Book Review: Two by Hugh (Ross Williamson)

I have heard of Hugh Ross Williamson (1901-1978) before: he was an early revisionist historian of the Whig tradition of the English Reformation and its aftermath: The Gunpowder Plot (1951); The Beginning of the English Reformation (1957); The Conspirators and the Crown (1959), etc. He was raised in a Nonconformist (English Protestants not accepting Church of England doctrine and worship) family, became an Anglican minister in 1943 and then became a Catholic in 1955. 

At that time there was no Pastoral Provision (as Pope Saint John Paul II established in 1982) or Anglican Ordinariate (as Pope Benedict XVI established in 2009), so as he was married, he became a layman in the Catholic Church and continued his career as a prolific author. Joseph Pearce highlights his career in Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (Ignatius Press). 

One of the best anecdotes Pearce relates is Williamson's opportunity to write a play for the 1953 Canterbury Festival (the same event for which T.S. Eliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral and Dorothy L. Sayers The Zeal of Thy House). Like Eliot, whom Williamson admired, he wrote a play about a former Archbishop of Canterbury, entombed in the Cathedral like many Catholic archbishops before him: Reginald Cardinal Pole (!). The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, did not attend Williamson's play, His Eminence of England, and Robert Speaight, the Catholic (convert) actor who portrayed both St. Thomas of Canterbury and Reginald Cardinal Pole in their respective plays, regretted the low turnout for the performances. 

When he became a Catholic, Williamson lost all his sources of income, including his role on the BBC Brains Trust program (the BBC TV version). His brain--being now Catholic--could not be trusted. So he wrote, acted (as Ian Rossiter), etc., to support his family.

I'm going to comment on these books in the reverse order of my reading: The Great Prayer (Gracewing) and The Great Betrayal (Arouca Press). That's the order in which he wrote them.

The first point to be made about The Great Prayer is that he wrote it was he was still an Anglican minister (dated Maundy Thursday, 1954). When Gracewing (a Catholic publisher in the UK) republished the book, it did not seek a Nihil Obstat or Imprimatur from a Catholic diocese but did ask a Catholic bishop, Alan S. Hopes, to recommend the book. 

Hopes was at the time an Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster and is now the Bishop of East Anglia--coincidentally (?) he was also once an Anglican minister, ordained in 1968. In 1994, he joined the Catholic Church, then was ordained a Catholic priest in 1995, then ordained a bishop in 2003. Pope Francis appointed him the Bishop of East Anglia in 2013. 

N.B.: Hopes had evidently never been married, thus did not need a Pastoral Provision or Personal Ordinariate. 

In his introduction, Hopes notes that "while this is not the most up-to-date scholarly work on this Eucharistic prayer, it does nevertheless hold its value. Its freshness of style will make it a pleasant as well as an informative read for today." (p. vi)

The point is: this is a historical document as much as it is a liturgical and theological study of the Roman Canon, what is now the First Eucharistic Prayer in the Roman Missal of 1970, but which remains the only Eucharistic Prayer in the Roman Missal of 1962. When Hugh Ross Williamson wrote it, he was convinced of certain ecclesiastical and doctrinal facts within the Church of England that proved not to be true: therefore he became a Catholic. 

He hoped that the Roman Canon, since it existed for more than a thousand years before the Church of England was established, could be a point of unity between Catholics and Protestants. He thought that it did not require belief in the doctrine of Transubstantiation to believe in The Real Presence of Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, since this Great Prayer was in use before the Council of Trent. 

Like Newman, Williamson was appealing to antiquity (and more recent history before the English Reformation) for the basis of change or reform in the Church of England:

In praying the Canon we unite ourselves with all fellow-Christians 'throughout the ages, world without end'. In knowing the Canon, we become grounded in the teaching of the primitive Church which Protestants no less than Catholics accept [sic?] and so we may find that the Lord's Table, despite all the controversies which have disgraced His followers, is indeed the centre of unity." (p. 14) . . .

[The division of opinion between Christians is not] "between those who believe in 'some kind of change in the elements' and those who call the change 'Transubstantiation'" . . . [it is] "between those who believe that they are receiving the Body and the Blood in a Sacrament and those who believe that their faith is spiritually quickened by eating bread and drinking wine in an act of remembrance."

The first Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Augustine, sent by Pope Saint Gregory the Great, had offered the unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit through this Great Prayer--why couldn't he, Father Hugh Ross Williamson, do the same?

But his Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, disagreed with him on this point as he did on the play celebrating Cardinal Archbishop Pole. I was surprised that in Literary Converts Pearce said that the issue of the Church of South India being admitted to the Anglican Communion was the final blow for Williamson, not the use of the Roman Canon/the Great Prayer in Anglo-Catholic services. 

There is another interesting parallel between Newman and Williamson here: one of the last blows for Newman, moving him from his Anglican deathbed to the "one, true fold of Christ" was the Jerusalem bishopric to be shared by Church of England and Lutheran prelates.

Williamson descries the "Irrational prejudices [that] still cloud the reason" among the English against the spiritual authority of the Pope (who is mentioned and prayed for in the first prayer of the Great Prayer, the Te Igitur). Although Article XXXVII (37) of the Thirty-Nine Articles rejects the authority of the Pope within England, Williamson argues that it clear that the current Pope (Pius XII) has spiritual, moral, and doctrinal authority over Catholics throughout the world. He wishes that the continuing cries of "No Popery" would cease. 

Just to continue the thread of Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher's impact, we should note that he met with Pope John XXXII at the Vatican in 1960--the first contact between the head of the Church of England and the Vicar of Christ for centuries.

So Williamson faced two of the main issues dividing Protestants (and some Anglo-Catholics) and Catholics: the Real Presence and the authority of the Pope. He also addresses Catholic (catholic?) beliefs about the Blessed Virgin Mary, prayer for the dead, the Communion of Saints, and other controversial topics between Catholics and Protestants from an Anglo-Catholic viewpoint.

Throughout his explication of the Great Prayer, Williamson emphasizes the sacrificial aspect of the Mass, of the offering of the bread and wine, of the re-presentation of the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, and on the atonement we participate in through this prayer. He notes again that many outside the Church misunderstand what happens at Mass: we do not crucify Jesus again; this an unbloody sacrifice. We can only offer what God has given us; not just the bread and wine on the Altar but ourselves, our intentions, our desire to be one with God. As Williamson also emphasizes, that's the meaning of atonement and he wishes we pronounced it at-one-ment--we want to be united with God and the only way we can be is through Him. We cannot do it ourselves. (Williamson notes that Pelagianism is "that old British heresy which might even be called modern British orthodoxy" (p. 145)--the English priest Pelagius had taught that Original Sin had no effect on human nature; we all had the ability to save ourselves through our Free Will choice of doing good and living according to the Commandments and we really didn't need God's Grace to do so.)

