There is a natural – and already expertly-trodden – way of approaching the topic of Newman and modernism. This would explore the influence of Newman in the lives and thought of some of the key modernist writers – Tyrrell, Loisy, Bremond, Ward, Von Hügel – examining the extent to which some of his ideas were taken up, modified, and transformed, and discussing how far, if at all, one or other of these ‘Newmanists’ remain true to Newman himself. Such an enquiry would, naturally, deal with the controversy engendered by the promulgation in September 1907 of Pascendi dominici gregis, Pope St Pius X's encyclical ‘on the doctrines of the modernists’. Was Newman, perhaps, himself a modernist? Of course, Nicholas Lash is right that this question ‘is anachronistic and in the last analysis lacking in intellectual seriousness’,Footnote 1 but this does not necessarily occlude speculation as to whether Newman's own positions are, if only implicitly, included within Pascendi's sweeping denunciations.
Such questions are relevant to this paper. Like others before me,Footnote 2 I too have researched the furore in the religious and secular press sparked by Pascendi and, more to the point, the suspicion that Newman was condemned by it, using principally the Times, the Tablet, and the Guardian (a High Church weekly not to be confused with the periodical known at that time as the Manchester Guardian). The same names feature as heavily here as they do elsewhere: Tyrrell, Ward, Gasquet, Merry del Val. Where this paper differs, however, is in the questions that it brings to the evidence. The Pascendi controversy reveals, I believe, far more about the reception and significance of Newman, in both England and Rome, than has hitherto been considered.
Writing in his January 1908 editorial for the Dublin Review, Wilfrid Ward, who was at that time writing the official biography of Newman, remarked: ‘It seems, at first sight, very strange that the name of Cardinal Newman should have been, even tentatively, associated by anyone with [modernism].’Footnote 3 Ward's professed mystification is decidedly disingenuous, since his own panicked first impression on reading Pascendi was that the pope had, albeit inadvertently, condemned Newman ‘beyond all doubts so far as the words of the Encyclical go’.Footnote 4 That Newman's name should have been brought up, despite his own declared lifelong struggle against ‘the spirit of Liberalism in religion’,Footnote 5 was not surprising given the fact that (as Gabriel Daly points out) ‘so many Modernists mentioned him as an important influence in their intellectual and ecclesial lives.’Footnote 6 Newman was not the only major figure who influenced the modernists, nevertheless it was him upon whom attention – and by no means all of it Catholic attention – fixated in the months following the publication of Pascendi. Indeed, it is not too great an exaggeration to say that, at least in England, it was not Pius X and Pascendi that caused such attention to fall on Newman, but rather Newman that caused it to fall on Pius X and Pascendi.
Why was this so? I shall pick up this controversy with the promulgation of Pascendi in September 1907 and leave it with St Pius’ letter to Bishop O’Dwyer in March 1908 reviewing it in light of two questions which remain significant today: what was Newman's standing in the eyes of the curia and the magisterium and what was Newman's symbolic role in the cultural acceptance of Catholicism in England at the start of the twentieth-century? The background to both these issues is, of course, the wranglings over Newman's legacy between the ‘modernists’ and the ‘anti-modernists’– those agreeing to a greater or lesser extent, either with William J. Williams that Pascendi condemned ‘every characteristic proposition for which [Newman] made himself responsible’,Footnote 7 or with Aidan Gasquet that ‘no theory, no idea, no opinion even, put forward by the great Cardinal has been either implicitly or indirectly set aside, let alone condemned’.Footnote 8 (Needless to say, many other positions were also possible between these two extremes.) Which side was right, or perhaps less wrong, is not, however, a question that will be broached here. To adapt a metaphor from biblical studies, my primary concern here is with the various ‘Newmans of faith’– that is, the differing constructions of Newman at play in the Pascendi crisis – rather than with the ‘historical John Henry’.
