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Joseph Berington‐‘Prophet of Ecumenism’?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
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The Reverend Joseph Berington (1743-1827) has never had a particularly good press even from sympathetic Catholic historians. This is almost certainly due to the fact that he was a leading supporter of the cisalpine, if not gallican, Catholic Committee and was one of those Catholics who belived that an Oath of Supremacy, properly understood, was not incompatible with Catholic principles. As a result of his attitude and activities, he was at one stage censured by the bishops and deprived of his faculties. Berington himself felt that English Catholics had suspected him since he taught philosophy at Douay where he was regarded as being too modern and bold in his philosophical opinions, and that this explained the later questioning of his orthodoxy. Joseph Gillow simply claims that Berington’s ‘love of novelty and of the affected liberality of the day created great prejudice against his writings, which, however, was considerably removed before his death’.
Yet according to a ‘Memoir’ published in the Catholic Miscellany, Berington made ‘the first open and bold attack ... on the immense mass of Protestant prejudice that had been accumulating against Catholics for more than two centuries’, while the Reflections addressed to the Rev. John Hawkins was described as his ‘principal work on religious controversy’. The story of this particular publication began in America during 1784 when Charles Wharton, one of the first American Jesuits, published his Letter to the Roman Catholics of the City of Worcester. This personal apologia for leaving the Church was addressed to the English Catholics whom he had served as chaplain.
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- Copyright © 1972 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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page 227 note 2 Ibid., pp. 225, 298.
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When G … had ceased on his Bible to work,
Because it would suit neither chagel nor Kirk
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Declar'd not a copy would sell in ten Winters:
One piour Catholic expressed the hope that ‘his translation will serve for nothing but to wrap up pepper and spices, or become offerings to Cloacina’. (Banister to Rutter, 7th June, 1790, Upholland College Archives.)
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