Stephanie A. Mann's Blog, page 233

The Venerable Mother Frances Taylor

The Catholic Herald published the news that Mother Frances Taylor, a nineteenth century convert, foundress, and historical novelist, has been declared Venerable:
 
A nurse who tended dying soldiers alongside Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War could become Britain’s next saint after the Pope declared that she lived a life of “heroic virtue”.

Pope Francis has given Frances Taylor the title “Venerable” and authorised the Church to search for the two healing miracles needed to proclaim her a saint.

Frances, the youngest of 10 children of an Anglican vicar from Lincolnshire, was 22 when she volunteered to join the “Lady of the Lamp” in Scutari, Turkey, in 1854 when Britain, along with France and the Ottoman Empire, was at war with Russia.

She converted to Catholicism after she was impressed by the faith of the dying Irish soldiers she was caring for.

She went on to establish a religious order – the Poor Servants of the Mother of God – which under her direction opened refuges for prostitutes and homeless women and children in London before spreading throughout Europe.

As Mother Magdalen Taylor, Frances also founded the Providence Free Hospital in St Helens, Lancashire, and she took over the running of St Joseph’s Asylum in Dublin. She died in her convent in Soho Square in 1900 after falling ill en route to Rome and she is buried at Roehampton, south west London, after establishing 20 institutions in her own lifetime.

Today her order continues to work particularly with the poor, the elderly and the disabled.

The order has published these prayers for her beatification:

Heavenly Father you gave to Mother Magdalen Taylor a profound insight into the Mystery of the Incarnation and a great love and compassion for the poor and needy. We pray that her life of deep faith and loving service may continue to inspire us and that, one day, she may be beatified to the glory of your name. We ask this through Christ Our Lord. Amen. Heavenly Father, you chose Mother Magdalen Taylor to found the Poor Servants of the Mother of God to serve the poor and needy.
While on earth she never failed to respond to those in distress, so confident of her intercession I pray you to grant me this favour...which I ask in the name of Jesus your son. Amen.
She would be the first Englishwoman beatified or canonized since St. Anne Line, St. Margaret Clitherow, and St. Margaret Ward, great martyrs for the Faith included among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970.

Mother Frances Taylor wrote about the age of martyrdom during Elizabeth I's reign in Tyborne .

The Nazarene School at Blessed Sacrament in Wichita

You'll remember that I posted about visiting the Church of the Blessed Sacrament one Friday afternoon after some new/old Stations of the Cross from our renovated Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception were installed.The pastor updated the status of the stations on his blog, giving some history, here.

The originals were painted in the 1840's for the Church of St. Johann Nepomuk in Vienna, Austria and you may find them highlighted in this pamphlet and a complete gallery of them here. The artist was Joseph Führich, a member of the Nazarene School or Movement of painting.

Just filling in some background.

Learning Something New Everyday: The Scottish Episcopal Church

I am reading the third of my early Summer books: The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, 1830-1930, and was thrilled to find out more about the Scottish Episcopal Church and how it came under the influence of the Oxford Movement. Stewart J. Brown writes in the chapter "Scotland and the Oxford Movement" that the Scottish Episcopalian Church had suffered under the Penal laws in Scotland enforced by the Presbyterian Kirk, the Church of Scotland. The Presbyterians (without bishops) and the Episcopalians (with) both claimed descent from the early Catholic saints of Scotland (St. Ninian, St. Columba, St. Margaret of Scotland, etc), without, of course, ties to the Holy See and the papacy.

James VI of Scotland ("No bishops; no King") favored the Episcopal Church form, the appointment of bishops being under his control, of course. When Charles I and Archbishop Laud famously tried to introduce a Scottish form of the Book of Common Prayer--which resulted in riots and rebellion--it had been with the goal of greater unity between the Presbyterian Kirk and the bishops (the book combined Knox's Book of Common Prayer with the Anglican Book of Common Prayer).

After the Interregnum and with the Restoration, Charles II and then James II supported the re-establishment of the Episcopal Church in Scotland--but when William and Mary usurped the throne of Scotland, the Episcopal bishops refused to swear oaths of loyalty, since James VII was still alive and had not abdicated--thus they were Non-jurors, just like the Non-jurors in England. As Jacobites, the Non-jurors were penalized and thus were oppressed until, after the death of the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1788, they could swear loyalty to King George III (Henry Cardinal Stuart not being a viable contender for the throne of Great Britain).

