Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T21:35:51.678Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Origins of Anglo-Catholic Missions: Fr Richard Benson and the Initial Missions of the Society of St John the Evangelist, 1869–1882

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2015

ROWAN STRONG
ROWAN STRONG*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Murdoch University, Perth, WA 6150, Australia; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper investigates the origins of Anglican Anglo-Catholic missions, through the missionary theology and practice of the founder of the Society of St John the Evangelist, Fr Richard Benson, and an exploration of its initial missionary endeavours: the Twelve-Day Mission to London in 1869, and two missions in India from 1874. The Indian missions comprised an institutional mission at Bombay and Pune, and a unique ascetic enculturated mission at Indore by Fr Samuel Wilberforce O'Neill ssje. It is argued that Benson was a major figure in the inauguration of Anglo-Catholic missions; that his ritualist moderation was instrumental in the initial public success of Anglo-Catholic domestic mission; and that in overseas missions he had a clear theological preference for disconnecting evangelism from Europeanising. Benson's approach, more radical than was normal in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a consequence of envisaging mission's being undertaken by a religious order, an entirely new phenomenon for Anglican missions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 66 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 90 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall, ii, Oxford 1979, p. xix.

2 Ernest Hawkins to J. H. Newman, 12 Aug. 1844, in The letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Francis J. McGrath, x, Oxford 2006, 311.

3 Jupp, R., ‘“Nurseries of a learned clergy”: Pusey and the defence of cathedrals’, in Butler, Perry (ed.), Pusey rediscovered, London 1983, 139–61Google Scholar, 158–9.

4 Ibid. 155.

5 Strong, Rowan, Alexander Forbes of Brechin: the first Tractarian bishop, Oxford 1995, 43–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Mumm, Susan, Stolen daughters, virgin mothers: Anglican sisterhoods in Victorian Britain, London 1999Google Scholar, ch. iv.

7 Reed, John Sheldon, Glorious battle: the cultural politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism, Nashville, Tn 1996, 160Google Scholar, 162, 168, 170–2.

8 Anglican slum ritualism has been studied, and sometimes celebrated, in works such as Ellsworth, L. E., Charles Lowder and the Ritualist Movement, London 1982Google Scholar; Palmer, Bernard, Reverend rebels: five Victorian clerics and their fight against authority, London 1983Google Scholar; Rowell, Geoffrey, The vision glorious: themes and personalities of the Catholic revival in Anglicanism, Oxford 1983Google Scholar, ch. vi; and Yates, Nigel, Anglican ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1839–1910. Oxford 1999Google Scholar.

9 Cox, Jeffrey, The British missionary enterprise, London 2008, 194Google Scholar, 198, 206. Cox refers to Anglican sisterhoods and brotherhoods engaged in missionary work as ‘High Church’ when in fact they were explicitly Anglo-Catholic; and to the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa as ‘moderately High Church’, when it was thoroughly High Church.

10 Frykenberg, Robert E., Christianity in India from beginnings to the present, Oxford 2008, 256–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 I have previously noted this ritualist distinction between older and younger generations of adherents to Oxford Movement Anglicanism: Strong, Alexander Forbes of Brechin, 83–7. The distinction has a basis in contemporary nomenclature and also in secondary works: Reed. Glorious battle, 281 n. 1.

12 Porter, Andrew, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700–1914, Manchester 2004, 58Google Scholar.

13 Ibid. 229, 231–2.

14 Maughan, Steven, ‘Imperial Christianity? Bishop Montgomery and the foreign missions of the Church of England, 1895–1915’, in Porter, Andrew (ed.), The imperial horizons of British Protestant missions, 1880–1914, Grand Rapids, Mi 2003, 32–57Google Scholar at pp. 36–8.

15 Ibid. 41 n. 36.

16 Cox, Jeffrey, Imperial fault lines: Christianity and colonial power in India, 1818–1940, Stanford 2002, 13Google Scholar.

