As Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Edward Manning had been much involved in negotiations over the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (Forster’s Act), which aimed at establishing a national system of elementary education. By the early 1880s, Manning was dissatisfied with the operation of the Act, because the secular board schools, financed from rates, had become substantial competitors with the voluntary denominational schools, which were supposed to be the backbone of the system. This established, in effect, a dual system of secular and denominational education, which Manning believed the Act had never envisioned. He lobbied for a Royal Commission to amend the Act, which Lord Salisbury granted in 1886 (the Cross Commission), with Manning as a member. In his work on the Commission, Manning was motivated by three principles, which he believed were critical for the engagement of religious bodies with the liberal state. The first was cross-denominational collaboration in support of religious education. The second was voluntarism so as to prevent state control. The third was localism as opposed to centralization, which was eventually realized with the creation of County Councils by the Local Government Act of 1888, upon whom the supervision of schools eventually devolved.

In the course of his long career (1865–1892) as Archbishop of Westminster and head of England’s Catholic Church, Henry Edward Manning articulated a position on the engagement of voluntary religious organizations like the Church with the liberal state, now understood, at least in the British context, as religiously neutral and responsive to public opinion through increasingly democratic forms of government and mediated through political parties. The greatest test and illustration of this position was his involvement in Irish Home Rule, where he deferred to the Irish hierarchy in their support of Charles Stuart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party against his own inclinations and the immediate interests of the Catholic population in England. Manning’s position was in sharp contrast to that of Pope Leo XIII, who negotiated directly with Otto von Bismarck, and over the heads of the hierarchy and Germany’s Catholic Centre Party, to end the Kulturkampf. Thus Manning worked out a modus vivendi for the Church in relation to the liberal, democratic state that anticipates in many ways the practice of the Church in politics today.