‘Feeding the Lord's flock’
Pascendi dominici gregis (‘Feeding the Lord's flock’) was released to the world in L’Osservatore Romano, on the evening of 16 September, 1907. It will be worth reacquainting ourselves with some its highlights.Footnote 9 Pascendi begins by noting that ‘the number of the enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly’ (art. 2).Footnote 10 These enemies are not only outside the Church, but also ‘lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear’ (art. 3). These internal enemies are, moreover, specially to be feared since they are well-known for their virtues and learnedness (arts. 3, 14). (Tyrrell would wryly comment on the Church's novelty here in not charging a group of heretics with ‘gross and brutal forms of vice’.Footnote 11) Such nefarious individuals are, of course, the ‘modernists’. Among the many errors for which they are lambasted in the course of the document are: methodological agnosticism (arts. 5–6); unduly emphasizing religious feeling at the expense of revelation (art. 14); a purely symbolic interpretation of the sacraments (art. 21); maintaining that there are two Christs, a genuinely historical one and ‘the one of faith’ (art. 31); and attempting ‘to diminish and weaken the authority of the ecclesiastical magisterium itself by sacrilegiously falsifying its origin, character, and rights, and by freely repeating the calumnies of its adversaries’ (art. 42). Pascendi asks:
And now, can anybody who takes a survey of the whole system be surprised that We should define it as the synthesis of all heresies? Were one to attempt the task of collecting together all the errors that have been broached against the faith and to concentrate the sap and substance of them all into one, he could not better succeed than the Modernists have done. Nay, they have done more than this, for, as we have already intimated, their system means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone but of all religion. (Art. 39)
The encyclical is not, however, without its faults. It is a document born in time, and must be read against the anxieties and controversies of its day. Moreover, several suggested reforms ascribed to the modernists, and duly condemned, have since found approval from the magisterium. These include reforming the Index and the Holy Office, and decentralizing ecclesiastical authority (art. 38). Yet Pascendi is far from ‘the work of men who have ceased to think’.Footnote 12 Many of the doctrines it condemns, and which it ascribes (rightly or wrongly) to one or other of the modernists, are indeed incompatible with Catholic theology. Furthermore, the spread and progress of these doctrines, prophesied by Pascendi, has in many cases come to pass. Widespread indifferentism and subjectivism (art. 14), denial of the authority of scripture, tradition and magisterium (art. 42), the belief that Christ was ‘a mere man’ (art. 2): in fearing a time when such views might become prevalent even within the Church, Pascendi proves itself a prescient (if bombastic) interpreter of ‘the signs of the times’. Above all, the encyclical was, and remains, an extraordinary (in both senses of the word) expression of the magisterium. Catholic theologians ought not to dismiss it for that reason alone.
Notices concerning the imminent publication of what the Tablet referred to as ‘the long-expected Encyclical on “Modernism”’, were published by the Rome correspondents of both the Times and the Tablet in the third week of September.Footnote 13 In its next issue, the Tablet devoted to it a long editorial, confidently asserting that:
[T]he judgment of the Apostolic See will be received here, as by Catholics throughout the world, with glad obedience, and with a deepened sense of gratitude to the Holy Father for the signal and timely service which in the discharge of his august office he has rendered, not only to the protection of the Catholic Faith, but to the defence of the fundamental principles of Christianity.Footnote 14
The Times, however, was not so sure. It left its analysis to George Tyrrell, who had been dismissed from the Jesuits the previous year and whose disciplinary process was still ongoing. Tyrrell's critique, ‘The Pope and Modernism’, was published over two days. Interestingly, though it is now a commonplace to describe Pascendi's explication of ‘modernism’ as a straw man,Footnote 15 this was far from Tyrrell's own appraisal. He regarded Pascendi's exposition to be ‘from the pen of some subtle scholastic theologian unusually well versed in the literature of his subject’. Not only that, but:
one would sometimes be tempted to think he might be a traitor in the orthodox camp. For the picture he draws of modernism is so seductive to an educated mind, and the counterpart he suggests so repellent, as to make the Encyclical rather ‘dangerous’ reading for the children of this world.Footnote 16
While Tyrrell's assessment was not unanimous among modernists, he was not alone in this opinion – a fact which, as one might expect, was duly noted by the encyclical's apologists.Footnote 17
Yet that one point aside, Tyrrell's praise was in short supply. Without delving too deeply into his arguments, for our purposes it is worth noting that Tyrrell mentions Newman several times. These are mostly in passing, though at one point he asks rhetorically whether the genuine root of modernism might not be found ‘in the spirit that breathes in a certain letter of a certain Cardinal to a certain Duke?’Footnote 18 Concerning the pope, Tyrrell doubts whether he is even capable of grasping the condemnations issued in his name.Footnote 19 And referring to our Lord's commandment to Peter to feed his flock, alluded to in the encyclical's title, Tyrrell remarks: ‘Pius X. comes forward with a stone in one hand and a scorpion in the other.’Footnote 20
Tyrrell's Times articles were intentionally provocative, as was an Italian commentary he published in the anticlerical Giornale d’Italia.Footnote 21 It is sometimes said that Tyrrell was condemned for his modernism but that is not quite the case. Rather it was for the scandal of his insubordination and contempt for the magisterium in the secular press.Footnote 22 As Canon James Moyes wrote in the Tablet (in an article soon reprinted in full in L’Osservatore):
That a priest could so far forget himself … as to publish in the columns of the chief journal of the land a vehement attack upon the Encyclical, and the specific body of teaching which the Holy See has solemnly addressed to the whole Catholic world, holding up to contempt the august person of the Vicar of Christ as one who has not sufficient intellectual capacity even to comprehend the meaning of what he is condemning, is a scandal, which it is impossible to condone.Footnote 23
He continues: ‘The spectacle of a priest waging battle against the Holy See in the columns of The Times is one which even the few sympathisers whom he may have in this country will be very glad to forget.’Footnote 24 Incidentally, in the same article, among numerous criticisms of the modernists, Moyes finds time to berate the modernists for being, even as heretics, not fully up to scratch:
[W]e feel the movement is found to compare in many ways less favourably with its forerunners. It has something of the astuteness, but neither had, or can have, anything like the numbers of Jansenism. It has no writer like Pascal, nor has it the prestige of the saintly scholars of Port Royal. It has produced no genius comparable to De la Mennais, and its erudition is far short of that of that of Döllinger and those men of European reputation who joined hands with him in the abortive movement of 1890.Footnote 25
How degenerate must these modern times be, if even their heretics are so lacking in quality?
