The hundred years that have elapsed since the restoration of the
English Hierarchy [in 1850] have been a time of slow but uninterrupted
progress for English Catholicism. There have been no spectacular triumphs
and no catastrophic defeats, but step by step the Church has been
gradually recovering her lost position in the life of the nation. And
this is no small achievement when one considers how completely the face of
the world has changed during the last century: how the old European order
and the new liberal order that aspired to take its place have both alike
been swept away by new forces that were hardly perceptible in 1850, so
that Europe itself and the millennial tradition of Western civilization
are now in process of dissolution.
In 1850 English Liberalism, having surmounted the crisis of
Chartism, was settling down to enjoy the fruits of the new order that it
had created. The collapse of the old regime on the Continent in 1848 and
the failure of the revolutionary movements to establish a stable
democratic order had combined to strengthen the prestige of English
institutions and ideals, not only in our own eyes but in those of Europe.
Consequently, it is not surprising that the restoration of the Hierarchy
and the reappearance of Catholicism as a living power in
nineteenth-century England should have been regarded as a challenge to the
spirit of the age, an act of "papal aggression." For the liberal
rationalist and the conservative Protestant alike, the Papacy seemed the
embodiment of those forces of reaction against which the modern world was
in revolt.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 marked the final achievement of the
Victorian compromise in which all the leading elements of English society
found their place. High Tories like the Duke of Wellington, cosmopolitan
pacifists like John Bright, Christian idealists and scientific
rationalists, artisans and capitalists, all came together under the
leadership of the Queen and the Prince Consort to celebrate the triumphs
of science and industry and the dawn of a new era of universal peace and
enlightenment. But there was no place for the English Catholics in this
festival of national and international unity. The unpopularity of the
Oxford conversions combined with that of Irish Nationalism and that of the
Papal Government caused Catholics to be regarded with hostility and
suspicion by Liberals and Conservatives alike. In their attitude to
Catholicism there was nothing to choose between Liberals like Lord John
Russell and Tory extremists of the type of Newdegate and Sir Robert
Inglis.
Yet in spite of all this, the deeper intellectual tendencies of the
age were far less hostile to Catholicism than one would suppose from the
expression of popular opinion in Press and parliament. The great writers
of the Victorian age, such as Carlyle and Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, were
as a rule highly critical of the optimism and selfcomplacency of Victorian
liberalism.
The romantic interest in the Middle Ages which was so
characteristic of the nineteenth century affected moralists and historians
no less than poets and artists, and produced a new appreciation of
medieval Catholicism which did much to destroy the deeply-rooted inherited
prejudices of Protestant England. Here, at last, there was common ground
on which Protestant men of letters like Ruskin, Anglican scholars like
S.R. Maitland, Catholic converts like Kenelm Digby and continental
Catholics like Montalembert and Rio could meet and fraternize. The extent
to which these influences penetrated English culture is to be seen not so
much in its more obvious manifestations--in the Oxford Movement, in Young
England, or in the Pre-Raphaelites--as in a change in the climate of
opinion which made the rabid anti-Catholic prejudices of 1850 a thing of
the past. Never since the Reformation have Catholics played such a large
part in English public life or possessed such close relations with the
leaders of public opinion as in the second half of the nineteenth century
under the social leadership of Manning and the intellectual leadership of
Newman. The conversion of an elder statesman like the first Marquess of
Ripon and the political activity of Catholics like the Duke of Norfolk,
Lord Emly (William Monsell) and Lord Russell of Killowen, show what a
remarkable change had passed over English society during the generation
that followed the restoration of the Hierarchy.
CATHOLICS AND THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE
These changes did not involve any weakening of the Victorian
compromise; on the contrary, they strengthened it by broadening its basis
and liberating it from religious intolerance. In its essentials the
Victorian compromise outlasted the Victorian age and endured until the
first world war destroyed its social and economic foundations. It was this
unbroken period of peaceful continuity which distinguishes the English
development from that of the continent, where the second half of the
nineteenth century had proved no less revolutionary than the earlier
period--where kingdoms and empires were being created and destroyed by war
and revolution and where political liberalism was an anticlerical force
which threatened the very existence of the Church.
But in England, although the leaders of the Catholic
revival--Newman no less than Manning--were fully aware of the dangers of
religious or ideological liberalism, there was never any tendency to
identify religious with political Liberalism. On the contrary, the
political affinities of the Victorian Catholics were Liberal rather than
Conservative, and many of the leading Catholic figures, like Ripon, Acton,
Monsell, and Russell of Killowen, were themselves strong Gladstonian
Liberals. Thus English Catholicism developed in an atmosphere which was
singularly free from political disturbances, and the traditional
continental pattern of ideological conflict between Left and Right,
between anti-Christian revolutionaries and Catholic reactionaries,
remained almost entirely foreign to English life and thought.