As he notes in the section on "Unde et Memores" after the Consecration:

We are careful not to forget that . . . we can only offer what he has given us. . . Tuis donis ac datus -- 'from what thou hast thyself given and granted.' All we can ever do is to render, not to give, and now, above all, is the moment to remember it. (pp. 114-115) 

Williamson highlights the main purpose of the priesthood: to "consecrate the bread and wine so that they become Christ's Body and Blood, to offer Christ thus present on the altar to the Father, to communicate Christ thus present to the faithful . . . All other functions of the priesthood are allied to or derived from this." (p. 143)

A major frustration throughout the text is that Williamson cites and quotes many authors and works, but does not provide footnotes or definite sources! He refers to Chesterton, Newman, Dom Gregory Dix, the Cure d'Ars, Pope Innocent III, Pope Pius X, C.S. Lewis, Archbishop of Canterbury Benson and his son the Catholic convert Father Benson (I presume), Dean Farrar, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many, many others. Sometimes he mentions a title, like The Breaking of the Bread (Father John Coventry), Liturgy and Life (Dom Theodore Wesseling), The Christian Sacrifice (Dom Eugene Masure), etc., but he still does not give page numbers or other information. Gracewing obviously published the book without tracking down those citations, because that would be a time-consuming project.

Based upon his deep understanding of the Sacrifice of the Mass and the role of the priesthood, I presume that it would have been a great sorrow to him that when he became Catholic that he could not celebrate the Mass as a Catholic in the fullness that he had wanted to as an Anglican. Williamson could still participate in the offering of the Mass and receive the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus in Holy Communion, but he could not consecrate the bread and the wine. 

But the further sorrow for him--which I'll continue in another post soon--came for him with the changes in the order of the Mass after the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Missal of 1970. He addressed those in the next book I'll review, The Great Betrayal--and among the issues he discusses there is the creation of optional Eucharistic Prayers which he contends do not represent the Sacrifice the Mass as fully as the Great Prayer/The Roman Canon (that's really litotes on my part!).

Arouca Press has brought two of Williamson's essays together in this edition:"The Modern Mass: a Reversion to the Reforms of Cranmer" from 1969 and "The Great Betrayal: Some Thoughts on the Invalidity of the New Mass" from 1971. Joseph Shaw, the current Chairman of the Latin Mass Society in the UK and Williamson's daughter, Julia Ashenden, who was also one of Joseph Pearce's sources in Literary Converts for information about her father, contributed the Foreword and Introduction, respectively. 

Obviously, a more controversial subject. Reading that volume and Pearce's reporting of Williamson's last years reminded me of Evelyn Waugh's bitter trial with the changes made to the celebration of Holy Week and the Holy Mass before the Roman Missal of 1970.

Lingard on Newman, Part Two

I've been waiting for this article since January of this year, when I wrote:

I look forward to learning more about Lingard's reasons for not liking Newman in the promised subsequent article. . . .

I also commented that John Lingard's desire for conversions to the Catholic Church was not completely satisfied by those who converted: he mistrusted Newman and Faber, etc.

Shaun Blanchard's concluding article about Lingard's mistrust and dislike of Newman continues the same theme: rather contradictory but also rather ignorant. For example Blanchard notes that Lingard associated Newman with Faber too closely--he lumped the Oxford converts together without distinction or discrimination:

Lingard followed news of Newman and his conversion closely.[12] However, in addition to never really permitting Newman to shake his association with the Oxford Movement (a strike against him in Lingard’s eyes), the old Cisalpine also seems to have negatively associated Newman with Faber (whom he called “credulous”)[13] and with the burgeoning ultramontanism and Romanticism sweeping English Catholicism. Unfortunately, Lingard never recognized Newman as the profoundly unique thinker he was, nor as one who deftly eschewed the standard binaries and party lines of the age and of the church. Lingard even admitted, in 1845, to not having yet read Newman![14] . . .

The second reason for Lingard’s sense of alienation from those he called the “Newmanites” was more principled. When he bluntly admitted to John Walker in January of 1850 that he “didn’t like Newman” that reasons he cited are telling: “too much fancy or enthusiasm.”[20] While there is an element of taste here—Lingard was a man of the Catholic Enlightenment who naturally recoiled from Romanticism and Pugin’s neo-Gothic revival—there was also an important principle at stake.[21] For Lingard, and many of his generation, the theologically correct and pragmatically most effective way to engage Protestants was through stripping away superstitions, triumphalism, and any unnecessary accretions to the Old Faith. Protestants rightly resented all of these things. What remained could be grasped by Protestants of good will as the pure faith of their English ancestors and, indeed, of the early church.

We have to remember that Lingard died in 1851, just after the Restoration of the Hierarchy and just six (6) years after Newman's conversion--but for one who knows a little about Newman's devotional and even architectural proclivities, these comments are strange and seem unfair. If Lingard hadn't read of any Newman's writings in 1845, would he have read Loss and Gain, the Discourses to Mixed Congregations, or Anglican Difficulties (or followed the reports of the lectures) by 1850? 

He seems to have relied merely upon his impressions and prejudices, not upon any real research or sources.

Lingard had very particular goals in mind for any converts, and Blanchard again highlights Lingard's rather contradictory views of the converts coming out of the Oxford Movement:

There is a kind of paradox here, or at least a tension, because on one hand Lingard intimated that the new converts were not Catholic enough—or at least suspiciously attached to “false ideas they imbibed at Oxford”—but on the other hand they were resented for being too Catholic, in the sense of trying to assimilate their Catholicism too much to a foreign standard that was Roman, “Jesuitical,” or Italian.

In an odd way, Newman appears to great advantage in this article, because not knowing what Lingard had written about him, he expressed admiration of Lingard's methods and "comportment":

Newman, thankfully, seems to have been totally unaware that Lingard disliked him. At the death of Lingard’s close friend John Walker in 1873 (to whom Lingard confided so much of his disdain for “Newmanites”!). Newman wrote of his “greatest esteem” for Walker. Newman “looked at [Walker] with veneration as one of the few remaining priests who kept up the tradition of Dr. Lingard’s generation of Catholics.”[24] Seven years earlier, Newman had written to John Walker, thanking him for sending information on Lingard’s intra-Catholic controversies in the early 1830’s. In light of his later praise of Lingard, Newman presumably approved of his comportment. In Lingardian fashion, Newman went on in the same letter to caution against the merits of seeking out confrontation with Anglicans.[25] . . .

Blanchard hopes that Lingard might have learned to like Newman if he had lived longer:

Had he lived longer, or had he been fairer to Newman and actually engaged with his thought as an individual rather than a symbol, Lingard would have seen that the sensitive and brilliant Oxford convert was in fact preserving many of the concerns that Lingard himself held dear. We should keep in mind that in the years around Newman’s conversion, Lingard was an old man, suffering on and off from ill health. It is nevertheless unfortunate that Lingard did not engage with Newman’s ecclesiology in particular. He would have discovered a kindred spirit with nuanced and sophisticated views of the structures and offices of the church. Lingard would have also seen how much more he had in common with Newman than with the Mannings, Fabers, and Wards with which he lumped him together. . . .

In his first footnote to the article, Blanchard highlights an excellent source for a review of Father John Lingard's historical career and outlook for his future investigation, which I reviewed in 2010:

An informative chapter on Lingard from John Vidmar should be included in my review of the secondary literature on Lingard: Vidmar, English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation, 1585–1954 (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 52–74.

By the way, it's available in paperback now!

