Lord Ripon’s reception into the Catholic Church early in September 1874 caused a minor sensation in the world of politics and a howl of no-popery protest in the non-Catholic press. Ripon’s conversion took London society and even his closest friends by surprise. Victorians had long accustomed themselves to the steady drift of ritualists and Puseyites to Rome, but were puzzled when this wealthy nobleman, evangelical Anglican, ex-Christian-Socialist friend of F. D. Maurice, and Grand Master of the English Freemasons, was received into the Catholic Church on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin on September 8, 1874.