Spring Time for the Martyrs

From Blessed John Henry Newman's "Second Spring" sermon, preached July 13, 1852, in St. Mary's, Oscott, in the first Provincial Synod of Westminster:

Can we religiously suppose that the blood of our martyrs, three centuries ago and since, shall never receive its recompense? Those priests, secular and regular, did they suffer for no end? or rather, for an end which is not yet accomplished? The long imprisonment, the fetid dungeon, the weary suspense, the tyrannous trial, the barbarous sentence, the savage execution, the rack, the gibbet, the knife, the cauldron, the numberless tortures of those holy victims, O my God, are they to have no reward? Are Thy martyrs to cry from under Thine altar for their loving vengeance on this guilty people, and to cry in vain? Shall they lose life, and not gain a better life for the children of those who persecuted them?Is this Thy way, O my God, righteous and true? Is it according to Thy promise, O King of saints, if I may dare talk to Thee of justice? Did not Thou Thyself pray for Thine enemies upon the cross, and convert them? Did not Thy first Martyr win Thy great Apostle, then a persecutor, by his loving prayer? And in that day of trial and desolation for England, when hearts were pierced through and through with Mary's woe, at the crucifixion of Thy body mystical, was not every tear that flowed, and every drop of blood that was shed, the seeds of a future harvest, when they who sowed in sorrow were to reap in joy? . . .

When the English College at Rome was set up by the solicitude of a great Pontiff in the beginning of England's sorrows, and missionaries were trained there for confessorship and martyrdom here, who was it that saluted the fair Saxon youths as they passed by him in the streets of the great city, with the salutation, "Salvete flores martyrum"? And when the time came for each in turn to leave that peaceful home, and to go forth to the conflict, to whom did they betake themselves before leaving Rome, to receive a blessing which might nerve them for their work? They went for a Saint's blessing; they went to a calm old man, who had never seen blood, except in penance; who had longed indeed to die for Christ, what time the great St. Francis opened the way to the far East, but who had been fixed as if a sentinel in the holy city, and walked up and down for fifty years on one beat, while his brethren were in the battle. Oh! the fire of that heart, too great for its frail tenement, which tormented him to be kept at home when the whole Church was at war! and therefore came those bright-haired strangers to him, ere they set out for the scene of their passion, that the full zeal and love pent up in that burning breast might find a vent, and flow over, from him who was kept at home, upon those who were to face the foe. Therefore one by one, each in his turn, those youthful soldiers came to the old man; and one by one they persevered and gained the crown and the palm,—all but one, who had not gone, and would not go, for the salutary blessing.

The Collect for the Feast of the Martyrs of England and Wales from the Divine Worship form of the Roman Rite of the Anglican Ordinariate:

O MERCIFUL GOD, who, when thy Church on earth was torn apart by the ravages of sin, didst raise up men and women in England who witnessed to their faith with courage and constancy: give unto thy Church that peace which is thy will, and grant that the who have been divided on earth may be reconciled in heaven and be partakers together in the vision of thy glory; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Image Credit: English Martyrs window at Holy Name,Oxton,Birkenhead by Margaret Agnes Rope, Sister Margaret of the Mother of God (CC BY-SA 3.0)

166 Years Ago Today at St. Mary's

Just a reminder that Anna Mitchell will replay our interview discussing Newman's "Second Spring" sermon during the EWTN hour of the Son Rise Morning Show this morning. That's sometime between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. Central (6:00 and 7:00 a.m. Eastern). The podcast will also be available on the show website.

Also, please check my blog site on the National Catholic Register, which will be updated with an article I submitted that tells the story of that sermon and the context, as Anna and I discussed:

Father John Henry Newman of the Congregation of the Oratory gave his sermon at the Mass of the Holy Spirit celebrated on July 13—166 years ago today. It moved some, especially Cardinal Wiseman, to tears, as Newman described the death and rebirth of Catholicism in England.

