After several years’ prevarication, for diplomatic and matrimonial reasons, Henry VIII finally promised the Queen of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands, in July 1543 (just two days before his marriage to Catherine Parr) that he would send 40,000 ducats to assist the Emperor in his fight against the Turks. It was a drop in the ocean as far as Charles V was concerned; his yearly revenue was averaging about 2¼ million ducats at this time. But that was insufficient to meet his expenses, and another 40,000 ducats was by no means to be spurned. In truth, it was modest enough too on the part of the English King as a contribution to so high a cause as the defence of Christendom, being equivalent to £10,000 sterling. But it was £10,000 which Henry could ill afford given his other commitments particularly on fortifications and military expenditure, and it seems to have been intended only as a loan, to be financed, when the logistics had been worked out, by bills drawn on London bankers and on the merchants of the staple at Calais.

If the English Reformation can be seen as an extended transaction between the laity and the clergy, then its outcome is surely well described, in Claire Cross’s phrase, as the ‘triumph of the laity’. While most Elizabethan Protestant divines were more than happy about the spiritual aspects of that triumph, they were altogether less enthusiastic about its impact on the standing of the clergy. Certainly the independence, status, and thus the material wealth of the clergy were subjects of concern for many Elizabethan Protestants. Presbyterians, moderate Puritans, conformists, both ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, all were much exercised by the problem of the status and financial independence of the clerical estate. But while they may have shared a common concern with the question, the different priorities and values which divided Elizabethan Protestant divines amongst themselves inevitably coloured their attitude to church property and clerical status. In particular the issue provided a central strand in the polemical exchange between Presbyterians and conformists, as each tried to label the other as the clergy’s own worst enemy in its protracted, indeed interminable, negotiations with lay society for improved pay and conditions.

A Certificate From Northamptonshire, published anonymously in 1641, proclaimed that the current attacks being made on the bishops had a secret purpose behind them: the abolition of the requirement to pay tithe, whether to cleric or layman. ‘If the bishops and their courts were overthrown’, so the author claimed, the people would be freed from paying tithes, ‘which is the secret thing which our common free holders and grand jury-men do so much aim at’. The writer’s claims concerning the motives which led men to demand the abolition of episcopacy may have had some truth in them, but he was to be proved wrong about the consequences of such abolition; as, indeed, a better informed observer pondering the extent of lay involvement in the ownership of tithes might have been able to predict. Despite several close calls and a variety of imaginative proposals for abolition or reform, tithes remained and survived the demise of bishops, deans, and ecclesiastical courts, standing alongside glebe as one of the twin pillars of the maintenance of the parochial ministry.

A frequent criticism of the Society of Jesus, and one which Martin Grene, the Jesuit apologist whose An Account of the Jesuites Life and Doctrine was published in 1661, was especially eager to refute, was the possession of immense wealth. Grene’s rebuttal began with a distinction between an individual Jesuit and a Jesuit institution. The former was forbidden to accept any financial compensation for his apostolic services. What he did, he did freely. Grene stressed that the work was done by the Society gratuitously and simply for the love of God. The Jesuits sought no reward but relied on the providence of God ‘who exciteth devout people to supply their [the Jesuits’] necessity out of pure charity’. The alms of the faithful supported the Society and, through its dependence on charity, the Society hoped to avoid all semblance of avarice and simony.

We are all familiar with the idea that the Church is in the world but not of it, and that too great a preoccupation with earthly things may compromise the Church’s other-worldly objectives. One thinks of the extravagance of a Renaissance pope such as Leo X, reputed to have said, ‘Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us’: or of an ancien régime prelate like the Archbishop of Mainz, who arrived for the coronation of the Emperor Joseph II with a retinue of fourteen sumptuous carriages: or, in our own time, the Vatican’s reported links with some of the shadier elements in the world of international finance. Yet, it is equally obvious that lack of adequate material resources can act as a serious impediment to the Church’s mission to go forth and teach all nations. Excessive poverty, like excessive wealth, brings its own problems. As the adage has it, not money itself but the desire for money is the root of all evil. Excessive poverty and the desire for money are the themes which I wish to pursue in this paper, in the context of the Scottish Catholic Mission in the eighteenth century, and more specifically as they relate to the so-called Jansenist quarrels which divided the Mission in the 1730s and 1740s.

