A Harvest of Hope: Jesuit Collegiate Education in England, 1794-1914 by Ian D. Roberts (review)

BOOK REVIEWS123 Nationalism is another important issue that does not receive sufficient treatment . However,it had a major influence in the rise ofboth modern Irish Catholicism and the national school system.When it entered the nineteenth century, the Church was far from strong, united, or respected, as Keogh implies. Rather the radical end of the eighteenth century, foUowed by the disunity occasioned by the Union, left the Church in the early nineteenth in desperate need of a unifying force that would strengthen its otherwise very weak influence among most of die Irish Catholic laity, poor as weU as middle class. Given their motto, "CathoUc and Celtic, to God and IrelandTrue," the Irish Christian Brothers, like the Irish bishops, were strongly influenced in building up their own organization by making use ofthe new nationalistic lay fervor that Daniel O'ConneU had so effectively enkindled in 1823 with the founding of the CathoUc Association. However, in so doing, each seemed determined to maintain their independence from the other. Still, despite these questions or omissions, Keogh has given us a very worthwhUe study that is a solid addition to our growing knowledge of the Irish Catholic Church. Vincent J. McNally Sacred Heart School ofTheology Hales Corners, Wisconsin A Harvest ofHope:Jesuit Collegiate Education in England, 1 794-1914. By Ian D. Roberts. [Series III: Original Studies Composed in EngUsh, Number 12.] (Saint Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources. 1996. Pp. xvii, 253- $27.95 paperback ) In the introduction to England and Christendom, published two years after his accession to the see ofWestminster, Henry Edward Manning asserted that, foUowing the restoration of the English and Welsh hierarchy, the Church had begun "to act as a body by its corporate presence and influence upon public opinion and upon every class of the English people . . ." (p. xxxv). He certainly envisioned the mission of the Church in the nineteenth century as being to penetrate the thinking of English people with Catholic truths and ideas in the various aspects of their social, political, and religious lives.There was not be an exclusive concentration of energy upon a simple conversion poUcy because that would be accompanied by the danger of adopting a protective mentality in the event of inevitable verbal attack or other adversity.This far-sighted programme was presaged in Manning's weU-known speech to the Council Fathers in 1870. He considered, indeed, the main thrust of the Council to lie in the freeing of the Church from too close an association with an increasingly secular or pagan state.The CouncU was to deliver the framework that would enable the Church to advance her teaching mandate untrammelled by the remaining shackles of the ancien régime. In this view lay the essence of Manning's brand of ultramontanism, linked to his conviction of the growing importance of the 124BOOK REVIEWS need for unity in approach and in endeavor. It posited the forging of interlocking mechanisms that would constitute a chaUenge to the world by the use of that spiritual authority which was designed to change the world.The internal self-completion of the Church thus lay at the heart of his thinking and of his poUcy. Ian Roberts in A Harvest ofHope considers ultramontanism as self-evidently worthy of opprobrium. Manning, however, did not view ecclesiastical authority as ifit were "an imperious act, substituting command for reason" but,he teUs us, rather as "reason and evidence speaking by a legitimate voice" (Miscellanies, 1877, II, 174). New chaUenges could not be met by caulking a rudderless ship. Indeed, as Professor Peter Erb has written,"we do Manning an injustice ifwe interpret his actions aside from the foundational principles of his theology and life" (A Question ofSovereignty, 1996, p. 23). Manning's uneasy relationship with the English Jesuits, an attitude shared by a number of his feUow bishops, was influenced by what was seen as a propensity on the part of some of the Society's superiors to place the particular interests of the order in education before those of the local church as perceived by its ordinaries.This led to division in the key area of national ecclesiastical development . The fracasso with Bishop Herbert Vaughan over the Manchester CoUege...