The Winter is Now Past; The Coming of a Second Spring

Newman’s sermon exemplifies what G.K. Chesterton noted in The Everlasting Man: “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” In 1829, Catholics had at last been accorded their full rights as citizens and loyal subjects, able to worship freely, pursue their vocations and their careers, vote and hold office—everything but attend the great centers of learning, Oxford and Cambridge. In 1850, Pope Pius IX had restored the hierarchy in England with the Papal Bull Universalis Ecclesiae.

As Newman hardly needed to remind Cardinal Wiseman and the other bishops, this restoration had shocked Protestant England. It was one thing for individual Catholics to be free to practice their faith; it was another thing for an organized, structured Catholic hierarchy to start building, educating, and growing the Catholic Church in England. 

Queen Victoria’s government reacted by calling the restoration an act of “papal aggression”; there were anti-Catholic riots; Parliament passed a law called the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851 which declared it illegal for the new Catholic bishops to use the name "of any city, town or place, or of any territory or district (under any designation or description whatsoever), in the United Kingdom" in their titles. This act was never enforced and was repealed twenty years later. It was the last gasp of anti-Catholicism in Parliament. It would not be the last gasp of anti-Catholicism in England, as Newman had just experienced.

Newman on Trial 

The month before he gave this famous sermon, Father John Henry Newman had been in a London courtroom. He had been charged with libel against a former Dominican priest turned anti-Catholic agitator Giovanni Giacinto Achilli. . . . 

Father John Henry Newman, formerly a Fellow of Oriel College at Oxford and an Anglican vicar, found out what being a Catholic in nineteenth century England meant. His integrity was attacked and his guilt assumed because he was a Catholic. He had spoken about English prejudice against Catholics before; now he had experienced it.

He was found guilty, fined, and ordered to pay court costs in the amount of £12,000. The judge lectured him on his fall from grace since he had left the Anglican communion. Newman could have been sent to prison.

Even the Times of London perceived the injustice of this trial: “a great blow has been given to the administration of justice in this country, and Roman Catholics will have henceforth only too good reason for asserting that there is no justice for them in matters tending to rouse the Protestant feelings of judges and juries.”

Please read the rest there.

Speaking of the Second Spring

Joseph Pearce highlighted Blessed John Henry Newman's 1852 sermon "The Second Spring" in his first lecture at the the Fall Forum last weekend. He cited this passage:

A great change, an awful contrast, between the time-honoured Church of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, and the poor remnant of their children in the beginning of the nineteenth century! It was a miracle, I might say, to have pulled down that lordly power; but there was a greater and a truer one in store. No one could have prophesied its fall, but still less would any one have ventured to prophesy its rise again. The fall was wonderful; still after all it was in the order of nature;—all things come to nought: its rise again would be a different sort of wonder, for it is in the order of grace,—and who can hope for miracles, and such a miracle as this? Has the whole course of history a like to show? I must speak cautiously and according to my knowledge, but I recollect no parallel to it. Augustine, indeed, came to the same island to which the early missionaries had come already; but they came to Britons, and he to Saxons. The Arian Goths and Lombards, too, cast off their heresy in St. Augustine's age, and joined the Church; but they had never fallen away from her. The inspired word seems to imply the almost impossibility of such a grace as the renovation of those who have crucified to themselves again, and trodden under foot, the Son of God. Who then could have dared to hope that, out of so sacrilegious a nation as this is, a people would have been formed again unto their Saviour? What signs did it show that it was to be singled out from among the nations? Had it been prophesied some fifty years ago, would not the very notion have seemed preposterous and wild?

Pearce noted that Newman's conversion in 1845 brought more converts during his lifetime and then that more converts followed in in the 20th century: some great literary converts: Gerard Manley Hopkins, G.K. Chesterton, Robert Hugh Benson, Siegfried Sassoon, etc.

Henry VIII biographer J.J. Scarisbrick (Dr. James Scarisbrick) proposes that England needs a Third Spring of Catholicism in The Catholic World Report--and not just a literary revival, but a moral, spiritual, and cultural revival to fill the gap of religion in England:

The overall collapse of the Anglican Church and the near-disappearance of Methodism and the other non-Conformists from the national religious scene in recent times have left a huge spiritual vacuum at the heart of English society. Ours is indeed a post-Christian one. An increasingly arrogant neo-paganism is engulfing us.