William Leigh and Woodchester

I happened upon part of an episode of a program called Escape to the Country on our local PBS "Create" channel:

Jules Hudson is helping a self-confessed city-lover to break free from the big smoke and find some countryside calm where she can raise her young son. With a budget of £850,000, Gloucestershire is the chosen location, and her little sister is coming along for support. While in the county, Jules also tries his hand at some 19th-century building skills within the walls of an abandoned gothic mansion.

What piqued my interest during Jules Hudson's visit to "an abandoned gothic mansion" was when the owner's status as a convert to Catholicism was mentioned!

William Leigh, as the host and his guide in the mansion mentioned had joined the Catholic Church in 1844. Because he had inherited a fortune and excellent business prospects, Leigh wanted to build a gothic mansion for a kind of retreat center for Catholics, living in community in a still hostile environment, according to the show. 

So you know I had to find out more! Thus I found this book, Woodchester: A Gothic Vision: The Story of William Leigh, Benjamin Bucknall and the Building of Woodchester Mansion by Liz Davenport, which I've purchased on Kindle. (All proceeds from the sales of the book go to the Woodchester Mansion Trust.)

This website offers a review of the book and highlights William Leigh's zeal to create a Catholic community in the Cotswolds:

Chapter III opens with the purchase of Woodchester Park in 1845, where Leigh aimed to create a Catholic community in the Cotswolds. Advice was first sought from A. W. N. Pugin, who described Woodchester Mansion as "wretched" and advocated demolition. Leigh's thoughts then turned to a community, with church and monastery, to be served by the Passionists. Pugin considered all this to be too ambitious for the budget and site, and withdrew from any involvement. However, by this time, Leigh was already consulting Charles Hansom, whose estimate for the church was considerably lower. The foundation stone of the church was laid by Bishop Ullathorne in 1846. Through Ullathorne, Leigh paid for a design by Hansom for work in Australia, seeing it as a model church for "the New World." Others followed. Leigh was careless of cost and had high expectations. The interior of Leigh's Church of the Annunciation near Woodchester, designed by Hansom, "resembled the new House of Lords." The east window above the altar was painted by William Wailes, there is a doom painting above the chancel arch and floor tiles were by Minton. This impacted upon the Mansion, where the builder was personally out of pocket and work was at risk of stopping.

With the death of Father Dominic Barberi, the Passionist Provincial, the Passionists concluded that the Woodchester community was too small to sustain the number of services Leigh sought. Ullathorne suggested replacing them with Dominicans, who were based at Hinckley in Leicestershire, where the Hansoms had previously resided. Their requirements were more costly than the Passionists, which further impacted upon Leigh's work at the Mansion. The final cost, partly funded by Leigh, was around £20,000. As Davenport frequently points out, Leigh was not careful in his budgeting and typically overspent. . . .

Here's a gallery of images from the unfinished mansion: work basically ceased after William Leigh's death in 1873.

Once I found out about the connection to Blessed Dominic Barberi, the Passionist missionary to England who among other great things received Saint John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church, you can imagine that I wanted to know more! 

I have found the websites of two Catholic churches in the area associated with Woodchester Mansion and William Leigh, The Church of the Immaculate Conception in Stroud and Woodchester  Priory on St. Mary's Hill also in Stroud.

From what I have gleaned from this information now is that of William Leigh we could partially apply verse 9 from Psalm 69 (Douai-Rheims translation) to his efforts:

For the zeal of thy house hath eaten me up: and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me.

He set out on a great project but was not able to complete it, God bless him! Yet his efforts bore fruit in the community and he is well-remembered.

More to come, I assure you! I will post a review of the book noted above in due time.

Blessed Dominic Barberi, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit: (Public Domain): Photo d'une peinture de Dominique Barberi, prêtre, né à Viterbo en 1792, mort en Angleterre en 1849.

Lingard on Newman in "The Newman Review"

Shaun Blanchard, Assistant Professor of Theology at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, tantalizes us in the opening paragraphs of an article in The Newman Review--and then promises more in a subsequent article--by quoting the Catholic historian Father John Lingard's opinion of the recent convert and Oratorian, Father John Henry Newman:

“I don’t like Newman,” wrote the famous English historian Fr. John Lingard in January 1850. The reasons the aged and ailing Catholic historian gave for his antipathy towards perhaps the most celebrated English convert of all time encapsulated the collision of old and new: “too much fancy or enthusiasm”[1] was Lingard’s gripe in a letter to his friend John Walker. The relative obscurity of Lingard today is surprising, since in his day (he died in 1851) he was “the best-known and most widely read English Catholic writer.”[2] Lingard’s “Victorian celebrity” was due primarily to ground-breaking historical works, but also significantly buttressed by his reputation as a formidable theo-political controversialist: both in intra-Catholic squabbles and in defense of his community against Protestant detractors.[3] The crowning achievement of a life of research, his eight-volume History of England (1819–1830) featured pioneering work with primary source material.[4] Lingard’s History was widely reviewed and debated. It was translated into many languages, went through multiple editions, and was even abridged for use as a school textbook in France. In the twentieth century, Hilaire Belloc added a final volume to bring the narrative from 1688 to the present; this version of Lingard’s History of England can still be found in old family libraries around the UK. Lingard can be counted as a kind of founding father of certain “revisionist” historical positions on English history advanced by scholars like Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh. Long before Duffy’s classic The Stripping of the Altars (1992), Lingard’s work suggested a re-narration of the Whiggish and triumphalist national story vis-à-vis Catholicism.[5]

Lingard in fact had quite a lot of interesting things to say about Newman, dating from his growing awareness of the importance of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s until Newman’s conversion in 1845, when Lingard was in his mid-seventies. In a subsequent essay, I’ll explore Lingard’s take on Newman and on the great changes sweeping the English Catholic community at the end of his life (Lingard strongly associated Newman with many of these changes, and mostly bemoaned them). This essay, however, will introduce readers to Lingard, one of the major intellectual lights of the English Catholic community when Newman joined it in 1845 at Littlemore. . . .

Please read the rest there. I look forward to learning more about Lingard's reasons for not liking Newman in the promised subsequent article. Lingard seems to have been most particular about how Catholics practiced their faith, and the last sentence in this quotation seems most contradictory:

While his willingness to defend the Catholic community from outside critics had won him renown, he grew extremely critical of elements within English Catholicism that he found embarrassing, theologically suspect, or intellectually wanting. He dismissively mocked Italian priests who came to England to run retreats fueled by “enthusiasm,” and criticized the women who attended them (sometimes directly, by letter, as attendees included close friends). Lingard’s correspondence also reflects a stereotypical English mistrust of the French and the Irish. A man of the eighteenth century and the Catholic Enlightenment, he could barely contain his dislike of Gothic revival, Pugin’s work, and the Anglo-Catholic Tractarians. While ardently desiring the conversion of non-Catholics, especially socially prominent Anglicans, he distrusted the leading converts of the Oxford Movement like Frederick Faber and Newman. . . .

