Liberal Catholicism in the Church of England

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the genesis of liberal Catholicism in England from 1822 to roughly 1848, with particular reference to Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Newman’s reflections reveal a side of liberalism hitherto given little consideration. As a Catholic priest, he endured, albeit disapprovingly, a sort of theological liberalism which sought to reform the Church of England. The discussion of his recollections unravels the ethical and political disposition of early liberals, which in some respects resembles later iterations of liberalism in politics. As a movement, liberal Catholicism did not retain authoritative primacy for very long in England or in any other of the European nations, though the effect of disorientation that it had on the Christian Church was considerable. A careful analysis of this brief chapter of liberalism is perhaps relevant to the study of its political orientation as a whole.

KEYWORDS:

• liberalism
• Catholicism
• Enlightenment
• Cardinal Newman
• faith
• reason

Notes

1. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, 102.

2. For documents that attest to pre-Anglo-Saxon liberalism, cf. Vieussieux’s Essay on Liberalism cited below, according to which liberalism as such was a multinational phenomenon prior to 1820 (i.e., in France, Italy, and Germany); see also Javier Fernández Sebastián’s La Aurora de la Libertad: Los Primeros Liberalismos en el mundo Iberoamericano for a record of its development in Ibero-American regions.

3. Stabler, Religious Liberty in the ‘Liberal’.

4. Vieusseux, Essay on Liberalism, 4–5.

5. Powell, Liberalism Unveiled, 29–30.

6. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 62: “I was specially annoyed with Dr. Arnold, though it did not last into later years. Some one, I think, asked in a conversation at Rome, whether a certain interpretation of Scripture was Christian? it was answered that Dr. Arnold took it; I interposed, ‘But is he a Christian?’ The subject went out of my head at once; when afterwards I was taxed with it I could say no more in explanation, than that I thought I must have been alluding to some free views of Dr. Arnold about the Old Testament:—I thought I must have meant, ‘But who is to answer for Arnold?’”

7. The Oxford Movement was a group of Anglicans scholars who were accused of an organized attempt to render the Church of England “Roman,” by revising the liturgy to emulate the forms and rites of ancient Catholicism, as practiced by the “Church Fathers.” Their vision of the Church did not comply with that of the liberal Catholics nor even with the more modest clergymen. By 1845, Newman had joined the Roman Catholic Church, whose superior tradition he could never foresee reaching England.

8. The explanation of Newman’s concession to Montalembert and Lacordaire was attested to by their later actions, which revealed a loyalty to the established Church order in spite of any conflicting sentiments:

In this new orthodox form, no less than in the heretical and democratic form expressed byLamennais, [liberal Catholicism] served to detach a section of Catholics from thereactionary policy of Restoration and bring them into touch with the main stream ofnineteenth-century liberalism. We shall see these Catholics taking part in the revolutionof 1848 and coming forward to oppose the Caesarism of the Second Empire. It was inlarge part owing to their work [Montalembert and Lacordaire, now with FélixDoupanloup and Frédéric Ozanam] that the revolutionaries, who in 1830 were unanimousin hating the “ultras” and the priests, were in 1848 full of religious fervour, and askedthe Church for its blessing upon the flag of liberty” (De Ruggierro, History ofEuropean Liberalism, 176).

9. While originally published in 1864, Newman’s Apologia is retrospective. He provided a vivid chronology of his experiences, though not always with the specificity needed for the current investigation. The passages cited relate his encounters with liberals during the 1830s, starting from 1832 and, based on his Tract for the Times (1833–41), possibly extending to the 1840s.

10. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 59–61.

11. Brinton, Shaping of Modern Thought, 134.

12. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 20.

13. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 12.

14. “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5, Authorized King James Version). This is a common dictum found throughout the New Testament, namely, the subjection of psychological phenomena (or mental acts) to moral law, of which Matthew 5:28–29 is a well-known example. Actions of the mind, whether or not carried out by the body in concert, are therefore considered equally punishable and iniquitous. This aspect of Christian morality is considerably relevant to the current study, for Cardinal Newman and the Pope are in plain agreement as to the morbidity of exalting reason beyond the judgement of Divine Revelation, an impersonal measure of conduct which could never result from the reasonings of many individuals. According to most exponents of religious dogma, the reasoning faculty can be exercised in an infinite number of directions, and can thus justify the most obscene undertakings if left unchecked by divine judgement.

15. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 165–66.

16. For other invocations of Newman’s 18 propositions, see Brinton, Shaping of Modern Thought, 180; Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, 172; Janowski and Duggan, John Stuart Mill, 747.

17. Newman, “Notice of Liberalism in Oxford,” in Janowski and Duggan, eds., John Stuart Mill, 750 (emphasis added).

18. Ibid., 751.

19. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 106, 173, 198.

20. Ibid., 209.

21. Ibid., 210.

22. As has been shown, a great deal of the spiritual power of a place of worship rests in its immunity to the world outside of it, and especially to human judgement and reason, for which the Church has sought to be a corrective. For further treatment of the Catholic principle of cognitive demarcation, see Pope Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors” (1864), which also corroborates the endurance of the liberal “indifferentism.” The Church that is committed to conservation, however, today struggles to reconcile itself with an ever diversifying world. This struggle of the past-rooted Church against a modernizing civilization has caused many an episcopal congregation to adapt their House to be more “inclusive,” demonstrating flexibilities that often negate their heritage. Thus the dilemma is whether a priesthood should speak out against the assimilation of the Church to the times (à la Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos), or if it should adjust itself and the House according to the fluxes of modernity, for example by the incorporation of pop-music into the choir, changes in dress code, alternative portrayals of the Savior, or freer, unregulated interpretation of Scripture, the last of which is characteristic of the liberal-Catholics. Among the most controversial of questions forced upon the Church is the treatment of sexual relations; for an argument posited against the Church of England on this matter, see Coward, “Decadence of the Church of England.” For more on the contemporary handling of Church modification, see the online popular press articles: Kimball, “5 Problems with the Modern Christian Church”; Aboreson, “Religion Evolving to Fit the Modern World”; Shortall, “When Catholicism Embraced Modernity”; Schall, “On Adapting to ‘Modern Times’”; and McIntosh, “Adapting to Culture… Appropriately!”

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Jacob Duggan

Jacob Duggan is a student at Towson University, Baltimore, USA. He is the co-editor, with Zbigniew Janowski, of John Stuart Mill: On Democracy, Freedom and Government & Other Selected Writings (St. Augustine’s Press, 2019), and the author of “Civilization: Guizot and Mill,” The Postil Magazine (2020).