One of the leading proponents of the Oxford Movement in the Scottish Episcopal Church was Cecil, marchioness of Lothian, who contributed to the building of Tractarian style churches, designed for the High Church style liturgical services favored by the Oxford Movement. Like James Hope, later James Hope-Scott, however, the influence of the Oxford Movement led her to Catholicism. As Rowan Strong writes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Lady Lothian, she

was born on 17 April 1808 at Ingestre Hall, Staffordshire, the daughter of Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, second Earl Talbot of Hensol (1777–1849), and his wife, Frances Thomasine (1782–1819), daughter of Charles Lambart of Beau Parc, co. Meath, Ireland. She was sixth child and younger daughter in a family of twelve children. Her mother died when she was only eleven; her father proved an attentive parent, encouraging her study of Latin and the Commentaries of Blackstone. He raised in her his own moderate high-churchmanship to respect the sabbath, the Book of Common Prayer, and the established church. She became a woman whose vitality was combined with a natural reserve, striking rather than beautiful, with a strong sense of moral duty. On 12 July 1831 she married John William Robert Kerr, seventh marquess of Lothian (1794–1841), and they made their home in Scotland, at Newbattle Abbey, Midlothian, although she preferred their house at Monteviot in Roxburghshire. They had five sons and two daughters before the marquess died suddenly at his estate at Blickling, Norfolk, on 14 November 1841. Cecil Lothian never married again and began to devote herself to the care of her children, to the very capable management of the estate, and to a new sense of religion.

Abandoning the religion of her father and husband, with its emphasis on establishment, Lady Lothian became one of the earliest sponsors and financiers of Tractarianism in Scotland. This took the form of her building and endowing a chapel for the Scottish Episcopal church at Jedburgh, near Monteviot. She supervised its construction carefully, building it in the Gothic style approved of by the Camden Ecclesiological Society and Tractarians. It included a stone altar redolent of the Tractarian doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice. She also insisted on the almost unprecedented use of the Scottish communion office, the nonjuring office of eighteenth-century Episcopalians which was preferred by many Tractarians as being more explicitly Catholic than the Book of Common Prayer. The church's consecration on 15 August 1843 was attended by leading high-churchmen and Tractarians, including Walter Farquhar Hook and John Keble. But Lady Lothian became increasingly uncertain about the catholicity of Anglicanism. Her allegiance was gradually undermined by the successive secessions to Rome of John Henry Newman in 1845; the chaplain at Dalkeith who was her spiritual adviser; and, finally, by Henry Manning in 1851, as a consequence of the Gorham judgment. Instructed by Manning, she became a Roman Catholic in June 1851. Her conversion imperilled her guardianship of her sons, as the other guardians appointed by her husband's will sought to have them removed from her custody lest she attempt to convert them to Rome. (They were not concerned about the religion of her daughters.) In a midnight adventure, she escaped from Newbattle Abbey with her younger children, taking them to Edinburgh where they were received into the Roman Catholic church. Her eldest son, William, the eighth marquess, was away at Oxford at the time, and remained a staunch Episcopalian.

Lady Lothian now became a sponsor of Roman Catholicism in Scotland. She built a Roman Catholic church at Dalkeith, began regular visits to Rome, and undertook extensive charitable work in Edinburgh assisted by her friend Charlotte, duchess of Buccleuch, who would eventually convert in 1860. One of Lady Lothian's daughters, Cecil, became a Sacred Heart nun in the convent in Paris in 1859. Having established a connection with the Jesuits in Farm Street, London, Lady Lothian encouraged their opening a church in Edinburgh, and they eventually took over the church at Dalkeith in 1861. She was active in the Refugee Benevolent Fund in London, established as a consequence of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, but her relief work in England was never as much her own as the missions in Jedburgh and Dalkeith. Her son Lord Walter Kerr (1839–1927), later admiral of the fleet and senior naval lord, was a companion when his naval life allowed, but his marriage in 1873 brought a new loneliness in her final years. In 1877 Lady Lothian went to Rome for the jubilee of Pius IX and died there on 13 May. Her body was buried at the foot of the altar in the church at Dalkeith.

