Devotion to Saint Thomas of Canterbury

I've grown in my spiritual devotion to the Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales of the Reformation era, and I'm also growing in devotion to Saint Thomas of Canterbury, thanks to this book of prayers asking his intercession and meditating on his life and martyrdom.

Saint Thomas has often been seen as an important figure in the conflicts between Church and State: defending the rights of the Church in England against Henry II's attempt to take away the bishops's authority over priests and clergy. But Father John S. Hogan, in this book from Gracewing, Devotions to St Thomas Becket, reminds us that devotion to the martyred saint began as people went on pilgrimage to pray for his intercession, seeking miraculous healings through his prayers.

Therefore, Father Hogan includes prayers to Saint Thomas of Canterbury for the sick, a Litany for the Sick, a Prayer for Miracles, etc.

Father Hogan also reminds us that Saint Thomas of Canterbury grew in his Christian faith, that we find a process of conversion in his life, not just from his secular life at Court with Henry II, but through his exile and other sufferings. Father Hogan declares, "As he slowly woke to the way of true Christian discipleship, his experiences, his mistakes, his trials and sufferings, progressively turned him completely to Christ". (p. x) So there are prayers for conversion, including a Novena for the Grace of Conversion. 

Because Saint Thomas of Canterbury was a priest and bishop Father Hogan includes prayers for priests, for bishops, and a "Eucharistic Prayer", emphasizing Becket's growth in devotion to the Eucharist and to celebrating Mass with great reverence.

Thomas  Becket was born on the 21st of December (in 1119/20) and died on the 29th of December (in 1170), so there's a novena to celebrate the martyr between those dates. Since Canterbury is still a site for pilgrimage, there's a "Seven Stations" series of prayers with landmarks like St. Dunstan's Church, where Henry II started his penitential pilgrimage to the Cathedral in reparation for the martyr's murder, the Cloister of the Cathedral through which both the saint and his killers walked to enter the north transept, the Crypt where his first tomb was located, and the parish church of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, the Catholic shrine to this great saint.

There's also a Litany to St Thomas Becket and other prayers for courage, in time of persecution, etc. Gracewing has also published Father Hogan's biography of the saint.

Saint Thomas of Canterbury, pray for us.

Preview: May the Fourth Be With You: The Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales

Tomorrow is May 4th, the Feast of the ALL the Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales in dioceses of England and throughout the Anglican Ordinariate. Anna Mitchell has asked me to discuss them on the Son Rise Morning Show tomorrow, at my usual time, 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here or on your local EWTN affiliate.

When we speak of ALL the Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales, it is a considerable number:

~54 were Beatified on December 29, 1886 by Pope Leo XIII (including Thomas More and John Fisher and 11 others who would later be canonized)

~Pope Leo also declared 30 martyrs Venerable on that date (which is the feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury)

~Pope Leo XIII beatified nine more martyrs on May 13, 1895

~136 more were beatified by Pope Pius XI on December 15, 1929 (29 of those martyrs would later be canonized

~Pope St. John Paul II beatified 85 more martyrs on November 22, 1987

So there are 42 canonized martyrs: St. Thomas More, St. John Fisher and the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. There are 242 beatified martyrs; and 30 venerable martyrs--314 Martyrs of England and Wales! (Not counting the Irish martyr St. Oliver Plunkett or the Scottish martyr St. John Ogilvie.)

Their feast has been celebrated on May 4 since 2000 since that is the anniversary of the executions of the protomartyrs of the English Reformation under Henry VIII in 1535: The Carthusians John Houghton, Robert Lawrence, and Augustine Webster; the Briggitine Richard Reynolds, and the priest John Haile.

Since I first "appeared" on the Son Rise Morning Show in 2010, we've told the stories of many of these martyrs--Anna Mitchell, Matt Swaim, and I even completed a weekly series on the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales in 2020 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of their canonization! So tomorrow, I thought we'd focus on what these martyrs model for us: their courage, their constancy, and their conversion.

Courage is perhaps almost too obvious: they risked their lives by being true to Jesus and His Church, to the unity of the Church, to the celebration of the Sacraments, and the protection of priests. Since executions, either by burning, beheading, hanging, or hanging, drawing, and quartering were public, they knew the agonies they could or would suffer.

If they faced a court and were condemned, they would hear the judge announce (language alert) what they would suffer: you will be "laid on a hurdle and so drawn to the place of execution, and there to be hanged, cut down alive, your members to be cut off and cast in the fire, your bowels burnt before you, your head smitten off, and your body quartered and divided at the Queen's/King's will, and God have mercy on your soul."

To take two obvious examples, St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More heard those words and returned to their cells in the Tower of London, not knowing that Henry VIII would commute their death sentences to being beheaded, merely, on June 22 and July 6. The martyrs who suffered before them on May 4, 1535 heard those words and then suffered the full torture of that punishment as traitors to Henry VIII. The Carthusians were wearing their habits and St. John Houghton still wore his hair shirt. 

Condemned martyrs might have been spared part of the agony of that form of execution if they died by hanging before the evisceration, but they would not know that would happen, so faced agony as they were dragged through the streets to their place of execution; as the first suffered, the others witnessed what they would endure. Executioners could be efficient, or inept like the one who tortured Blessed Hugh Green, unable to locate his heart to cut it out of his chest (August 19, 1642). 

Before their trials and executions, they demonstrated courage through imprisonment and torture, especially during the Elizabethan era: hanging by the wrists, the rack, flogging, and the Scavenger's Daughter. Clamped in irons, kept in the Little Ease, where they neither stand upright or lie down completely--the Tudors especially practiced many forms of torture to break the spirit of the martyrs. St. Robert Southwell's father exhorted Queen Elizabeth I to try, convict, and even execute his son rather than leave him in such filth and darkness.

These English and Welsh martyrs give us a model of constancy: they remained true to their faith through all the dangers and difficulties. Some of the missionary priests returned to England again and again after imprisonment and exile. The missionary priests had to hide, travel constantly while the laity protecting them had to be on constant look out, always aware of their danger. In the midst of all the changes in religion, in doctrine, worship, and devotion occurring all around them, these lay martyrs remained true. They--and many who did not suffer martyrdom--paid the fines, prayed the Rosary of Our Lady, counting on their fingers if it was too dangerous to use beads, made Acts of Perfect Contrition and Spiritual Communions, joined their intentions to Masses celebrated throughout the world; hid their Catholic books, and tried their best to practice the Faith of their Fathers and Mothers. The pressure to conform to the Established Church of England must have been enormous, financially, legally, socially, and within the family: but they were constant.

This might seem contradictory, but they also give us models of conversion; we might also say of contrition and repentance. Unlike the Carthusian priors, all the abbots and priors of the monasteries and priories of England took the oaths Henry VIII demanded: but a few repented and returned to the Faith: the last Abbots of Glastonbury, Colchester and Reading Abbeys finally refused to surrender and dissolve their monasteries and thus suffered martyrdom (beatified by Pope Leo XIII on May 13, 1895).

