What I'm Reading Now: Newman Retitled

Os Justi Press has started a new series of Theological Classics, well-prepared works, affordably priced, with introductions and other helpful aids for readers. I purchased the re-titled--The Virgin Mary as New Eve--aka/pka as A Letter Addressed to The Rev. E.B. Pusey on Occasion of His Eirenicon by Saint John Henry Newman. The change in title, as the editor of the series, Peter Kwasniewski, explains, focuses our reading on the "principal theme of the entire letter". I've read this work before, on-line at the Newman Reader and in a cheap reprint, and neither format was conducive to an effective study for me. I prefer real books and want excellent books too.

So far what I've read beyond the Editor's Preface is the introduction by Fr. Thomas Crean, OP--and already learned something new! Pusey had written his Eirenicon in response to a work by Henry Manning, another Anglican convert and Catholic priest. Manning's work was titled The Workings of the Holy Spirit in the Church of England, in which he "deprecated those works." Pusey replied with The Church of England a Portion of Christ's One Holy Catholic Church, and a Means of Restoring Visible Unity: An Eirenicon, which was "far from peaceable."

An eirenicon is "a statement that attempts to harmonize conflicting doctrines" and is a borrowing from Greek and according to the OED, Pusey's unique borrowing at the time: 

The earliest known use of the noun eirenicon is in the 1860s.
OED's earliest evidence for eirenicon is from 1865, in the writing of Edward Pusey, Church of England clergyman and theologian.

Father Crean also notes that Newman had recently met Pusey and Keble again after so many years in September of 1865; Keble spoke about the "Eirenicon" and then Newman was surprised to read it and find out just how un-irenic it was. Newman decided to concentrate on Keble's remarks about Catholic Marian doctrine and devotion and began writing his reply on November 28 and finishing it on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1865.

Crean continues his introduction by highlighting the excellences of Newman's Letter with some "animadversions" to certain of Newman's statements, and concludes with analysis of reaction to the Letter from Pusey and others.

When I've read Newman's own work I might make some other comments on this blog. I'm so happy to have this work available in an attractive, well-prepared, and reasonably priced edition.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Dawson on Victiorians and Catholicism

After posting on the History Today book review yesterday, I found this essay by Christopher Dawson on ENGLISH CATHOLICISM AND VICTORIAN LIBERALISM in the EWTN Library:

The hundred years that have elapsed since the restoration of the English Hierarchy [in 1850] have been a time of slow but uninterrupted progress for English Catholicism [Dawson thus was writing in 1950]. There have been no spectacular triumphs and no catastrophic defeats, but step by step the Church has been gradually recovering her lost position in the life of the nation. And this is no small achievement when one considers how completely the face of the world has changed during the last century: how the old European order and the new liberal order that aspired to take its place have both alike been swept away by new forces that were hardly perceptible in 1850, so that Europe itself and the millennial tradition of Western civilization are now in process of dissolution.

In 1850 English Liberalism, having surmounted the crisis of Chartism, was settling down to enjoy the fruits of the new order that it had created. The collapse of the old regime on the Continent in 1848 and the failure of the revolutionary movements to establish a stable democratic order had combined to strengthen the prestige of English institutions and ideals, not only in our own eyes but in those of Europe. Consequently, it is not surprising that the restoration of the Hierarchy and the reappearance of Catholicism as a living power in nineteenth-century England should have been regarded as a challenge to the spirit of the age, an act of "papal aggression." For the liberal rationalist and the conservative Protestant alike, the Papacy seemed the embodiment of those forces of reaction against which the modern world was in revolt.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 marked the final achievement of the Victorian compromise in which all the leading elements of English society found their place. High Tories like the Duke of Wellington, cosmopolitan pacifists like John Bright, Christian idealists and scientific rationalists, artisans and capitalists, all came together under the leadership of the Queen and the Prince Consort to celebrate the triumphs of science and industry and the dawn of a new era of universal peace and enlightenment. But there was no place for the English Catholics in this festival of national and international unity. The unpopularity of the Oxford conversions combined with that of Irish Nationalism and that of the Papal Government caused Catholics to be regarded with hostility and suspicion by Liberals and Conservatives alike. In their attitude to Catholicism there was nothing to choose between Liberals like Lord John Russell and Tory extremists of the type of Newdegate and Sir Robert Inglis.

Yet in spite of all this, the deeper intellectual tendencies of the age were far less hostile to Catholicism than one would suppose from the expression of popular opinion in Press and parliament. The great writers of the Victorian age, such as Carlyle and Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, were as a rule highly critical of the optimism and selfcomplacency of Victorian liberalism.