This Friday: December 18: Andrew Nash on Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

My Newman friend, Edward Short, interviewed Andrew Nash for the Catholic World Report about his new film on the poet and convert, Father Gerard Manley Hopkins:

A new EWTN film about the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) seeks to introduce the unique nineteenth-century Victorian-era writer to a wider audience. The film was made by Dr. Andrew Nash, who studied English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was Head of English and a Housemaster at the Oratory School (founded by St. John Henry Newman). Nash, who is the first doctoral graduate of the Maryvale Institute, Birmingham, has lectured on Newman and his critical edition of Newman’s Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England was published by Gracewing in 2000.

Now retired from his former position as Headmaster of St. Edward’s School, Cheltenham, he spoke recently with CWR about the film Gerald Manley Hopkins: Priest-Poet, which will debut in the United Kingdom and Ireland on December 9th (12:00 pm London Time) and in the United States and Canada on December 18th (8:00 pm EST) on EWTN. . . .

Please read the rest there. I am looking forward to watching this program Friday night on EWTN! I have read and appreciated Hopkins' poetry since I was an undergraduate English major!! It is most appropriate that Nash will focus on The Wreck of the Deutschland, the poem Hopkins wrote "To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875"!!

Kneller's Chinese Catholic Convert

Godfrey Kneller, the great portrait painter of the Stuart Courts from the reign of Charles II to Anne and of the first Hanoverian Court of George I, was born on August 8, 1646 and died on October 19, 1723.

He painted portraits of kings, queens, members of the Kit-Cat Club, the Hampton Court Beauties, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. He also painted the portrait of the Chinese convert to Catholicism, Michael Alphonsus Shen Fuzong who was visiting England during a tour of Europe with the Flemish Jesuit Father Couplet. He called this painting "The Chinese Convert".

Jonathan Spence described the occasion of this painting in a 2010 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for the NEH:

. . . sometime during that spring or summer of 1687 Shen Fuzong had his portrait painted. . . . This was not just a casual venture by an unknown artist: it was a full-length portrait by one of the best-known and most fashionable portraitists of the day, Godfrey Kneller, soon to be knighted and already celebrated as a painter both of the English royal family, and of many leading aristocrats of the day. Kneller portraits did not come cheap, and the painter’s own surviving account books from the time show him receiving between thirty-five and forty pounds sterling for a full-length portrait such as this one. (Three-quarter length and bust length portraits were cheaper, depending on the exact square footage.) According to those who knew Kneller, this was the painting of his of which he was the proudest, and in retrospect it gains additional value as the first detailed portrayal ever made of a Chinese in England. It is startling both in its pose and in its clarity. Shen is shown holding a crucifix in his left hand, and gesturing toward it with his right, even as he looks up and past the viewer to some distant horizon, with his face (beneath a fur hat) and his hands shining in the light of dawn. Shen’s attire is an unusual mixture of styles and fabrics, part Chinese and part Western. He stands on a marble floor, with the view to a distant tropical countryside opening out through the open window behind him. On the lavishly fringed table covering, just touched by the light, is a leather-bound book that we might guess is the newly published Confucius volume, fresh from the Paris press.

Who commissioned this painting, and exactly when and where did Kneller create it? Was it a gift? If so, from whom? Could it have been commissioned by King James II himself? (That is not totally far-fetched, since on one occasion James sent Kneller to make a portrait of King Louis in France.) Or did the idea come from one of the prominent Catholic families, or from the newly appointed papal legate sent to London from Rome? Or from the Jesuit priests who could once again worship openly in post-Reformation England, now that the King, James II, was proclaimed as a Catholic monarch, and was taking the initiative in funding or reestablishing schools, hospitals and beautifully decorated chapels for the Catholic congregations? There were many people eager to salute the King for righting what they believed to be past wrongs, and for seeking to bring Catholics back to many public positions, from posts in the treasury to the masterships and fellowships of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Was Shen’s portrait, in this particular religious and political context, seen as the symbol of a new dawn for the Catholic faith, of which the mission to China was a manifestation? There seems no doubt that King James took a kind of proprietary interest in the painting and made sure that others knew of the pleasure it gave him. In a visit to Oxford in early September 1687, King James summoned [Thomas] Hyde from his desk in the Bodleian and asked him specifically if he knew this Chinese man, and to tell Hyde that he had Shen’s “picture to the life hanging in his roome, next to the bed chamber.” Hyde told the King that he not only knew Shen but that he personally “learned many things of him.”

Shen Fuzong left England in 1688 (good timing as Spence notes: "just before King James II was driven from his throne to permanent exile in France by his anti-Catholic political and religious enemies"), became a Jesuit priest in Lisbon and died on his way home to China in September 1691 of a fever near Mozambique. The portrait is part of the Royal Collections in England--I think the exiled King James II would have liked to have it with him in France.

Image Credit (Public Domain)

Gilbert Murray's Catholic Convert Daughter

Seeing Gilbert Murray's name as one of the editors of Chesterton's book on the English literature of the Victorian Age, I looked him up. In addition to being the Regius Professor Greek at the University of Oxford, he translated many Greek plays, wrote many other books on classical and other topics, and was an internationally known Humanist, even participating in the League of Nations.

Looking him up, I found out about his daughter, Rosalind, who was born in 1890,  married the historian Arnold Toynbee in 1913, converted to Catholicism in 1933, divorced Toynbee in 1946, and never remarried. She began her literary career as a novelist starting with The Leading Note in 1910 and then, after her conversion, began to write Catholic apologetical works: The Good Pagan's Failure (1939), Time and the Timeless (1942), The Life of Faith (1943), The Forsaken Fountain (1948) and The Further Journey: In My End Is My Beginning (1953). She died in 1967.

Persephone Books publishes one of her novels, The Happy Tree, which I plan to order soon:

This 1926 novel begins with the death of a young man during the war, flashes back to his happy childhood shared with the young woman who is the narrator, and then describes how the war – inevitably – took them unawares, destroyed their happiness and has left her, the young woman, emotionally maimed. In one sense it does not sound very entertaining. But the quality of the writing is extraordinary and it tells the reader as much about the after-shock of the war as, say, Testament of Youth [by Vera Brittain].

Persephone Books also provides a biography and a photo of young Rosalind.

The rest of her books, especially the books she wrote after her conversion, are out of print and hard to find. But The Good Pagan's Failure seems to have found some new readers lately. Most recently on the VoegelinView website:

No one today knows Murray’s name but in her lifetime she wrote steadily, sustained an audience, and garnered the attention of literary critics. In her later career she sidelined herself as a fiction-writer and devoted her productivity to religious non-fiction. She produced the first fruit of this authorial metamorphosis in 1939 under the heavily laden title The Good Pagan’s Failure. No doubt but that the coinage of “the Good Pagan” implies close personal relations, touching on both her father and her husband, but the book never mentions either. In it, rather, the formula denotes the modern, upper-class humanist whose sincere good intentions center on building up a global regime of justice and equality, but who, at the same time, rejects any concept of God and assumes a stance, sometimes dissimulated, that is hostile to religion. . . . 