Movie Review: The Monuments Men (2014)

 You might have noticed on this blog that I am fascinated by the history of art stolen by the Nazis during World War II from various museums and also the private collectors (often Jewish). The Rape of Europa is the great documentary about Hitler's great plan for a Linz art museum in his name honoring all the great art he desired, the Nazi disgust for certain art they considered degenerate because non-Aryan, efforts to protect and preserve the art in the midst of war, and efforts to return art stolen from individuals to their heirs, etc. So I bought a DVD of The Monuments Men: a mistake. Whatever good intentions George Clooney, director, writer, and producer and his co-writer and co-producer Grant Heslov had, they made a terrible movie, episodic and sentimental, illogical and historically inaccurate. What they did with the character of Claire Simon, based on the real-life Rose Valland, was most disappointing. At first resistant to helping the American museum curator sent to contact her, she then tries to seduce him even as she gives him the detailed notes she made about works stolen from private collections (The Rothschilds, etc). It is the most cynical, cold, calculated attempt of seduction, coming in the context of her mockery of the unfaithfulness of American soldiers to their wives. Matt Damon's character has no trouble rejecting it, although he tries to let her down easy in some trite way.  It's too bad that Clooney thought he had to make The Monuments Men into "Ocean's Fourteen"--with buddy movie jokes about mines and tooth decay in the midst of war, death, atrocities, and mayhem. It was horribly disappointing: I'd recommend the documentary and the books about the real "Monument Men" instead. If seeing the movie does lead viewers to those resources, it will have accomplished something good.

G.K. Chesterton, RIP

Yesterday, Dale Ahlquist paid tribute to Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who died 78 years ago today, June 14:

His death was front page news around the world and was met with an outpouring of spontaneous groans and genuine grief. Thousands of people who had never met Chesterton but who had welcomed him into their homes through his newspaper columns felt as though they had lost a friend. But the next few decades passed and he was forgotten. Then something quite contrary happened. Thousands of people suddenly found a friend in Chesterton. His books and essays surged back into print, and people got to know him all over again, embracing the sense of wonder and joy that lives on in his words.

We have witnessed a revival, and it has, of course, been personally gratifying as Chesterton has proved to be my friend, my hero, my mentor, my Virgil, who led me, not through the Inferno but through the comedy which is indeed divine. It is a great joke that he led this Baptist to the Catholic Church.

I certainly feel that I know him very well as I have explored the mountain of his words. Five thousand essays and counting. In the last few years we have found over four hundred previously uncollected essays. Yet I often think about the impenetrable wall that exists between those of us who have known Chesterton only through his writings and those who actually knew him in person. As we approach eight decades since his death, that latter list continues to dwindle.

Read the rest here.

This blog cites the many writers G.K. Chesterton influenced: from contemporaries like G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells (with whom he graciously disagreed) to current authors like Dean Koontz and J.K. Rowling. A sample:

 -Agatha Christie was a fan of Chesterton's detective Father Brown:

Father Brown has always been one of my favorite sleuths...He is one of the few figures in detective fiction who can be enjoyed for his own sake, whether you are a detective fan or not. [28]

-Dean Koontz is another Chestertonian. In an interview with Gilbert Magazine, he was asked which was the first Chesterton book he had read, stated:

Orthodoxy, and it had a powerful effect. Then I read The Everlasting Man, which I think was the better of the two. Together they were like a one-two punch. [29]

Shortly afterwards, when asked how Chesterton's precision of writing had influenced his writing, Koontz responded:

The precision of his language, the clarity of his thought, his exuberant nature, and his delight in tweaking the humorless who are humorless because of their dour materialism- all of those things influenced my writing.[29]

Indeed, Chesterton quotes feature as epigraphs in at least four of his novels (Relentless, Breathless, and two volumes of his Frankenstein Series: Lost Souls and The Dead Town). Koontz also dedicated The Dead Town to GKC:

To the memory of Gilbert K. Chesterton, who presented wisdom and hard truths in a most appealing package, changing countless lives with kindness and a smile [30]

-Another person on whom Chesterton's influence came was Alfred Hitchcock. According to Hitchcock biographer, Donald Spoto:

The influence of Chesterton must be assessed as well. Much admired and celebrated by the Catholic clergy, and read by Catholic schoolboys, Chesterton's popular essays "A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls" and "A Defence of Detective stories" (published in his 1901 collection The Defendant) entertained the adolescent Hitchcock, and provided him with ideas for the formation of his own style and vision when he was an apprentice filmmaker. It was Chesterton who defended popular literature, Chesterton who pointed out the archetypal, fairy-tale structure of police stories, and Chesterton who defended exploration of criminal behavior.

