4: The Conflict between the English Bishops Vatican I and the Papacy

Extract

The decade that preceded Vatican I saw what was by far the most intensive and exciting theological debate there has ever been in modern English Catholic history. Compared with the pious torpor of the decade that preceded Vatican II, certainly, the zest and odium of theological exchange prepared the clergy and educated laity in England more thoroughly for the proclamation of the doctrine of papal infallibility than was the case anywhere else in the Catholic world. It is true, of course, that nobody elsewhere expected papal infallibility to be so high on the agenda at the Council. The English debate, through Manning’s extraordinary influence at the Council, may even be described (with little exaggeration) as the key factor in ensuring that papal infallibility was moved to the head of the agenda.

The Dublin Review, from 1863 onwards, was the principal organ of the “New Ultramontanism”. In that year the editorship passed to William George Ward, the most brilliant of all the ex-Anglicans from Oxford who dedicated their energies to “Romanizing” the English Catholic community. A fellow of Balliol College by 1834, when he was twenty-two, Ward of course took minor orders but it was in mathematics and logic that his brilliance lay. As the DNB entry delicately puts it, “his union of a severely logical intellect with a craving for more concrete assurance in matters spiritual than reason can afford” led him inexorably to seek communion with Rome. Censured by Convocation on a famous occasion in the Sheldonian Theatre, because of his “Romanism”, Ward at once resigned his fellowship, married, and became a Catholic six months later. Six years later, in 1851, much to the horror of most of the Catholic clergy, Ward had been installed, against strong opposition both within and without the college, as lecturer in moral philosophy in the Westminster archdiocesan seminary.