The Good Pagan’s Failure belongs in a genre consolidated by the conservative critics of modernity, especially those who assume a Catholic perspective, as do Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, Henri de Lubac, and Gabriel Marcel. The cognoscenti will also detect in Murray’s Weltanschauung echoes of José Ortega y Gasset, whose influence on the final section of her study marks itself as indubitable. This spotting of sources by no means suggests a lack of originality, however. It attests, on the contrary, to Murray’s education both broad and deep, her enduring concern for the sinfulness of the modern condition, and her religious conviction, to which she adds the intense personal discoveries that originate in her highly conscious experiences of life – of her milieu in youth and of her thirty-three years of marriage.

Please read the rest there.

And if five years ago still counts as lately, Jude Dougherty, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the Catholic University of America, wrote an appreciation of her book in 2015 for The Wanderer:

She was remarkably positioned to know and to assess the mind of what she calls the “Enlightened Pagan.” The book is essentially a critique of the fashionable humanism and liberalism of her day, the epoch of George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and G.E. Moore.

It is Rosalind Murray’s contention that the crucial difference which separates and divides us as human beings is, and always must be, spiritual, exemplified by an acceptance or rejection of belief in God. “Our attitude on this fundamental question determines the whole direction of our living in all of its aspects, and in all relations, and that opposition in this one decisive matter implies secondary, but resultant, opposition in outlook and in value throughout our lives.” (2)

Speaking of herself, she writes, “Born and brought up among enlightened Pagans, their outlook and their standard, and their values are those which I first knew, [and] by which I was educated….In maturity, I have found enlightened Paganism inadequate to explain life as I see it, inadequate to deal with it as I find it. The picture presented to me in youth has proved, so it seems to me, a misleading picture, their accounting of existence offered, a false account; the key with which I was furnished unlocks no door.” (3)

In acknowledging her transfer of allegiance, she says, “I retain a deep regard, a very real respect for the good Pagans whom I must now oppose.” (4)

For the footnotes and the rest, please see the article.

Fascinating traces of a forgotten author. The Wikipedia entry for her father contains this intriguing anecdote:

[Gilbert] Murray was baptised as a Roman Catholic; his father [Sir Terence Aubrey Murray] was a Catholic, his mother [Agnes Murray] a Protestant. His daughter Rosalind (later Rosalind Toynbee), a Catholic convert, attacked his secularism in her book of apologetics, The Good Pagan's Failure (1939). About a month before he died, when he was bedridden, his daughter Rosalind called the local Catholic priest to see him.[54] Rosalind subsequently claimed that Murray was then reconciled to the Catholic Church; other family members, however, contested her version of the events.

Perhaps like Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited? Rosalind may have opposed her father's secularism, but she still loved him as a Good Pagan, and wanted the best for him: eternal life and the Beatific Vision!

A Catholic Convert, a Shrine, a Saint, an Abbey, and a Lady

Father John Hunwicke, formerly an Anglican minister and now a Catholic priest in the Anglican Ordinariate in England, has a blog titled "Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment". Recently he published several posts on an nineteenth century Catholic convert from the Church of England, previously a Presbyterian, and a minister of both churches. This convert is Sir Harry (Henry) Trelawny of Trelawne, Seventh Baronet.

First, Fr Hunwicke describes Trelawny's portrait on the National Portrait Gallery's website. Then some notes on his conversion to Catholicism, a conversion his wife did not share. Fr Hunwicke also describes Sir Trelawny's view of his ordination and priesthood as an Anglican after he became a Catholic--thus dealing with the issue of Anglican Orders, finally decided by Pope Leo XIII. In the third post, Fr Hunwicke quotes Ambrose de Lisle's account of Father Trelawny's ordination in Rome, Pentecost Sunday 1830:

De Lisle's account, which he says he had from Sir Harry and Miss Trelawny the following year, is both circumstantial and credible: " ... going on a visit to Rome, he made the acquaintance of the late Cardinal [Carlo] Odescalchi (portrait above)... Sir Harry told the Cardinal all his convictions, and explained his reasons for believing in the validity of Anglican Orders, and therefore, of his own priesthood. When the Cardinal had heard all he had to say, his Eminence replied that he had no idea there was so much to be adduced in favour of the orders of the Anglican Church, and that he could quite understand Sir Harry's strong feelings on the subject. Still he represented to Sir Harry that, as the custom of the Roman Catholic Church from the commencement of the schism had always been to re-ordain those of the Anglican clergy who returned to her communion, it was was clear that the question concerning their previous orders was a very delicate one, and one that was beset, at all events, with many grave doubts, that, consequently, it was not right in Sir Harry to continue to say Mass without submitting to a conditional re-ordination. Upon this Sir Harry replied to the Cardinal that from the first he had been ready to submit to a conditional re-ordination, but that the Catholic authorities in England would not hear of anything short of an absolute and unconditional rejection of his previous orders. The Cardinal, however, said that he took a different view of the matter, and was prepared to re-ordain Sir Harry with a tacit condition, the sacramental form, of course, remaining untouched. Sir Harry gave his full consent ..."

Then in the fourth post, Fr Hunwicke speculates on who wouldn't ordain Sir Trelawny in England after his conversion in 1810 so that he had to wait until 1830 in Rome.

In the first post, Fr Hunwicke mentions that Sir Harry Trelawny founded a shrine to Our Lady of Light in Clacton on Sea in Essex, so I looked it up and found this website.

The National Shrine of Our Lady of Light, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary that Trelawny and his daughters brought to England from Brittany, is now maintained by the parish church of Our Lady of Light and Saint Osyth, located in Clacton on Sea (North Sea). Saint Osyth was a (perhaps) martyred saint of the early 8th century and there was of course a religious house founded in her honor, a Priory then Abbey of Augustinian Canons:

An Augustinian priory was founded (fn. 3) in honour of St. Osyth at Chich, probably about the middle of the reign of Henry I, by Richard de Belmeis, bishop of London (1108—27). The founder granted to it the manor of Chich and the churches of Clacton, Southminster, Mayland and Althorne, and Henry I granted the churches of Blythburgh and Stowmarket in Suffolk. Blythburgh afterwards became a cell to St. Osyth's, canons being settled there in or before the reign of Stephen. (fn. 4) The priory at St. Osyth's was converted into an abbey about the middle of the century. It was dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul and St. Osyth. . . .

British History Online also documents the Abbey's dissolution:

In 1538 the convent had licence (fn. 51) to exchange lands, including the manor and rectory of Abberton, with Sir Thomas Audeley; and in the same year an attempt was made through him, as has already been said elsewhere, (fn. 52) to secure the continuance of Colchester and St. Osyth's in the form of secular colleges. But this failed, and on 6 November Cromwell gave orders (fn. 53) for their dissolution. No resistance appears to have been offered by St. Osyth's; for Sir John Seyncler in a letter (fn. 54) to Cromwell on 21 November mentions the abbot as one who was a true subject, and would obey the king without grudge. The abbey, however, did not actually fall until 28 July, 1539, when it was formally surrendered (fn. 55) by John Whederykke, alias Colchester, abbot, Cornelius Williamsun, William Neuman, John Russull, prior, Ralph Dale, Nicholas Bushe, John Harwyche, John Sherman, Richard Wood, John Thorpe, Richard Synyll, William Jolly, Edmund Grai, Robert Sprott, George Thurston and Thomas Haywod. . . . 