There are problems with this topic. Zinzendorf himself would certainly have considered it a non-subject, as he would certainly have regarded the counsel of his contemporary Wesley to ‘gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can’ as unspeakably bourgeois, an adjective I have no recollection of Wesley’s applying to himself. The severer kind of economic historian might also regard what I have to say as a non-treatment of a non-subject, for I cannot present you with a profit-and-loss account of Zinzendorf’s transactions; I know no more about his income than he did, which was not very much; and although I shall refer later to the successive valuations of Zinzendorf’s property which that remarkable scholar Otto Uttendürfer dredged up from the Herrnhut archives sixty years ago, I attach no great importance to them. They seem to me the same kind of artificial enterprise as the annual revaluations for borrowing purposes which were made of the empty Centre Point building in its earlier years. Moreover, the straightforward introduction to the theme which I enjoyed not long ago is not readily available to historians in the West. It is to work first in the archive of Francke’s Orphan House at Halle, and then move on to that of the Renewed Church of the United Brethren at Herrnhut. Francke’s Orphan House, one of the biggest buildings of eighteenth-century Europe, has the Thatcherite principle of cost-effectiveness written all over it, and is clearly based on the Prussian barracks. The whole community at Herrnhut combines baroque lavishness with simplicity in a way not easily put into words, but most movingly experienced in the Grosse Saal in which the Brethren now hold their services. A visit to the Moravian settlement at Zeyst in the Netherlands, however, may sufficiently illustrate the point.

The bankruptcy in 1756 of the major French creditors of Antoine Lavalette, superior of the Jesuit missions of Martinique, resulted in the ‘Lavalette affair’ of 1756–62. During that period, Lavalette borrowed feverishly in an attempt to save his commercial enterprises in the Caribbean, his religious superiors sought to deal with his betrayal of his religious vocation and his mounting debts, and the Jesuits’ enemies gained court orders for the seizure of Jesuit property and the dispersal of the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus was then suppressed in most French territory by royal edict in 1764.

Arguments in justification of the Church’s wealth can be illuminating in any age. The wealth of the Church of England in the eighteenth century has had a particularly bad press. Nineteenth-century reformers portrayed the Established Church of the previous century as a money-grabbing institution; clergy being too concerned with lining their own pockets to be effective pastoral leaders. John Wade in his Extraordinary Black Book wanted to expose the rapaciousness of clergy who, ‘with the accents and exterior of angels … perpetuate the work of demons’. He concluded that true Christianity was ‘meek, charitable, unobtrusive and above all cheap’. Clergy were castigated for holding a materialistic outlook which seemed to hinder their religious role and which has been taken by both subsequent Church historians and historians of the left as a sign of the clergy’s involvement with secularizing trends in society. Even the work of Norman Sykes leaves the impression that the clergy’s defence of their wealth went no further than jobbery and place-seeking. Like Namier he played down the ideological nature of such arguments, relegating them to the realm of cant and hypocrisy.

In the eighteenth century two things about Geneva were clear to all observers: the city’s astonishing prosperity, and its Calvinism. It is not necessary to suppose that the second caused the first (although many contemporaries thought it did) to read in the republic and such conspicuous expatriates as Necker clear evidence that God rewarded hard work and virtuous living. All Europe knew of the scale and importance of the international Protestant banking connection to which Genevans contributed so much.

In 1864, Lord Shaftesbury spoke out against the complacency of those who congratulated themselves on the liberality of the nation. He looked back to the Irish famine, the Indian famine, the Crimean War. ‘The newspapers were loud in bepraising the munificence of the country in all those cases; but I confess I never saw any munificence.’ The first half of the nineteenth century had seen the formation of a multitude of philanthropic enterprises, Bible and Tract societies, missionary societies, which were both symptoms of and conducive to a revived state of religion. Yet, given Britain’s increasing prosperity, itself a focus for Protestant pride, the spirit of benevolence, if it had increased absolutely, seemed relatively to have declined. Too often, income increased, but donations remained the same. Moreover, as the Baptist William Brock put it:

Too much of this world’s goods has traditionally been regarded as detrimental to Christians. But the experiences of a small, poor area like the Western District of the Scottish Roman Catholic Mission from the 1800s to the 1860s show that religion can become entangled with worldly questions of money through arguments over how to spend scarce resources. Scottish bishops in order to make the most effective use of the meagre funds they had (derived from grants from Rome, bequests and donations from laymen, and loans secured on church buildings) were forced to operate as bankers as well as pastors. Like bankers they had to provide stability and protect existing funds; at the same time they had to expand their credit basis laying out speculatively what they could to create new congregations, hoping that these new resource centres would, through their contributions, pay off the interest on the loans raised to erect their chapels. - Like all banking systems everything ultimately depended on credit and credibility, not only on trustworthiness, but also shrewd and cautious business management to keep the web of such monies as they had utilized to best advantage.

