Catholic Progressives in England After Vatican II by Jay P Corrin (review)

We English Catholics are well-trained in the art of keeping our heads down. Perhaps it is the result of a long-history of state persecution of Catholics after our home-grown Reformation in the sixteenth century. Or that most of us (a good 90 per cent) can trace our roots back to more recent immigrant families, mostly Irish, and therefore feel in some hard-to-define way that we are still outsiders, not quite as thoroughly English as our brothers and sisters in the established Church of England.

It is, granted, nowadays more of a collective memory than anything tangible, but we are still a minority faith (fewer than ten per cent of the population, even by the most optimistic estimates) and so are pleasantly surprised when anyone takes us as a subject of serious study, as Professor Jay P. Corrin of Boston University has done. He charts the troubled relationship in the 1960s among the Catholic hierarchy, the domestic Catholic press, and what he calls the “Catholic New Left,” a small number of progressives, inspired by Vatican Council II to campaign to make their local Church more outward-looking and socially and politically involved.

It is a story that is still very much within living memory, and several of the key players—notably Terry Eagleton, the prominent academic and public intellectual—are quoted extensively. And, as a tale of engaged, passionate lay Catholics, inspired by gospel values, struggling against institutional apathy and clerical conservativism, it is lively and will have strong echoes in other parts of the Catholic world.

Indeed, Professor Corrin’s account of a group of progressive Catholics, some left-leaning and attracted to Marxism, gathered around the Cambridge-based publication Slant in the middle and late 1960s, left me lamenting that such activism is today once more lacking in our typically cautious, heads-down English Catholic Church. For many of the leading lights of Slant ultimately either left, or found themselves pushed to the very margins.

For some—especially the priests, monks, and nuns among their number—disillusionment with the institution was mixed with a vocation to marriage. The best-known example was that of Charles Davis, arguably the only theologian on these shores at the time on a par with the great conciliar minds of continental Europe. When Davis announced in December, 1966, he was leaving the Catholic Church because he could no longer accept its claim to authority, he made frontpage headlines in the secular press. Some even hoped his defection might prompt a revolution in English Catholicism. As it was, it fizzled out. Davis married, disappeared to teach in North America, and was largely forgotten by the resolutely business-as-usual English Church by the time he returned home late in life, once more attending the sacraments before his death in 1999.

There is much to admire in Professor Corrin’s painstakingly-researched account, not least the invitation to recover and reconsider such names as that of Davis and his close collaborators. And there is a particular interest in seeing how a government measure—the 1944 Education Act which brought the Catholic Church’s high-achieving secondary schools into the state-funded system—produced a whole new generation in the 1950s and 1960s of working-class, highlyeducated young lay Catholics, intellectually light years ahead of their bishops.

When these young idealists got caught up not only by the spirit of Vatican II but also by the parallel political upheavals of the 1960s, symbolized by the anti-war movement and the campaign against nuclear weapons, it proved to be a heady cocktail. The historian Adrian Hastings, a fellow traveller, remarked of the Slant circle, that they were “intellectual Beatles.”

One of the consequences of its introspection is that the English Church has more than its fair share of idiosyncrasies, and on occasion Professor Corrin can miss the nuances. He lumps together G.K...