] Possibly because of the disparity of cult marriage between his own parents, Father Francis Morgan considered it "altogether unfortunate"[13] that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman.
Tolkien later wrote that "the combined tensions" of having a serious romantic relationship in his teens nearly caused, "a very bad breakdown" and are the reason why he "muffed [his] exams" to enter Oxford University.
Tolkien obeyed this prohibition to the letter,[14] with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.
Francis only went home every alternate year, as getting out there was such a business – booking a cabin to Gibraltar there and back on a P&O liner, or other such, and then the long journey by diligence to Puerto de Santa Maria.
Francis and his bachelor brother, Augustus, who lived in Spain, went to Palestine to see their sister, who had been a Reparatrice nun in Jerusalem for many years and wasn't very good at English.