St. Edmund Campion, SJ was a Catholic when Queen Mary visited his neighborhood in London; he was an Anglican when Queen Elizabeth I visited Oxford and he was on his way to a brilliant career in academe and the Church of England. But then reading the Fathers of the Church and talking to others who had returned to the Catholic Church made him pause, leave his career track, and become a Jesuit and then return to England as a priest. When he was martyred on December 1, 1581, another future martyr converted after some of Campion's blood splashed on him, and St. Henry Walpole, SJ left his study of the law, became a Jesuit, and was martyred on April 7, 1595.

Two of the three female saints canonized among the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales, St. Margaret Clitherow and St. Anne Line, were converts. when St. Anne Line, alias Anne Heigham Line  became a Catholic she and her brother William Heigham were disinherited and disowned by their Calvinist father. In 1586 she married Roger Line, another disinherited convert. Not long after their marriage Roger and her brother William were arrested for attending Mass and exiled from England. Roger lived in Flanders and died in 1594. 

Left without the financial support Roger had sent her from Flanders, Anne did not return to her father and renounce her Catholic faith; instead she managed a house in London established by Father John Gerard, SJ, as a refuge for Catholic priests, a dangerous occupation. She was arrested on Candlemas, the Feast of the Purification or Presentation on February 2, 1601 after helping the priest Blessed Francis Page, SJ escape arrest. Before she was hanged to death on February 27 that year she proclaimed: 

"I am sentenced to die for harbouring a Catholic priest, and so far I am from repenting for having so done, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand."

She is is a model of all three of these virtues: courage, constancy, and conversion.

Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales, pray for us!

Newman and Literature, Part Two

As promised, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show bright and early this morning (6:50 a.m. Central/ 7:50 a.m. Eastern) to talk with Anna Mitchell about Newman and Literature, focusing today on the wide range of Newman's literary output.

If we survey Newman's literary works--not forgetting the four great books he wrote (the Apologia pro Vita Sua; The Idea of the University; the Essay on the Development of Doctrine; the Grammar of Assent)--we see a great variety. He wrote book reviews, poetry, novels, hymns, saint's lives, historical essays, sermons, speeches, presentations, essays, tracts, prefaces; he translated Latin hymns and works of the Fathers of the Church, etc. He edited his books, reworked them years after their first publication, dedicated them to friends of many years. (His other novel, Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century, is also a conversion story, but in the midst of martyrdom in Roman North Africa--and features St. Cyprian of Carthage!)

Newman's command of literary genres is masterful. As Father Ian Ker commented years ago, he can be brutally satirical as in The Present Position of Catholics in England in which he sends up the English tradition of anti-Catholicism while lampooning the English claim that tradition doesn't bind them: they are reasonable, skeptical, fact-finding men who have accepted the tradition that Catholics are ignorant, superstitious, and under priestly control without evidence, without ever having met or talked to a Catholic in their lives, based on what someone else told them and what everyone has always said:

If you asked the first person you met why he believed that our religion was so baneful and odious, he would not say, "I have had good proofs of it;" or, "I know Catholics too well to doubt it;" or, "I am well read in history, and I can vouch for it;" or, "I have lived such a long time in Catholic countries, I ought to know;"—(of course, I do not mean that no one would make such a reply, but I mean that it would not be the reply of the mass of men; far from it). No; single out a man from the multitude, and he would say something of this sort: "I am sure it is;" he will look significant, and say, "You will find it a hard job to make me think otherwise;" or he will look wise and say, "I can make a pretty good guess how things go on among you;" or he will be angry, and cry out, "Those fellows, the priests, I would not believe them, though they swore themselves black in the face;" or he will speak loudly, and overbear and drown all remonstrance: "It is too notorious for proof; every one knows it; every book says it; it has been so ruled long ago. It is rather too much in the nineteenth century to be told to begin history again, and to have to reverse our elementary facts." That is, in other words, the multitude of men hate Catholicism mainly on tradition, there being few, indeed, who have made fact and argument the primary or the supplemental grounds of their aversion to it. And observe, they hate it on a single, isolated tradition, not a complex, conclusive tradition—not the united tradition of many places. It is true, indeed, that Holland, and Geneva, and Prussia, each has its own tradition against the Catholic Church; but our countrymen do in no sense believe, from any judgment they form on those united British and foreign traditions, but from the tradition of their own nation alone; which, though certainly it comprises millions of souls, nevertheless, is so intimately one by the continual intercourse and mutual communication of part with part, that it cannot with any fairness be considered to contain a number of separate testimonies, but only one. Yet this meagre evidence, I say, suffices to produce in the men of this generation an enthusiastic, undoubting and energetic persuasion that we torture heretics, immure nuns, sell licences to sin, and are plotting against kings and governments; all, I say, because this was said of Catholics when they were boys. It is the old heirloom, the family picture, which is at once their informant and their proof.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Newman's Desk in the Birmingham Oratory

Or he can be rhapsodic, as in this praise of his patron St. Philip Neri, in presenting the example of a good man in contrast to the fascination of sin and evil in fiction:

Philip preferred, as he expressed it, tranquilly to cast in his net to gain them; he preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt. 

And so he contemplated as the idea of his mission, not the propagation of the faith, nor the exposition of doctrine, nor the catechetical schools; whatever was exact and systematic pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule and authoritative speech, as David refused the armour of his king. No; he would be but an ordinary individual priest as others: and his weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love. All he did was to be done by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation. He came to the Eternal City and he sat himself down there, and his home and his family gradually grew up around him, by the spontaneous accession of materials from without. He did not so much seek his own as draw them to him.

This post would be as long as one of Newman's paragraphs (or sentences) if I went on to describe all his command of literary style and persuasive argument, all the beauty and power of his prose, etc. So just one more genre: poetry.

Newman would have to be considered a minor poet, but as a minor poet, he's had a significant impact in Catholic (and Anglican) hymnography, with three poems turned into hymns ("Lead, Kindly Light", "Praise to the Holiest", "Firmly I Believe and Truly"). The first is probably the most famous, set to various hymn tunes:

LEAD, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom          
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—          
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene—one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou          
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now          
Lead Thou me on! 
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still          
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till          
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

At Sea.
June 16, 1833.

Even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir appreciates Newman's poem in their sensitive performance of the John B. Dykes setting of the hymn I've linked above!

One of his longer poems, The Dream of Gerontius, was extraordinarily popular in its day--and was used by Sir Edward Elgar as the text for his oratorio of the same name. In a couple of weeks Matt Swaim and I will discuss it and its theme of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. (Anna Mitchell is preparing to go on maternity leave!)

Preview: Newman and Literature, Part Two

As I commented on the Son Rise Morning Show earlier this week (Monday, 8/19), Blessed John Henry Newman knew the power of Literature--of stories, tales, fiction--to persuade and move an audience. One of the best proofs of this is his first novel, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert. It is a semi-autobiographical story about a High Church Anglican at Oxford who becomes Catholic.