Meanwhile back in the Times, Tyrrell's denunciations seem to have failed to cause the stir for which he might have been hoping. At least, no letters responding to his articles were published in the days immediately following. On 4 October, however, the Times did publish brief notice of a different complaint against Tyrrell's article that had appeared in L’Osservatore.Footnote 26 Five days later, the Times published a letter responding to this from one Robert Dell. This is worth quoting at length:
The article in the Osservatore Romano, quoted by your Rome Correspondent … , contains a sentence so significant that it ought not to pass without notice: –‘The evolution of dogma is a logical nonsense for philosophers and a heresy for theologians.’ That is to say, Newman was a heretic. It has long been evident that this is the opinion of those who unhappily rule the Catholic Church at present; and, as Father Tyrrell has hinted, Newman is undoubtedly aimed at in the recent Encyclical Pascendi; but this is the first time that the Pope's official organ has put it so plainly. I hope that this informal condemnation of the author of the “Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine” will be duly appreciated by his Catholic fellow-countrymen. And I hope, too, that the Pope will be good enough to supply us with some method of justifying the Catholic position which will take the place of Newman's “logical nonsense.” Surely this is the least that we can expect from infallibility.Footnote 27
Dell's letter received a couple of responses, including one from Canon John Vaughan, brother of the late Archbishop of Westminster and one of the pope's ‘domestic prelates’, distinguishing between orthodox and heretical understandings of ‘development’.Footnote 28 The Times then fell basically silent on the encyclical for a couple of weeks until Tyrrell's excommunication in late October thrust it back into the spotlight.
On 2 November, the Times published a letter from William J. Williams, ‘on behalf, not only of those who call themselves Liberal Catholics, but also of many who have hitherto taken no part in the conflict between modernists and the Pope’. The letter is a protest against both Tyrrell's excommunication, and the ‘unprecedented evil that, while one Pope has implied a direct approval of the writings of an English Catholic by making him a Cardinal, his successor should reverse the decision by condemning every characteristic proposition for which that writer made himself responsible.’Footnote 29 This theme was taken up in the same issue, in an editorial titled ‘The Vatican and Father Tyrrell’. Significantly, this observes that:
the special character of Roman Catholicism in England renders it certain that a rigorous application of the Encyclical here will have speedier and more serious results even than it will abroad … . For here men have a natural reverence for the great minds of the past, and there are scores of English Roman Catholics to whom the name and example and intellectual influence of John Henry Newman means more than those of a whole curia of living Cardinals.Footnote 30
It continues:
It is idle to inquire whether the astute scholar who wrote what the Pope signed was or was not thinking of Cardinal Newman. The important thing is that many Roman Catholics in our country feel that he was so thinking. They have received such intellectual stimulus from his teaching, their sense of security within the Roman fold rises so largely from the fact of Newman's having felt safe there, that to lay violent hands on him is like letting wolves loose in their midst.Footnote 31
It was only at this point, with Williams’ letter and the Times’ editorial both explicitly mentioning Newman, that the furore in England surrounding the promulgation of Pascendi began in earnest – more than six weeks after its promulgation, and a good month after Tyrrell's two-part jeremiad. Both of the two just-quoted pieces make reference to the two key themes which I wish to draw out from the ensuing storm of letters, articles, editorials, pamphlets, pastoral letters, and even interventions, informal and (ultimately) formal, of St Pius himself: i) the alleged condemnation of Newman by the magisterium and the alleged antipathy towards him in Rome; and ii) the pre-eminent centrality of Newman to something called English Catholicism.