A gravestone in a Teignmouth cemetery displays the following inscription:

That unassuming epitaph bears testimony to one of the most remarkable figures in the story of Victorian missionary expansion. The missionary movement from both Britain and North America depended for its regular income on the enthusiasm of the small-scale contributor, but the munificence of the wealthy was essential to the financing of special projects or the opening up of new fields. The role of, for example, the jam manufacturer William Hartley as treasurer of the Primitive Methodist Missionary Society, or of the chemical manufacturers James and John Campbell White in providing much of the finance for the Free Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia Mission, is relatively well known.

The Church of Scotland, from which Episcopalians had departed in 1690, and Covenanters shortly thereafter, suffered further division in the eighteenth century. The Seceders broke off in 1733 and the Relief Presbytery in 1752. The Seceders split into Burghers and Anti-Burghers in 1747, and at the close of that century each of these bodies divided into New Light and Old Light. The Old Lights found their way back into the mainstream by means which need not concern us, while the two New Light bodies united in 1820 and in 1847 joined with the Relief Church to form the United Presbyterian Church.

You do need to be very romantic to accept the industrial civilization’, wrote G. K. Chesterton. ‘It does really require all the old Gaelic glamour to make men think Glasgow is a grand place. Yet the miracle is achieved, and while I was in Glasgow I shared the illusion.’ The industrial dream suited the Scots. Here was a really romantic vista suited to a romantic people. On a visit in 1919, Eric Gill was far more pointed: ‘Love God and do what you will’ would never lead you to a life in Glasgow. On one of his many visits, Rev. Vincent McNabb, the Dominican, declared a walk through the Glasgow slums demonstrated the futility of the money standard of civilization. Only a return to the land could bring real wealth and contentment. In similar vein John Ruskin and his active local following in the city confidently awaited the collapse of industrialism. William Cassels, the President of the Glasgow Ruskin Society, championed these ideas in lectures, pamphlets, and reading guilds. Impressed by Rerum Novarum and associated with local Catholics in the Single Tax movement, he and a socialist friend had spent some time with Edward Carpenter’s communal land experiment. Glasgow, the Second City of the Empire and the epitome of the Victorian acquisitive society, had a remarkably prolific record in spawning alternative social visions. Catholics were to draw on these native experiences and their own traditions in founding the Scottish Land Colonisation Association. Rev. Professor John McQuillan was their inspiration. Their farm, Broadfield, Symington, Lanarkshire, was a practical statement about their attitudes to wealth.

One fairly obvious difference between this paper and those you have heard so far is that liberation theology, whatever it means, is still being discussed, attacked, caricatured, and defended with great vehemence and passion. The theme does not possess the completeness and neatness that historians prefer. It sprawls and proliferates. The bibliography is immense. We have already reached the stage of the overarching survey. D. W. Ferm has provided a 150-page summary with a helpful ‘reader’ for the use of college students. Ferm’s survey includes African and Asian theologians as well as Latin Americans. I can understand his desire to include Archbishop-elect Desmond Tutu in South Africa and to provide some hints as to why President Marcos could be deposed in the Philippines. And there is indeed a body called the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians—its unfortunate acronym is EATWOT—which gives some substance to this universalizing claim. But I am going to confine myself to Latin America because it was there that the ‘option for the poor’ was first spoken about. The date was 1968. CELAM, the regional association of Latin American Bishops, met at Medellin in Colombia in August. Pope Paul VI was present, and was the first Pope to kiss the soil of Latin America. There was a feeling abroad that at the Second Vatican Council, which had ended three years before, an essentially European agenda concerned typically with ecumenism and Church structures (collegiality) had prevailed; the Council had yet to be ‘applied’ to the Latin American situation. One phrase, however, provided a stimulus and a starting-point. Gaudium etSpes, the pastoral constitution on the Church in the World of Today, begins with the ringing assertion that ‘the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this time, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties, of the followers of Christ’.