Richard Challoner, RIP, January 12, 1781

Richard Challoner, Vicar Apostolic for the London District in England, died on January 12, 1781. The Vicar Apostolic structure provided support for Catholic priests and laity in England in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries until the Restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850.

Born on September 29, 1691, he was raised a Presbyterian until after his father died when his mother became a servant in a Catholic household. Then he was raised Catholic and was baptized when he was thirteen. He entered the English College in Douai in 1705 and remained there until he returned to England in 1730. Challoner was ordained a priest in 1716 and served as an administrator at Douai for many years until becoming a missionary priest in London among the poor; although the recusancy laws were not as strictly enforced at that time, Father Challoner was still disguised as a layman and was careful not to attract official attention the the Masses and other Sacraments he celebrated in all kinds of locations.

In 1728 he had published his first work, Think Well on It. William Hyland discusses his many other published works in this Touchstone article.

Among his works, including a revision of the Douai-Rheims Bible and several devotional books, I think his most interesting were the historical and hagiographical efforts--books on the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval saints and especially on the Catholics martyrs who suffered in England from the reign of Henry VIII to that of Charles II. Those works provided the tiny minority of Catholics in England a vision of their past and indeed of its glories. In their own age they were nearly forgotten and quite ignored--not even worth persecuting!

Strangely enough, that latter condition changed after Parliament passed the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. Lord Gordon, President of the Protestant Association enraged the mobs so in 1780 that various No Popery riots took place (as recounted in Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge), as well as a march on Parliament, leading to many arrests and executions. The mobs also attacked the Embassy buildings of Bavaria and Sardinia, as well as the homes of wealthy noble Catholics. Bishop Challoner, aged 89, had to hide--just like a 16th century priest of old--until the mobs left his London home. The shock and terror of that near escape was too much for him. Bishop Challoner suffered paralysis two days before his death.

He was succeeded as Vicar Apostolic by his Coadjutor James Talbot; the last to hold that title was Nicholas Wiseman, who became the first Archbishop of Westminster in 1850.

E.E. Reynolds, biographer of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, summed up Bishop Challoner's achievements thus:

By divine providence, Richard Challoner served the Catholics in England for fifty years at a period when the penalized Church was slowly losing ground; many had become disheartened and the prospects of recovery were more than doubtful. Challoner's numerous publications are the chief achievements that now bring him before us, but, as Bishop John Milner noted in his funeral discourse in January 1781: `If it were not known how assiduous he ever was in the discharge of his sacred functions, and how much of his time was constantly taken up with preaching, instructing, administering the sacraments, attending to the various and intricate concerns of his district, and with his prayers and devotions, we might be led to imagine that he had done nothing else but write, and that his whole life had been devoted to the composition of the many works he has left us in defence of the true faith and of sound morality.' 

It was by this twofold apostolate — his pastoral care and his writings — that he sustained the faith of his flock when they sorely needed encouragement to persevere. At the end of his life he saw the first step taken towards emancipation, and it was undoubtedly his decisive approval that made it possible for that step to be taken; had he insisted on consultation with Rome at every stage, the opportunity would have been lost by the inevitably long-drawnout exchanges of opinion. Yet it remains true to say that it was by his books that his influence was most effective, far beyond his own District, and, indeed, among non-Catholics as well. The Garden of the Soul and his Meditations, as well as other publications, were, as we have seen, frequently reprinted up to the early years of this century. His Missionary Priests gave Catholics a pride in their ancestry and showed them patterns of endurance under persecution. His revision of the Douay Bible was for two centuries the Bible known to Catholics. 

For his contemporaries there was a third influence — his holy life. To quote Bishop Milner again: `When I represent Bishop Challoner as a saint, I say no more of him now after his death, than all who knew him have said of him during his life.'