This is lamentable. But is it not also a God-given opportunity for the English Catholic community to come out of its post-Vatican II diffidence, deference, introversion (call it what you like) and resume what our forefathers began again in 1850: that is, to reclaim our beloved country for the true Church?

Famously, in 1852 John Henry Newman, preaching at a celebration of that restoration of our Hierarchy, spoke of a ‘Second Spring’. This yielded a rich harvest. But now we need a third.

How will this come about?

It will be the apostolate of every Catholic priest, deacon, lay woman and man. We all have to take up this challenge.

Above all it will be the responsibility of our bishops. Hitherto unseen and unheard by the outside world, they have to come out from the sidelines – to become the nation’s spiritual leaders, heirs to the likes of Anselm, Becket, and John Fisher.

They must proclaim the good news that God loves us and longs for us to love him; that his Son has re-opened the gates of Heaven for and we can all pass through them if we want to; that the seven sacraments have been given to us to enable us to do so.

The same is true of the USA and every nation where Catholics live. We have Good News to tell and we should tell it!

Image: bust/shrine of Blessed John Henry Newman in New York City, copyright 2011-2017 Stephanie A. Mann.

The Second Spring and the "Catholic Spring"

From Crisis Magazine and the inimitable Father George Rutler, this comparison between a great, holy Newman and 21st-century Newman:

On a Tuesday in 1852, the thirteenth of July for the literary record since it was a day important for English letters, Blessed John Henry Newman mounted the pulpit of Oscott College, its halls relatively new though designed by Joseph Potter and Augustus Pugin to recall the best of the Tudor times before the depredations of the eighth Henry. Always attentive to signs of decay, at 51 he claimed to be entering old age but was ready for a second breath, both for himself and his Church. That sermon, “The Second Spring,” is as poetic as homiletic, and could take its place in the annals of free verse as one of its most lyrical samples.

The occasion was the gathering of the First Provincial Synod of Westminster, when the Catholic episcopate had been restored, and hope was mingled with a quality of caution, for the road ahead was not straight and smooth and there were no sureties of rest along the way. That is why Newman took the temperature of the times:

Have we any right to take it strange, if, in this English land, the spring-time of the Church should turn out to be an English spring, an uncertain, anxious time of hope and fear, of joy and suffering,—of bright promise and budding hopes, yet withal, of keen blasts, and cold showers, and sudden storms?

The same might be preached today, in this peculiar period when the Church seems as conflicted as our nation, for the issues at hand have never been greater and the commentaries on them both in Church and State are almost burlesque in their shallowness and venality. Napoleon called China a sleeping giant and various sources have said the same of the Catholic Church. During the present election season, fevered as it is with unprecedented bitterness and banality, the Church could almost pass as a giant more comatose than slumbering.

If anything has stirred the Church, rusty when urban and flaccid when suburban, it has been the discovery of documents revealing cynical attempts by political strategist to subvert and suborn the institution, stripping her of supernatural credentials to become a tool of the State, like the Gallican Church of the French Revolution. Leaked emails from February 10-11, 2012 record exchanges entitled “Opening for a Catholic Spring?” between the current manager of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, John Podesta, and Sandy Newman, president of a political action group called Voices for Progress. Sandy Newman is certainly no heir to John Henry Newman nor are his visions of Spring like those of the Second Spring preached at Oscott. For Sandy Newman, “There needs to be a Catholic Spring in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church.” The mandate for contraception coverage in medical plans might be a rallying point to “plant the seeds of the revolution.”

How Victorian! Accusing the Catholic Church of being medieval! 

Gentlemen, the Catholic Church is ancient; we are one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Podesta and this Newman may think they are sophisticated and brilliant strategists, planning the infiltration of the Catholic Church, but they should look up Julian the Apostate, Napoleon Bonaparte, and a few others along the long history of the Church and see how well they fared in their attempts.