Dawson goes on to cite cultural influences like the Romantic and Victorian interest in the Middle Ages, and of course the rise of Catholic intellectual converts like Newman and Manning.

But even as he comments on this rise and influence of Catholics in English Society, Dawson notes that it proceeded along the lines of Victorian liberalism and secularization:

Yet throughout this period the secularization of English culture has proceeded almost without a check, so that our position today is no longer that of a Catholic minority in a Protestant society, but that of a religious minority in a secular or neo-pagan civilization. We have become so accustomed to this change that we are apt to forget its tremendous implications. During the last hundred years English Catholicism has developed under the protection ofthe Victorian compromise. We have accepted the Victorian principles of individual freedom, religious toleration and the limited character of the State as elementary conditions of existence which hardly needed to be defended. But, in proportion as civilization becomes secularized, all these principles and rights lose their political expression in totalitarian States.

Dawson's argument reminds me of Russell Shaw's American Church and recalls Owen Chadwick's classic study of the rise of secularism in the nineteenth century. The Catholic Church in both the United States and in Britain accepted the values of the modern democratic state as the means of increasing influence and effectiveness. The great pitfall of this process is that those values wane as secularism waxes:

Today all the basic liberties which were formerly regarded as essential conditions of modern civilization are everywhere questioned and often completely abolished, and the new secularist ideologies are establishing themselves as exclusive dogmatic anti-religions which demand the total surrender of the mind and will. It is true that this country is still relatively immune. A feeble gas-jet of freedom still flickers in the dilapidated Victorian basement. But it is obvious that English Catholicism cannot rely on the continuance of the conditions which prevailed during the first century of its restored existence. Sooner or later it must come up against the same forces that prevail in the rest of the world. No doubt this will involve great changes in our apologetic, which, like so much else, is an inheritance from the Victorian age, and which has been dominated for a century by the long- drawn-out controversy with Anglicanism. Today these familiar controversies are overshadowed by the world debate between Christianity and atheism, and we have to deal not with the validity of Anglican orders but with the existence of the human soul and the ultimate foundations of the moral order.

The ever prophetic Christoper Dawson!!

William Wilberforce, The Great Emancipator, RIP

 

When the movie Amazing Grace was released on DVD several years ago, we gave copies of it to many people as Christmas presents because we were so impressed by the story of William Wilberforce--who died on July 29 in 1833--and the effectiveness of the presentation of his causes and faith in the movie (although the latter was not as focused as it could have been). The movie was based on Eric Metaxas' book AMAZING GRACE: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. More on his life and influence here, from the BBC.

 

Of course, the movie does not depict what happened in the Wilberforce family after his death: that three of his sons would become Catholics, mostly under the influence of the Oxford Movement. For that story, The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Man­ning by David Newsome is an excellent source. As David Denton reviewed Newsome's book in The New Oxford Review in 1994, he notes the context of their conversions:

 

In England in the early 1800s, William Wilberforce was the Great Emancipator. He had been the most visible personality in the abo­lition of the British slave trade (1807), and of slavery itself in the Empire, though that would only occur shortly after his death. The joyful, self-sacrificing Christian influence that the senior Wilberforce and others of that wealthy evangelical group, the "Clapham Sect," brought to bear on English society was consider­able. They have aptly been charac­terized as the Fathers of the Victo­rian Age.

Wilberforce sent three sons, Robert, Samuel, and Henry, to be educated at Oxford's Oriel College. This was a departure for an evan­gelical or Low Churchman, since most sons of these families were sent to Cambridge University, which was considered much more sympathetic to Low Church theol­ogy. At Oxford these bright, high-minded sons of the Great Emanci­pator became part of the golden academic renaissance that had been taking place there since the turn of the 17th century. There they came into contact not only with the High Church influence of John Keble and Edward Posey, but with Hurrell Froude and John Henry Newman, both former evangelicals whose Anglo-Catholi­cism had not only begun to nettle the somnambulant C. of E., but was, for evangelicals, threatening the Reformation itself. Troubling as they were for evangelicals, these Anglo-Catholics were inexorable adversaries of the latitudinarian­ism growing in power at Oxford and in the C. of E., which, then as now, submits the creeds, doc­trines, and Scriptures to the delu­sions of skeptical reason and the acids of materialism.