'One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mast of which we contentedly describe as vulgar.' Hitchcock read in 'A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls.' [31]

In fact, the title (though not the plot) of one of Hitchcock's movies (and it's remake), The Man Who Knew Too Much, is derived from a book of mysteries by Chesterton's of that name:

Hitchcock made The Man Who Knew Too Much twice, in England in 1934 and in America in 1956. It was based on a story by Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, though the title actually comes from a collection of mysteries by G.K. Chesterton, to which Hitchcock owned the rights and which has nothing to do with the story-line of the films he made. [32]

-Chesterton was "one of [President Theodore] Roosevelt's favorite contemporary writers." [33], and Roosevelt expressed a desire to meet Chesterton during a visit to England. [33a]. Such a desire was fulfilled, and Roosevelt, after meeting Chesterton, had this to say about him.

What a supreme genius Chesterton is! I never met a man who could talk so brilliantly and interestingly. [33b]

-J.K. Rowling, a member (at least at one time- I do not know if she is still or not) of the UK Chesterton Society [34], has "paid homage to" Chesterton. [35]

And here's another post, focused on Chesterton's influence on Christians in his own time and ours.

Brandon Vogt has a Chesterton giveaway, including the book pictured above, on his blog. As I mentioned to a facebook friend--"You could enter, but I should win!"

Book Review: "God's Traitors"

Rather like Adrian Tinniswood with The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth Century England, which focused on that family's reactions to events like the English Civil War and Interregnum,  in God's Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England Jessie Childs focuses on the Vaux family of Harrowden Hall (and connected families like the Treshams of Rushton) and how they, remaining true to their Catholic faith, responded to the ever-tightening restrictions on recusant Catholics during Elizabeth I's reign--and how much they knew about the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

One great feature of the design of this book, which includes two insets of color images, other illustrations, a list of principal characters, and a family tree, is the map of the Midlands of England with the Catholic houses identified in each county: Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire. Seeing the distances (if not the terrain) between the houses, I could imagine the missionary priests moving from house to house, celebrating the Sacraments, keeping ahead of the government pursuivants. I could also imagine the government pursuivants, going from house to house, hoping to catch a priest!

By telling the story of Vaux family, as each generation continues the family's faithfulness to the Catholic Church, Childs retells stories familiar to me, of St. Edmund Campion and Father Robert Persons, St. Robert Southwell, Fathers Henry Garnett and John Gerard, and other priests and martyrs, from a different angle: how the Vaux family had sheltered and assisted the priests.

As Childs describes each Vaux generation's response to recusancy, the tension and the danger mount: fines, arrests, imprisonment, debt, danger, conflict within the extended family, and death. Trying to find a way to practice his faith and yet be an Englishman proved exhausting for William the second Baron Vaux. Recusant Catholics could "either obey their Queen and consign their souls to damnation", as Childs says, "or obey the pope and surrender their bodies to temporal punishment". His son Henry and daughters Anne and Eleanor and daughter-in-law Eliza would be even more courageous, leading the underground network of safety for the missionary priests. The later generations of Vauxes--further and further separated from how the Catholic faith had once been practiced in England--grew more and more desperate as they found their choices so limiting: unable to take part in the leadership of their country, they fled to the Continent as mercenaries, like Ambrose, the black sheep of the family.

The Vauxes are always on the edges of the conspiracies against Elizabeth I (the Ridolfi Plot, the Babington conspiracy, the Throckmorton Plot)--and thus William Vaux spent so much time answering questions, along with his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Tresham, paying fnes, enduring imprisonment and house arrest. But at the end of the book, the Gunpowder Plot attempt to blow up Parliament with King James I, his family, and all the Lords and Commons, sums up the entire struggle. Anne Vaux feared that young men she knew well like Robert Catesby were plotting something horrible and she wanted Father Henry Garnet to tell them not to go forward with their plans. Did Father Garnet do enough? did he ask the right questions? respond forcefully enough to tell Catesby and Digby et al not to pursue whatever plot they had in mind? Those were questions he asked himself while in prison and even during his questioning. Although he did not instigate the plot or encourage the plot--he knew about the Gunpowder Plot and he did not report it to the authorities, citing the seal of the confessional.