17 Ibid. 19.

18 Dieter Voll, Catholic evangelism, London 1963, 49.

19 Ellsworth, Charles Lowder and the ritualist movement, 19–22.

20 The Guardian, 17 Nov. 1869.

21 Ibid. 17 Nov., 1 Dec. 1869.

22 The Times, 14 Nov. 1869.

23 The Guardian, 1 Dec. 1869.

24 The Times, 19 Nov. 1869.

25 The Guardian, 1 Dec. 1869.

26 Woodgate, M. V., Father Benson: founder of the Cowley Fathers, London 1953, 63Google Scholar, 67.

27 Anson, Peter, The call of the cloister, 2nd edn, London 1964, 51–69Google Scholar.

28 The Guardian, 1 Dec. 1869.

29 Voll, Catholic evangelism, 49; Jeffrey, R. M. C., ‘When all are Christians none are: Church and mission in the teaching of Father Benson’, in Smith, Martin L., (ed.), Benson of Cowley, London 1980, 119–36Google Scholar.

30 Kent, John, Holding the fort: studies in Victorian revivalism, London 1978, 246Google Scholar.

31 Mason, A. J., Memoir of George Howard Wilkinson, London 1910, 118Google Scholar.

32 Kent, Holding the fort, 244. A letter, dated 6 August 1986, to the author of this article from Fr Alan Grainge, the SSJE archivist at St Edward's House, London, states that the manuscript book that Kent cites is no longer to be found.

33 Jeffrey, ‘When all are Christians’, 130; Kent, Holding the fort, 236.

34 The Guardian, 1 Dec. 1869.

35 Kent, Holding the fort, 263–4.

36 Curti, Geoffrey, ‘The mystical theology of Father Benson’, Church Quarterly Review cl (1950), 213–29Google Scholar at p. 213; Benson, R. M., Spiritual readings for every day: Christmas, London n.d., 49Google Scholar.

37 Benson, R. M., The final Passover, I: The upper chamber, London 1884, 232–3Google Scholar; Further letters of Richard Meux Benson, ed. W. H. Longridge, London 1920, 43–4; Letters of Richard Meux Benson, ed. G. Congreve and W. H. Longridge, London 1916, 156–7.

38 Benson, R. M., The final Passover, IV: The life beyond the grave, London 1898, 100Google Scholar, 504.

39 Reed, Glorious battle, 26–8, 242.

40 Slade, H. E. W., A work begun: the story of the Cowley Fathers in India, 1874–1967, London 1970, 72Google Scholar.

41 The Guardian 17 Nov, 1 Dec. 1869.

42 Cowley S. John, Feb. 1874, 22.

43 The SSJE mission would be followed a few years later by the Community of St Mary the Virgin, which sent sisters to work in the SSJE Pune mission in 1877 at the invitation of Bishop Mylne of Bombay: Anson, Call of the cloister, 255.

44 Neill, Stephen, A history of Christianity in India, 1707–1858, Cambridge 1985, 229CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 273, 395–6. I am grateful to the anonymous reader for this Journal for drawing my attention to A. W. Street.

45 R. M. Benson to Samuel Wilberforce O'Neill, 8 Aug 1859, Letters of Benson, 227–9.

46 Benson to O'Neill, 23 July 1874, Further letters, 16.

47 Benson to O'Neill, 10 Feb 1876, ibid. 96.

48 Cox, Imperial fault lines, 4.

49 Sedding, E. D., Godfrey Callaway: missionary in Kaffraria, 1892–1942, his life and writings, London 1945Google Scholar; Hilliard, David, God's gentlemen: a history of the Melanesian mission, St Lucia, QLD 1978Google Scholar.

50 Benson, Spiritual readings, 206–7.

51 Benson to O'Neill, 13 June 1877, Further letters, 165–6.

52 Slade, A work begun, 35.

53 Woodgate, Father Benson, 116.

54 Slade, A work begun, 51–3.

55 Ibid. 61.

56 Ibid.

57 Young, Richard Fox, ‘Enabling encounters: the case of Nilakanth-Nehemiah Goreh, Brahman convert’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research xxix (2005), 16–17Google Scholar.

58 Idem, ‘Holy orders: Nehemiah Goreh's ordination ordeal and the problem of “social distance” in nineteenth-century North Indian Anglicanism’, Church History and Religious Culture xc (2010), 75–80Google Scholar, 81–2.

59 Gardner, C. E., The life of Father Goreh, London 1900, 110Google Scholar, 115, 242.

60 Ibid. 151.

61 Ibid. 153, 158, 164–5, 211.

62 Ibid. 178.

63 Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 414.