When the novel was published in 1848, the Advertisement to the novel explained its purpose:

THE following tale is not intended as a work of controversy in behalf of the Catholic Religion, but as a description of what is understood by few, viz., the course of thought and state of mind,—or rather one such course and state,—which issues in conviction of its Divine origin.

Nor is it founded on fact, to use the common phrase. It is not the history of any individual mind among the recent converts to the Catholic Church. The principal characters are imaginary; and the writer wishes to disclaim personal allusion in any. It is with this view that he has feigned ecclesiastical bodies and places, to avoid the chance, which might otherwise occur, of unintentionally suggesting to the reader real individuals, who were far from his thoughts.

At the same time, free use has been made of sayings and doings which were characteristic of the time and place in which the scene is laid. And, moreover, when, as in a tale, a general truth or fact is exhibited in individual specimens of it, it is impossible that the ideal representation should not more or less coincide, in spite of the author's endeavour, or even without his recognition, with its existing instances or champions.

It must also be added, to prevent a further misconception, that no proper representative is intended in this tale of the religious opinions which had lately so much influence in the University of Oxford.

Newman wrote the novel in part to answer another work of fiction, From Oxford to Rome: And how it fared with some who lately made the journey by Miss Elizabeth Harris. Harris had become a Catholic and then returned to the Anglican communion. She intimated in the novel that Newman and his Oratorian fellow converts were thinking about returning to the Church of England too. As the advertisement to the sixth edition of Loss and Gain in 1874 explained:

A TALE, directed against the Oxford converts to the Catholic Faith, was sent from England to the author of this Volume in the summer of 1847, when he was resident at Santa Croce in Rome. Its contents were as wantonly and preposterously fanciful, as they were injurious to those whose motives and actions it professed to represent; but a formal criticism or grave notice of it seemed to him out of place.

The suitable answer lay rather in the publication of a second tale; drawn up with a stricter regard to truth and probability, and with at least some personal knowledge of Oxford, and some perception of the various aspects of the religious phenomenon, which the work in question handled so rudely and so unskilfully.

Especially was he desirous of dissipating the fog of pomposity and solemn pretence, which its writer had thrown around the personages introduced into it, by showing, as in a specimen, that those who were smitten with love of the Catholic Church, were nevertheless as able to write common-sense prose as other men.

Under these circumstances "Loss and Gain" was given to the public.

Newman  was not aiming to write a Catholic novel of opposing propaganda, however, but a good novel. Notice that one of things he disliked about Harris's novel was that the Catholic converts she depicted weren't as able "to write common-sense prose as other men"! Her characters were pompous and pretentious--Newman wanted to write more naturally and often pokes fun at those who do speak pompously. He did not write about perfect, sinless men and women, but real, fallen people who are struggling to find their way. In this novel, the way the protagonist, Charles Reding, is navigating is the way of religion. Newman introduces the religious matters that were at issue in Oxford in his time with a discussion about a chapel as Reding and his friend William Sheffield encounter a Mr. Bateman as they walk down High Street in Oxford on their way to Oxley:

He proceeded to give the history of the chapel—all it had been, all it might have been, all it was not, all it was to be.

"It is to be a real specimen of a Catholic Chapel," he said; "we mean to make the attempt of getting the Bishop to dedicate it to the Royal Martyr—why should not we have our St. Charles as well as the Romanists?—and it will be quite sweet to hear the vesper-bell tolling over the sullen moor every evening, in all weathers, and amid all the changes and chances of this mortal life."

Sheffield asked what congregation they expected to collect at that hour.

"That's a low view," answered Bateman; "it does not signify at all. In real Catholic churches the number of the congregation is nothing to the purpose; service is for those who come, not for those who stay away."

"Well," said Sheffield, "I understand what that means when a Roman Catholic says it; for a priest is supposed to offer sacrifice, which he can do without a congregation as well as with one. And, again, Catholic chapels often stand over the bodies of martyrs, or on some place of miracle, as a record; but our service is 'Common Prayer,' and how can you have that without a congregation?"

Bateman replied that, even if members of the University did not drop in, which he expected, at least the bell would be a memento far and near.

"Ah, I see," retorted Sheffield, "the use will be the reverse of what you said just now; it is not for those that come, but for those who stay away. The congregation is outside, not inside; it's an outside concern. I once saw a tall church-tower—so it appeared from the road; but on the sides you saw it was but a thin wall, made to look like a tower, in order to give the church an imposing effect. Do run up such a bit of a wall, and put the bell in it."

"There's another reason," answered Bateman, "for restoring the chapel, quite independent of the service. It has been a chapel from time immemorial, and was consecrated by our Catholic forefathers."

Sheffield argued that this would be as good a reason for keeping up the Mass as for keeping up the chapel.

"We do keep up the Mass," said Bateman; "we offer our Mass every Sunday, according to the rite of the English Cyprian, as honest Peter Heylin calls him; what would you have more?"

Whether Sheffield understood this or no, at least it was beyond Charles. Was the Common Prayer the English Mass, or the Communion-service, or the Litany, or the sermon, or any part of these? or were Bateman's words really a confession that there were clergymen who actually said the Popish Mass once a week? Bateman's precise meaning, however, is lost to posterity; for they had by this time arrived at the door of the chapel. It had once been the chapel of an almshouse; a small farm-house stood near; but, for population, it was plain no "church accommodation was wanted". Before entering, Charles hung back, and whispered to his friend that he did not know Bateman. An introduction, in consequence, took place. "Reding of St. Saviour's—Bateman of Nun's Hall;" after which ceremony, in place of holy water, they managed to enter the chapel in company.

Thus, it's clear that Newman had made a good study of English literature; he knew how to use dialogue to depict character and the conflicts and quandaries faced by the characters in his story. The confusions about faith and worship in the Church of England will continue in Reding's heart and conscience. He begins to have doubts about the 39 Articles of the Church of England; he discusses these doubts with other Anglicans, High Church and Low; he talks to one Catholic convert; he has to tell his family about these difficulties, and once he has decided to become a Catholic Reding endures a succession of arguments against taking such a step. Finally, he comes into a Catholic church--the Passionist parish in London (a Passionist, Blessed Dominic Barberi, received Newman into the Catholic Church)--and presents himself for admission to the Church:

Though Reding had continued standing, no one would have noticed him; but he saw the time was come for him to kneel, and accordingly he moved into a corner seat on the bench nearest him. He had hardly done so, when a procession with lights passed from the sacristy to the altar; something went on which he did not understand, and then suddenly began what, by the Miserere and Ora pro nobis, he perceived to be a litany; a hymn followed. Reding thought he never had been present at worship before, so absorbed was the attention, so intense was the devotion of the congregation. What particularly struck him was, that whereas in the Church of England the clergyman or the organ was everything and the people nothing, except so far as the clerk is their representative, here it was just reversed. The priest hardly spoke, or at least audibly; but the whole congregation was as though one vast instrument or Panharmonicon, moving all together, and what was most remarkable, as if self-moved. They did not seem to require any one to prompt or direct them, though in the Litany the choir took the alternate parts. The words were Latin, but every one seemed to understand them thoroughly, and to be offering up his prayers to the Blessed Trinity, and the Incarnate Saviour, and the great Mother of God, and the glorified Saints, with hearts full in proportion to the energy of the sounds they uttered. There was a little boy near him, and a poor woman, singing at the pitch of their voices. There was no mistaking it; Reding said to himself, "This is a popular religion". He looked round at the building; it was, as we have said, very plain, and bore the marks of being unfinished; but the Living Temple which was manifested in it needed no curious carving or rich marble to complete it, "for the glory of God had enlightened it, and the Lamb was the lamp thereof". "How wonderful," said Charles to himself, "that people call this worship formal and external; it seems to possess all classes, young and old, polished and vulgar, men and women indiscriminately; it is the working of one Spirit in all, making many one."

