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Caring for the Sick and Dying in Early Twentieth-Century Anglo-Catholic Parishes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2022
Abstract
This article explores the evidence given to the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline (1904–6), to examine how Anglo-Catholic clergy and parishes across England were caring for the sick and dying at the beginning of the twentieth century. It considers why Anglo-Catholic clergy and parishes had come by that point to believe that the existing provisions for the care of the sick and the dying provided by the Book of Common Prayer were not wholly satisfactory. Through the replies of clergy to the commission, it discusses the extent to which these practices were born out of a need to find new ways to reach the sick and the dying in twentieth-century England, and to what extent they were seen as demonstrating an allegiance to a more ‘catholic’ theology.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 58: THE CHURCH IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH , June 2022 , pp. 330 - 351
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Ecclesiastical History Society
References
1 There is a debate to be had about terminology, over whether ‘ritualist’ or ‘Anglo-Catholic’ best describes the practices of those active at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘Ritualist’ is a rather loaded term, full of derogatory connotations, and one perhaps better fitted to the nineteenth century than the twentieth. As this article is concerned solely with the twentieth century, it will show preference for the term ‘Anglo-Catholic’.
2 For a recent example, see Pereiro, James, ‘The Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholicism’, in Strong, Rowan, ed., OHA, 3: Partisan Anglicanism and Its Global Expansion 1829–c.1914 (Oxford, 2017), 187–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 208–9.
3 The idea that the pastoral care offered by Tractarian priests was significantly different from that of their non-Tractarian brethren has been challenged, quite convincingly, by Herring, George in his The Oxford Movement in Practice: The Tractarian Parochial Worlds from the 1830s to the 1870s (Oxford, 2016), 150–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Guides such as The Tourist's Church Guide, the first edition of which came out in 1874, whilst providing information on the location of ritualist churches, give rather scant information on the practice of those churches: Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1999), 386–414.
5 For a thorough overview of this campaign, see G. I. T. Machin, ‘The Last Victorian Anti-Ritualist Campaign, 1895–1906’, VS 25 (1982), 277–302.
6 Dan D. Cruickshank, ‘Debating the Legal Status of the Ornaments Rubric: Ritualism and Royal Commissions in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England’, in Rosamond McKitterick, Charlotte Methuen and Andrew Spicer, eds, The Church and the Law, SCH 56 (Cambridge, 2020), 434–54, at 441–8.
7 Ibid. 448.
8 Unofficial ‘guides’ to churches, such as Mackeson's Guide, sometimes covered a larger number of churches, but these were unofficial and often gave scant information: John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, TN, and London, 1996), 267.
9 Ibid. 255. Reed seems to have confused here the number of churches included in the English Church Union's The Tourist's Church Guide, 25th edn (London, 1901), which was 8,689, with the number of churches on which the Royal Commission heard evidence.
10 Donald Gray, The 1927–28 Prayer Book Crisis: (1) Ritual, Royal Commissions, and Reply to the Royal Letters of Business, Joint Liturgical Studies 60 (London, 2005), 25–6.
11 Report of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, Cd 3040 (London, 1906), 20.
12 See Dan D. Cruickshank, The Theology and Ecclesiology of the Prayer Book Crisis, 1906–1928 (Cham, 2019).
13 Gray, 1927–28 Prayer Book Crisis: (1), 25–8.
14 Bethany Kilcrease, The Great Church Crisis and the End of English Erastianism, 1898–1906 (London and New York, 2017), 147–61.
15 Yates, Anglican Ritualism, 327.
16 Gray, 1927–28 Prayer Book Crisis: (1), 25.
17 See Dan [D.] Cruickshank, From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Ritualism and Anglo-Catholicism in the Evidence of the Royal Commission into Ecclesiastical Discipline, 1904–6 (London, 2018); idem, ‘Debating the Legal Status’.
18 The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (Goring Heath, 1999), 392.
19 Gordon P. Jeanes, Signs of God's Promise: Thomas Cranmer's Sacramental Theology and the Book of Common Prayer (London and New York, 2008), 110–12.
20 The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church according to the Use of the Church of England [1662] (London, 1992), 265.
21 G. J. Cuming, A History of the Anglican Liturgy (London and Basingstoke, 1982), 124.
22 Ian Machin, ‘Reservation under Pressure: Ritual in the Prayer Book Crisis, 1927–1928’, in R. N. Swanson, ed., Continuity and Change in Christian Worship, SCH 35 (Oxford, 1999), 447–63, at 447–8.
23 Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline: Volume One, Cd 3069 (London, 1906), 25, 326, 350; Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline: Volume Two, Cd 3070 (London, 1906), 243.
