Book Review: Essays on Catholic Emancipation, 1829 to 1929

This really is a book of its time: the publisher/editor assumed that everyone knew exactly who the authors were and why each one was qualified to write his or her particular essay. It's also a book in which Cardinal Newman is often mentioned in good standing and fond remembrance. 

Published on the 100th anniversary of Catholic Emancipation in England, Catholic Emancipation, 1829 to 1929: Essays by Various Writers with an Introduction by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne (Longmans, Green and Co., London, New York, Toronto, 1929) contains honest and informative analyses of how Catholics in England had succeeded or failed to take advantage of relative religious freedom in England throughout one hundred (100) years.

Contents:

Introduction by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne [the fourth Archbishop of Westminster from 1903 to 1935; born in 1861; died in 1935]

I. Joy in Harvest--A Sequel to the Second Spring by Monsignor William Barry, DD (referring to St. John Henry Newman's famous "Second Spring" sermon of 1852)

II. The Catholic Church and the Spiritual Life by The Most Reverend Archbishop [Alban] Goodier, SJ [author of many books including Saints for Sinners] One very lovely line: "When he witnessed, in 1908, the Eucharistic Congress in London, Newman in heaven must indeed have thanked God." p. 43)

III. The Catholic Church and Education by Sir John Gilbert, KBE, KCSG [praises Newman's efforts to educate Catholics; deprecates the unfortunate decision by Henry Cardinal Manning, et al, preventing Catholic men from attending Oxford and Cambridge]

IV. The Catholic Church and Literature by Algernon Cecil [author and barrister; author of Six Oxford Thinkers, including Newman]

V. The Catholic Church and Science by Sir Bertram C.A. Windle, FRS, ScD, PhD [most interesting comment: Thomas Huxley was most influential in convincing Englishmen of the conflict between the Church and science]

VI. The Catholic Church and Music by Ernest Oldmeadow

VII. Catholics in Public Life by Viscount [Edmund Howard] Fitzalan

VIII. Catholic and Philanthropy by The Bishop of Brentwood [Arthur Doubleday]

IX. Religious Orders of Men by Abbot [Basil Christopher] Butler [of Downside Abbey; later Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster; born in 1902; died in 1986; he was a participant in and strong proponent of the Second Vatican Council; one of the youngest contributors to this volume]

X. Religious Communities of Women by Maud Monahan [I could not find any dates for her; she translated spiritual works and wrote about Janet Erskine Stuart, superior general of Society of the Sacred Heart]

XI. The Influence of Catholic Laywomen by Miss Margaret Fletcher [1862-1943; she became a Catholic in 1897 and was the founder of the Catholic Women's League]

XII. Statistical Progress of the Catholic Church by Rev. Herbert Thurston, SJ [author of many entries in the Catholic Encyclopedia; interested in Spiritualism and Madame Blavatsky; friend of  Father George Tyrrell, SJ of the Modernist Movement]

and, saving the best for last:

XIII. The Outlook by G.K. Chesterton [just seven (7) years after becoming a Catholic!!]

Perhaps among the most entertaining of the chapters before Chesterton's Outlook is Oldmeadow's analysis of music in Catholic cathedrals and churches (VI). He deplores the long-lasting legacy of the Embassy chapels, which presented many great professional soloists (especially Italian opera singers), thus discouraging the congregation from singing. Oldmeadow encourages instead the use of plainchant, Gregorian or otherwise, and welcomed Pope St. Pius X's 1903 motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini. One of the best passages in his chapter:

Rossini, with his flashy "Stabat Mater", found us an easy prey; and Gounod wound us round his little finger. The show-choirs rose to their showiest; their tenors shook shakes, their leading ladies trilled trills, and a little later on Mendelssohn's "Lauda Sion" was thought to be the most lofty and severe of Church music. Yet there might have been unison singing from every throat and celestial polyphony from a few divinely favored choristers. (p. 135)

Throughout most of the chapters, the constant themes are the patchwork method of repealing penal acts against Catholics, the influx of Irish Immigrants, the influence of French religious and priests (welcomed into England during and after the French Revolution), the growth in schools and colleges, the importance of converts, the development of religious orders (for both men and women), the impact of World War I on how the English viewed Catholics after serving as soldiers, sailors, chaplains, nurses, etc.

