Clarence Augustus Walworth

Clarence Augustus Walworth was born in Plattsburgh, New York, on May 30, 1820. He graduated from Union College in 1838, entered legal practice after admission to the bar in 1841, and then studied for Episcopal ministry at General Theological Seminary. He entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, joined the Redemptorists, and was ordained at Wittem in the Netherlands on August 27, 1848. Returning to the United States in 1851, he became a prominent missionary preacher.

Walworth shared in the early history of the Paulist movement but did not remain permanently in the community. After illness and overwork, he entered diocesan ministry and served as pastor of St. Mary's Church in Albany. His public work also included advocacy concerning labor abuses, temperance, political corruption, and conditions at the St. Regis reservation. He wrote religious, historical, and literary works and died in Albany on September 19, 1900.

Walworth's lasting contribution to hymnody is his singable English rendering of Franz's German Te Deum paraphrase. Hymnological records locate its first publication with music in The Catholic Psalmist, Dublin, in 1858. Rather than making a literal prose translation, he shaped English words to the established meter and melody. The version later crossed denominational boundaries and became the foundation of the hymn sung in many English-language Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and evangelical collections.