Victorian Catholicism and the Oxford Movement, 1990-1996

REVIEW ARTICLE VICTORIAN CATHOLICISM AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT, 1990-1996 V. Alan McClelland (ed.). By Whose Authority: Newman, Manning and the Magisterium. Badi: Downside Abbey, 1996. Paul Vaiss (ed.). From Oxford to the People: Reconsidering Newman and the Oxford Movement. Leominster: Gracewing, 19%. The 1990s dius far have seen a surprising number of anniversaries of interest to students of Victorian Catholicism and die Oxford Movement in relation to it. The decade opened witii die Newman centenary, his beatification, and a spate of books on his life and work, beginning two years earlier with Ian Ker's, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988)1 and continued widi the more readable and insightful Newman and His Age (London: Dation, Longman and Todd, 1990) by Sheridan Gilley. This initial activity was provided widi new energy in 1995 by die one hundred fiftiedi anniversary of Newman's conversion and his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.2 In 1992 it came the turn of Newman's so-called arch-rival, Henry Edward Manning,3 and that year too, although not so popularly noted, stimulated a good deal of writing: The journals Recusant History 21 (1993), The Allen Review 6 (Hilary, 1992), and The Chesterton Review 18/4 (November, 1992) all devoted special issues to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, David Newsome's classic study, The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Manning (Grand Rapids Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993; first published, London: John Murray, 1966), was reissued, and his less successful but nevertheless important parallel biography, The Convert Cardinals: Newman and Manning (London: John Murray, 1993) appeared. The Manning centenary, linked as it is with the appointment of his successor, the one-hundredth celebration of Westminster Cathedral in 1996, and perhaps the more contentious and less publicized anniversary, that of the promulgation in Review Article115 1896 of Leo XDTs Apostolicae curae (by which Anglican orders were declared null and void) all played their part in stimulating Robert O'Neil helpful new biography, Cardinal Herbert Vaughan: Archbishop of Westminster, Bishop ofSalford, Founder of the Mill Hill Missionaries (Tunbridge Wells: Bums & Oates, 1995). The essays collected in the two volumes reviewed here can be understood as part of all these centennial celebrations, McClelland's collection highlighting the convert cardinals and focussing readers on the themes of authority and the magisterium, so great a concern for both Manning and Newman4 and so central in the Catholic world that followed them. First, and among the finest of the many superb essays in the McClelland volume is Peter B. Nockles, 'Early Tractarian Politics' (79Ul ), a slighdy expanded version of which is published in the Vaiss collection as '"Church and King:" Tractarian PoUtics Reappraised' (93123 ). Readers of Nockles' The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994)5 will find in diis essay the same careful attention to primary sources and full understanding of contemporary scholarship so evident in his book. In The Oxford Movement Nockles carefully traced the shifting and nuanced changes in Orthodox political theology, reviewing the theory of sacral kingship among the Old Highchurchmen, theories of church state relations and of the royal Supremacy as understood in the Protestant Constitution, early Tractarian views on all these issues, Tractarian divisions with the Old Highchurchmen, and the respective positions of the two groups as they faced crises over the Maynooth Grant in 1845-46 and the Gorham decision in 1850. In his article Nockles revisits some of this ground but he does so in such a way as to make clear the subde redirections of Newman's political thought as he shifted his views from an older defense of the Hookerian church-state links under the influence of Froude and changing political circumstances. A second article by Nockles' in By Whose Authority?, his 'Sources of English Conversions to Roman Catholicism in the Era of the Oxford Movement' (1-40) follows similar patterns. This treatment of conversions in the period is neither 'over-contextualized' nor 'overparticularized ', provides a number of explanations of the 'varied factors' both interior and exterior which must be considered in a discussion of the topic, reviews in detail earlier emphases on the role of Tractarian Oxford in the phenomenon...