In a previous number of Recusant History, the present writer discussed the philosophy of knowledge of the Liberal Catholic periodical The Rambler. The philosophy of knowledge concept was used to examine ideas on the nature of mind and reason and on the value, use and limitations of reason, on the grounds that such ideas were the foundation for the reviewers’ speculations on education—one of the most vital of nineteenth century debates. Moreover, the philosophy of knowledge proved to be a useful vehicle for relating the world-view of the periodical writers to their discussions of education at all levels.

On whit Monday, June 1st, 1857, the first general chapter of the Oblates of St. Charles Borromeo in the diocese of Westminster was held at Bayswater, one month before the splendid new gothic-conceived church of Thomas Meyer was solemnly blessed by Cardinal Wiseman and dedicated to St. Mary of the Angels, a title reflecting Manning’s enduring devotion to St. Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Third Order. Subsequent building, extensions and additions were to be the work of John Francis Bentley. The founding group of Oblates was small, all its members being admitted as novices of the community on the day of the first general chapter. When the first biennial elections were held, Manning was confirmed by Wiseman as Superior and henceforth known to the community simply as ‘the Father’. Before the year was over the group was to be joined by three new novices and two postulants, all of whom eventually persevered in their vocation. By the time Manning died in 1892, the Oblates had been able to number a total of forty-six priests in their ranks in the space of only thirty-five years, thus easily outstripping the recruitment pattern of Brompton Oratory, the closest to the concept of the Oblates in both spiritual formation and organisation. Over the eighty years immediately following Manning’s demise, a further thirty-three priests were to be counted among the Oblates.

In an article published in The Month in 1908 Charles Plater claimed that there were three pressing needs which had to be met if English Catholic social action were to develop fruitfully. He admitted that there was no shortage of charitable institutions, and a long English Catholic tradition of charitable work, but claimed that in the main Catholics were apathetic when it came to social work. The three needs were, firstly, a need for experts, both clerical and lay, who could produce a sound social literature. These experts would form a Catholic equivalent of the British Institute of Social Service, to command the best advice and to foster local initiatives; with its help, Catholics could join in such bodies as anti-sweating leagues, housing schemes, temperance campaigns, and so on, and be sure of their ground. Secondly, there was a need for organised social study in all Catholic educational establishments, and for more or less informal study circles, so that interested and informed laypeople would be produced. Thirdly, there was a need to organise working-men’s study clubs to enable working-class Catholics to hold their own against socialist colleagues and so to form labour leaders. As Plater was to stress time and time again, working-men could only be reached by working-men. They would, he claimed, welcome the sense of power gained by this training and the self-improvement effected by it.

Among the companions of John Henry Newman at Littlemore at the time of his reception into communion with Rome in October 1845, perhaps the least remembered is John Walker. Indeed, Ambrose St. John, Richard Stanton, and Bernard Dalgairns followed Newman to the Oratory, yet Walker could never bring himself to do likewise. Often confused with Canon John Walker of Scarborough (one of Newman’s subsequent theological correspondents), ‘Dismal Johnny’, as he was dubbed by Manuel Johnson, the Radcliffe Observer, enjoyed a less than happy relationship with Newman. To recall the life of Walker is to shed some further light upon Newman’s own character, and to witness a reconciliation of estranged companions in old age.

On his arrival at Lavington in January 1833 H. E. Manning’s theological baggage fitted neatly into a few short sentences. He summed it up in a letter written to Samuel Wilberforce (October 20, 1850): ‘When I came to Lavington in 1833 I believed, as I always did, in Baptismal Regeneration: I had no view on the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ: and no idea of the Church’. In the recollections of his later ‘Journal’ (1878–82) he described his position at that time in greater detail: ‘The state of my religious belief in 1833 was profound faith in the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, in the Redemption by the Passion of our Lord, and in the work of the Holy Spirit, and the conversion of the soul. I believed in baptismal regeneration, and in a spiritual, but real, receiving of our Lord in Holy Communion. As to the Church, I had no definite conception’. His evangelical background and piety seems still to have filled most of his religious horizon.

It is not surprising that Henry Edward Manning had strong opinions about the Kulturkampf, Otto von Bismarcks effort in the early 1870’s to bring the Roman Catholic Church in Germany under the control of the State. As head of the Catholic Church in England, it appropriately fell to Manning to condemn what most British Catholics would have seen as the persecution of their Church in the new German Empire. Moreover, Manning knew personally the bishops involved in the conflict with Bismarck from their time together at the Vatican Council. Indeed, he was well acquainted with some of them who had played important rôles, either for or against, in the great controversies of the Council that led to the definition of Papal Infallibility. MiecisIaus Ledochowski, Archbishop of Gnesen and Posen, imprisoned and expelled from his see by the German government in 1874, had, together with Manning, been a prominent infallibilist. Paulus Melchers, Archbishop of Cologne, and leader of the German inopportunists, suffered the same penalty. The bishops of Breslau, Trier and Paderborn, all of whom had played significant rôles at the Council, the first two against, the latter for the definition, were either imprisoned, expelled, or both. Manning considered these men to have suffered for the cause of religious liberty, and could not understand the indifference of British politicians, especially of liberals like Gladstone, to their fate.

Luigi Sturzo, the exiled founder of the suppressed Italian Christian Democrats, wrote in May 1942 that American Catholic papers prior to the American entry into the war had been sympathetic to Franco and even Mussolini as well as to Vichy France. After Pearl Harbor, these papers retained their sympathy for Vichy France.

It is a convention—now hardened to cliché—of Victorian historiography that Henry Edward Manning and John Henry Newman lived parallel lives: both virtual contemporaries, both sons of bankrupt fathers, both Oxford Anglicans with promise of greatness, both converts to Rome, both ascetics, both Cardinals. Equally conventional are the differences: Newman’s subtlety, Manning’s stoutness, Newman’s ‘Englishness’, Manning’s Romanita, Newman the outsider, Manning an Establishment figure from the start. These conceits are serviceable, but a more useful linkage is this: Manning and Newman lived not parallel lives, but paradoxical ones, the paradox being that each, in a sense, lived the other man’s life. Consider how each developed in unimagined ways. Newman was one of the most private men of his day. To a temperament already solitary was added the isolation of conversion, then the loneliness of failure, finally the realisation that he represented only a minority in a flamboyantly Ultramontane church. Yet Newman was never left alone with his solitude. His inner life became public property: his soul-struggle debated in the popular prints, his spiritual journey subject of tract and pamphlet and letter to the editor. People thought they knew him better than he knew himself, and, were they a Henry Kingsley or a Robert Wilberforce or an Orestes Brownson, lost little time in telling him. The boundaries of a decent interiority were crossed again and again, until he became icon, symbol, Everyman’s Newman.

Henry Manning first settled in Sussex when he became John Sargent’s curate at the tiny village of Upwaltham in 1832. A year later Sargent made him his curate at Graffham and Lavington. When John Sargent died in May 1833, his widow presented Manning to the two livings. On December 24 1840, he was appointed Archdeacon of Chichester. He was to remain in Sussex for eighteen years until his resignation from all these preferments in December 1850, and shortly afterwards, in his own words, Manning became a Catholic ‘off his own bat’.