Newman and the Curia
After an initial flurry of controversy upon its publication, general interest in Pascendi quickly died down. Only once it was suggested in the secular press that Newman had been condemned can one speak of any notably widespread controversy in Britain. Though that is not to say that is was not causing ructions in certain ecclesiastical circles – not least, given the encyclical's suggestions regarding vigilance and enforcement, by those who were suspected, whether by themselves or by others, of falling foul of its strictures. Yet even the Tablet, following Moyes’ lambasting of Tyrrell in mid-October, scarcely mentioned the encyclical in its next three issues. Not until 9 November did it comment, somewhat belatedly, on the controversy by then in full swing in the Times’ letters pages: ‘It was, of course, inevitable, that the little group of persons who in this country describe themselves as “Liberal Catholics” should do their best to represent the Encyclical “Pascendi” as a condemnation of Cardinal Newman.’Footnote 32 Williams’ letter in the Times had sparked a series of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, on the subject of whether Newman was – intentionally or not – included in Pascendi's anathemas. Among those forcefully arguing ‘not’, were the Abbot-president of the English Benedictine Congregation, Aidan Gasquet (whom Pius had recently appointed to the Pontifical Commission for the Revision of the Vulgate, and whom he would make a cardinal in 1914),Footnote 33 and Fr John Norris, the Superior of the Birmingham Oratory. The latter offered, in his own words, assurances ‘from the highest authority, that the “genuine doctrine and spirit of Newman's Catholic teaching are not hit by the Encyclical, but [the] theories of many who wrongly seek refuge under a great name are obviously censured.”’Footnote 34 These assurances were soon corroborated by L’Osservatore.Footnote 35 Commenting on this (ongoing) situation, and with a waspishness which it seems regrettably to have lost, the Tablet remarked: ‘we have on one side Father Norris, the head of the Congregation to which Cardinal Newman belonged, Abbot Gasquet, and the Osservatore Romano, speaking with the direct authority of the Holy See, and on the other – Mr. Williams of Eastbourne.’Footnote 36
I shall leave aside, as beyond my competence, the issue of whether or not Newman's theories are implicated by the letter of Pascendi to focus on the frequently-voiced claim that this was indeed the intention of those drafting it. Generally speaking, our 1907 modernists, fellow-travellers, and sundry allies are happy to absolve St Pius himself from any malice here. He, they concur, was probably too ignorant and theologically unsophisticated properly to grasp what was released in his name. As Tyrrell puts it in his 20 November article in the Guardian, ‘The Condemnation of Newman’ (of which more later): ‘That Pius X had the slightest idea that he was condemning Newman in his Encyclical may be firmly denied. Of Newman he has probably never read a line’.Footnote 37 Two weeks earlier Tyrrell had written to Ward: ‘It is quite possible that in his dense ignorance the Pope did not know that his Encyclical had condemned Newman.’Footnote 38 Such magnanimous benefit of the doubt was not, however, extended to Pascendi's drafters themselves. For Robert Dell, writing again in the Times: ‘The writer of the Encyclical – an old and bitter opponent of Newman's ideas – has taken advantage of the fact that the Pope is not acquainted with the writings of Newman to commit his Holiness to his own personal opinions.’Footnote 39 Ward, as usual, was somewhat more circumspect: ‘Its theology is drawn up … by a scholastic theologian who may either be an anti-Newmanist, as they often are, or does not know Newman's work’.Footnote 40 Tyrrell, also as usual, was rather less circumspect. He wrote to Ward: ‘is it any use denying that whatever Pius X meant, Billot and Janssens have de facto slain not only ‘modernism’ but Newmanism: or that they deliberately intended to do so?’Footnote 41
Not only is it frequently asserted that Pascendi was written by theologians actively hostile to Newman, but this is often tied to a broader claim about Newman's historical standing in the eyes of Rome. Newman is depicted here as a perennial outsider, always despised and distrusted by the magisterium and its most trusted confidants. As Tyrrell expressed it at length in his Guardian article:
It is … undeniable that at Rome, under the influence of the scholastic revival, Newman's anti-scholastic methods have been steadily distrusted and disliked. That he has not been condemned long ago, that after years of bitter animosity and attack he was raised to the purple by the ultra-scholastic Leo XIII, is certainly not due to the conversion of his adversaries or to any sympathy with his methods on the part of Leo. It is due simply and solely to the fact that a method, however defective, which makes for “the conversion of England” must be tolerated and even approved as a temporary expedient, as divorce was tolerated by Moses on account of the hardness of men's hearts. … if conjecture is right as to the actual fabricators of the document to which [Pius] put his name, they are the lineal descendents of that “insolent and aggressive faction” for whom Newman was ever a heretic.Footnote 42