In the Epilogue, Childs continues the story of the Vauxes: the sisters Anne and Eleanor and their sister-in-law Eliza continue their good works, focused now on the children to be raised in the Catholic faith. The family endures the long Eighteenth century and then finally enjoys Emancipation and freedom. One of the best details of this after story is that the nine Baron Vaux was Father Gabriel Gilbey, O.S.B. and took his seat in the House of Lords in 1962, 403 years after the last Benedictine served in the House (I presume that could be John Feckenham, the last abbot of Westminster Abbey).

Alice Hogge in God's Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (2005) described the lives and deaths of the missionary priests who studied abroad and returned to England, branded as traitors for their priesthood, in her build-up to the Gunpowder Plot and its aftermath. It could almost serve as the companion volume to Childs' great story of the Vaux family. By focusing on the noble Vaux family, the lay men and women who struggled to remain true to their Church and to their nation, however, Childs has given us a great story of faithfulness and endurance. I cannot recommend God's Traitors highly enough: it is well-narrated and her analysis is always balanced and insightful.

Please note that I received this review copy from the author, with the only expectation being that I would read it and review it honestly.

Dawson on The French Revolution

Also announced for publication by Catholic University of America Press is a new edition of Christopher Dawson's The Gods of Revolution (January 2015):

In The Gods of Revolution, Christopher Dawson brought to bear, as Glanmor Williams said, "his brilliantly perceptive powers of analysis on the French Revolution. . . . In so doing he reversed the trends of recent historiography which has concentrated primarily on examining the social and economic context of that great upheaval."

Dawson underlines the fact that the Revolution was not animated by democratic ideals but rather reflected an authoritarian liberalism often marked by a fundamental contempt for the populace, described by Voltaire as "the 'canaille' that is not worthy of enlightenment and which deserves its yoke." The old Christian order had stressed a common faith and common service shared by nobles and peasants alike but Rousseau "pleads the cause of the individual against society, the poor against the rich, and the people against the privileged classes." It is Rousseau whom Dawson describes as the spiritual father of the new age in disclosing a new spirit of revolutionary idealism expressed in liberalism, socialism and anarchism. But the old unity was not replaced by a new form. Dawson insists the whole period following the Revolution is "characterized by a continual struggle between conflicting ideologies," and the periods of relative stabilization such as the Napoleonic restoration, Victorian liberalism in England, and capitalist imperialism in the second German empire "have been compromises or temporary truces between two periods of conquest." This leads to his assertion that "the survival of western culture demands unity as well as freedom, and the great problem of our time is how these two essentials are to be reconciled."
This reconciliation will require more than technological efficiency for "a free society requires a higher degree of spiritual unity than a totalitarian one. Hence the spiritual integration of western culture is essential to its temporal survival." It is to Christianity alone that western culture "must look for leadership and help in restoring the moral and spiritual unity of our civilization," for it alone has the influence, "in ethics, in education, in literature, and in social action" sufficiently strong to achieve this end.


I have a copy of an out-of-print edition with an introduction by Arnold Toynbee, who declares that "However often the subject has been dealt with by his predecessors, Dawson's handling throws new light on it." When I read this book several years ago, it completely opened my mind to the truth about the French Revolution--I had just my high school history course to go on and it had been depicted as a great crusade for the common good (aka Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity) with some unfortunate unintended consequences (The Reign of Terror), but Dawson cleared that error up for me. After his book, then Susan Dunn's book Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light continued my education.

Book Review: Persecution without Martyrdom

From the publisher, Gracewing:

