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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
From Tuesday, July ioth, to Friday, July 13th, during a summer heat of unparalleled ferocity, the men and women who look upon themselves as the heirs of the Tractarians held a Congress in the Albert Hall. The things said and done by these successors of Froude, Keble and Newman give food for thought and prayer.
(1) The Congress, merely as a social and religious phenomenon, cannot be ignored, and should not be belittled. It is a social and religious fact of no little interest that, during a heat-spell which welted our tropical visitors, one of the largest halls in the world was filled for even the less important meetings of a religious congress.
Moreover, this Congress was representative not of a Church, but only of a party within a Church. It was assuredly a religious phenomenon of significance that this section of a section of Christians could brave tropical heat for a religious idea. This is all the more interesting to us Roman Catholics, because, if we may believe our experts in organisation we, the Roman Catholics of England and Wales, might undertake the task of filling the Albert Hall at general, but hardly at the sectional, meetings of any congress. We are therefore glad that The Tablet has set the note of commentary in these wise words of charity :
‘Other pens as keen as scalpels will probe the weak places of the Congress; but we prefer to look at its strong points. Surely it is an occasion of thanksgiving that the largest, the most earnest, the most reverent, the most learned party in the Established Church is openly recanting at least ninety per cent, of the traditional protests against Rome’ (The Tablet, 14th July).
(2) The significance of this Congress may best be measured by its heredity. It is, what it claims to be, the authentic child of the Oxford Movement. The Congress hand-book recorded that . . . ‘the Saturday
1 The Anglo-Catholic Congress (Handbook). Preface: A Vision of the Future. N. P. W(illiams). P. 19.
2 Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, 1920. V., No. 8, Part III.
3 The Church Times, 29th June, p. 768.