Chestertonian: Fr Kit Cunningham in his parlour, seated beneath his own portrait 

Father Kit Cunningham was an English Catholic priest who created, at St Etheldreda's, Ely Place in the City of London, a sort of magic kingdom. There, beautiful liturgy combined with Chestertonian good fellowship to produce an engagement with the world rare in the modern Church.

Cunningham, who died in December aged 79, could be a robust, even pugnacious man whose ordination surprised many who knew him. A member of the Rosminian order, he had travelled a bit, spending a decade in Tanzania and some years as prison chaplain at Wandsworth and Brixton, before arriving at Ely Place, the Rosminians' London base, in the late 1970s. This charming medieval chapel, off Holborn Circus, had few resident parishioners and offered few opportunities to an ambitious priest, especially in the drab and declining post-Conciliar Church.

The new rector saw that St Etheldreda's history and location could, with energy and imagination, be turned to good effect. The building, originally the palace chapel of the bishops of Ely, was the only pre-Reformation London church in Catholic hands, having been purchased by the Rosminians in 1873. Fr Kit brought out the connection with penal times by placing in the nave eight striking statues of local Catholic martyrs, ranging from a Thames waterman to a lady-in-waiting.

Of traditional views but modern outlook, Cunningham saw that the English faithful — whose ancestors had died for the sake of hearing Mass — were starved of decent liturgy. He built up the choir to professional standards, and the Latin High Mass on Sunday attracted a following from across London. (It still does.) Part of the attraction was the preaching of Fr Jean Charles-Roux, the son of Pétain's ambassador to the Vatican, who resided at the presbytery in Ely Place. Charles-Roux was an extreme traditionalist, but despite his dubious political antecedents, he was also learned and humorous. He and Cunningham made an extraordinary double act, the Frenchman's pale elegance contrasting with the rector's sturdy frame and ruddy complexion.