Persecution Without Martyrdom: The Catholics of North-East England in the Age of the Vicars Apostolic 1688-1850
by Leo Gooch
978 0 85244 819 9  -  488 pages   -  £20.00 (I received a review copy from the publisher for my honest opinion and review: see below)
Until comparatively recently, historical studies of English Catholicism have lavished attention on the ‘Age of Martyrs’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or on the ‘Second Spring’ of the nineteenth century, while the eighteenth, a century of ‘persecution without martyrdom’ as Edwin Burton described the life and times of Richard Challoner, is largely passed over. That neglect is wholly unwarranted. The creation of the four Vicariates Apostolic in 1688 marks the foundation of the modern Roman Catholic Church in England ND Wales and a series of significant ecclesiastical developments affecting the disposition and operation of the mission followed over the next century and a half: its emergence from ‘seigneurial’ rule, its shift from its rural strongholds into the towns, and its metamorphosis into a centrally-managed organization. In the secular field, this was the age when major political crises relating to Catholicism arose, when Catholics threw off discrimination and oppression and by degrees emerged from recusancy to full citizenship; and when the sociological character of the English Catholics changed completely. Theses were all important enough singly, but cumulatively they amounted to nothing less than a radical transformation of the structure and outlook of the English Catholics. The later achievements of the Church of Cardinals Manning, Wiseman and Newman could not possibly have been won without the perseverance and vigour of the eighteenth-century recusants.
This book is a tremendous resource for understanding the status of Catholics in north-east England after the Glorious Revolution and up to the 1850 restoration of the diocesan hierarchy. The range of dates from 1688 to 1850 means that the period covered includes the Jacobite attempts to restore the Catholic Stuarts, the end of the Stuart dynasty and the beginning of the Hanoverians (1714--three hundred years ago!), and the slow restoration of freedom to worship and civil rights  for Catholics, leading up to Emancipation in 1829. The first four chapters offer a compelling narrative of Catholic gentry in the northeast of England surviving the fall of James II, continuing their family's traditions and education, working for their freedom of religion and worship, and responding to the presence of the Vicars Apostolic.The last two chapters provide tremendous detail about the chapels and the chaplains established by the gentry on their estates, breaking off from the narrative of the first four chapters.
In chapter one, Gooch provides statistical surveys of the recusant Catholics throughout the period, noting the ebbs and falls of their population. He demonstrates that while they had to be careful and discrete, they were committed to practicing their faith. He notes that Catholic gentry often played down their wealth--to avoid confiscation and fines by the government--by various financial arrangements, loans, and leases. The gentry provided both the chapels and the chaplains for the celebration of Catholic Mass and the other Sacraments--and Gooch gives much more detail of these arrangements in the last two chapters.
Gooch depicts the education, travel and intellectual avocations of north-east Catholic gentry in chapter two. The Catholic gentry were better educated than their Anglican peers, because they attended the Jesuit colleges on the Continent while Cambridge and Oxford were still serving primarily as educational institutions for  Anglican clergy. Catholic gentlemen traveled extensively on the Continent on long Grand Tours, collecting books and artwork. They usually were accompanied by a chaplain cum chaperone, spending Holy Week in Rome and celebrating the Feast of the Ascension in Venice. 
The Catholic Question--the issue of Catholic freedom to worship and take full part in English political and social life--occupies our interest in chapter three. Could Catholics be trusted? Gooch notes that not many of the north-eastern Catholic gentry had supported the Jacobite cause, and that as the English gentry negotiated with the government, they were often ready to compromise on certain aspects like government approval of episcopal appointments or allowing the government to read official church correspond with the Holy See, just so they could be free of the fines or threat of fines for not attending the Church of England services, exempted as they were from the Toleration Act of 1689.
In chapter four Gooch discusses the Vicars Apostolic (V.A.) of the Northern District, Titular Bishops without geographical dioceses or sees, and how they changed the structures of ecclesiastical power. They had titles like Titular Bishop of Marcopolis, Bolina, Trachis, Abydus, or Samosata. The latter was the title of the V.A. of the Northern District, William Hogarth, who became the Bishop of Hexham in 1850. We have to remember that the gentry were hiring--and firing--the clergy for their private estate chapels. As Gooch will demonstrate in the last two chapters, this practice meant that if the head of the  family conformed to the established Church of England, the chapel could be lost to the Catholics on the estate--or if there was some disagreement between the chaplain and family, he could be fired. The Vicars Apostolic, of course, wanted to establish a more stable infrastructure of "parish" chapels with assigned pastors. Their efforts before Emancipation and between Emancipation and the restoration of the hierarchy are what Gooch argues helped prepare Catholicism in England for the achievements of bishops and archbishops like Hogarth, Briggs (another V.A. in the north who became a diocesan bishop in 1850, of Beverley), Wiseman, Ullathorne, Manning, etc. after them.  I do not think that including Cardinal Newman in the blurb was necessary or appropriate, since he was never a bishop and was named a Cardinal Deacon late in life by Pope Leo XIII as a personal honor rather than as a hierarchical office or position (he continued his work at the Oratory in Birmingham in fact, not moving to Rome as usually required at that time for a Cardinal Deacon).
The last two chapters, while providing the great wealth of detail about different estates, their families, chapels, and chaplains, really should have been placed in an appendix. After stating that the Vicars Apostolic had, as the blurb above notes, worked to create a "centrally-managed organization", two chapters describing the "seigneurial rule" in such detail contradicted--at least structurally--the argument. Throughout the book, Gooch's attention to detail and excellent research, with tremendous notes and sources consulted, is obvious. I also wish the publishers could have included maps or some illustrations--especially the maps, which would have helped an American reader not familiar with the territory. Certainly, this is a great achievement and resource.

