No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
In his famous essay on von Ranke‘s history of the Popes, Thomas Babington Macaulay remarked that the ‘ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy… the Catholic Church makes a champion’. ‘Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.’ Macaulay’s general argument that Roman Catholicism ‘unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent’, depends for its force on his comparison of the Catholic Regular Orders with the popular preachers of Nonconformity. As the son of a leader of the Clapham Sect, his witness in the matter has its interest for scholars of the Evangelical Revival, and has been echoed by Ronald Knox in his parallel between Wesley and the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Paolo Segneri, who walked barefoot 800 miles a year to preach missions in the dioceses of northern Italy. More recently the comparison has been drawn again by Owen Chadwick, with the judgement that the ‘heirs of the Counter-Reformation sometimes astound by likeness of behaviour to that found in the heirs of the Reformation’, and Chadwick’s volume on the eighteenth-century Popes contains some fascinating material on the resemblances between the religion of the peoples of England and of Italy. An historian of Spanish Catholicism has compared the Moravians and the mission preachers of eighteenth-century Spain, not least in their rejection of modern commercialism, while an American scholar has traced some of the parallels between nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic revivalism in the United States. Not that Wesleyan historians have been attracted to study the great movements of revival religion in the Catholic countries in Wesley’s lifetime—a neglect which is hardly surprising. One point of origin of the Evangelical revival was among refugees from Roman Catholic persecution, and for all the popular confusion, encouraged by men like Bishop Lavington, between Methodists and Papists, and for all Wesley’s belief in religious toleration and tenderness for certain Catholic saints and devotional classics, he was deeply hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, as David Hempton has recently shown. Yet there are many points of likeness as well as difference between the enthusiasts of Protestant and Catholic Europe, and both these need to be declared if Catholics and Protestants are ever to attempt to write an ecumenical history.
1 MacaulayT, B. T, B., ‘Von Ranke’ (1840) in Critical and Historical Essays, 2 vols (London, 1966), 2, pp. 62–3Google Scholar.
2 Knox, R. A., Enthusiasm: a Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (Oxford, 1950), p. 423Google Scholar.
3 Chadwick, O., The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford, 1981), p. 159Google Scholar.
4 Noel, C. C., ‘Missionary preachers in Spain: teaching social virtues in the eighteenth century’, AHR, 90(1985), p. 888Google Scholar.
5 Dolan, J. P., Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience 1830–1900 (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1978)Google Scholar.
6 Thus one of the Macaulay quotations above (comparing Wesley and Loyola) is cited, but mis interpreted for the eighteenth century in Rupp’s, E. Gordon new Religion in England 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986), p. 444Google Scholar.
7 Hempton, D., Melhodism and Politics in British Society 1750–1850 (London, 1984), pp. 31Google Scholar ff.
8 Macaulay, p. 51.
9 Rosa, M., ‘The Italian churches’, in Callahan, W. J. and Higgs, D., eds, Church and Society in Catholic Europe of lhe Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), p. 72Google Scholar.
10 Maria, Fr. Giuseppe, Life of Blessed Leonard of Port-Maurice (London, 1852), p. 166Google Scholar (with the Life of Blessed Nicholas Fattore by Fr. Giuseppe Alapont).
11 Life of Blessed Leonard of Port-Maurice, p. 98.
12 Ibid., p. 53.
13 The Life of S. Alphonso Maria de Liguori [sic], Bishop of St. Agatha of the Goths, 5 vols (London, 1848–9), 4, pp. 24–42.
14 Giuseppi Maria, p. 43.
15 Noel, p. 886.
16 Farmer, D. H., The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 1987), p. 278Google Scholar.
17 Daniel-Rops, H., The Church in the Eighteenth Century, trans. Warrington, J. (London, 1964), p. 319Google Scholar.
18 By Edward Caswall. There is another version by another (ex-Evangelical) Oratorian, Frederick Faber. See The Westminster Hymnal. There is also an enchanting story of the influence of the hymn in an English country parish in Frederick Brittain’s ‘Mr. Sweetie’, in Mostly Mymms: Tales and Sketches of South Mymms and Elsewhere (Cambridge, 1953), pp. 19–24. The Vicar of the village, known as the Patriarch, was an Anglo-Catholic of the evangelical type, who once confounded the Kensitite demonstrators against his incense-bearing annual village procession by borrowing some of General Bramwell Booth’s Salvation Army bandsmen.
19 Giuseppi Maria, p. 41.
20 Boulard, F., An Introduction to Religious Sociology. Pioneer Work in France (London, 1960)Google Scholar.