Joseph Martin McCabe was an English free thought writer and speaker who had previously served as a Roman Catholic priest. He has been described as "one of the great mouthpieces of free thought in England . McCabe became a critic of the Catholic Church and joined organizations like the Rationalist Association and the National Secular Society. He criticized Christianity from a rationalist standpoint, but he was also involved in the South Place Ethical Society, which emerged from dissenting Protestantism and was a forerunner of modern secular humanism. He was born on 12 November 1867 and died on 10 January 1955. McCabe was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, to an Irish Catholic family, but he moved to Manchester as a child. He joined the Franciscan order at the age of 15 and completed a year of basic studies at Gorton Monastery. His novitiate year was spent in Killarney, followed by the balance of his priestly study at Forest Gate in Essex (now St Bonaventure's Catholic School). In 1890, he was ordained as a priest under the name Father Antony.