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Popular and Elite Religion: the Church and Devotional Control*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Sheridan Gilley
Sheridan Gilley*
Affiliation:
Department of Theology, University of Durham
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Extract

Popular and elite are imprecise terms, but it may be possible to give them a closer definition by relating them to categories in the work of John Henry Newman. In 1877, Newman was growing old. He was republishing his Anglican writings, both to preserve what they contained of value and to draw what poison remained. A particular difficulty attached to his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, published forty years before, in 1837, which classically defined the peculiar merit of the Church of England as occupying a middle way or via media between Romanism and popular Protestantism. The work contained some sharp attacks on Rome, which Newman had retracted even before his Roman conversion. There remained, however, a particular matter which had long been an obstacle to his submission to Rome, his conviction that the honours which Roman Catholics paid to the Virgin and saints derogated from the unique worship due to Christ, which Newman combined with a fastidious distaste for the more ‘unmanly’ and sentimental or sugary aspects of modern Catholic devotion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 42: Elite and Popular Religion , 2006 , pp. 337 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2006

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Dr Mary Heimann for reading a draft of this essay, which I would like to dedicate to the memory of John Fuggles.

References

1 See Newman, John Henry, ‘Retraction of Anti-Catholic Statements’ (1845), The Via Media of the Anglican Church, 2 vols (London, 1891), 2: 425–33 Google Scholar, esp. 428–33, quoting his retractions of February 1843. The quotations come from this edition.

2 See, for example, Newman, John Henry, ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’, Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols (London, 1871), 2: 1–73 Google Scholar, esp. 71–2. Originally published as ‘Catholicity of the English Church’, for the British Critic 27 (January, 1840), 40–88.

3 Pusey, E. B., The Church of England a Portion of Christ’s One Holy Catholic Church, and a Means of Restoring Visible Unity. An Eirenicon, in a Letter to the Author of ‘The Christian Year’ (London, 1865), 101–90 Google Scholar, esp. 116–20 on Fr Faber.

4 A letter to the Rev. E.B. Pusey, D.D., on his recent Eirenicon (London, 1866).

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8 ‘Gaude Mana Virgo, cunetas haereses sola interemisti in universo mundo’: Brevarium Romanum … Pars hiemalis (London, 1946), 178. Partly quoted in Ineffabilis Deus: see Mattei, De, Pius IX, 176 Google Scholar. The text is also cited on p. 123 from Quanta Cura, the encyclical accompanying the Syllabus of Errors.

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13 These categories were fully enunciated by Calvin from Scripture, and so were known by Newman from the English Protestant tradition, as from Pearson and Bishop Butler. See Weidner, The Via Media, l-lviii. Newman’s ideas are greatly expanded in the Baron Friedrich von Hügel’s ‘The Three Elements of Religion’, Chapter II, The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her Friends, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1923), 1 : 50–82.

14 ‘Preface’, The Via Media (1891), 1: xliii.

15 I say odd because it is unclear how the ‘people of God’ should exercise authority except through representatives, who invariably take authority to themselves.

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18 Loss and Gain: the Story of a Convert (London, 1891), 426.

19 ‘Preface’, The Via Media (1891), lxviii.

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