While he was thus thinking, a change came over the worship. A priest, or at least an assistant, had mounted for a moment above the altar, and removed a chalice or vessel which stood there; he could not see distinctly. A cloud of incense was rising on high; the people suddenly all bowed low; what could it mean? the truth flashed on him, fearfully yet sweetly; it was the Blessed Sacrament—it was the Lord Incarnate who was on the altar, who had come to visit and to bless His people. It was the Great Presence, which makes a Catholic Church different from every other place in the world; which makes it, as no other place can be, holy. The Breviary offices were by this time not unknown to Reding; and as he threw himself on the pavement, in sudden self-abasement and joy, some words of those great Antiphons came into his mouth, from which Willis had formerly quoted: "O Adonai, et Dux domûs Israel, qui Moysi in rubo apparuisti; O Emmanuel, Exspectatio Gentium et Salvator earum, veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster".

More about Newman and Literature, including his other literary works, on Monday. Anna Mitchell and I will continue this discussion of Newman and Literature in our Santo Subito! series on the Son Rise Morning Show Monday, August 26 at 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern!

St. Augustine of Canterbury and Ecumenical Gifts

St. Augustine of Canterbury's Grave in the 

Ruins of the Abbey Church of his Monastery

Image Credit

Since today is the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury, it seems appropriate to post some comments on the gifts given to the Anglican Archbishops of Canterbury by Pope Paul VI and Pope Francis, noted in this article in The Catholic Herald. When Michael Ramsey visited Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1966, Pope Paul gave him a gift of a ring from his own finger:

Many Anglo-Catholics inferred that the ring was the Pope’s way of tacitly repudiating Pope Leo XIII’s papal bull Apostolicae Curae, which declared Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void”. Whatever Paul VI meant by it, it was a dramatic gesture of the kind of recognition of Christian brotherhood that was described by Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, from 1964. The two men issued a common declaration, and an official Anglican-Catholic dialogue was born. At a celebration in Rome in 2016 to mark the 50th anniversary of the event, Pope Francis gave Archbishop Justin Welby a replica of the crozier of St Gregory the Great, who commissioned Augustine, later the first Archbishop of Canterbury, to re-Christianise Britain in 595.

Gift-giving has become expected. But ecumenism between Catholics and Anglicans has not succeeded in the way Ramsey and his generation originally imagined.

According to this article, Ramsey was quite moved by the gesture and wore the ring for the rest of his life. Subsequent Archbishops of Canterbury have worn the ring when meeting with the Pope. The article includes a picture of the ring.

The author of The Catholic Herald article is a former Episcopalian priest, Andrew Petiprin. He cites a comment that Ramsey made about Newman that surprised me:

For those still committed to the success of dialogue in bringing about corporate reconciliation, however, individual defections from the Anglican Communion to the Catholic Church are deemed unfortunate. By the end of his life, Ramsey went so far as to tell American seminarians about the “final tragedy” of John Henry Newman’s conversion in 1845. He regarded Newman as having made a selfish, pre-ecumenical mistake in leaving behind the English Church of his baptism and ordination. Strangely, Ramsey imagined the way for Newman to solve the dilemma of not feeling Catholic enough was to double down on being more Anglican. “He had not quite got historic Anglicanism into his bones,” he said, “and he came to it rather as one who is fulfilling deep personal needs of his own.”

As I've been preparing for my Newman presentation at the Eighth Day Institute's Florovsky-Newman week the first week of June, I'd reread Henry Cardinal Manning's opinion of Newman, which flatly contradicts Ramsey:

"I see much danger of an English Catholicism of which Newman is the highest type. It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church." (Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 609).

Newman became a Catholic, not for some selfish reason, but because he believed the Catholic Church was the one, true fold of Christ, the Church Jesus had established. Like St. Augustine of Canterbury, he was a Catholic because, as Andrew Petiprin's book title says, Truth Matters.

St. Augustine of Canterbury, pray for us!

Newman and Converts and the Church

Matt Swaim--who also works for the Coming Home Network--and I will talk about Blessed John Henry Newman and conversion on the Son Rise Morning Show at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern DST/6:50 a.m. Central DST. All last week we prayed at the daily Masses of the Octave of Easter for those who joined the Church at the Easter Vigil, particularly through Baptism. According to CRUX, publishing a story by the Catholic News Service:

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Tens of thousands of new Catholics are expected to join the Catholic Church at Easter Vigil liturgies in parishes throughout the United States the night of April 20.

While a precise number was not available, reports from 89 U.S. Latin-rite dioceses, roughly half the total number, indicate that their dioceses alone will account for about 37,000 Catholics joining the Church.

As the article states, many of those who became Catholic on Saturday, April 20, came through a parish Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. They were prepared for the Rites of Initiation: Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion, through study, prayer, reflection, questions and answers, practices and rehearsals, and the final decision to join the Catholic Church, either leaving another faith community or coming to the Sacraments for the first time.

But how has the Church or the individual parish been prepared to receive them? Welcome them beyond a "recruiting" process, and help them become part of the parish? The process of initiation can't end at the Easter Vigil.

That was a concern Newman certainly had about the individuals and groups of Anglican converts coming to the Catholic Church in the 1840's and later. The converts had to be prepared for the Church, but he also thought the Church needed to be prepared for them: how to welcome them; how to integrate them; how to make use of their education and abilities. As he commented:  “There are those who only wish to convert, and then leave the poor converts to shift for themselves, as far as knowledge of their religion goes. The other end which is so important, is what I call levelling up." He did not want failed conversions: “I am afraid to make hasty converts of educated men lest they should not have counted the cost & should have difficulties after they have entered the Church . . . . ” 

It is true that Newman thought the Catholic Church in England needed to focus on making sure the Catholics she had were well formed and educated, but he also worked with hundreds of prospective converts, helping them prepare for life in the Catholic Church, to understand what they faced with their families and friends, etc. But when he knew that they believed that the Catholic Church was the one, true Church that Jesus had founded, he insisted that they should become Catholics as soon as possible and he pointed to the example of himself and others who may suffered loss and trouble in temporal matters, but had received great spiritual consolation and comfort in knowing they were in the "one fold of Christ." 