24 Yates, Anglican Ritualism, 84–5.
25 Royal Commission: Report, 37.
26 Yates, Anglican Ritualism, 328.
27 Royal Commission: Report, 37.
28 Royal Commission: Volume One, 25.
29 Ibid. 1.
30 W. E. Bowen, Contemporary Ritualism: A Volume of Evidence (London, 1902).
31 Gray, 1927–28 Prayer Book Crisis: (1), 23.
32 Ibid. 23–4.
33 Royal Commission: Volume One, 2.
34 Tourist's Church Guide, 25th edn; Royal Commission: Volume One, 2.
35 Royal Commission: Volume One, 25.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Royal Commission: Report, 38. This number is of course higher than the total number of churches the commission found practising reservation, which suggests that the numbers produced by the commission should be seen as a minimum number, and as a sample, rather than suggestive of the total number of churches using a practice.
39 Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline: Volume Three, Cd 3071 (London, 1906), 259.
40 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 443.
41 Ibid. 276.
42 C. P. S. Clarke, The Oxford Movement and After (London and Oxford, 1932), 277.
43 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 326. The Devonport society of the Sisters of Mercy was one of the first Anglican religious orders founded after the Reformation, in 1848: see Thomas J. Williams, ‘The Beginnings of Anglican Sisterhoods’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 16 (1947), 350–72, at 353–6.
44 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 326.
45 Although the doctrine of the real presence was a central issue for post-Oxford Movement theological writers, the question of reservation was rarely seen as part of this discussion. For an overview, see Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), 235–49.
46 E. B. Pusey, The Real Presence of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ: The Doctrine of the English Church with a Vindication of the Reception by the Wicked and of the Adoration of our Lord Jesus Christ truly Present (Oxford and London, 1869), 313–14. Article 28 states: ‘The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.’
47 See, for example, Darwell Stone, The Reserved Sacrament (London, 1917).
48 First and Second Prayer Books, 266.
49 Ibid. 266–8.
50 Ibid. 422–3.
51 John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville, VA, and London, 2005), 307–8; Book of Common Prayer [1662], 328–30.
52 Book of Common Prayer [1662], 265.
53 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 326.
54 Drew D. Gray, London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (London and New York, 2010), 119–32.
55 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 326.
56 Cruickshank, Theology and Ecclesiology of the Prayer Book Crisis, 39.
57 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 199.
58 Ibid. 202.
59 Ibid. 243.
60 Ibid. 276.
61 Ibid. 278.
62 Royal Commission: Report, 23.
63 Percy Dearmer, The Parson's Handbook, 1st edn (London, 1899), 161.
64 The Editors of ‘The Order of Divine Service’, Ritual Notes on the Order of Divine Service (Oxford, 1894), 46.
65 Royal Commission: Volume One, 242.
66 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 325.
67 Royal Commission: Volume One, 529.
68 1 Corinthians 14: 16. My thanks to Jonathan How for the translation.
69 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 22.
70 Using such legal loopholes and questioning the interpretation of rubrics was standard practice across the Anglo-Catholic movement: Cruickshank, ‘Debating the Legal Status’.
71 Lori Branch, ‘The Rejection of Liturgy, the Rise of Free Prayer, and Modern Religious Subjectivity’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 29 (2005), 1–28.
72 David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London and New York, 1989), 55; Gareth Atkins, ‘Anglican Evangelicalism’, in Jeremy Gregory, ed., OHA, 2: Establishment and Empire, 1662–1829 (Oxford, 2017), 452–73, at 453–4.
73 Peter B. Nockles, ‘The Oxford Movement as Religious Revival and Resurgence’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, eds, Revival and Resurgence in Christian History, SCH 44 (Woodbridge, 2008), 214–24, at 219.
74 The Church Association, founded in 1865, had spearheaded attempts to have ritualist clergy prosecuted in the second half of the nineteenth century: Yates, Anglican Ritualism, 216–20.
75 Royal Commission: Volume One, 150.
76 Ibid. 269.
77 Ibid. 373.
78 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 119.
79 Ibid. 303.
80 Ibid. 298.
81 Ibid. 333.
82 Ibid. 331.
83 Royal Commission: Volume One, 338. Dolling was a leading ritualist priest who had died in 1902: Yates, Anglican Ritualism, 282–3.
84 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 202.
85 Ibid. 204.
86 Hinchliff, Peter, Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: A Life (Oxford, 1998), 274–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
87 Reed, Glorious Battle, 89.
88 ‘Tract 72’, in Tracts for the Times: Volume Four (London, 1839).
89 Rowell, Geoffrey, Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford, 1974), 99–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
90 Ibid. 105.
91 Royal Commission: Volume One, 12.
92 Ibid. 41.
93 Most of these written responses adhered to a template apparently produced by the ECU: Cruickshank, ‘Debating the Legal Status’, 449.
94 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 239.
95 Ibid.
96 Reed, Glorious Battle, 89.
97 Royal Commission: Volume Two, 239.
98 Ibid. 240.
99 Andrew Atherstone, ‘Identities and Parties’, in Mark D. Chapman, Sathianathan Clarke and Martyn Percy, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Anglican Studies (Oxford, 2016), 77–91, at 81.