This website offers some details about the life and death of a later owner of the Abbey property:

The property was inherited in 1639 by Elizabeth Darcy, daughter of the 3rd Lord Darcy, who married Sir Thomas Savage, afterwards Earl Rivers and Viscount Colchester. Lady Savage inherited Melford Hall in Suffolk on her husband’s death in 1635 and St Osyth Priory from her father in 1639, and in 1641 she was created Countess Rivers in her own right.

Lady Savage was a staunch Catholic and Royalist with the result that she suffered cruel depredations upon her property in the Civil War. In 1642, the rabble sacked her house at St Osyth, chased her to Melford and sacked that too. All the furnishings were stolen or destroyed, and the deer in the park carried off. Lady Savage escaped to London and was forced to compound for her lands, to the extent of being reduced to the debtor’s prison, where she died in 1650.

You may find a portrait of this brave woman here. Her family continued to uphold the Catholic faith and one of her grandsons was accused during the Popish Plot hysteria: the last man to inherit the title of Earl Rivers was a Catholic priest and the title died with him.

So we see the usual combination of success and failure, suffering and perseverance, destruction and resurgence, dissolution and re-establishment in this story: An Anglican minister converts, develops a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and brings it to England. An Augustinian Abbey and its church are dissolved, repurposed, and destroyed and a parish church preserves the name of a saint from long ago. A woman remains true to her faith, suffers for it and endures until death and her family, for a time at least, remains faithful.

Image Credit (public domain): portrait by Agnes Xavier Trail, a Presbyterian convert (brought into the Church by Carlo Cardinal Odescalchi!

Venerable Francis Libermann, RIP

In my review of David W. Fagerberg's Liturgical Mysticism, I mentioned that in one chapter he highlighted the spirituality of Venerable Francis Libermann, who died on February 2, 1852. He was convert to Catholicism from Judaism and is known as the Second Founder of the Spiritan order:

Venerable Francis Libermann had a most remarkable journey of faith. He was born into an orthodox Jewish family in the Alsace region of France in 1802, and given the name Jacob.

Jacob Libermann’s father was a rabbi, and Jacob was preparing to become a rabbi himself when his studies led him to the New Testament and to Christianity.

He was baptized Francis Mary Paul, in 1826, at Christmas.

Soon he was studying for the Catholic priesthood, but violent attacks of epilepsy put his vocation on hold.
It was fifteen years before he was finally ordained, in 1841.

In 1848 Libermann brought personnel and a renewed Spiritual energy to the Spiritans that transformed the Congregation.

Those intervening years were a time of grace and of maturing, as Libermann became an advisor and confidant to many seminarians and others wanting to grow in the spiritual life. His own trials and painful experiences, as well as joys and perceived blessings, developed in him a great confidence in Providence and a sense of the Holy Spirit directing human affairs.

Professor Fagerberg quotes from the five volumes of spiritual letters the counsel he gave correspondents to embrace their cross and suffer with Jesus. Duquesne University has a selection of his letters online. He also offered other advice; for example to Louise des Loges, Libermann advised her in her discernment of a missionary vocation:

• Libermann encourages Louise to open her heart to the Lord in perfect freedom and peace. "He who feeds even the smallest animals will provide what is necessary for those who desire to serve Him.
  
• "She is not to rely on her own efforts, which lead nowhere. Rather, she is to "cling to Jesus," the "bridegroom of her soul" in the confidence that he provides "sweetness, love, and peace" for those who desire to serve him.
  
• Her weaknesses do not prevent her from sharing in God's love. Rather "true self-knowledge brings with it an increase of love for God."
  
• In the power of God's love Louise will "leap over" all the obstacles holding her back from following the "impulses of grace" and walk confidently in God's love.

Although Libermann was the founder of a missionary order, he never served as a missionary, but he wrote a rule for the Spiritan missionaries that is considered a great guide to missionary work. Father Libermann also wrote a book about the Gospel of St. John, translated as Jesus Through Jewish Eyes: A Spiritual Commentary on the Gospel of St. John by the Spiritans. Here is a commentary on that book, also published by the Spiritans.

He was declared Venerable in 1876 by Pope Pius IX.

Poland Is Well Worth a Mass, Too--One by Bach!

My brother and sister and I went to a free concert at Friends University Monday night (our late parents' wedding anniversary): the Flute Choir were performing works arranged or composed for the flute family: piccolo, c flute, alto and bass flute. Among the works performed was an aria from a secular cantata by J.S. Bach, BWV 206 Schleicht, spielende Wellen, und murmelt gelinde! (Glide, O sparkling waves and murmur softly!) Bach wrote it for the birthday of Augustus III, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. 

It's an allegorical representation of four rivers, the Vistula, Danube, Elbe, and Pleisse praising Augustus III for the peace and harmony his reign has brought. We heard an aria sung a soprano representing the Pleisse, with a very appropriate opening line for a flute choir concert:

Hört doch! der sanften Flöten Chor
Erfreut die Brust, ergötzt das Ohr.
    Der unzertrennten Eintracht Stärke
    Macht diese nette Harmonie
    Und tut noch größre Wunderwerke,
    Dies merkt und stimmt doch auch wie sie!

Hark now! The gentle flutes in choir
Make glad the breast and please the ear.
The undivided union's power
Creates this lovely harmony
And even greater works of wonder;
This mark and with their tune agree.

The soprano, who also played the piccolo and the c flute, sang the aria in German.

J.S. Bach hoped to be named a court composer to Frederick Augustus II of Saxony and in 1733 had sent the new Elector a Kyrie-Gloria Mass (which he would later incorporate into the Mass in B Minor)--and he had succeeded: Bach composed this secular cantata for performance on Augustus III's birthday in 1736. 

The Mad Monarchist blog gives some background on King Augustus III and his conversion from Lutheranism to Catholicism to succeed to the throne of Poland in 1534:

Augustus III was born on October 17, 1696 in Dresden in the Electorate of Saxony, a member of the House of Wettin which once reigned over many countries and still reigns today over Belgium, the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth Realms. His father was Augustus II, nicknamed “Augustus the Strong” who is today most remembered for his huge number of illegitimate children, some putting the number of his offspring in the hundreds. Augustus III, however, was his only legitimate son and would, like his father, one day become Prince-Elector of Saxony, Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. He was brought up for this purpose and, as his father had done earlier, this required his conversion to Catholicism in 1712. The Electors of Saxony had been Protestants all the way back to the days of Martin Luther and this caused considerable outrage among the Saxon aristocracy as well as an effort by Prussia and Hanover (whose Elector was also the British monarch [George I]) to deprive Saxony of its leadership of the Protestant caucus in the Reichstag (the princely upper house of the Imperial Diet or parliament of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) but the Prussians and Hanoverians were unsuccessful.