64 Gardner, Life of Father Goreh, 268.

65 Young, ‘Enabling encounters’, 17.

66 Nehemiah/Nilkanth Goreh, unpublished conference paper quoted in Further letters, p. vii.

67 Benson to O'Neill, 16 Sept. 1875, Letters of Benson, 171–2.

68 Benson to O'Neill, 6 July 1882, ibid. 163–4.

69 Ibid. 163.

70 Benson to O'Neill, 16 Sept 1875, ibid. 172.

71 Benson to O'Neill, 21 Jan 1881, Further letters, 242.

72 Benson to O'Neill, Ascension Day 1882, Letters of Benson, 1580.

73 Gardner, Life of Father Goreh, 228–9.

74 Ibid. 252.

75 Further letters, pp. x–xiii.

76 Gardner, Life of Father Goreh, 252.

77 Samuel Gopal, ‘Samuel Wilberforce O'Neill’, The Cowley Evangelist (Dec. 1905), 269–77. I am indebted to Hannah O'Rourke, a master's student at the University of Oxford, for her research skills and persistence in tracking down this article for me.

78 Gopal, ‘O'Neill’, 273–4.

79 Ibid. 270.

80 Woodgate, Father Benson, 141.

81 Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 314.

82 See, for example, Bede Griffiths, The marriage of east and west, London 1982.

83 Benson, R. M., The religious vocation: instructions on the Rule. London 1939, 39–40Google Scholar.

84 Porter, Andrew, ‘An overview, 1700–1914’, in Etherington, Norman (ed.), Oxford history of the British Empire companion series: missions and empire, Oxford 2005, 40Google Scholar.

85 Strong, Rowan, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700–1850, Oxford 2007, 60–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Greenless, J. G. and Johnson, C. M., Good citizens: British missionaries and imperial states, 1870–1914, Montreal 2003, 3Google Scholar, 8; Johnston, A., Missionary writing and empire, 1800–1860, Cambridge 2003, 38–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 For example, the childhood of Bishop Stephen Neill: Daughrity, D. B., Bishop Stephen Neill: from Edinburgh to South India. Oxford 2008Google Scholar. I am grateful to Robert Frykenberg for drawing my attention to the gap between ideal and reality in missionary children's lives, and for this reference.

88 Frykenberg, Robert E., Christians and missionaries in India: cross-cultural communication since 1500, Grand Rapids, Mi 2003Google Scholar.

89 Maughan, ‘Imperial Christianity’, 32–57.

90 Skinner, Simon A., Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: the social and political thought of the Oxford Movement, Oxford 2004, 87–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Strong, Rowan, ‘Continuity and change in Anglican missionary theology: Dr Thomas Bray and the 1910 World Missionary Conference’, Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology ii (2011), 20–32Google Scholar (http://postcolonialjournal.com/Resources/Strong%20JPTT.pdf).

92 Benson to O'Neill, 16 Sept 1874, Letters of Benson, 138.

93 This connection between conversion and British civilisation went back to the 1720s when it began to become prominent among SPG advocates with respect to that society's missions to the North American indigenous peoples: Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, 50–9.

94 Benson to O'Neill, 14 July 1882, Letters of Benson, 166–7.

95 Porter, Andrew, ‘Church history, history of Christianity, religious history: some reflections on British missionary enterprise since the late eighteenth century’, Church History lxxi (2002), 555–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar at pp. 581–2; Richard Fox Young, ‘World Christian historiography, theological “enthusiasms”, and the writing of Frykenberg's, R. E.Christianity in India’, Religious Compass v (2011), 71–9Google Scholar.

96 Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, 282.

97 See, for example, various works by Stanley, Brian, particularly ‘“Commerce and Christianity”: providence theory, the missionary movement, and the imperialism of free trade, 1842–1860’, HJ xxvi (1983), 71–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Religion versus empire?, 10–11, 33–6, 58–62; and Brown, Stewart J., Providence and empire, 1815–1914, London 2008, 2–4Google Scholar.

98 Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 339. However, like Benson, Miller's enculturation agenda was limited, in his case by his passionate defence of the supreme value of western education: Neill, Stephen, Colonialism and Christian missions, London 1966, 107Google Scholar.

99 Cox, British missionary enterprise, 206–7.

100 Porter, ‘Church history’ 583.