As Father Rutler concludes:

So there we are at this crossroads of culture and, more than that, of civilization itself. Two Newmans proffer two Springtimes and they are not occasional variations of a common climate. Our nation has endured recent years of eroding faith and moral reason. It cannot endure several years more in the confidence that the erosion can be reversed as though it were just the habit of a cyclical season. There is a better prospect, but it is possible only if Catholics assent to the lively oracles of the Gospel and cast their votes and vows against those who are against it. The Newman who is blessed saw a Catholic Spring in the pulpit at Oscott that is not the clandestine plot of e-mails:

I listen, and I hear the sound of voices, grave and musical, renewing the old chant, with which Augustine greeted Ethelbert in the free air upon the Kentish strand. It comes from a long procession, and it winds along the cloisters. Priests and Religious, theologians from the schools, and canons from the Cathedral, walk in due precedence. And then there comes a vision of well-nigh twelve mitred heads; and last I see a Prince of the Church, in the royal dye of empire and of martyrdom, a pledge to us from Rome of Rome’s unwearied love, a token that that goodly company is firm in Apostolic faith and hope.

The photograph above is of the shrine Father Rutler installed in his former parish in New York, the Church of the Saviour. I certainly hope it is still there (the succeeding pastor made some changes). I took this picture in 2011 and so it is (c) Stephanie A. Mann.

Newman the Model of Rhetoric and Style

On the last day of February, 2015 it was snowing in Wichita. We shoveled the snow off our driveway (partially), filling the truck bed and drove off in a more roadworthy vehicle to Eighth Day Books. A book I'd ordered had arrived. The wily proprietor at EDB, our friend Warren told me about some used books recently obtained, Longmans' editions of Newman. We took our free coffee upstairs and I found the volumes Warren mentioned--I already had two of them.

One of them, however, was intriguing, so I bought it. It is The Second Spring by Cardinal Newman, Edited by Francis P. Donnelly, SJ, a 1921 printing of the book originally published by Longmans, Green, and Co. on Fourth Avenue & 30th Street, New York (also with offices in London, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras) in 1911. It had been a library book at the St. Joseph Convent of the Sisters of Divine Providence in Perry, Oklahoma. The Sisters of Divine Providence were founded by St. Mother Therese Guerin in St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana. She was a French Sister of Providence of Ruillé sur-Loir who came to the United States in the 19th century. There was a Catholic school in Perry, Oklahoma named St. Joseph, but it must have closed (see this facebook page). Evidently when the Perry convent closed it must have come to Wichita because there are stamps for the Mount St. Mary's Convent Library, which is the motherhouse of the Congregation of St. Joseph, fka the Sisters of St. Joseph.

Father Francis P. Donnelly, SJ wrote several books, including some meditations for the Holy Hour. From what I can determine from an online search, he taught and administered at Jesuit colleges in the U.S.A.: Gonzaga and Holy Cross College. His edition of Newman's famous "The Second Spring" sermon, is a rhetoric and composition textbook for high school students. He introduces the sermon, which Newman preached at the first diocesan synod held since the English Reformation, discusses Newman's Ciceronian style and then, after the text of the sermon, provides exercises for the students. He guides them in analyzing the structure of the sermon, each paragraph, selected sentences, and various other aspects of word choice, etc. He assigns themes so the student may treat them as Newman treats the extraordinary reversal of most human history--the Catholic Church in England had been dead; the Catholic Church in England is alive again!

Imagine being a high school student in Perry, Oklahoma--or anywhere else--and being asked to imitate this as a way to form your writing style:

But what is it, my Fathers, my Brothers, what is it that has happened in England just at this time? Something strange is passing over this land, by the very surprise, by the very commotion, which it excites. Were we not near enough the scene of action to be able to say what is going on,—were we the inhabitants of some sister planet possessed of a more perfect mechanism than this earth has discovered for surveying the transactions of another globe,—and did we turn our eyes thence towards England just at this season, we should be arrested by a political phenomenon as wonderful as any which the astronomer notes down from his physical field of view. It would be the occurrence of a national commotion, almost without parallel, more violent than has happened here for centuries,—at least in the judgments and intentions of men, if not in act and deed. We should note it down, that soon after St. Michael's day, 1850, a storm arose in the moral world, so furious as to demand some great explanation, and to rouse in us an intense desire to gain it. We should observe it increasing from day to day, and spreading from place to place, without remission, almost without lull, up to this very hour, when perhaps it threatens worse still, or at least gives no sure prospect of alleviation. Every party in the body politic undergoes its influence,—from the Queen upon her throne, down to the little ones in the infant or day school. The ten thousands of the constituency, the sum-total of Protestant sects, the aggregate of religious societies and associations, the great body of established clergy in town and country, the bar, even the medical profession, nay, even literary and scientific circles, every class, every interest, every fireside, gives tokens of this ubiquitous storm. This would be our report of it, seeing it from the distance, and we should speculate on the cause. What is it all about? against what is it directed? what wonder has happened upon earth? what prodigious, what preternatural event is adequate to the burden of so vast an effect?

We should judge rightly in our curiosity about a phenomenon like this; it must be a portentous event, and it is. It is an innovation, a miracle, I may say, in the course of human events. The physical world revolves year by year, and begins again; but the political order of things does not renew itself, does not return; it continues, but it proceeds; there is no retrogression. This is so well understood by men of the day, that with them progress is idolized as another name for good. The past never returns—it is never good;—if we are to escape existing ills, it must be by going forward. The past is out of date; the past is dead. As well may the dead live to us, well may the dead profit us, as the past return. This, then, is the cause of this national transport, this national cry, which encompasses us. The past has returned, the dead lives. Thrones are overturned, and are never restored; States live and die, and then are matter only for history. Babylon was great, and Tyre, and Egypt, and Nineve, and shall never be great again. The English Church was, and the English Church was not, and the English Church is once again. This is the portent, worthy of a cry. It is the coming in of a Second Spring; it is a restoration in the moral world, such as that which yearly takes place in the physical.

More about the book I went to Eighth Day Books to purchase tomorrow. That's me outside the front door of Eighth Day Books, bag full of books in hand.

The Ashless Ash Wednesday of 1548

Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars is so indispensible! If I had to be on a desert island and couldn't follow up on G.K. Chesterton’s advice to have a book about building ships, I would want to have Duffy's book with me. It definitely changed our view of the English Reformation. Note that Alec Ryrie comes at the English Reformation from a distinctly Protestant view, but appreciates Duffy’s achievement so well:

As an interpretation of English Reformation history, there was nothing particularly revolutionary about The Stripping of the Altars. The argument, essentially, was that pre-Reformation English Catholicism was a vibrant, popular, unified and flourishing tradition; a tradition that was then wantonly, deliberately and violently destroyed by a small clique of Protestant extremists. Others had made similar arguments, and while this picture can be overstated, precious few scholars today reject it entirely.

Duffy's particular achievement, though, was to show us "traditional religion" (not "popular" religion, he insists: the elite shared it, too) at parish level. And Duffy, an Irish Catholic born in 1947, understands this tradition in his bones. He can explain how, for example, an illiterate people could fully understand a Latin liturgy even if they could not actually translate it. He rescues medieval Catholicism from both the caricatures of later Protestantism and the condescension of later Catholicism. . . .

But he has changed the discipline, for three reasons. First, the sheer mass of evidence his scholarship has accumulated. This is a fat book, which, as a review quoted on the cover insists, is "not a page too long". Second, it makes sense of so much else. Scholars with Protestant sympathies frequently agree with Duffy about much of what happened, if not with his tone of lament. His rehabilitation of Mary I - long remembered as "Bloody Mary" - has been particularly compelling.

Lastly, the passion with which he writes gives the reader not merely a shrewd historical argument but a compelling vision of what it meant actually to live this traditional religion. It is a vision that a secular historian could not have given us.

In the chapter on Edward VI, ("The Attack on Traditional Religion III: The Reign of Edward VI") he recounts the Ashless Ash Wednesday of 1548, which followed the Candle-less Candlemas of the Feast of the Purification. Palm Sunday was palm-less that year, of course, and no processions--no Creeping to the Cross on Good Friday. The entire edifice of Catholic culture and liturgy was being dismantled in England.