Father Stanley Jaki and Peter Wilcox have written about the letters Newman sent to prospective converts and those who had joined the Church, advising them, consoling them, urging them to be patient, forbearing, and brave.

The Anglican Ordinariate, which will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the publication of Anglicanorum Coetibus this November 4th, provides a structure for groups of Anglicans coming into the Catholic Church. The Pastoral Provision which Pope John Paul II arranged in 1980 still assists individual Anglicans and Episcopalians. The Coming Home Network--perhaps I should interview Matt!--reaches out to all Protestant pastors and their families to help them in their journeys to the Catholic Church. For most of the men, women and children who became Catholic at the Easter Vigil on April 20, however, it will be up to the parishes they joined to help them progress in their love of Jesus and His Church.

Preview: Blessed John Henry Newman and Conversion

Since we are still in the Easter Season--Easter is not just a day, it is a Liturgical Season lasting 50 days until Pentecost--Anna Mitchell and I thought the next appropriate topic to discuss in our Newman series would be conversion. By that we mean specifically becoming a Catholic Christian. Many people have joined the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil: either being initiated as a Christian, receiving Baptism, Confirmation, and First Holy Communion in one night; or being confirmed and receiving their First Holy Communion (because they'd already been baptized). So Matt Swaim and I will talk about Newman and Conversion on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, April 29 at the usual time: about 7:50 a.m. Eastern DST/6:50 a.m. Central DST. Listen live here.

That Newman was a convert to Catholicism is well-known: his feast day on October 9 celebrates his conversion.

He also instructed and helped prospective converts from the Church of England to become Catholic, preparing them for the challenges they'd face and working with the Church to be prepared for a special group of Anglican ministers and families, some of them representing the power of the English Establishment. They were educated people, bringing talents and leadership skills the Church should be aware of and make use of.

The Provost of the Birmingham Oratory, Father Julian Large, wrote in November 2018 about how converts to Catholicism sometimes feel underappreciated and reminded them that Blessed John Henry Newman had to work through those feelings too:

Latecomers to the Faith who are made to feel that their convert status makes them second class citizens in the eyes of some of those who make a profession out of religious commentary can take comfort in the knowledge that Blessed John Henry experienced all of this before them. The sincerity of Newman’s conversion is beyond question to anyone of good faith. As an Anglican he had increased in his sympathy for doctrines such as Transubstantiation and the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, having considered them individually in the light of their antiquity and of their compatibility with Holy Scripture. When he made his profession of Faith in front of Father Dominic Barberi, however, he was declaring that from now on he would embrace these truths, and every other Catholic doctrine, on the grounds that they were taught by Christ’s Church. He was assenting to his firm belief that the Catholic Church was founded by Our Lord as the pillar and the foundation of saving truth, with divinely invested authority to teach on faith and morals. He brought himself to his knees before an authority which he firmly believed to be at the service of Truth, but he also fell to his knees in the knowledge that in the Church on earth that divinely invested authority is always liable to be abused by fallen men who are prone to sin, and whose intellects are often too dim to appreciate the truths they have been commissioned to teach. But he accepted this. He accepted it because he was willing to suffer for and with the Church, because he loved Her as the Mystical Body of Christ on earth, and He believed Her to be true. Newman is an example to all of us of patience and genuine piety. Suffering with and for the Church is one of the ways we show our love for Christ, and one of the signs that our faith is alive.

For those of us who are converts to the Faith, Newman shows us how to be good converts. We must be docile, and obedient to lawful authority. But we should also be dogged in our pursuit of all truth, and we must be willing to suffer for our insistence on it. The religious submission of mind and will which we owe to the teaching authority of the Church never obliges us to submit ourselves to humbug, bluster and spin, but only to Catholic Truth in its soul-saving fullness.

Newman's correspondence with prospective and neophyte converts would fill "six to seven hundred pages" according to the late Father Stanley Jaki.  Fr. Peter Willi wrote an article for the International Centre of Newman Friends on "Newman as a Convert and Counsellor of Converts" in which he describes some of the advice Newman offered those thinking about becoming Catholic:

 

Newman often talks about this absolutely necessary condition. “Be convinced in your reason that the Catholic Church is a teacher sent to you from God, and it is enough. I do not wish you to join her, till you are. If you are half convinced, pray for a full conviction, and wait till you have it. It is better indeed to come quickly, but better slowly than carelessly….”[40]

Nobody should join the Roman Catholic Church while unable to accept the fullness of her doctrine. Whoever has not reached the personal certainty that the Roman Catholic Church contains the fulness of truth, should remain in his own ecclesial communion. This applied to Newman’s highly appreciated and saintly friend John Keble.[41] Although on the threshold of the Roman Catholic Church, he died with a good conscience, even though, objectively, it was erroneous. Throughout his life he had sincerely and honestly searched for the truth and had lived according to his insight. He accepted practically all of the Catholic doctrines, but never recognized the necessity of unity with the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Saint Peter. Therefore his conscience obliged him to remain in the Anglican Communion.

The beauty of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church and the fact that someone is drawn to it, are not, for example, reasons sufficient to justify the step of conversion. It is, however, possible for someone to hear the call to become a Roman Catholic, and to gain the certainty that the Roman Church is the true Church, while participating in her liturgy.

On the way to conversion the would-be convert accumulates one argument after another in favour of entering the Catholic Church and accepting her doctrine. It may also happen that, without any initiative on his/her part, the Holy Spirit awakens motives and insights in the future convert which point to conversion. The reasons are cumulative and mutually supportive, urging the free will towards conversion. The will is urged to act not only by reason, but also by conscience. According to Newman, religious processes and decisions necessarily include the action of reason and in no way should they exclude it. On the other hand, such processes and decisions should not be limited to reason alone.

My experience here in the United States has been that converts are sought and welcomed. The Diocese of Wichita has a strong RCIA program (of course it varies from parish to parish) and highlights the celebrations of the Rite of Election each Lent and publishes the list of those becoming Catholic in the diocesan newspaper after the Easter Vigil too--by parish! Some of my best friends are converts. With the attention given to converts by the Coming Home Network and all the conversion stories that are published (for example), perhaps it's different here in the USA.

 

More on Monday about how Newman thought the Church should be prepared for converts and how Pope Benedict XVI's Anglicanorum Coetibus in some ways fulfilled his hopes.