The school that bears his name in Kingston upon Thames includes this prayer for his beatification in their documentation:

O God who made your servant Richard a true and faithful pastor of your little flock in England, raise him, we beseech you, to the altars of thy Church, that we, who have been taught by his word and example, may invoke his name in heaven for the return of our country to belief in the Gospel and to the unity of all Christians in the one Church of Jesus Christ. We ask this through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Image credit: "Blue" plaque outside Challoner's London home at 44 Old Gloucester Street, from Wikipedia commons, used by permission of the photographer.

Book Review: Persecution without Martyrdom

From the publisher, Gracewing:

Persecution Without Martyrdom: The Catholics of North-East England in the Age of the Vicars Apostolic 1688-1850
by Leo Gooch

978 0 85244 819 9  -  488 pages   -  £20.00 (I received a review copy from the publisher for my honest opinion and review: see below)

Until comparatively recently, historical studies of English Catholicism have lavished attention on the ‘Age of Martyrs’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or on the ‘Second Spring’ of the nineteenth century, while the eighteenth, a century of ‘persecution without martyrdom’ as Edwin Burton described the life and times of Richard Challoner, is largely passed over. That neglect is wholly unwarranted. The creation of the four Vicariates Apostolic in 1688 marks the foundation of the modern Roman Catholic Church in England ND Wales and a series of significant ecclesiastical developments affecting the disposition and operation of the mission followed over the next century and a half: its emergence from ‘seigneurial’ rule, its shift from its rural strongholds into the towns, and its metamorphosis into a centrally-managed organization. In the secular field, this was the age when major political crises relating to Catholicism arose, when Catholics threw off discrimination and oppression and by degrees emerged from recusancy to full citizenship; and when the sociological character of the English Catholics changed completely. Theses were all important enough singly, but cumulatively they amounted to nothing less than a radical transformation of the structure and outlook of the English Catholics. The later achievements of the Church of Cardinals Manning, Wiseman and Newman could not possibly have been won without the perseverance and vigour of the eighteenth-century recusants.

This book is a tremendous resource for understanding the status of Catholics in north-east England after the Glorious Revolution and up to the 1850 restoration of the diocesan hierarchy. The range of dates from 1688 to 1850 means that the period covered includes the Jacobite attempts to restore the Catholic Stuarts, the end of the Stuart dynasty and the beginning of the Hanoverians (1714--three hundred years ago!), and the slow restoration of freedom to worship and civil rights  for Catholics, leading up to Emancipation in 1829. The first four chapters offer a compelling narrative of Catholic gentry in the northeast of England surviving the fall of James II, continuing their family's traditions and education, working for their freedom of religion and worship, and responding to the presence of the Vicars Apostolic.The last two chapters provide tremendous detail about the chapels and the chaplains established by the gentry on their estates, breaking off from the narrative of the first four chapters.

In chapter one, Gooch provides statistical surveys of the recusant Catholics throughout the period, noting the ebbs and falls of their population. He demonstrates that while they had to be careful and discrete, they were committed to practicing their faith. He notes that Catholic gentry often played down their wealth--to avoid confiscation and fines by the government--by various financial arrangements, loans, and leases. The gentry provided both the chapels and the chaplains for the celebration of Catholic Mass and the other Sacraments--and Gooch gives much more detail of these arrangements in the last two chapters.

Gooch depicts the education, travel and intellectual avocations of north-east Catholic gentry in chapter two. The Catholic gentry were better educated than their Anglican peers, because they attended the Jesuit colleges on the Continent while Cambridge and Oxford were still serving primarily as educational institutions for  Anglican clergy. Catholic gentlemen traveled extensively on the Continent on long Grand Tours, collecting books and artwork. They usually were accompanied by a chaplain cum chaperone, spending Holy Week in Rome and celebrating the Feast of the Ascension in Venice. 