Without denying that Newman's ideas were not always universally embraced by Roman dogmaticians, one would do right to be suspicious of such accounts as exhibiting a considerable degree of paranoia and delusion. Certain, oft-repeated vignettes of Newman's Roman reception – Peronne's incomprehension at his account of doctrinal development, for example – are familiar. But the fact that some of Newman's ideas found disfavour, some of the time, by some Roman theologians,Footnote 43 is hardly grounds for the construction of reality presented here. Yet for Tyrrell, even Leo XIII's raising of Newman to the rank of cardinal is forced to fit his depiction of Newman as a lone kindly light amid th’encircling gloom of the nineteenth-century papacy. Almost certainly, Tyrrell would have been in full agreement with Ignaz von Döllinger's assessment some years previously: ‘If Newman had written in French, Italian or Latin, then his books would have been placed on the Index long ago.’Footnote 44
The great irony in all this is that Pascendi had in fact been commissioned by a high-ranking, native English-speaking curial official, who was both familiar with Newman's writings, and who actively quoted and recommended them to others.Footnote 45 Furthermore, he had not only been a student of Billot's, but had been a consultor to the Index for the past ten years.Footnote 46 Far from being a liberal fifth column within the Vatican, that man was none other than the ‘uncompromising ultramontane’Footnote 47 Cardinal Merry del Val.
Born in London in 1865, the son of a Spanish diplomat, Rafael Merry del Val lived in England until he was thirteen, and later returned to begin his ordination studies at Ushaw. Following a meteoric rise within the Vatican diplomatic corps – including, bizarrely, being made a monsignor before he was a priest – he served with Gasquet on Leo XIII's commission investigating the validity of Anglican orders in 1896, and was ultimately appointed Secretary of State by Pius X in 1903, aged just thirty-eight. Despite his Spanish name and nationality, Merry del Val considered himself to ‘be English to all intents and purposes’,Footnote 48 even to the point of dreaming in English.Footnote 49 Just prior to his appointment as Secretary of State, there were rumours that he might succeed Cardinal Vaughan as Archbishop of Westminster. Though this was not to be, he took a keen interest in English ecclesiastical life, taking an active role in the foundation of the Beda, and maintaining close links with Ushaw – he suggested at one point during its centenary celebrations in 1908 that it might like to be made a college of Pontifical right.Footnote 50 Furthermore, he kept a vigilant eye on the progress of British modernism. For example, Tyrrell's card was marked as early as 1900, and Merry del Val played a significant role in his ultimate excommunication.Footnote 51 Ward too did not fail to escape his attentions. Writing to the vice-president of Ushaw in 1908, he noted:
I am glad to see that among your speakers [for the centenary] you have not W. Ward who is so unsafe. He is an acrobat and performs the trick of teaching or insinuating unsound doctrines and of wriggling out of them within twenty-four hours, and then tells everybody that all that is Newman. Poor Newman. We don't want this humbug at Ushaw where we like the genuine article in everything.Footnote 52
Contrary to the guessing assertions of Tyrrell and others, Pascendi was drafted by neither Janssens nor Billot.Footnote 53 The story goes that Pius’ desire for an encyclical on modernism was met with a series of inadequate drafts, before Merry del Val heard of Joseph Lemius, procurator of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, whose hobby had for some years been the critical study of various modernists. Lemius took just four days to write something satisfactory.Footnote 54 Through his role in both commissioning and enforcing Pascendi, Merry del Val thus, almost singlehandedly, gives the lie to the wilder figments of Tyrrell's and others’ imaginations. Evidently, Pascendi was not the work of a cabal of reactionary curial theologians who either had, at best, neither grasp of English nor acquaintance with Newman's ideas, or at worst, a pathological animus against the great cardinal. This false view, I would venture, arose and gained sustenance from an ideologically-jaundiced view of Rome, and of the magisterial authority of the Church in particular. Far from suspecting or repudiating Newman, anti-modernist ultramontanes such as Merry del Val and Gasquet were his enthusiastic champions and defenders. Whereas it suited Tyrrell and Ward to portray anti-modernism as an assault on Newman, what we in fact witness in the Pascendi controversy is a tussle between supporters of opposing interpretations of Newman's achievement and legacy. Both sides, naturally, accused the other of hijacking Newman. And both sides had handy ‘prooftexts’ to support their assertions. To every quotation such as that from the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk about drinking first to conscience and only then to the pope,Footnote 55 one might easily appose a statement such as the following (referring to a non-infallible pronouncement):
St. Peter has spoken, it is he who has enjoined that which seems to us so unpromising. He has spoken, and has a claim on us to trust him … . If ever there was a power on earth, who had an eye for the times, who has confined himself to the practicable, and has been happy in his anticipations, whose words have been facts and whose commands prophecies, such is he in the history of the ages, who sits from generation to generation in the chair of the Apostles, as the Vicar of Christ and the Doctor of His Church.Footnote 56
The key point is this: nobody had a bad word to say about Newman at this time. This was a pitched battle not between Newmanists and anti-Newmanists, but between two, implacably opposed sets of the former – neither of which, it may be said, is without its descendants today.