One of the most frustrating chapters was on the influence of Catholic laywomen in England between 1829 and 1929. Miss Margaret Fletcher begins with some stirring images as she begins to describe the progress of Catholic laywomen and the "woman's movement":

When in 1829 Emancipation was at last granted, and Catholic women realised that henceforth they would not form part of the quarry of a slackened hunt, they knew themselves to be in many ways scarred and spent by the long chase; and yet at the same time to be gloriously free. They had acquired a spiritual fortitude and had preserved an inner moral liberty which were not characteristics of English women at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (p. 225)

Although she recounts how English Catholic laywomen rejected some aspects of the international woman's movement, I was never sure what influence they really exerted in England. Fletcher intends to sketch the history of their efforts in meetings and publications but uses so much passive voice that I don't know who did what--perhaps she was too reticent to describe her own activity and achievements.

Now to Chesterton's Outlook: he was was the right person to write that chapter: his hopeful innocence and insightful wisdom are evident throughout his contribution:

. . .Whole aspects of Catholic doctrine and tradition, hidden by historical accident and the special quarrels of recent times, will be revealed to the world when it begins to address new questions to the Church. This is a point that has not been sufficiently stressed in the relations between Protestantism and Catholicism. Very often a Protestant was not only a man merely protesting, but a man merely protesting against a particular thing. He sometimes thought that thing was Rome; but it was really only one of the thousand aspects of Rome. When new aspects appear under new searchlights, he will be not so much defeated as simply outside the affair. A Baptist disapproves of baptising babies; a Presbyterian disapproves of bishops; a Prohibitionist disapproves of beer, and so on. But a Presbyterian, as such, has nothing very special to say about the Subconscious Mind. A Baptist as such has nothing special to say to a Behaviorist as such. But a Catholic may have a great deal to say to these people.

For the Catholic commentary on life has gone on so much longer, it has covered so many different social conditions, has dealt so carefully with countless fine shades of metaphysics or casuistry, that it really has a relation to almost any class of speculation that may arise. Thus, in the matter of psychoanalysis and the study of the subconscious, the Church will probably be found sooner or later defending certain essentials about Will and Conscience against a welter of wild impersonality. Catholics remembering Catholicism will have a right and reason to do this. But Calvinists who have half forgotten Calvinism have no particular reason to do it.

There is, for instance, one influence that grows stronger every day, never mentioned in the newspapers, not even intelligible to people in the newspaper frame of mind. It is the return of the Thomist Philosophy; which is the philosophy of common sense, as compared with the paradoxes of Kant and Hegel and the Pragmatists. The Roman religion will be, in the exact sense, the only Rationalistic religion. The other religions will not be Rationalist but Relativist; declaring that the reason is itself relative and unreliable; declaring that Being is only Becoming or that all time is only a time of transition ; saying in mathematics that two and two make five in the fixed stars, saying in metaphysics and in morals that there is a good beyond good and evil. Instead of the materialist who said that the soul did not exist, we shall have the new mystic who says that the body does not exist. Amid all these things the return of the Scholastic will simply be the return of the sane man. (pp. 278-279) 

There goes Chesterton, leading the way into the future, pointing out what the Catholic Church will need to offer the civilization and culture of the next hundred years:

But to say that there is no pain, or no matter, or no evil, or no difference between man and beast, or indeed between anything and anything else — this is a desperate effort to destroy all experience and sense of reality; and men will weary of it more and more, when it has ceased to be the latest fashion ; and will look once more for something that will give form to such a chaos and keep the proportions of the mind of man. Millions of men are already at least wondering whether this solution is not to be found in the Catholic order and philosophy.

Above all, the Church has regained that unique position in the world in a fair field and under the very reverse of favour; having had for a hundred years no more than the common right of speaking and publishing and voting in popular assemblies; and as her Master affirmed his divinity by becoming a man among men, she has become for a season a sect among sects, to emerge at the end as something separate or supreme. (p. 281)

As usual, he's almost too right; it's only too bad that we Catholics haven't held on tightly enough to the Common Sense of St. Thomas Aquinas! 

I'd say his chapter, Oldmeadow's and Goodier's on the spiritual life of English Catholics are the best in this book of insights, gratitude for the progress made, and acknowledgement of difficulties and even failures.