In 1733 King Augustus II died and Augustus III succeeded his father as Prince-Elector of Saxony (as Friedrich Augustus II). His election as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania was expected but not a forgone conclusion. For that, he would require foreign support. The Russians backed Augustus III as King of Poland, which was not too surprising but the Austrians did as well. Of course, the German Reich (HRE) as a whole did as well, which was also not surprising, favoring a German monarch on the Polish throne but the specific backing of the Austrians, which is to say the House of Habsburg, was a matter of political bargaining. The Habsburgs were anxious to secure their own position which was endangered by the fact that the last Emperor had only a daughter, Maria Theresa, to succeed him and tried everything from backroom deals to outright bribery to gain support for his “Pragmatic Sanction” by which the German princes pledged to support Maria Theresa.

The danger, of course, was that the German lands would fall into the same pattern of civil war and dynastic infighting which later befell Spain during the Carlist Wars in a similar situation. Augustus III agreed to support the Pragmatic Sanction and thus won the support of Emperor Charles VI for his election to the Polish throne. Likewise, his promise to support the Russian claim to Courland by the Empress Anna, ensured that he had Russian support for his election as well. It also helped that he had, in 1719, married Archduchess Maria Josepha of Austria, daughter of Emperor Joseph I which also helped win over the Habsburgs. On October 5, 1733 the Polish electors gathered and Augustus III was elected King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. However, he was still faced with a problem as there was already a King of Poland to deal with and a Polish one at that in the person of Stanislaw Leszczynski (King Stanislaus I). He had widespread support in Poland and had fought Augustus II for control of the country. When Augustus II died, he returned with French support to reassert his rule. The Russians and Austrians feared an alliance between the French, Poles and Swedes and so backed Augustus III against him.

Please read the rest there.

A performance of Bach's BWV 206 is available here.

Image credit: King Augustus III by Pietro Rotari.

You just never know what attending a concert may inspire: an exploration of history, music, and conversion in this case!

Frederick Apthorp Paley and Father John Morris

I posted yesterday the story of Father John Morris, SJ, a convert to Catholicism influenced by Newman and other Anglicans becoming Catholic. In that story there was a note about Frederick Apthorp Paley (F.A. Paley) having to leave Cambridge because it was supposed that he had influenced Morris--rather like the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas being disbanded because students became Catholic!

Here's Paley's notice in the Catholic Encyclopedia. I find the parts I've put in bold type rather poignant:

Classical scholar, born at Easingwold near York, 14 Jan., 1815; died at Bournemouth, 9 December, 1888, son of the Rev. Edmund Paley and grandson of William Paley who wrote "Evidences of Christianity". He was educated at Shrewsbury School and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he taught and continued to study for eight years after his B. A. degree (1838). His studies were mainly classical; but, despite an incapacity for mathematics, he was interested in mechanics and in natural science and was an enthusiastic ecclesiological antiquary. In 1846, being well known as a Cambridge sympathizer with the Oxford Movement, he was expelled from residence in St. John's College, on suspicion of having influenced one of his pupils to become a Catholic. He was himself received into the Church in this year. For the next fourteen years he supported himself as a private tutor in several Catholic families successively (Talbot, Throckmorton, Kenelm Digby) and by his pen. From 1860, when Tests began to be relaxed, he again lived at Cambridge until 1874; from 1874 to 1877 he was professor of classical literature at the abortive Catholic University College at Kensington. From 1877 till his death he continued to write assiduously. But the interruption of his university career, the want of a settled competence, and his banishment from the place, the society, and the learned facilities which might best have improved his talents and industry, had the effect of rendering nearly all his voluminous production ephemeral. His many classical editions which had a great and not undeserved vogue and influence in their day became soon obsolete and marked no decisive epoch in classical philology. Yet his work on Euripides and Aeschylus in particular may still be consulted with profit, at least as a monument of protest against the Victorian mock-archaic convention in translations from Greek poetry; and it is easy to underrate now the merits of work which met a great demand for school and college use, and itself did much to evoke the more scientific scholarship which has superseded it.

His works number more than fifty volumes, besides numerous magazine articles and reviews contributed to the "American Catholic Quarterly", "Edinburgh Review", "Journal of Philology" etc. The first of his classical publications, and the one which established his reputation as a scholar, was the text of Aeschylus (18447); during the next forty years he edited with the commentaries, Propertius (1853); Ovid's "Fasti" (1854); Aeschylus (1855); Euripides (1857); Hesiod (1861); Theocritus (1863); Homer's "Iliad" (1866); Martial (1868); Pindar (transl. with notes) 1868; Aristophanes' "Peace" (1873); Plato's "Philebus" (1883); "Private Orations of Demosthenes" (l874); Plato's " Thaetetus " (1875); Aristophanes' "Acharnians" (1876); Medicean Scholia of Aeschylus" (1878); Aristophanes' "Frogs " (1878); Sophocles (1880). To these must be added many critical inquiries, especially on the Homeric question, and most of his Commentaries ran through three or four editions, of which Marindin remarks that "every new edition was practically a new work". He found leisure to issue books on architecture; his "Manual of Gothic Mouldings", first published in 1845, went into a fifth edition in l891.

That was that writer's view in the early 20th century. I would hope that Paley, like Newman, would have rejoiced in his spiritual consolations of being part of the one, true fold of Christ. He may have been very happy with all his projects and his achievement in reading those great works, translating, editing, and publishing the results! Cambridge University Press still has his Euripides in print: perhaps Paley's work isn't as obsolete as his biographer supposed.

"Render to God the things that are God's."

John Hungerford Pollen, SJ appropriately wrote the biography of Father John Morris, SJ, for the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Canon, afterwards Jesuit, F.S.A., b. in India, 4 July, 1826; d. at Wimbledon, 22 Oct., 1893, son of John Carnac Morris, F.R.S. He was educated partly in India, partly at Harrow, partly in reading for Cambridge with Dean Alford, the New Testament scholar. Under him a great change passed over Morris's ideas. Giving up the thought of taking the law as his profession, he became enthusiastic for ecclesiastical antiquities, took a deep interest in the Tractarian movement, and resolved to become an Anglican clergyman. Going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October, 1845, he became the friend, and then the pupil of F.A. Paley, grandson of the well-known divine, and already one of the leading Greek scholars of the university. 

The conversion of Newman, followed by the receptions of so many others, deeply impressed him, and he was reconciled by Bishop Wareing, 20 May, 1846. A storm followed, beginning in the "Times", which made itself felt even in Parliament. Paley had to leave Cambridge (which led to his subsequently joining the Church), while Morris was practically cast off by his family. 

He then went to the English College, Rome, under Dr. Grant, and was there during the revolution of 1848. Soon after the restoration of the English Hierarchy in 1850, he was made Canon of Northampton, and then returned as vice-rector to Rome (1853-1856). He now became postulator for the English Martyrs, whose cause owes perhaps more to him than to any other person. Returning to England, he took part in the third Synod of Westminster, became secretary to Cardinal Wiseman, whom he affectionately nursed on his death-bed, and served under Archbishop Manning, until he became a Jesuit in 1867. 

He taught Church History from 1873-1874; he was Rector of St. Ignatius' College, Malta, from 1877-78; master of novices in 1879; and director of the writers of the English Province in 1888. Always remarkable for his ardent affectionate nature, his untiring energy and earnest holiness of life, he was also an excellent scholar, an eloquent speaker, and a high-principled leader of souls. 

His death befitted his life; for he expired in the pulpit, uttering the words, "Render to God the things that are God's." 