Blessed John Henry Newman moved his listeners to tears at the first Catholic synod held in the Diocese of Westminster on July 13, 1852 when he preached his sermon on the Second Spring:

Three centuries ago, and the Catholic Church, that great creation of God's power, stood in this land in pride of place. It had the honours of near a thousand years upon it; it was enthroned in some twenty sees up and down the broad country; it was based in the will of a faithful people; it energized through ten thousand instruments of power and influence; and it was ennobled by a host of Saints and Martyrs. The churches, one by one, recounted and rejoiced in the line of glorified intercessors, who were the respective objects of their grateful homage. Canterbury alone numbered perhaps some sixteen, from St. Augustine to St. Dunstan and St. Elphege, from St. Anselm and St. Thomas down to St. Edmund. York had its St. Paulinus, St. John, St. Wilfrid, and St. William; London, its St. Erconwald; Durham, its St. Cuthbert; Winton, its St. Swithun. Then there were St. Aidan of Lindisfarne, and St. Hugh of Lincoln, and St. Chad of Lichfield, and St. Thomas of Hereford, and St. Oswald and St. Wulstan of Worcester, and St. Osmund of Salisbury, and St. Birinus of Dorchester, and St. Richard of Chichester. And then, too its religious orders, its monastic establishments, its universities, its wide relations all over Europe, its high prerogatives in the temporal state, its wealth, its dependencies, its popular honours,--where was there in the whole of Christendom a more glorious hierarchy? Mixed up with the civil institutions, with king and nobles, with the people, found in every village an in every town,--it seemed destined to stand, so long as England stood, and to outlast, it might be, England's greatness.

But it was the high decree of heaven, that the majesty of that presence should be blotted out. It is a long story, my Fathers and Brothers--you know it well. I need not go through it. The vivifying principle of truth, the shadow of St. Peter, the grace of the Redeemer, left it. That old Church in its day became a corpse (a marvellous, an awful change!); and then it did but corrupt the air which once it refreshed, and cumber the ground which once it beautified. So all seemed to be lost; and there was a struggle for a time, and then its priests were cast out or martyred. There were sacrileges innumerable. Its temples were profaned or destroyed; its revenues seized by covetous nobles, or squandered upon the ministers of a new faith. The presence of Catholicism was at length simply removed,--its grace disowned,--its power despised,--its name, except as a matter of history, at length almost unknown. It took a long time to do this thoroughly; much time, much thought, much labour, much expense; but at last it was done. Oh, that miserable day, centuries before we were born! What a martyrdom to live in it and see the fair form of Truth, moral and material, hacked piecemeal, and every limb and organ carried off, and burned in the fire, or cast into the deep! But at last the work was done. Truth was disposed of, and shovelled away, and there was a calm, a silence, a sort of peace;--and such was about the state of things when we were born into this weary world.

Catholic Revival in English Literature

Several years ago, I read Father Ian Ker's The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh from the University of Notre Dame Press:

The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961 presents a thorough discussion of the six principal writers of the Catholic revival in English literature—Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, and Waugh. Beginning with Newman’s conversion in 1845 and ending with Waugh’s completion of the triology The Sword of Honor in 1961, this book explores how Catholicism shaped the work of these six prominent writers.

John Henry Newman claimed in The Idea of a University that post-Reformation English literature was overwhelmingly Protestant and that there was no prospect of a Catholic body of literature. Describing this claim as “happily lacking in prescience,” Ian Ker persuasively argues that Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, and Waugh succeeded in producing a substantial body of literature written by Catholics who wrote as Catholics. These revivalists were not so much influenced by traditional themes of guilt, sin, and ceremony, as they were attracted to unexpected facets of Catholicism. The idea of a Catholic priest as a craftsman is a recurring motif, as is the celebration of the ordinariness and objectivity of Catholicism.

Ker’s compelling and intelligent reading of these six major writers will appeal to anyone with an interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature, or the relation between literature and theology.