Even the catastrophic changes of the last thirty-five years have
not changed this situation so much as one might have expected. During the
present century English Catholicism has continued to develop along the
lines that were laid down in the later nineteenth century. The place of
Catholicism in English society, which had been won for a favored few in
the age of Manning, has gradually been extended to the rank and file of
the Catholic body, so that there is no longer any sphere of national life
from which Catholics are excluded. And this has been achieved without
political conflicts through the gradual leavening of English society by
the independent activity of Catholics in every class and profession.
Yet throughout this period the secularization of English culture
has proceeded almost without a check, so that our position today is no
longer that of a Catholic minority in a Protestant society, but that of a
religious minority in a secular or neo-pagan civilization. We have become
so accustomed to this change that we are apt to forget its tremendous
implications. During the last hundred years English Catholicism has
developed under the protection ofthe Victorian compromise. We have
accepted the Victorian principles of individual freedom, religious
toleration and the limited character of the State as elementary conditions
of existence which hardly needed to be defended. But, in proportion as
civilization becomes secularized, all these principles and rights lose
their political expression in totalitarian States.
THE WORLD DEBATE BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ATHEISM
Today all the basic liberties which were formerly regarded as
essential conditions of modern civilization are everywhere questioned and
often completely abolished, and the new secularist ideologies are
establishing themselves as exclusive dogmatic anti-religions which demand
the total surrender of the mind and will. It is true that this country is
still relatively immune. A feeble gas-jet of freedom still flickers in
the dilapidated Victorian basement. But it is obvious that English
Catholicism cannot rely on the continuance of the conditions which
prevailed during the first century of its restored existence. Sooner or
later it must come up against the same forces that prevail in the rest of
the world. No doubt this will involve great changes in our apologetic,
which, like so much else, is an inheritance from the Victorian age, and
which has been dominated for a century by the long- drawn-out controversy
with Anglicanism. Today these familiar controversies are overshadowed by
the world debate between Christianity and atheism, and we have to deal not
with the validity of Anglican orders but with the existence of the human
soul and the ultimate foundations of the moral order. This is a
tremendous task, since the gulf which separates the world of Newman's
"Loss and Gain" or that of Mrs. Wilfred Ward's novels from the world of
George Orwell's "1984" or Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" is not one that
can be measured in terms of years or generations.
But this change is not necessarily unfavorable to Catholicism.
When the secularists themselves are forced to acknowledge "the mystery of
injustice" and to see modern civilization sliding into the abyss, it is
surely the time for Catholics to make the present age realize the claims
of the Church as the City of God and the one hope of humanity.
A hundred years ago, at the time of the restoration of the
Hierarchy, it was hard to make Englishmen realize the relevance of these
tremendous claims amidst the confused babel of the sects and in face of
the complacent optimism of Victorian Liberalism. For even men who were
not influenced by Protestant prejudices, like Thackeray or Matthew Arnold,
viewed the Church with patronizing tolerance as a picturesque survival
from the dead past.
A CITY OF REFUGE FOR HUMANITY
Today the babel of tongues is becoming silent, and Western man has
lost faith in himself and in his future. But the Church still stands as
she stood fifteen hundred year ago, as the one earthly representative of
an eternal order which survives the fall of empires and civilizations: and
the darker become the prospects of secular culture, the more clearly does
the Church stand out as a city of refuge for humanity. Now the history of
the Church in England during the last century has been a preparation for
this new situation. From the beginning of the modern epoch English
Catholicism has been a minority movement which has had to depend on its
own internal resources and not to look for support to the State and the
traditional social order. The very period which has seen the
secularization of modern culture has also been an age of Catholic rebirth
and restoration in this country.
Consequently, though we have hitherto been protected by the
peculiar conditions of an insular national culture, and the persistence of
liberal traditions, from the impact of total secularization, we are
perhaps in a better position to withstand that attack than are those
societies which have possessed a continuous tradition of Catholic culture
and the protection of a Catholic State. But we can only do so if we
accept the full consequences of the new situation and prepare to face the
new issues which this situation involves. These issues are not altogether
new; they are, indeed, very similar to those that confronted the Church
under the Roman Empire, but they are as remote from those of the Victorian
age as those of the Apocalypse are from Newman's "Difficulties of
Anglicans."
Taken from the Fall 1993 issue of "The Dawson Newsletter." For
subscriptions send $8.00 to "The Dawson Newsletter", P.O. Box 332,
Fayetteville, AR 72702. John J. Mulloy, Editor
