“Monstrous Propositions” of a Dominican

Extract

When, as a student at Oxford, Johnson “took up Law’s Serious Call. . . expecting to find it a dull book”, he found it “quite an overmatch” for him. Taking up David Urquhart’s Effect on the World of the Restoration of Canon Law ... a Vindication of the Catholic Church against a Priest, I found myself in somewhat similar case—struck by the moral passion and remorseless logic. Urquhart’s luckless opponent was the Dominican friar, Fr. Rodolph Suffield—celebrated English Dominican preacher of the 1860s. Urquhart (1805-77) was an eccentric Scottish aristocrat, a Protestant papalist, who succeeded in pushing his concern over the morality of war on to the preparatory documentation of the first Vatican Council. Suffield (1821-91), by the late 1860s profoundly antagonistic to ultramontanism, left the Church to become a Unitarian minister shortly after the promulgation of the Infallibility Decree. It is perhaps timely to recall their contestation as contemporary British foreign policy impales itself upon the horns of its current moral dilemmas.