Now I have, but have not yet commenced to read, Adam Schwartz's The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones from Catholic University of America Press:

 

For most of modern history, Roman Catholics in Britain were a "rejected minority," facing hostility and estrangement from a culture increasingly at odds with traditional Christianity. Yet British Catholicism underwent a remarkable intellectual and literary renewal, especially in the twentieth century, drawing a disproportionate number of the age's leading minds into its ranks. The Third Spring unravels this paradox of a renascent Catholic culture within a post-Christian society. It does so through detailed profiles of the spiritual journeys and religious and cultural beliefs of four seminal members of that twentieth-century revival: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones.

Although these four authors came from different backgrounds and wrote primarily in different genres, each converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult and made his new faith the foundation of his intellectual and artistic work. All of them judged the Church to be the last corporate voice of orthodox Christianity in a hitherto unmatched irreligious climate of opinion; and they concluded that the Roman Catholic vision of human nature, thought, history, and art was truer and richer than proposed by prevailing secularism. They thus built on the nineteenth-century "Second Spring" of British Catholicism proclaimed by John Henry Newman to create a fresh assertion of Roman Catholicism, one suited to an era of unprecedented unbelief: a Third Spring.

This book is the first detailed examination of these four authors as part of a Roman Catholic, counter-modern community of discourse. It is informed by extensive research in the writers' works, scholarship on them, and their personal papers. This study is also distinguished by its careful attention to the authors' cultural and religious contexts, and to the psychology and theology of conversion. It will therefore deepen understanding, and correct some misconceptions, of each man's spiritual development and his thought, while revealing the twentieth-century Catholic literary revival to be a distinct movement in both British and Roman Catholic thought.

And the author of The Third Spring here reviews yet another book on Catholics and English Literature: The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850 to 2000 by Richard Griffiths from Continuum (2010):

Although The Pen and the Cross provides some insight into British Catholic imaginative writing and its historical context, its sympathies for favored literary critical models and for modernist and progressive theology preclude it from presenting a comprehensive portrait of the Catholic renascence or from appreciating what made it distinctive. . . .

As accurate as Griffiths’s descriptions of the nature and history of British Catholic intellectual life are, his analysis of them is marred by his interpretive frameworks. Griffiths shows a marked preference for writers whose work reveals “acceptance of modern trends in literature,” regarding them as a “refreshing departure.” His treatments of novels therefore privilege realistic fiction, which twentieth-century critics typically considered the foremost arena of forward-looking artistry. But this emphasis presents a grave problem for a synthetic investigation of Catholic literature. Although Griffiths claims correctly that realistic fiction has been the “dominant strain” in British Catholic narrative prose, he admits and discusses the substantial Catholic presence in other such genres, including historical fiction, detective stories, and fantasy. Yet his examination excludes utterly the finest Catholic fabulist, J. R. R. Tolkien.

Oscott College

How I would love to spend a day at St. Mary's College Oscott, specifically in "The Recusant Library and Rare Books Collection"!

The Recusant Library at Oscott College, with over 12,000 books and pamphlets, and 400 manuscripts, holds works of Catholic interest published between c.1470 and c.1850. There are, additionally, a number of historical, scientific and medical works.

The collection developed initially from two sources. First, the Harvington Secular Clergy Library which was assembled at the recusancy centre of Harvington Hall, Worcestershire. Founded in 1696 by Lady Mary Yate for the use of her family chaplains, it became a library for the use of priests of the Midland District.

As might be expected, this collection is particularly strong in controversial, catechetical and devotional works relating to the Church in England. The pamphlet wars of the 1670s and 1680s are well-represented. Bishop Milner acquired the collection in 1810 for the use of the College.

Oscott, of course, is where Blessed John Henry Newman preached at the first Catholic synod after the restoration of the hierarchy, so I would want to visit the Pugin-designed chapel too:

The pulpit is associated with the most significant occasion at Oscott in its early decades, the first synod of the restored Catholic hierarchy in 1852. This occasion was marked by the striking sermon preached from this pulpit by John Henry Newman. Later published as 'The Second Spring', the sermon was a moving account of the recovery of English Catholicism from the dark days of penal times to its Victorian splendour. It came to characterise the expression of the restoration of Catholicism, and the very title 'The Second Spring' passed into common usage to describe Catholic life in Victorian England.