Catholic Emancipation
A Hundred Years of- Catholic Emancipation. By Denis Gwynn. (Longman. 10s. 6d.)
Tim story of the Oxford Movement has been told many times in such a manner as to appeal to learned and devout Church men. It is not too much to say that Mr. Gwynn has dramatized it for all and 'sundry. The great characters who caused the spiritual upheaval live before us and live in an atmosphere whose stimulant quality he has had the skill to reproduce. To say that his book will delight his co-religionistS is not to give him his due. The opponents of the Church, before they finish it, will find themselves in agreement with the words of Macaulay. Thinking of Rome, he wrote to Lord Lansdowne, he hardly knew whether he was more interested in " the extraordinary empire which has perished " " in the still more extraordinary empire which after all the shock which it has sustained is still full of life and of perverted energy."
Catholic emancipation was in no sense brought about by the old Roman Catholic families in England, and neither was it in any sense a popular movement. It came of that mixture of active justice and indulgent contempt which the thoughtful Englishman so often shows to a perfectly harmless opponent. " These few people have a right to their own ideas," John Bull thought, which are, after all, " too absurd to spread " in enlightened days. But religion in any form being a wholly incalculable force, it was from the very seat of enlightenment, from Oxford itself, that the wind of the spirit began to blow. Intensely perturbed by the rising storm, John Henry Newman and Hurrell Froude visited the English College in Rome in 1833. Wiseman, the future Cardinal, was then at the head of it. The spiritual attitude of these two young men who still proclaimed their unshakeable loyalty to the Anglican Church inspired the ambitious priest with the idea that the Roman Church had still a great future in England.
Wiseman's missionary visit to England disturbed the old Catholic families not a little. He stayed in their houses, made himself familiar with their extremely timid point of view, and came away saying that it seemed to him that they had but " just come out of the catacombs " with minds cramped and stiffened by long imprisonment. All hope lay with the new converts, and above all with those great men who, he was astute enough to see, though still kicking against the pricks, were being driven towards Rome. With frank independence of spirit and recognition of his own limitations he warned his co-religionists that to stand in the way of the incoming men of intellectual mark, was to imperil their own true interests. " We are their inferiors," he said. " I have long said to those about me that if the OiEford divines entered the Church we must be ready to fall into the shade, and to take up our position in the background. I will willingly yield to theni place'and honour, if God's good service require it."
The harvest of conversions - which followed Newman's reception allayed the fears of the most cautious, once more however to be roused, by the Times when Wiseman was made a Cardinal, and the English hierarchy, restored by Papal decree. A newspaper outburst of indignation, however, soon died down, and the new Catholics, reinforced by Manning, congratulated themselves that they were once more in smooth waters. Trouble, however, soon arose within their own ranks. Mr. Gwynn draws a masterly picture of this struggle of giants, all working for the same ends, all intolerant of each other's methods. Newman's efforts, the efforts of a great master of English, a poet, and a saint, to found a Catholic university, to confound the Victorian agnostics, by the aid of an intellectual Catholic journal, did not succeed, but his failures produced his " Apologia " which took the thoughtful world by storm. Manning made an impression upon the English working-class such as no divine had made before or since. Single-handed he settled a strike almost as dangerous as the one the country weathered two years ago, making what became known as " The Cardinal's Peace." His politics he declared could be summed up in one sentence :
" I have compassion on the multitude because they have nothing to eat." His successor, Cardinal Vaughan, was a man of different stature, and was aware of it. Mr. Gwynn quotes a letter from him expressing his hesitation in accepting the Archbishopric of Westminster which, for unstudied humility, could hardly be surpassed. The end of the story, or, rather, of the first hundred years' instalment, is a matter of statistics ; the Roman Catholic population of England and Wales has grown within the past century from about two hundred thousand to considerably over two millions, partly of course owing to a large Irish and foreign immigra- tion. The last chapter dealing with the rule of Cardinal Bourne is naturally non-critical. It is headed significantly, " The Fusion of Forces."
Previous page