Best Books Read in 2020

Near the top of my selections for best books read in 2020: Reinhard Hutter's John Henry Newman on Truth & Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times. I devoted two posts to my review of it: here and here. As I summarized my impressions of the book and its impact on me:

The bibliography is excellent, and the footnotes, as I mentioned, are important to read. I recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the influence of Newman's teachings and writings on conscience, faith, ecclesiology and the Church's magisterium, and the idea of a university. I enjoyed and benefited from "hearing" Professor Hutter's voice of reason and experience throughout his discussion of these important subjects. It's a book I've had a hard time putting down even after I read the last word.

In contrast, Eamon Duffy's brief study of Newman was the most disappointing read of 2020. It could have been written by his brother Frank or Edwin Abbot.

Either a close second or tied for top spot: Robert R. Reilly's America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. It also merited two posts for my review: here and here. For me, Reilly's survey of the influences on our countries founders as framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America was a great philosophical education:

Robert R. Reilly, whom I saw speak at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference in Wichita (cancelled this year by COVID of course) a few years ago on his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, in this book offers an exploration of the philosophical and intellectual sources that inspired the Founders of the United States of America in their quest for independence from Great Britain and the establishment of a new nation.

He goes all the way back to the pre-philosophical era, explores Greek philosophy focusing on Aristotle, Jewish monotheism, and the Latin/Roman Catholic synthesis of Greek philosophy and Revelation focusing on St. Thomas Aquinas, and continues his philosophical lessons through to the eighteenth century.

Other best non-fiction books: Lisa McClain's Lest We Be Damned; Maura Jane Farrelly's Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860; and Liturgical Mysticism by David Fagerberg.

I did not read much fiction last year, so Simon Tolkien's No Man's Land is my top pick in that category.

For the most entertaining book read last year: G.K. Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature. In his chapter on the Great Victorian Novelists, he shows a great appreciation for Jane Austen, which I appreciated:

Her [George Eliot's] originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power in fiction as  well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter comes into our present consideration only as that most exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write. (p. 35)

He later says of her in comparison to Eliot and the Brontës :

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities. (p. 37)

If you like, please cite your favorite books from last year in the comments. 

Happy New Year!!

Newman and the Four Women to be Canonized

Yesterday I mentioned that four women will be canonized with Newman tomorrow at St. Peter's Basilica--or that Newman will be canonized with four women--and The Catholic Herald, in the midst of its celebration of Newman, does offer background on these saints, three religious and one laywoman:

Pope Francis will canonize four women alongside John Henry Newman this Sunday. These women – a stigmatist, a mystic, a Roman orphan, and Nobel Peace prize nominee – also proclaimed Christ through their lives and their miracles in a unique way.

In its profile of Mother Mariam Thresia of India, founder of the Congregation of the Holy Family , the Herald offers this quotation:

“Our main charisma is family apostolate. We have schools, hospitals and counseling centers etc. But our main focus is the family apostolate. Making the families like a Holy Family of Nazareth,” Sister Dr. Vinaya of the Congregation of the Holy Family said.

Having just read Newman's homily on the Feast of the Holy Rosary and its connection with the Holy Family, I can see how he and Mother Mariam have this in common.

The Swiss Marguerite Bays was a laywoman serving her parish community and handing on the faith--Newman would praise her for that:

This 19th century Swiss laywoman and stigmatist, who dedicated her life to prayer and service to her parish community without marrying or entering a religious community. As a Third Order Franciscan, she lived a simple life as a dressmaker and carried out a lay apostolate as a catechist.

Newman would have similarly lauded both Mother Giuseppina Vannini and Sister Dulce Lopes for their service to the poor and suffering.

But what connections would the women have found with Newman and his life and works? Since two of the sisters founded religious orders, they would have shared the common concerns involved in that process. Newman's own service to the poor in Littlemore and Birmingham is a common bond. His support for the Catholic laity and his desire that we know our faith certainly connects Marguerite Bays's good works in her parish.

Of course, what the five share is their love for God and their love for their neighbor, fulfilling Jesus's greatest commandments.

"Orange Peel"/"No Peel" Robert Peel Born

Robert Peel, twice Prime Minister of England, was born on February 5, 1788. He held many political offices during the reigns of George IV, William IV and Victoria, including that of Chief Secretary for Ireland. He had received the nickname "Orange Peel" because he was so staunchly anti-Catholic and because he was a redhead.

