In June 1858, a young French priest of the order of the Missionaries of St. Francis de Sales was sent from the mother house of his order to a village called Kaniptee in India. It so happened that near that village the 91st Regiment was encamped and the French priest, Father Francis Larive, made the acquaintance of a Captain Charles Dewell whose home was in Malmesbury and who had recently been received into the Catholic Church. The English officer dreamed of starting a mission in his native town, and as he got to know Father Larive better and to admire his strong faith and missionary zeal it seemed to him that perhaps it was through him that the dream might be realised. After much thought, permission was sought and obtained from the Bishop of Clifton, and Father Larive was released from his work in India. Captain Dewell decided to resign his commission, so the two men left India and travelled to Malmesbury. It was a bitter disappointment for Captain Dewell to find on his arrival, in May 1861, that his house had, contrary to his instructions, been let on a five year lease which would not expire until 1866. Father Larive went to Chippenham and, from there, started a mission at Devizes; Captain Dewell entered the Jesuit novitiate and became a lay-brother. A few miles from Malmesbury, at Rodbourne House, lived Sir Richard Hungerford Pollen who was a Catholic. He obtained permission to have Mass said at his house, so Father Larive went to serve there in 1864.
Father Larive and Brother Dewell, as he had then become, met again in London in 1865, and Brother Dewell begged the priest not to forget his aim of starting a mission in Malmesbury. But the project seemed beset with difficulties. The Bishop of Clifton told Father Larive to wait at least a year because of lack of funds, and the Superior of his Order also wrote saying that no new missions must be started in England at present.
Some six months later, Father Larive was in France and went on a pilgrimage to La Salette in the French Alps, not far from Grenoble. Here, in 1846, Our Lady had appeared to two children who were looking after the cows grazing on the lower slopes of the mountain called Mont-sous-les-Baisses. The children could not be shaken from their certainty that they had seen a beautiful lady surrounded by light, dressed in white and gold and wearing on her breast a golden crucifix bearing the pincers and hammer of the Passion. "If I would not have my Son abandon you I am compelled to pray to Him without ceasing", she said. The hand of her Son which she held had become heavy, she told the children, because the people had grown neglectful of their prayers, often missing Mass on Sunday and often taking Christ’s name in vain. By the time that Father Larive went there, the Church had accepted this occurrence as a true appearance of Our Lady and had started to build a basilica on the spot.
The priest made his pilgrimage with the thought uppermost in his mind of his longing to bring the Catholic faith back to Malmesbury. "I begged God in fervent prayer", he wrote in his diary, "to remove all difficulties from the immediate opening of the Malmesbury mission. ... I felt in my soul that God was asking of me my consent to the sacrifice of my health, of my reputation, of my spiritual consolations, of my life, in return for it. This consent I gladly gave". A few days later, he saw his Superior at Annecy and received permission to go forward with the work if he felt it practicable and, on his return to England, he found a letter from the Bishop saying that he would no longer raise any objection. In 1866 the lease of Cross Hayes House expired, thus enabling Father Larive to take possession of it.
On Palm Sunday, 14th April 1867, Father Larive said Mass in the large parlour of Cross Hayes House in the presence of twenty two people from Devizes, Chippenham, Rodbourne and Brinkworth. It must have been a moment of great emotion for the priest and, indeed, all who were present. Father Larive started a night school at which he gave lessons three times a week to forty boys. A year later he started a day school which met with bitter opposition from the establishment of Malmesbury. Something of the animosity that then existed against the Catholic Church is shown in one incident, among others, when a stone was thrown at the priest as he walked through the town. It hit him in the face and the blood trickled down from the wound. A small boy who witnessed it, Richard Collins of Luckington, was so filled with compassion and admiration for the man who upheld his faith against such hatred that he determined that when he grew up he, too, would become a priest. In the fullness of time his ambition was realised and eventually he became Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle. It was a curious coincidence that he confirmed a certain twelve year old boy in his diocese, little thinking that the boy, Basil Harrison, would one day become Parish Priest of Malmesbury.
In 1869, Father Larive bought a piece of land adjoining Cross Hayes House on which he erected a temporary church which later became the Catholic school, run by the Sisters of Mercy from Bristol from 1870 until 1884. However, he had yet to build a permanent church (for which there was no money) so he travelled through France and Italy begging for funds to complete his work. He was received in audience by Pope Pius IX who gave him 4,000 lire towards the new church.
So in 1875 the Church was built and Father Larive’s strivings were crowned with success. But it will be remembered how, at La Salette, he had written in his diary that he felt that God was asking him to give up his health, his reputation, his spiritual consolations and life itself for the blessing of being able to restore the Catholic faith to Malmesbury, the little town that he had come to love so much. And now it seemed that all these things were indeed to be exacted of him. The tensions of withstanding the hostility of the non-Catholic population, the strains of overwork, of travel, of worry, made him ill. To his sorrow he was recalled to Annecy though his heart would always be in Malmesbury.
Father Larive’s successor in Malmesbury was another French priest who had also been a missionary in India. Father Decompoix was Parish Priest here for more than forty years. During this time, in 1884, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Annecy, who also had a presence in India, came to the town and took over the management of the school, Father Decompoix having found it difficult to obtain good teachers. The Sisters took up residence at Cross Hayes House, while Father Decompoix moved into the original coach house where he lived until his death. This little building is now known as the "Clubroom".
Despite the passage of the years the number of Catholics in the parish remained small and there was still hostility towards them. But Father Morrin, who was appointed Parish Priest in 1912, set out to overcome this by making the doctrine of the Church more widely known. He gave public lectures about the Catholic faith and started a parish magazine to put forward the Catholic point of view. He joined the local debating society and when the First World War came he involved himself in work for refugees and became chairman of the Food Committee. All this helped to dispel forever the attitude of dislike and contempt towards Catholics which had been prevalent in the town. Father Morrin also worked hard to raise money with which to improve the church and considerable architectural alterations were made and central heating and lighting installed. In 1933 a new school building was opened which continues in use to the present day.