His principal works are: "The Life and Martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket" (London, 1859 and 1885); "The Life of Father John Gerard" (London, 1881), translated into French, German, Spanish, and Polish; "Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers" (3 vols., London, 1872-1877); "Letter-books of Sir Amias Poulet" (London, 1874); and many contributions to "The Month", "The Dublin Review", "Archæologia", and other periodicals.

He is buried in the Gap Road Cemetery in Wimbledon.

I say it's appropriate that Pollen wrote about Morris because he had written a book-length biography of his Jesuit colleague, including his letters. Pollen describes the influence of St. John Henry Newman's conversion on Morris in 1845 when he just arrived at Cambridge:

John Morris went up to Cambridge in October, 1845, carrying with him the high expectations which Alford had formed of his future progress, and the proud hopes which his father entertained of his distinguishing himself at the University. His stay there was destined to be brief, though pregnant with important issues. It resulted in a cruel disappointment to his father, while it permanently affected his tutor’s position. As regards himself, it ended in his embracing the true faith, and receiving the further great grace of a vocation to the religious life. Before he had time to settle down in his rooms in the New Court at Trinity, the whole country was talking of John Henry Newman’s reception into the Catholic Church. Thousands of Anglicans besides Morris felt that their own adherence to the body in which they were born might soon become a point for serious consideration, and they set about examining anew the grounds of safety for their own position. In Morris’s case, the Anglican theory of the Church, to which he had hitherto clung, began slowly to lose its force with him. At first, indeed, with inborn loyalty, he tried his best to preserve his confidence in the beliefs which he had so ingenuously accepted. His state of mind at that time reveals itself in a series of letters, which he wrote from Cambridge, to Mr. Ambrose Lisle Phillipps, and which show that he held out as long as he conscientiously could, against the ever deepening conviction, that the Roman Church was after all the one and only Church.

In chapter 8 of that biography, Pollen describes Morris's efforts to promote the causes of the English Catholic martyrs of the Reformation era, beginning with this description of their status before Morris (and he) worked so diligently to document their sufferings:

As Father Morris’s conversion and religious vocation were the most important events, of which we are cognizant in his interior life, so the chief external work of his life is connected with his efforts in behalf of the English Martyrs. In this cause he was engaged for forty years, not continuously indeed, but with interruptions due to the delays of others or to the pressure of conflicting occupations, not to any want of perseverance on his part. Fifty years ago the names and the fame of the splendid line of witnesses to England’s lost Faith were in danger of falling into hopeless oblivion. They had already faded away into mere distant, indistinct memories, the long but inevitable silence of ecclesiastical authority concerning them having given rise to a feeling of uncertainty in the minds of Catholics. If the sufferers had really died for the Faith, why did they not receive the honour due to martyrs? Could it possibly be that there was something more than false accusation in the treason with which they had been charged by their persecutors ? Hence had arisen timidity in speaking and writing of them, a timidity which was natural in those who had so long languished under a cruel proscription, and were now looking for fairer treatment from their former oppressors.

St. John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Holy Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales, pray for us!

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton's Nephew, RIP

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the Episcopalian convert to Catholicism and first native born canonized saint of the USA, had a nephew who like her grew up Protestant and then became Catholic: James Roosevelt Bayley. From his middle name you may surmise that he was related to the Roosevelts: his mother was Grace Roosevelt, Jacobus Roosevelt's only surviving daughter by his first marriage to Maria Eliza Walton. Jacobus was FDR's great-grandfather. More about the Bayley and Roosevelt family connections here.

James Roosevelt Bayley was born on August 23, 1814 in New York City and died on October 3, 1877 as the Archbishop of Baltimore (but in Newark, NJ!). In between those dates, he had been an Episcopalian minister, a student of the Oxford Movement and the Fathers of the Church, a convert to Catholicism, an ordained priest, and the first Bishop of Newark, New Jersey.

The Oxford Movement connection is indicated by his biographer, Sister M. Hildegarde Yeager. Another source, an archived biography from the Archdiocese of Baltimore, gives this explanation for the process of his conversion:

Bayley’s work with the poor in his community, many of who were Irish immigrants, and the friendships he formed with neighboring Catholic pastors, led to his being increasingly drawn to Catholicism. Over the next three years, he read and prayed his way into the Catholic Church, receiving instruction from the future Cardinal Archbishop of New York, Fr. John McCloskey. He also received counsel from his first cousins, the children of his father’s stepsister, St. Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, foundress of the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, to whom he remained close throughout his life. 

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia he went to Europe to effect his conversion to Catholicism and begin his studies for the priesthood:

Bayley's early school days were spent at Amherst College, where he once thought of going to sea and obtained a commission of midshipman in the navy. He abandoned the plan, however, and continuing his studies, entered Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, to prepare for the Episcopalian ministry. He graduated here in 1835 and after receiving orders was appointed rector of St. Peter's church, Harlem, New York. He resigned this charge in 1841 and went to Rome, where on 28 April, 1842, he was baptized and received into the Catholic church in the room of St. Ignatius by Father Esmond, S.J. He then entered the seminary of St. Sulpice at Paris for his theological studies. Returning to New York, he was ordained priest by Bishop Hughes, 2 March, 1844, and made a professor and the vice-president of the seminary at Fordham. He was acting president there in 1846 and was next given charge of the parish at the Quarantine Station on Staten Island, so long the residence of his grandfather, Dr. Bayley. Bishop Hughes then appointed him his private secretary, an office he held for several years and in which his administrative ability was specially manifested. . . .

When the Diocese of Newark was established he was named its first bishop and consecrated 30 October, 1853, in St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, by Archbishop Bedini, the Apostolic Nuncio to Brazil, who wan then en route to Rome. The Bishops of Brooklyn and Burlington were consecrated at the same time, the first occurrence of such an elaborate ceremony in the United States. Bishop Bayley's work of organizing the new diocese was not easy. He had more than 40,000 Catholics mainly of Irish and German extraction, with only twenty-five priests to minister to them. There was not a single diocesan institution, no funds, and poverty on all sides.

The website of the Archdiocese of Newark has more details about his accomplishments there. He became the eighth Archbishop of Baltimore in 1872:

At the death of Archbishop Spalding of Baltimore he was promoted, on 30 July, 1872, to succeed that prelate. He left Newark with much reluctance. In 1875 as Apostolic Delegate he imposed the cardinal's biretta on Archbishop McCloskey of New York. In May, 1876, he consecrated the Baltimore cathedral, having freed it from debt. Convening the Eighth Provincial Synod of the clergy, August, 1875, he enacted many salutary regulations, particularly with regard to clerical dress, mixed marriages, and church music. Illness obliged him to ask for a coadjutor and Bishop Gibbons of Richmond was appointed to that position 29 May, 1877. The archbishop then went abroad to seek for relief, but in vain. He returned to his former home in Newark in August, 1877, and after lingering for two months, died in his old room, where he had laboured for so long. At his own request he was buried beside his aunt, Mother Seton, at the convent at Emmitsburg, Maryland.

The archived biography cited above notes that he had Bright's Disease during his tenure in Baltimore.