Christmas and Easter Meet in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"

John M. Grondelski writes some "Catholic Thoughts on A Christmas Carol" for Crisis Magazine, highlighting the religious lessons to be learned from Dickens' classic Christmas ghost story:

Justice and Mercy Meet. Marley suffers because of the man he made himself into: “I wear the chain I forged in life” and now fetters him eternally. The same fate threatens Scrooge, whose chain was “as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas Eves ago.” But that turn of justice is not something external, imposed by an angry God: it is rather that we reap what we have sown. The women justify theft of Scrooge’s deathbed curtains by his life: “Every person has a right to take care of themselves. He always did.” If he took care of himself, why can’t she? And if neglect breeds ignorance, despair, and death, then Tiny Tim’s fate is not imposed but ineluctable: “If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.” But if they are changed, if “courses be departed from,” things can be different. God lets us have what we want: we need to be sure it’s indeedreally what we want.

Kids love the “spirits” and thrills of A Christmas Carol, a story with an easily dislikable villain and a happy ending, a blend of Christmas and Halloween. One can reduce the Carol to that cartoon level. But there’s a greater richness in the story where, through the intervention of the supernatural, a man takes stock of himself and rises a new creature. It that sense, it’s a blend of Christmas and Easter.

G.K. Chesterton also noted the theme of "a man takes stock of himself and rises a new creature" in his study of Dickens, in which he notes that each of us, as much as Scrooge, need to undergo that process, that conversion:

And as with his backgrounds of gloom, so with his backgrounds of good-will, in such tales as "The Christmas Carol." The tone of the tale is kept throughout in a happy monotony, though the tale is everywhere irregular and in some places weak. It has the same kind of artistic unity that belongs to a dream. A dream may begin with the end of the world and end with a tea-party; but either the end of the world will em as trivial as a tea-party or that tea-party will be as terrible as the day of doom. The incidents change wildly; the story scarcely changes at all. "The Christmas Carol" is a kind of philanthropic dream, an enjoyable nightmare, in which the scenes shift bewilderingly and seem as miscellaneous as the pictures in a scrap-book, but in which there is one constant state of the soul, a state of rowdy benediction and a hunger for human faces. The beginning is bout a winter day and a miser; yet the beginning is in no way bleak. The author starts with a kind of happy howl; he bangs on our door like a drunken carol singer; his style is festive and popular; he compares the snow and hail to philanthropists who "come down handsomely;" he compares the fog to unlimited beer. Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any more than he is at the end. There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all his life. The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no the visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future, they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly called High Spirits. They are impelled and sustained by a quality which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently lived is as normal and attainable as sleep, positive, passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home; and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells. It is lyric and exclamatory, from the first exclamatory words of it. It is strictly a Christmas carol.

St. Philip Howard, Martyr in Chains

The story of St. Philip Howard exemplifies both conversion and martyrdom, as this site demonstrates:

Queen Elizabeth I became aware of the change in Philip, particularly noting his reconciliation with Anne, so when Anne was reported to her as a recusant she seized the opportunity and had her arrested. Their first child, a daughter, was born while she was in the custody of Sir Thomas Shirley at Wiston in Sussex. Philip had her baptised in the Protestant church. But nevertheless he was very near to his great decision, which eventually he came to at Arundel Castle in 1584. He was reconciled to the Church by the Jesuit Father William Weston.

This was no token conversion. It meant a complete change of life for Philip. He had a priest in his Charterhouse home in London, so that he could have daily Mass. Prayer became a regular part of his life. He continued to attend the Lords and the Court, but avoided attending Church services on various pretexts. The great question now in his mind was; how could he best serve the Catholic cause? He wrote to Cardinal Allen at Douai asking his advice. The letter was intercepted, and the Queen’s Council, using a priest in their pay, sent a bogus reply recommending him to leave England. Although Father Weston and all his friends had been against it, Philip accepted what he thought was Allen’s advice, and secretly took ship for the Continent. But of course his movements were known to the Council, and off the coast he was boarded by a warship and brought back under arrest.

Being held in the Tower of London at Queen Elizabeth's pleasure, Howard was only 28 years old. He would never leave the Tower, not even for a beheading on Tower Green, for he was accused of supporting the Spanish Armada in 1588. Although condemned to death, that execution was never scheduled:

Philip was condemned unanimously and was returned to the Tower. He was never to know whether the sentence would be carried out. He intensified his hours of prayer and fasting, and occupied himself in writing and translating books of piety. For a time he was supported as before by Father Southwell’s letters, until he too was apprehended and sent to the Tower. The two never met, although Philip’s dog did find his way to Southwell’s cell.

By the time Robert Southwell was executed at Tyburn, Philip was dying by degrees, from the privations of his imprisonment. He appealed again to the Queen to allow him to see his wife and son. The Queen replied: if Philip would go but once to their church, not only would she grant his request, but he would be restored to his estates and honours with as much favour as she could show. Philip once more sadly declined the offer. Nothing could show more clearly that, as Robert Southwell had written, “your cause, by whatever name it may be disfigured, by whatever colour deformed in the eyes of men, is religion.”

The last night of his life was spent mainly in prayer; he died on Sunday 19th October 1595 at noon. He was thirty eight. The immediate cause of death was most probably dysentery, though rumours of poison were current at the time. They buried him in his father’s grave in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower. It was nearly thirty years before his widow could get his body removed to her home at West Horsley, and then to Arundel, to be laid in the family vault, the Fitzalan Chapel.

St. Philip Howard is one of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales, canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970.

His motto from the wall of his cell in the Tower: “Quanto plus afflictionis pro Christo in saeculo, tanto plus gloriae cum Christo in futuro.”

“The more affliction we endure for Christ in this world, the more glory we shall obtain with Christ in the next.”

Religion and Secularism in England

One of my favorite authors, Father Aidan Nichols OP, writes about secularism and religion in England for the Imaginative Conservative: he outlines two possible ways to deal with the diversity of religion and secularism (separate "public spaces" and assimilation) and then proposes a third way, which recalls his book The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England:

The third response is recovery of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as what is most foundationally form-giving in English society and culture, while allowing that, on grounds of conscience, there are individuals and groups who cannot make that tradition fully their own. Freedom of conscience can and should be balanced against the interests of a particular historic society as a whole. What can be said in favour of this option?

A nation, like a civilization, needs a shared vision of reality, at any rate in fair degree. It is unclear that a great civilization can be formed except on the ground of metaphysical or religious principle. There is no other obvious way in which to secure the foundations of ethics, or to inspire a high artistic culture, or to animate institutions that will be seedbeds of the virtues. In the case of England, whose emergence as a nation coincides with its conversion, this can only be Christianity, with its Judaic background, and more especially, I unfashionably suggest, the “New Israel” of the Catholic Church.

The thousand years of Catholic Christianity that preceded the Reformation settlement are responsible for the origins of the English literary imagination, for the principles of the common law, for the concept of a covenanted people under God that permeates the induction of the sovereign, and for the range of virtues that have been commended, and sometimes practised, in English society and culture. In the context of an international Church, this entailed a measured trans-nationalism.