After opposing any concessions to Irish or English Catholics throughout his career, Sir Robert Peel, a Tory, supported the Duke of Wellington--who was also reluctant--Arthur Wellesley, the Prime Minister, in obtaining the votes to pass the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829. As this website explains:

Support for the Anglican Church was the life-blood of Toryism. The Tories believed that there could be no yielding over the central rights of the Established Church. This therefore implied opposition to Catholic Emancipation on principle because it would destroy the constitutional supremacy of the Anglican Church. Canning supported Catholic Emancipation and wanted it to be passed before the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts was granted. The Cabinet was divided on this however, so it was left as an open question and a settlement was deliberately postponed until the crisis of 1828-29.

Peel's Protestant convictions led to his refusal to join Canning's government in 1827 and Wellington refused to serve for the same reason, although he had been moving towards Catholic Emancipation since 1825 and personally had decided for it by the 1826 Irish General Election which demonstrated the electoral strength of the Irish Catholics. Wellington considered Catholic Emancipation to be a political, not a religious question. By 1828 he felt that resistance was impractical and dangerous because of the result of the County Clare election. . . .

He was crucial to the passage of Catholic Emancipation once it was clear that the "present position of Catholics in England" and Ireland was untenable:

Between 1828 and 1830 Peel, almost single-handed, sustained Wellington's government in Commons' debates, suffering a savage campaign of ridicule and abuse in the press for his betrayal of Protestantism. As Home Secretary in Wellington's government Peel was the most important man in the House of Commons.

In August 1828 after the County Clare election, Peel accepted the necessity for, but not the desirability of Catholic Emancipation. He tendered his resignation but Wellington persuaded him that the legislation would never pass without Peel's support. By January 1829 Peel's high-principled stand was weakening. He told Wellington that he would continue in office 'if my retirement should prove ... 'an insuperable obstacle' to the passing of Catholic Emancipation. Wellington responded:

"I tell you frankly that I do not see the smallest chance of getting the better of these difficulties if you should not continue in office."

Peel agreed to put Catholic Emancipation to the Commons. Only Peel and the Lord Chancellor were fully in Wellington's confidence over Catholic Emancipation. Peel put duty before principle and in February 1829 proposed the Bill to an astounded House of Commons. After all, for the past twenty years, Peel had been the one man who had consistently opposed the measure.

He was fiercely opposed in Oxford, whom he represented in the House of Commons, and lost his seat during an election in 1829. There was even a little verse about it:

Oh Member of Oxford, you shuffle and wheel
You have altered your name from R. Peel to Repeal

In fact, we can see the effects of this election in Oxford today. When visiting Christ Church on the way to the Great Hall, the college website reminds visitors:

Before heading up the stairs be sure to note the markings on the doorway, especially the ‘No Peel’ graffiti. This was not a response to anything served up in the Hall - instead it was a protest at the potential re-election of Robert Peel, Christ Church alumnus and later prime minister, as the MP for the University. In 1829 Peel had announced his support for the emancipation of Catholics within Britain, though he had previously opposed such a move (Catholics at the time were barred from holding public positions). Peel knew that his volte-face conflicted with University policy and resigned his seat, but was promptly nominated to stand for re-election. The anti-Peel party set about making its feelings known in a divided Christ Church, nailing the door of the then treasury with the message ‘No Peel’. Due in part to their efforts, Peel was defeated in Oxford, but he returned to Westminster as MP for a small borough in Wiltshire. To this day, there is no picture of Peel within the Hall, even though he ranks among the most eminent of the college’s alumni.

Note that Mr. John Henry Newman, then a Fellow at Oriel College, was most supportive of opposition to Peel. While he was rather indifferent to the "Catholic cause" he was concerned that Emancipation would weaken the Anglican church, leading to "Indifferentism" in the Church of England. Find a sample of his letters during this period here.

At 11:30 a.m. Today

I'll be at the seventh annual Eighth Day Institute Symposium making my presentation on "Long Live the Queen: John Henry Newman and the Place of Theology in a Liberal Arts Education". My reflection is live on the EDI website and will be included in the January issue of Synaxis:

Reading Newman’s Idea and his vision of university education now, so many years later, I am struck by how timely his defense of Theology as a field of study with a body of knowledge is for us today. In the mid-nineteenth century he saw that if Theology was not accepted as an academic subject, with content and knowledge to impart, religious doctrine and practice would devolve into mere feeling. Then religious doctrine and morality will be “based, not on argument, but on taste and sentiment” and “nothing [is] objective”; in fact “everything [is] subjective”. Newman saw that if Theology is only a matter of “taste and sentiment” and Christian doctrine “the bane of true knowledge”, theologians will be rejected. Theologians—the watchmen—will face “a feeling, not merely of contempt, but of absolute hatred” if they dare state that what they say is true and based not on opinion or affection, but on knowledge and experience. Newman seems a prophet in that vision, as in many other things.