The Catholic Question--the issue of Catholic freedom to worship and take full part in English political and social life--occupies our interest in chapter three. Could Catholics be trusted? Gooch notes that not many of the north-eastern Catholic gentry had supported the Jacobite cause, and that as the English gentry negotiated with the government, they were often ready to compromise on certain aspects like government approval of episcopal appointments or allowing the government to read official church correspond with the Holy See, just so they could be free of the fines or threat of fines for not attending the Church of England services, exempted as they were from the Toleration Act of 1689.

In chapter four Gooch discusses the Vicars Apostolic (V.A.) of the Northern District, Titular Bishops without geographical dioceses or sees, and how they changed the structures of ecclesiastical power. They had titles like Titular Bishop of Marcopolis, Bolina, Trachis, Abydus, or Samosata. The latter was the title of the V.A. of the Northern District, William Hogarth, who became the Bishop of Hexham in 1850. We have to remember that the gentry were hiring--and firing--the clergy for their private estate chapels. As Gooch will demonstrate in the last two chapters, this practice meant that if the head of the  family conformed to the established Church of England, the chapel could be lost to the Catholics on the estate--or if there was some disagreement between the chaplain and family, he could be fired. The Vicars Apostolic, of course, wanted to establish a more stable infrastructure of "parish" chapels with assigned pastors. Their efforts before Emancipation and between Emancipation and the restoration of the hierarchy are what Gooch argues helped prepare Catholicism in England for the achievements of bishops and archbishops like Hogarth, Briggs (another V.A. in the north who became a diocesan bishop in 1850, of Beverley), Wiseman, Ullathorne, Manning, etc. after them.  I do not think that including Cardinal Newman in the blurb was necessary or appropriate, since he was never a bishop and was named a Cardinal Deacon late in life by Pope Leo XIII as a personal honor rather than as a hierarchical office or position (he continued his work at the Oratory in Birmingham in fact, not moving to Rome as usually required at that time for a Cardinal Deacon).

The last two chapters, while providing the great wealth of detail about different estates, their families, chapels, and chaplains, really should have been placed in an appendix. After stating that the Vicars Apostolic had, as the blurb above notes, worked to create a "centrally-managed organization", two chapters describing the "seigneurial rule" in such detail contradicted--at least structurally--the argument. Throughout the book, Gooch's attention to detail and excellent research, with tremendous notes and sources consulted, is obvious. I also wish the publishers could have included maps or some illustrations--especially the maps, which would have helped an American reader not familiar with the territory. Certainly, this is a great achievement and resource.

And It Arrived on My Birthday! A Review Copy from Gracewing

This looks like a fascinating study of a period that's not so well known in the history of Catholicism in England after the English Reformation--and I do agree that the usual view of that era is that it was very quiet and stagnant:

Persecution Without Martyrdom: The Catholics of North-East England in the Age of the Vicars Apostolic 1688-1850, by Leo Gooch
 
Publisher's Blurb: Until comparatively recently, historical studies of English Catholicism have lavished attention on the ‘Age of Martyrs’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or on the ‘Second Spring’ of the nineteenth century, while the eighteenth, a century of ‘persecution without martyrdom’ as Edwin Burton described the life and times of Richard Challoner, is largely passed over. That neglect is wholly unwarranted. The creation of the four Vicariates Apostolic in 1688 marks the foundation of the modern Roman Catholic Church in England AND Wales and a series of significant ecclesiastical developments affecting the disposition and operation of the mission followed over the next century and a half: its emergence from ‘seigneurial’ rule, its shift from its rural strongholds into the towns, and its metamorphosis into a centrally-managed organization. In the secular field, this was the age when major political crises relating to Catholicism arose, when Catholics threw off discrimination and oppression and by degrees emerged from recusancy to full citizenship; and when the sociological character of the English Catholics changed completely. Theses were all important enough singly, but cumulatively they amounted to nothing less than a radical transformation of the structure and outlook of the English Catholics. The later achievements of the Church of Cardinals Manning, Wiseman and Newman could not possibly have been won without the perseverance and vigour of the eighteenth century recusants.

I look forward to reading it and reviewing it.