This is a point I would like to explore a little further. Before doing so, however, it is perhaps worth noting St Pius’ own magisterial intervention in the controversy. As mentioned previously, L’Osservatore Romano was proactive both in its defence of Newman, and on the status of Pascendi vis-à-vis his theology. Both Fr Norris and Canon Vaughan mentioned the Holy Father's private praises for Newman in their letters to the Times. Not until March 1908, however, did Pius X go on record. This was in a written commendation of a pamphlet on Newman and the encyclical by the Bishop of Limerick, Edward Thomas O’Dywer. He lauds the bishop for showing that ‘the writings of Cardinal Newman, far from being in disagreement with Our Encyclical Letter Pascendi, are very much in harmony with it’,Footnote 57 and proceeds to praise Newman himself in some detail. Most strikingly, and displaying a levity not normally ascribed either to him or to Merry del Val (who would almost certainly have played some role in the production of the document), the pope comments of Newman: ‘Certainly, it is possible to find in such great labours and abundant works something which seems alien to the usual way of theologians’.Footnote 58 Referring to Pius's letter as whole, Gary Lease observes: ‘It is difficult to imagine a stronger statement of approval and support from the Roman authorities than this letter from the very man who just six months before had issued the condemnations of Pascendi.’Footnote 59
Newman and ‘English’ Catholicism
What began as a controversy about Pascendi which fizzled out fairly quickly, soon morphed, at least in the British press, into a rather more protracted controversy about Newman. Newman's influences on, and reception by, the early twentieth-century modernists is an interesting enough topic for scholars to debate, but that, in itself, scarcely explains its ability to enflame the letters page of the Times for a good couple of months. Why, then, this fixation on Newman?
The most obvious answer, of course – and the one offered by Bishop O’Dwyer, Pope Pius X, and other like minds – is that the modernists’ constant emphases on Newman were (in the words of L’Osservatore):
prompted by the same thought and have the same object in view, viz., to invoke the illustrious name and authority of Cardinal Newman in favour of the Modernists and their false teachings and thus to shelter them from the condemnation which they have so richly deserved in the Papal Encyclical.Footnote 60
On this view, the appeal to Newman is one of defence: Newman is orthodox, therefore we are orthodox. One could likewise imagine the Jansenists publishing an article called ‘The Condemnation of Augustine’, or Luther ‘The Condemnation of Paul’, as support for their views. And no doubt this was indeed the aim of many invokers of Newman. Yet Tyrrell's own motives were, I suspect, somewhat different. For Tyrrell had, by this time, largely renounced his earlier ‘Newmanism’.Footnote 61 Convinced as Tyrrell was that ‘Newman cannot help us anymore’,Footnote 62 Nicholas Sagovsky is right to identify in his constant appeals to him in the wake of Pascendi ‘an element of special pleading, for none of the Modernists pinpointed more clearly the points at which he diverged from Newman.’Footnote 63 As such, I believe a fairly strong case can be made that Tyrrell's persistent foregrounding of Newman was not calculated to defend either himself or others, but rather to attack Pius X, and, crucially, to discredit the Holy See in the eyes of the educated British (or rather, for reasons to be explained, English) public. Two considerations support this hypothesis. Firstly, Tyrrell by this time had no desire to defend his position within the institutional Church. Already mired in disciplinary proceedings, he can have been under no illusions that his provocative articles in the Times and the Giornale d’Italia would ensure his excommunication. More to the point, that October he also saw fit to publish in the French journal Le Grande Revue an article he had originally written in 1904 on the subject of ‘salutary excommunications’. In this he argued that: ‘the circumstances of the Church are such at the present moment as to make the patient acceptance of excommunication a strict duty for a rapidly increasing number of more intelligent and earnest minded Catholics’. Finding this to be ‘shocking and heretical’, the ever obliging Merry del Val promptly wrote to Archbishop Bourne that Tyrrell might the sooner be so honoured.Footnote 64 And secondly, prior to his own ‘Condemnation of Newman’ article in the Guardian, Tyrrell was lobbying others to write similar articles. He wanted William Gibson, for example, to publish a signed piece in the Times arguing that Pius had condemned Newman, though Gibson ultimately refused.Footnote 65 It is difficult to avoid the impression that, in so campaigning, Tyrrell's direct target was the credibility of Pius X, who, as he was not shy of claiming in his private correspondence, Tyrrell believed had gone over to the ‘power of darkness’.Footnote 66 As David Wells has written, in an article tellingly entitled ‘The Pope as Antichrist: The Substance of George Tyrrell's Polemic’:
Tyrrell's personal antipathy to Pius X was extraordinarily intense. When his disconnected utterances about Pius are pieced together, it would seem that this antipathy was built on three notions. Firstly, Tyrrell doubted the Pope's sanity. Secondly, he was convinced that the Pope was a heretic and, thirdly, he believed that the Pope was in schism.Footnote 67
Newman is, of course, often and rightly identified as having played a major role in the lessening of English anti-Catholicism over the course of the nineteenth-century. Erik Sidenvall's excellent monograph on this topic, After Anti-Catholicism? John Henry Newman and Protestant Britain, 1845 – c. 1890, notes: ‘Once treated in the most violent manner during the first two decades that ensued upon his change of religious domicile, he became towards the end of his life the revered lion of Victorian culture.’Footnote 68 This was indeed quite a turn-around, not only for Newman personally, but for British Catholicism in general. Indeed, the national papers’ eulogies following Newman's death in 1890 were a far cry from the ‘no Popery’ riots occasioned by the Maynooth affair only four decades earlier.Footnote 69 That the Times might one day write upon a cardinal's passing, ‘Thus enviably closes a most noteworthy life; a life that in itself sums up in the best and most attractive way one side of the religious life of the century’, would have been unthinkable to the estimated one million people who, following the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850, petitioned Parliament to take action against these ‘intruders’.Footnote 70 This dramatic cultural shift cannot, of course, solely be credited to Newman alone. Indeed, popular acclaim for Newman was as much a product as a catalyst of the changing fortunes of British Catholicism. It would, however, be naïve to assume that anti-Catholicism was laid to rest quite so swiftly or unequivocally as the lionization of Newman might suggest. Several of its tensions and ambiguities surfaced quite clearly in the course of the Pascendi controversy.
It may be recalled from earlier in this paper that, especially in the Times correspondence, a great deal was made of English Catholicism and English Catholics. Williams’ original letter, protesting at what he assumed was Pascendi's condemnation of Newman, pointedly describes the cardinal as an ‘English Catholic’, and claims the encyclical is ‘grossly insulting to the majority of educated English Catholics’, many of whom regard ‘every blow aimed at Father Tyrrell as a blow to the whole structure of English Catholicism.’Footnote 71 Similar examples could be quoted ad nauseam from other writers. And this holds good for those on both sides of the dispute. In at least some cases, a contrast is evidently implied between ‘English’ Catholicism and some other genre – whether ‘Roman’ in the narrow sense or, perhaps, simply ‘foreign’. This seems to hark back, consciously or not, to nineteenth-century accounts of the credulity of both Irish and mediterranean Catholics.Footnote 72 Perhaps mindful of this, Rafael Merry del Val, disavowing the possibility of his becoming Archbishop of Westminster, once remarked: ‘not to speak of my many deficiencies, my name alone is an insuperable obstacle.’Footnote 73
Revealingly, if one compares this with the complimentary press coverage of Newman in his later years, once again it is his own, impeccable Englishness that is thrust continually to the fore. Upon his receiving the red hat in 1879, for instance, the Times’ editorial read:
The ecclesiastic is, after all, very much an Englishman. He loves at bottom English ways, and is proud of the memories common to all of us, whatever our faith may be. He does not go abroad for models of sanctity. He likes the English type of Catholic better than any other. He loves that “dear mother tongue” of which he is a master.Footnote 74
Evidently, Newman was proof that one could be both a Catholic and an Englishman: ‘English Catholic’ was no longer the contradiction in terms that it might have seemed to earlier ears. But that does not mean, in the popular perception, that the two descriptors sat easily together. As late as the mid-1870s, Gladstone had argued the impossibility of being both a loyal Catholic and a loyal Englishman, on the grounds that ‘no one can become [Catholicism's] convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of some other’.Footnote 75 Newman, in his justly famous reply, was necessarily explicit that ‘I see no inconsistency in my being at once a good Catholic and a good Englishman.’Footnote 76 Successful as Newman may have been, one nonetheless finds hints in the press that Newman's English Catholicism was, at least to some degree, an attenuated one: that he had, as it were, negotiated a via media between being English and being Catholic, a way of being Catholic without embracing all that distasteful ‘Romishness’. (Unlike Cardinal Manning, perhaps, who then as now served as a handy, caricaturishly ultramontane foil to this view of Newman.) Consider the press reaction to the (mistaken) reports that while Leo XIII had offered to make Newman a cardinal, he had courteously declined the honour. According to the Guardian: ‘It is well that the Pope has offered him that distinction; it is better still that Dr. Newman has excused himself from accepting it.’ Punch concurred: ‘The Pope, much to his credit, has respectfully offered Dr. Newman a Cardinal's Hat. The venerable Doctor, equally to his credit, has respectfully declined the honour.’ It famously added: ‘’Tis the good and great head that would honour the hat, Not the hat that would honour the head.’Footnote 77 It was one thing to be a Catholic, but quite another to associate oneself too closely with the papacy and curia. Upon Newman's death over a decade later (and thus only seventeen years before Pascendi), the Daily News evidently felt the need to justify its praise of a Roman cardinal: ‘John Henry Newman was an Englishman before he was Catholic … in some respects, even to the end, he was an Englishman first, and a Catholic afterwards.’Footnote 78
Returning to 1907, what is absolutely undeniable is the importance which Newman held for a great many Catholics in England at that time. In his Oxford Anglican days, it was once said that: ‘For hundreds of young men Credo in Newmanum was the genuine symbol of faith.’Footnote 79 Seventy years later, among educated English converts especially, something very like this still endured. And if Newman had indeed been condemned, then for them, it was not the magisterium that would have discredited Newman, but rather Newman's condemnation that would have discredited the magisterium. As I have already quoted from the Times, ‘there are scores of English Roman Catholics to whom the name and example and intellectual influence of John Henry Newman means more than those of a whole curia of living Cardinals.’Footnote 80 Such an attitude was, not surprisingly, greeted with disbelief by anti-modernists such as Gasquet. In his words:
I cannot understand, if I may say so, Catholic faith based upon … the authority of this or that great name. The Catholic religion to me, and I venture to think all “educated Catholics,” rests, indeed, not on the authority of any individual were he even an Augustine or a St. Thomas, but upon that supreme authority to which alone is committed the right and duty of teaching the universal Church – namely, the Pope.Footnote 81
Tyrrell, of course, was by no means unaware of these attitudes. Indeed, they are a major theme of his Guardian article, ‘The Condemnation of Newman’. Agreeing with Williams that ‘English Roman Catholics [ … ] have been, to a great extent, led to, and retained in, the Roman Catholic Church by those methods and arguments which Newman has developed’, he continues:
For those who rely on Newman's apologetic arguments, who are not convinced by those of the seminary textbooks, a condemnation of the former must be disastrous as striking at the conditio sine qua non of their faith in the authority of the Roman Church.Footnote 82
Arguing (wrongly, as we have seen) on the basis that Newman had indeed been so condemned, and writing almost a month since his own excommunication, Tyrrell's true purpose, I contend, was not to defend Newman but to attack the Church. And to do this, he knew well enough to play upon latent anti-Catholicism in both the secular and Anglican press. By portraying the Vatican's attitude towards Newman as one of suspicion and contempt, Tyrrell and others could draw on both the naive constructions discussed in the previous section, as well as enduring prejudices against the possibility of being both English and Catholic.
Conclusion
It is clear, then, that, contrary to frequent reports at the time, there was no campaign against Newman within the curia at the time of the publication of Pascendi. While the wording of Pascendi may perhaps have been ambiguous in this regard, it was nobody's intention to condemn him, or to cast aspersions on his theology in any way. At the same time there continued to exist certain ‘anti-Catholic’ tropes, which, though subtler than in decades’ past, surfaced unmistakably in 1907. A close reading of the nineteenth-century sources, even (and perhaps especially) those lauding the later Newman, reveals these too. Together with a number of other factors, these explain just why the topic of ‘Newman and modernism’ became such a cause célèbre, enlivening the letters pages of the Times (and other publications) for a good couple of months.
A final comment: had Merry del Val or St Pius been less zealous in their defence of Newman, then a doubt would surely have been cast over him that even his latter-day supporters John Paul II (who declared him Venerable) and Benedict XVI (who broke his own protocol to beatify him personally, and who has previously suggested Newman to be a Doctor of a ChurchFootnote 83) might have been wary of overturning. Blessed John Henry might then forgive us if, just this once and on his behalf, we toast first a pope – and afterwards, his Cardinal Secretary of State.