Here's the schedule in case you want to come! Of course, bad winter weather is forecast for this weekend in Wichita, so caution is advised, especially on Saturday! 

Morrison on Imitation and Reform: Some Notes on Newman

Reading this by Peter Kwasniewski on the New Liturgical Movement website reminded me of Karl F. Morrison's great book, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in The West:

One cannot go back in the sense of re-living or re-creating the past as past, but one can and must always be reaching into the past for inspiration, for tried and true models, for a trustworthy way of life. One looks to the past in order to bring something of its fire and spirit into the present moment and into every future generation. To think that we are uniquely stranded in our age, cut off from the beneficent and fertilizing influence of tradition, is a peculiarly modern form of pride and even, perhaps, a subtle form of vanity. We want to view ourselves as different from every former age and therefore as freed from our obligations to our predecessors — the fundamental obligation of grateful receptivity that every Christian generation owes to its inheritance. To think that we must forge ahead on a new path that is not in continuity with the past is a pernicious error, actually a denial of our creaturely dependence on all the causes that made us what we are and continue to make us what we are. . . .

It is not without significance that, throughout the history of the Church, reform movements always look back: they look to the apostolic age (as when religious orders conscientiously model their way of life after the blueprint given in the Acts of the Apostles); they look back to the origins of monasticism in the desert or the wilderness; they look back to the spirit and rule of their founders; they appeal to the Church Fathers, the Councils, the annals of the saints. It is part of the very essence of Christianity to be looking both backwards and forwards — indeed, paradoxically, to look to the future only through the past. This is what is meant by “the binding force of Tradition,” which liberates those it binds from the fads and fashions of their own particular age and its blind spots or prejudices. For a genuine Catholic, it could never be legitimate to lay aside vast portions of inherited tradition—be it artistic, intellectual, liturgical, or what have you.

Yes, it is possible to enhance the vast treasury we inherit, but we do so by augmenting it, not by suppressing, dismantling, or destroying its contents, or considering them impossibly distant and irrecoverable. There may be times when some component of our Christian life needs to be modified, but this will be done rarely, reverently, and conservatively. New things will emerge out of old things, in a manner that is gentle and organic, not violent or mechanistic or self-punishing.

Karl F. Morrison's The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in The West is still available from Princeton University Press, but only as a print-on-demand volume. The description on the press website is woefully inadequate:

Ancient writers distinguished between art and style, arguing that free imitation was a critical strategy that freed artists from servile copying of objects and blind submission to rules of style. In this study Karl F. Morrison explores the far-reaching consequences of this distinction.

You may see the Table of Contents here to glimpse how far reaching the "consequences of this distinction" are. Fortunately, I still have my hardback copy of Morrison's great work (my brother gave it to me for my birthday in 1992). It's one of those books like E.R. Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages or Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (both also published by Princeton!) which survey a vast range of history and organize it conceptually. Morrison's achievement is even greater because he does not limit himself to the discussion of literature, but applies the concepts of imitation and reform to religion, philosophy, history, education, and society. He mentions Auerbach's Mimesis in the "Appendix: Thinking Mimetically about History: Some Bibliographical Orientations", and notes the limitation of that effort to literature.

I certainly haven't reread the book for this post, but I did scan the pages on which Morrison discusses the career of John Henry Cardinal Newman, noting the seeds of the failure of the Catholic University of Ireland in Newman's discourses on The Idea of a University. Morrison notes that Newman's theology of the development of doctrine and his emphasis on the national (Protestant) Literature of England, and how important both were in the education of a gentlemen according to the national (Protestant) character of England created great distrust among the Irish clergy. Morrison also goes on to address Newman's conflict with the theological milieu of Catholicism during the reign of Pope Pius IX--with the Cardinal's hat from Pope Leo XIII as a rescue of his reputation--even suggesting a conflict between Newman's biglietto speech against liberalism in religion and his own theological theories of what Morrison calls "mimesis by augmentation" and discontinuity in religious doctrine. Morrison's view of Newman seemed to be a misreading when I first read the book and its does now too. If Morrison had read Newman's sermons and letters he would have understood Newman's dedication to doctrine and tradition.