 

In fact, it's interesting to note that William Wilberforce died just 15 days after John Keble preached his "National Apostasy" sermon and at the very date of his death, Hugh James Rose was holding a meeting at his church rectory in Hadleigh to form the Association of Friends of the Church, which Hurrell Froude and William Palmer led. The Oxford Movement or Tractarian movement really took off with John Henry Newman's sermons in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin and the "Tracts for the Times", but the seeming coincidence of dates between the death of the Great Emancipator and the beginning of the Oxford Movement is fascinating.

Book Review: Roman Catholicism in England

Edward Norman, who recently joined the Catholic Church through the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, wrote this OPUS book in 1985:

Roman Catholicism in England[: from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council] is the first study for several decades of the way in which the English Catholics have asserted their faith in the four centuries since the Reformation, of how they have sought to balance allegiance to Rome and the 'old faith' with loyalty to the English Constitution, even in times of severe persecution. It examines the ideas of leading figures in the Church, assessing their contribution to significant changes in Roman Catholicism up to the Second Vatican Council and pinpointing the shifts away from traditional antagonism.

This short survey, only 138 pages (including index) covers the recusant centuries of martyrdom and suffering, the long eighteenth century, emancipation and restoration in the nineteenth century, and Catholic involvement in twentieth century England, including Catholic opposition to the establishment of the Welfare State (primarily because of its effects on the family). Norman begins with a fascinating comment on the particular response of Catholics in England to being an oppressed and suppressed minority: he notes that "small religious communities and churches, existing at the margin of society" which have attracted "the hostility of their neighbors" and are "subject to active persecution" often develop a sectarian and radical outlook. Norman contends, however, that "The English Catholic 'recusants'--those who refused to conform to the laws of the unitary Protestant establishment--did not develop  sectarian qualities, did not become political radicals (although a few sought revolution as a means of procuring a Catholic dynastic restoration), did not deviate from orthodoxy, and did not above all, quietly slide back into a comfortable acquiescence with the new order."

Norman concludes with this admiring comment: "Theirs is a noble history of enormous self-sacrifice for higher purposes, and of a rooted determination to preserve both their English virtue and their religious allegiance in a sensible and clear balance."

This is just the first page of the book! I found similar insights and brilliance throughout the contents of Roman Catholicism in England:

Preface
1. A rejected minority
2. The Elizabethan settlement
3. Catholics under the penal laws
4. The era of Emancipation and expansion
5. Leaders and thinkers
6. Twentieth-century developments

Suggested further reading
Index

Highly recommended.

Note: Norman dedicated the book to Saint Henry Walpole "Domus Sancti Petri Alumnus"!

The Lady of the Lamp Dies

Florence Nightingale, the famed Lady of the Lamp, was born on May 12, 1820 and died on August 13, 1910. The Guardian wrote of her death in 1910:

We greatly regret to announce that Miss Florence Nightingale, memorable for her work as organiser and inspirer of the Crimean War nursing service, died at her home in London somewhat unexpectedly on Saturday afternoon.

The cause of death was heart failure. Two members of her family were present when Miss Nightingale passed away. The funeral will take place in the course of the next few days, and will be of the quietest possible character, in accordance with Miss Nightingale's expressed wish.

Baptized in the Church of England, she was raised a Unitarian Universalist and yet at one time investigated the possiblity of joining a Catholic religious order. Nightingale, according to biographer Gillian Gill, saw that as a means to the end of becoming a professional nurse. Father Henry Manning, who had left the Oxford Movement and the Church of England to become a Catholic priest (and who would become the second Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster) corresponded with her.

Her Unitarian beliefs however prevented any serious consideration of conversion. When she went to the Crimea to assist the British military she did take Catholic sisters with her as nurses. There was some fear that the sisters would try to convert good Protestant men, weakened by their wounds and illness--so the Catholic sisters took care of the Irish Catholic soldiers.

As I recount in the second revised printing of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, however, one of the English lay nurses who accompanied Nightingale, Frances Taylor, did become a Catholic after working with the Catholic sisters and Irish soldiers in Scutari. After returning to England she founded the Poor Servants of the Mother of God and Frances Taylor became Mother Mary Magdalene of the Sacred Heart. She wrote Tyborne: and the Gem of Christendom, one of the first Catholic historical novels about the English Reformation.

Florence Nightingale is honored by the Church of England on August 12 as a social activist, even though she was not even a Christian. As a Unitarian, she did not believe in the Holy Trinity, in the Divinity of Jesus Christ and in many other crucial Christian teachings. But she is an English heroine, so they honor her. More about her religion and spirituality here.