The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950

5. The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

292 The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community By 1935 the English Catholic intellectual community faced an incipient threat to its cohesiveness. The first group of Bellocians had been followed after the Great War by another, younger generation. By the early 1930s these two cadres had formed the core of the community. At the same time, however, contemporaries of this younger generation had begun to question some of the central tenets of Bellocianism . Certainly in intellectual heritage they remained closely related to the Bellocians. They too had been raised on The Servile State and The Party System, on Belloc’s attack on “Protestant” history, and his veneration of the High Middle Ages, and they too accepted the fundamentals of Distributism. Most of them, moreover, were personal friends of Belloc and Chesterton, Gill and McNabb. Though there were developing differences, then, they still formed a coherent community . Tom Burns, Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward, and their friends had begun, however, to look to Christopher Dawson rather than Belloc for intellectual sustenance, and Dawson was hostile to Belloc and many of his ideas. In effect, the community had developed two hubs, and the discord between these two hubs threatened its stability. Could the Bellocians and Dawsonites continue to work together, or would the strain increase and divide the community as the European political crisis came to a head? C h a pt e r 5 The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community 293 Arthur Hinsley and the Tablet Arthur Hinsley succeeded Cardinal Bourne as archbishop of Westminster on 29 April 1935. Born in Yorkshire in 1865 to an English father who was a carpenter on one of the duke of Norfolk’s estates and an Irish mother, Hinsley had been educated at St. Cuthbert’s College seminary at Ushaw, near Durham, before being sent in 1890 to the English College in Rome to study at the Gregorian University, where he earned a doctorate in theology. He was sixty-nine years old when he became archbishop, and he had been out of England since 1917. From 1917 until 1926 Hinsley had served as rector of the English College in Rome, and he had subsequently spent eight years as the apostolic delegate to the British colonies in Africa. In 1934 Hinsley was made a canon of St. Peter’s and retired to Rome, where he expected to live out his days. It had come as a great surprise, then, when his friend Pius XI asked him to become archbishop of Westminster. Despite his relatively short tenure at Westminster, Hinsley was to prove an extraordinarily effective archbishop, not least during World War II. The strong bonds he formed with the English Catholic intellectual community were a significant reason for his success.1 One of Hinsley’s first important decisions as archbishop of Westminster involved the Tablet. In October 1935 its co-owners—­Hinsley and the superior general of the missionary college at Mill Hill, Fr. Stephen O’Callaghan—instructed the trustees to offer the weekly Catholic newspaper for sale. The decision was primarily financial. As Joseph Weld, one of its trustees, explained to Ernest Oldmeadow, editor since 1923, the proprietors had decided that “they could not spend Diocesan funds and trust funds for the Missionary Society running The Tablet at a loss.”2 In the estimation of Weld and his fellow trustees, the problem with the Tablet was its editor. Oldmeadow had been a Nonconformist minister at Halifax, Nova Scotia, before converting to Catholicism in 1897. Although one sympathetic observer has described him as “a genial , humorous man of the world with wide interests,” these qualities Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community 294 were not reflected in the Tablet under his editorship. Weld believed that Oldmeadow remained “too much of the Nonconformist minister .” His sermonizing alienated not only readers but also contributors , and as a result Oldmeadow began writing more and more of the copy himself. Circulation had in fact been falling, and this meant that advertising revenues began to decline sharply as well. A vicious circle developed. Even as Oldmeadow’s moralizing drove away readers and advertisers, his domination of the Tablet’s pages increased and thus made it ever more unlikely that it could afford to bring in the new voices that alone could help to halt the decline.3 English Catholic intellectuals had long derided the Tablet. Even before Oldmeadow’s tenure, Belloc had dismissed it...