The Heart of Newman: John F. Crosby on Newman's Personalism

From Catholic University of America Press this August:

It has been said that John Henry Newman "stands at the threshold of the new age as a Christian Socrates, the pioneer of a new philosophy of the individual Person and Personal Life." Newman's personalism is found in the way he contrasts the "theological intellect" and the "religious imagination." Newman pleads for the latter when he famously says, in words that John F. Crosby takes as the motto of his book, "I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God . . .but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice."

In The Personalism of John Henry Newman, Crosby shows the reader how Newman finds the life-giving religious knowledge that he seeks. He explores the "heart" in Newman and explains what Newman was saying when he chose as his cardinal's motto, cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks to heart). He explains what Newman means in saying that religious truth is transmitted not by argument but by "personal influence."

Crosby also examines Newman's personalist account of what it is to think; he explains what it is for a person to think not just by rule but by his "spontaneous living intelligence." Crosby examines the subjectivity of Newman, and shows how the modern "turn to the subject" is enacted in Newman. But these personalist aspects of Newman's mind, which connect him with many streams of contemporary thought, are not the whole of Newman; they stand in relation to something else in Newman, something that Crosby calls Newman's radically theocentric religion.

Newman is a modern thinker, but not the modernist he is sometimes mistaken for. The inexhaustible plenitude of Newman derives from the union of apparent opposites in him: the union of his teaching on the heart with his theocentric teaching, of the subjectivity of experience with the objectivity of revealed truth.

Crosby writes for a broad non-specialist public just as Newman did.

As I have noted before on this blog, it was attending a Newman School of Catholic Thought and learning about John Henry Cardinal Newman when I was in college that gave my life direction and inspired my interest in Newman and in the English Reformation and its aftermath. Professor John F. Crosby was one of the speakers during those early days of 1979. As a preview of this book, you could listen to his lectures on Newman and Personalism, delivered at the University of Steubenville in 2011.

"The Real Tudors" @ The National Portrait Gallery in London

The title of this exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London is intriguing:  The Real Tudors: Kings and Queens Rediscovered. In case you had been looking at portraits of the Fake Tudors. It runs from 12 September 2014  to 1 March 2015 and then travels across the Channel to the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris! Note the search for an authentic portrait of Lady Jane Dudley:
This special display, focusing on the portraiture of the Tudor monarchs, will allow visitors to rediscover these well-known kings and queens through the most complete presentation of their images staged to date.

Works from the Gallery’s Collection will be presented alongside exceptional loans and a prized possession of each monarch, as well as recent research undertaken as part of the Making Art in Tudor Britain project, to help visitors understand how and why such images were made.

The display includes the Gallery’s oldest portrait, that of Henry VII, which will be displayed with a Book of Hours inscribed by the king to his daughter; six portraits of Henry VIII, including a full-length portrait from Petworth House in Sussex, together with his rosary; portraits of Edward VI and a page from his diary in which he reports his father’s death; five portraits of Mary I combined with her Prayer Book loaned from Westminster Cathedral; and several portraits of Elizabeth I displayed alongside her locket ring. The search for a ‘real’ portrait of Lady Jane Grey in the sixteenth century will also be discussed through the display of a commemorative portrait of Jane that dates from the Elizabethan period.

A beautifully illustrated catalogue with over fifty reproduced portraits, and including the findings from recent technical analysis, is available from Gallery Shops and npg.org.uk/shop (not yet!)