When the medieval idea of Christendom weakened, the early modern nation-state tried more vigorously to instrumentalize the Church, politicizing the divine rather than—by exposure to a transcendent Good—divinizing the polis. Of course the post-Reformation history of this country cannot be airbrushed out. Consonant with its presence—along with a promise to uphold the Catholic faith—in the coronation of the monarch, it has left its own legacy of moral exemplars and inspirational literary texts, as well as institutions involved in education and pastoral care. Despite the ecclesial differences, which at their worst led to the vilification of the older Church, much of this Anglican development built on foundations already laid. . . .

. . . England remains a Christian state, albeit a decayed example of the genre. I advert for the third time to the coronation ritual, since it is the clearest, though by no means the only, manifestation of the continuing sacrality of the public order. In this connection, the retention by the Church of England of its established status is an essential requirement if the nation as a whole is to retain narrative continuity with its own origins, which are found in the baptismal covenant reflected in the laws of the Anglo-Saxon kings.

The establishment of the Church of England at law is far from rendering superfluous the public role of the English Catholic Church. The capacity of the sacerdotium to influence the regnum was gravely weakened by the mid-16th century break with Rome, for this rendered official English Christianity Erastian, blunting its cutting edge. “No Popery”—anti-Catholicism, whether popular or sophisticated—drew its force from a disturbed conscience—one can sense its discomfort in the ambivalence of Shakespeare’s plays. The recusant community witnessed to something once well-known to the English people: The transnational reality of Christendom in the Catholic Church centered on Peter’s chair, and the consequent capacity of a wider communion to offset narrowness of temper, or distortion of aim. Protestant Nonconformity added its own protest against, not an organic relation between polity and ecclesia, but the effective identification of the two.

Read the rest there.

Chesterton on Scrooge's Conversion--and Ours

As Chesterton points out, A Christmas Carol is a conversion story. The first ghost, Jacob Marley, comes to save Ebenezer Scrooge from a fate like his, loaded in chains, unable to do what he should have done while alive:

Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.

"Mercy!'' he said." Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?''

"Man of the worldly mind!'' replied the Ghost, "do you believe in me or not?''

"I do,'' said Scrooge. "I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?''

"It is required of every man,'' the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world -- oh, woe is me! -- and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!''

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain, and wrung its shadowy hands.

"You are fettered,'' said Scrooge, trembling. ``Tell me why?''

"I wear the chain I forged in life,'' replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?''

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Or would you know,'' pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!''

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing.

"Jacob,'' he said, imploringly. "Old Jacob Marley, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob.''

"I have none to give,'' the Ghost replied. "It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A very little more, is all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked beyond our counting-house -- mark me! -- in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me!''

After Scrooge complains that Marley might have come sooner if he knew Scrooge was in trouble:

The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Ward would have been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.

"Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,'' cried the phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunities misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!''

"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,'' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

"Business!'' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!''

It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.

"At this time of the rolling year,'' the spectre said, "I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!''

And that's the purpose of the next three Spirits, to get Scrooge to look up, visit the poor, see the want and need around him, and even in himself. But he also sees the joy and love around him and in himself. Chesterton makes the point that Scrooge isn't all bad--but that we aren't all good either. We need conversion as much as Scrooge: we need to begin to apply this warning to ourselves:

Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any more than he is at the end. There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all his life. The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no the visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future, they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly called High Spirits. They are impelled and sustained by a quality which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently lived is as normal and attainable as sleep, positive, passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home; and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells. It is lyric and exclamatory, from the first exclamatory words of it. It is strictly a Christmas carol.

A Final Reminder: the Greater Wichita local chapter of the American Chesterton Society will host A Chesterton Christmas at Eighth Day Books tonight from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Readings, carols, refreshments, gift ideas, and other Christmas preparations will be provided--and a visit, not by St. Nick, Jacob Marley or three other Spirits, but of G.K. Chesterton!

Father and Son: the Wattson's

The father of the founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, whose cause for canonization has begun, was an Anglo-Catholic Tractarian, according to this article:

Grace works in strange ways. The path to sainthood of Fr. Paul Wattson, whose cause for beatification was endorsed by the U.S. Conference of Catholics Bishops last week, may have begun with a practical joke one fateful day in 1844.

On that day Wattson’s father, Joseph Wattson, was kicked out of an Anglican seminary for joking that he was secretly a Jesuit.

The General Theological Seminary in New York City was cracking down on anything that smacked of “Popery,” including the reading of the extremely popular tracts of John Henry Newman, which called for a return to the more liturgical traditions of the past (sic).

When the elder Wattson suggested in jest that he was perhaps a “Jesuit in disguise,” he was expelled and, his career options now limited, consigned to life as a poor rural preacher.

According to Catholicism.org, Wattson’s father was fond of telling the story to his sons. Perhaps it instilled a desire for reconciliation within his son, because throughout his life, Father Wattson, born Lewis Thomas Wattson in 1863, never wavered from his desire to join reunite the Episcopal and Anglican Church to the Catholic Church of Rome.

The Catholicism.org article provides more detail about the crisis in the Anglican seminary brought about by the Tracts for the Times:

The “General” — as the seminary was known — was far too Protestant to welcome the Catholic nature of the tracts; they were forbidden literature to the students. Of course, they were smuggled into the place and eagerly read and discussed. Rumor had it that there were a number of “Jesuits in disguise” who had infiltrated the school and were subverting the students with the Popish literature. Young Joseph Wattson, who was a bit of a practical joker, led one of the more rabidly anti-Catholic seminarians to believe that he (Wattson) just might be one of those infiltrators. The matter was reported to the Dean and poor Wattson and another student were expelled, even though they were exonerated of being “secret Jesuits.” The Oxford tracts were causing such a stir in Anglican circles, that any hint of “Romish tendencies” put the seminarian on the suspect list. Not surprisingly, this incident haunted Joseph Wattson for the greater part of his ministerial career with the Anglicans, and the only pastoral positions he was able to find were in poverty-stricken areas.

On the other hand, the fate of some of his colleagues at the “General” who did “go to Rome” was anything but prejudicial. Edgar P. Wadhams, for example, sometime after his ordination and priestly ministry, became the founding bishop of Ogdensburg, New York, and Clarence E. Walworth befriended Father Isaac Hecker and became one of the original fathers of the Paulists, an order founded by Father Hecker after he was expelled from the Redemptorists. James A. McMaster, another Oxford convert, entered the Redemptorists, but concluded that he did not have a vocation to the religious life. Instead he became an outstanding figure in Catholic journalism, founding the New York Freeman’s Journal, one of the important Catholic American newspapers of the time. One cannot help but wonder what would have happened had the elder Wattson “poped” at the time of his expulsion from the seminary.

While the father did not "pope", the son did, eventually, as clergyman Paul Wattson sought to create more "Catholic" structures in the Episcopalian Church, and began to argue for corporate reunion of the Church of England with the Catholic Church. It's quite a story!

The Married Martyr: St. Philip Howard

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops features St. Philip Howard on their website about marriage, citing his conversion and return to his wife as crucial:

In 1970, St. Philip Howard was named by Pope Paul VI one of the “Forty Martyrs of Wales and England.” Yet as with many martyrs, St. Philip’s early life was little indication of the supreme honor he would one day receive, dying for the sake of Christ.

