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  • Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell, SJed. by Peter Holmes
  • Marcus K. Harmes
Holmes, Peter, ed., Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell, SJ( Catholic Record Society: Records), Woodbridge and Rochester, Boydell, 2012; hardback; pp. 358; 1 b/w illustration; R.R.P £45.00; ISBN 9780902832275.

Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan described a politician’s life as being poised between an indiscretion and a farce. How much harder though must it have been to be a Catholic in seventeenth-century England and to be poised, or rather caught, between conscience and the demands of an intrusive and quite deadly Protestant state.

This is the environment that gave rise to the casuistical exercises most probably compiled by Fr Thomas Southwell, an English Jesuit priest, and now edited and translated by Peter Holmes. Casuistry was training in how to engage with and navigate through complex cases involving the internal conscience of a Catholic with the external demands of the state, in order to find safety in Protestant England.

Holmes has previously edited a volume of Elizabethan casuistical exercises and he is therefore well placed to be able to judge the points of similarities [End Page 265]as well as the occasional but telling distinctions between the Elizabethan and Caroline cases. These are useful indications that the mindset of the Catholic minority in England was not monolithic but shifted according to external demands that impacted on the laity and the clergy.

Following the original divisions in the manuscript sources, Holmes has edited and translated cases divided into three groups: those generally relevant to the English situation; those for priests in particular; and those for penitents. Within these broader categories are a range of issues from witchcraft to what happens if a Catholic unexpectedly finds himself in the midst of Protestants spontaneously singing metrical psalms.

Holmes draws out major points of significance from these cases, including the anomalous situation of Catholics in England who lived in a state without bishops who could have ratified the outcomes of the Council of Trent and whose ecclesial framework thus was medieval and out of alignment with the continent. He also generally reconstructs Southwell’s mostly common-sense approach to Catholic responses to Protestant power and the cases suggest the areas where Southwell could see room for compromise or where none was possible.

The text retains the Latin originals with translations and will be a valuable resource for study of Caroline Catholicism.

Marcus K. Harmes
The University of Southern Queensland

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