Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T17:01:06.954Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Power and the Glory Authority, Freedom and Literature: Part 2

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

English Catholics have been a recognisable body; yet they have also been individuals engaged in a disorderly, energetic,personal and doubt-filled struggle to create, experience, explore and affirm. Catholic literature has been grounded in the tension between liberal and conservative: categories which are a function not only of how an individual relates to doctrine, but also of personality, for Catholics, like everyone else, believe as they must, as their personalities dictate. Cardinal Manning—together with his associates Herbert Vaughan, W. G. Ward and Mgr. George Talbot—may be taken as the archetype of the conservative mentality (Manning the presiding spirit of Vatican I), while Newman may be taken as the archetype of the liberal (the presiding spirit of Vatican II)—even though he was at least as doctrinally meticulous as Manning: temperaments— rather than theological or political stances—which constituted the warp and woof of English Catholic literature.

Manning sought an infallible authority, and identified himself with it, so that he aspired to be, as he said, ‘more Roman than Rome', and proceeded to make English Catholicism like himself. He had no sympathy, he said, for ‘the watered, literary, worldly Catholicism of certain Englishmen', and wished to keep Catholics untainted by English intellectual culture. In 1876 he told a gathering of Catholic intellectuals:

when any man comes and talks to you about scientific history, I advise you as soon as possible to change the subject. . . when the Church has decided, [he is speaking of the Vatican Council] defined, or decreed, any man who appeals from that decision to any human history whatsoever is guilty of rejecting a Divine Teacher, and of the sin of unbelief . . . Whosoever appeals from [the decrees of the Council] to human history commits heresy...

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

20 Manning, Henry E. Miscellanies 2nd. ser. (Bums & Oates, 1909) pp.243‐4Google Scholar.

21 Snead‐Cox, J.G. The Life of Cardinal Vaughan vol.1 (Burns & Oates, 1910) p.142Google Scholar.

22 Purcell, Edmund S. Life of Cardinal Manning vol.II (Macmillan, 1896)pp.322‐43Google Scholar.

23 Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition: II (Sheed & Ward, 1937) p. 153Google Scholar.

24 Gallagher, Donat The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (Methuen, 1983) p. 296Google Scholar.

25 Phillips, Gene D.Graham Greene InterviewedThe Month vol. CCXXIX No. 1234 (June 1970) pp.366‐7Google Scholar.

26 Sherry, Norman The Life of Graham Greene vol.2: 1939‐1955 (Jonathan Cape, 1994) pp.42‐3Google Scholar.

27 Dublin Review, 4th. quarter 1950, pp. 10‐11. Cf. Desmond Fennell ‘The Writer and the Church’Dublin Review, summer 1968, pp.99‐105.

28 Catholic Herald 14,7.1995.

20 Manning, Henry E. Miscellanies 2nd. ser. (Burns & Oates, 1909) pp.243‐4Google Scholar.

21 Snead‐Cox, J.G. The Life of Cardinal Vaughan vol.1 (Burns & Oates, 1910) p.142Google Scholar.

22 Purcell, Edmund S. Life of Cardinal Manning vol. II (Macmillan, 1896) pp.322‐R3Google Scholar.

23 Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition: II (Sheed & Ward, 1937) p.153Google Scholar.

24 Gallagher, Donat The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (Methuen, 1983) p. 296Google Scholar.

25 Phillips, Gene D.Graham Greene InterviewedThe Month vol. CCXXIX No. 1234 (June 1970) pp.366‐7Google Scholar.

26 Sherry, Norman The Life of Graham Greene vol.2: 1939‐1955 (Jonathan Cape, 1994) pp.42‐3Google Scholar.

27 Dublin Review, 4th. quarter 1950, pp.10‐11. Cf. Desmond Fennell The Writer and the Church' Dublin Review, summer 1968, pp.99‐105.

28 Catholic Herald 14.7.1995.