Philip Howard was born in 1557 in an England that was still reeling from King Henry VIII’s establishment of the Church of England. During Philip’s childhood, “Bloody” Queen Mary was on the throne, a Catholic ruler who rejected the Church of England. Accordingly, Philip was baptized as a Catholic by the archbishop of York. He later pursued his education at Cambridge.

However, times were soon to change. Queen Elizabeth I succeeded Queen Mary, and the country once again became Protestant; more than that, Catholicism was strictly forbidden. As with so many Englishmen at the time, Philip’s father took the family with him back into the Church of England. Change was also happening in Philip’s home: his father remarried a woman with three daughters. At the young age of 14, St. Philip was given in marriage to one of these daughters, Anne; his other two brothers married the other two daughters.

St. Philip’s early years as a husband were none too pious. Climbing the career ladder was forefront in his mind, while family and faith fell by the wayside. His young wife, Anne, stayed admirably devoted to her inattentive and often moody husband, even as he spent more and more time at the Queen’s court, seeking to build his prestige and affluence. And yet it was here at Court that the seeds were sown for Philip’s later years of discipleship.

Read the rest there. The post includes this prayer:

St. Philip Howard, husband and martyr, pray for those who are persecuted because of their faith in Jesus and their love of His Church. Give strength especially to those husbands and wives who are separated from each other under difficult circumstances. Pray in a particular way for the faithful of England, that they may stay rooted in the love of Christ.

St. Philip Howard, pray for us!

October 8, 1845, A Rainy Night in Littlemore

Blessed John Henry Newman wrote many letters on October 8, 1845, preparing them to post AFTER he had met with Father Dominic Barberi, Passionist for the purposes of becoming a Catholic. Some were to people who would be happy at the news--some definitely not!

He wrote to:

Edward Badeley (1852 convert)
Mrs. J.W. Bowden
R.W. Church
F.W. Faber (later, Father Faber of the London Oratory)
Mrs. William Froude
Miss M.R. Giberne
H.E. Manning (later Henry Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster)
Mrs. John Mozley (his sister Jemima)
E.B. Pusey
Charles Russell
M. Watts Russell
Isaac Williams
R. F. Wilson
Mrs. Wood
H.A. Woodgate

It was a dark and stormy night. Father Barberi rode to Littlemore from Aston Hall near Stone in Staffordshire (about 125 miles?) in a covered coach and presented himself at Newman's College in Littlemore soaked and exhausted. Warming himself by the fire, he was stunned when John Henry Newman knelt before him and asked to be received into the Catholic Church. Newman started his general confession that night, finished up the next morning and was received into the Catholic Church (baptized conditionally)--he received his first Holy Communion on October 10 there at Littlemore. Father Barberi had received John Dobree Dalgairns as a Catholic on September 29 and suggested that he should visit Newman again (he had previously in June of 1844) before he left for Belgium. Newman took Barberi's intent to visit a sign that it was time to act and began preparing for his general confession on October 5.

The International Centre for Newman Friends has a great new tradition (!) of an evening walk from Oxford to Littlemore to remember the night Newman asked Barberi to hear his confession:

7:45 pm         Short meditation at St. Aloysius, The Oratory, 25 Woodstock Road

Walk to Littlemore, stopping at places linked to Blessed John Henry Newman and Blessed Dominic Barberi.

9:30 pm         Candle Light Procession from 89, Rose Hill

10:00 pm        Holy Hour with Benediction at the church of Blessed Dominic Barberi. Priests will hear confessions during the Holy Hour.

 Procession to The College – Thanksgiving in Newman’s chapel

You can join at any part of the event.

Light refreshments will be provided afterwards. Before the walk you can leave your car in the car park of Blessed Dominic Barberi Church and take one of the busses (3, 16) from Littlemore to town.

A Reminder and A Preview

Just a reminder that my series on Blessed John Henry Newman begins tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the Spiritual Life Center in Wichita, Kansas. I'll be talking about Newman and Conversion:

• What is conversion?
• Newman's Conversion(s)
• Newman and His Converts: advice and guidance
• Newman and Conversion Today

And a preview: I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show Thursday morning, October 9, Newman's memorial in the dioceses of England and Wales. We'll discuss some of the same insights Newman offered prospective converts in the nineteenth century. I'm scheduled for 7:45 a.m. Eastern time/6:45 a.m. Central--the last segment on the EWTN portion of the show.

Next Week at Wichita's Spiritual Life Center

Just a reminder that I'll be presenting the first of two topics on Blessed John Henry Newman next Tuesday evening at the Spiritual Life Center in Wichita, Kansas. On Tuesday, October 7, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m., I'll be discussing "Newman and Conversion".

While preparing for these classes--the second topic is Conscience--I found the perfect quotation from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (before he became Pope Benedict XVI) that demonstrates the connection between the two topics (quoted on the flyer):

Newman had become a convert as a man of conscience; it was his conscience that led him out of the old ties and securities into the world of Catholicism, which was difficult and strange for him. But this way of conscience is everything except a way of self-sufficient subjectivity: it is a way of obedience to objective truth.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger made this crucial comment in a presentation at a symposium sponsored by the International Centre of Newman Friends in the centenary year of Newman's death (1890-1990). He noted that Newman's teaching on conscience was so crucial to him after the Second World War and the fall of Hitler and the Nazi party: 

We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual. One of its leaders had said: "I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler". The appalling devastation of humanity that followed was before our eyes.

The next year, in February 1991, Cardinal Ratzinger spoke to the United States' Catholic Bishops in Dallas, Texas about conscience and authority. Then he pointed out the crucial link between conscience and authority in Newman's thought: the truth.

First, Ratzinger comments--much as Newman did in his own day--on our modern tendency to create opposition between conscience and authority:

For him, conscience stands on the side of subjectivity and is the expression of the freedom of the subject. Authority, on the other hand, appears to him as the constraint on, threat to and even the negation of, freedom. So then we must go deeper to recover a vision in which this kind of opposition does not obtain.

Then Ratzinger highlights Newman's search for truth:

For Newman, the middle term which establishes the connection between authority and subjectivity is truth. I do not hesitate to say that truth is the central thought of Newman's intellectual grappling. Conscience is central for him because truth stands in the middle. To put it differently, the centrality of the concept conscience for Newman, is linked to the prior centrality of the concept truth and can only be understood from this vantage point. 

That's why when Charles Kingsley attacked Newman with the claim that Newman had said that truth did not matter to Catholic priests, Newman had to respond so seriously and comprehensively to this falsehood. For someone to whom truth meant everything to be accused of condoning dishonestly was utterly unacceptable. When Kingsley would not retract his statement, Newman answered with his Apologia pro Vita Sua which truly made Kingsley's comment so patently absurd that Newman's spiritual autobiography now stands on its own, without the catalyst.

More about the series and information about registration at the Spiritual Life Center is here.