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Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II
Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II
Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II
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Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II

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In Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II, Jay P. Corrin traces the evolution of Catholic social and theological thought from the end of World War II through the 1960s that culminated in Vatican Council II. He focuses on the emergence of reformist thinking as represented by the Council and the corresponding responses triggered by the Church's failure to expand the promises, or expectations, of reform to the satisfaction of Catholics on the political left, especially in Great Britain. The resistance of the Roman Curia, the clerical hierarchy, and many conservative lay men and women to reform was challenged in 1960s England by a cohort of young Catholic intellectuals for whom the Council had not gone far enough to achieve what they believed was the central message of the social gospels, namely, the creation of a community of humanistic socialism.

This effort was spearheaded by members of the English Catholic New Left, who launched a path-breaking journal of ideas called Slant. What made Slant revolutionary was its success in developing a coherent philosophy of revolution based on a synthesis of the “New Theology” fueling Vatican II and the New Left’s Marxist critique of capitalism. Although the English Catholic New Left failed to meet their revolutionary objectives, their bold and imaginative efforts inspired many younger Catholics who had despaired of connecting their faith to contemporary social, political, and economic issues. Corrin’s analysis of the periodical and of such notable contributors as Terry Eagleton and Herbert McCabe explains the importance of Slant and its associated group within the context of twentieth-century English Catholic liberal thought and action.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 30, 2013
ISBN9780268077006
Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II
Author

Jay P. Corrin

Jay P. Corrin is professor of social sciences at Boston University. His book Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002) won the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Gilmary Shea Prize in 2003.

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    Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II - Jay P. Corrin

    CATHOLIC PROGRESSIVES IN ENGLAND AFTER VATICAN II

    JAY P. CORRIN

    University of Notre Dame Press

    Notre Dame, Indiana

    Copyright © 2013 University of Notre Dame

    Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

    All Rights Reserved

    E-ISBN 978-0-268-07700-6

    This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu

    To my sister and good friend

    JANIS HEANEY

    CONTENTS

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    PART ONE

    The English Cultural Setting

    ONE. The Church in England

    TWO. The Sources of English Catholic Radicalism

    THREE. English Catholics and the Establishment

    PART TWO

    The Reformers

    FOUR. Reinforcing the Citadel

    FIVE. The Role of John XXIII

    SIX. The Council

    SEVEN. Vatican II Comes to Britain

    PART THREE

    The Revolutionaries

    EIGHT. The Catholic New Left

    NINE. The Slant Movement

    TEN. The Quest for New Community and Culture

    ELEVEN. Jesus and Marx: A Christian-Marxist Convergence?

    TWELVE. Charles Davis and the McCabe Affair

    THIRTEEN. What Must Be Done? The Catholic Left and British Politics

    FOURTEEN. Legacy and Impact

    Notes

    Bibliography

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    I wish to thank the staffs at Boston College’s John J. Burns Library and Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library for their generous assistance in facilitating my use of their excellent special collections on Catholic history. Bridget J. Burke, Associate University Librarian for Special Collections, John J. Burns Library, was especially helpful in creating an archive for my interviews with English Catholic New Left activists, which is now available at Boston College to other scholars.

    This book examines the development of progressive Catholic thinking that led up to Vatican Council II and its aftermath in the 1960s. Although I tried to examine carefully the plethora of materials published by and about the English Catholic New Left in its reactions to the Council, my assessment of their history would not have been complete without the willingness of those associated with the movement to share their thoughts on what up to now has been an unappreciated but significant episode in the history of Catholic social and political action. My thanks to the following: Neil Middleton, Bernard Sharratt, Terry Eagleton, Martin Shaw, Angela and Adrian Cunningham, Martin Redfern, Brian Wicker, Fergus Kerr, O.P., Christopher Calnan, and John Callenor.

    Bernard Sharratt, Christopher Calnan, and Neil Middleton spent considerable time in going beyond what one would reasonably expect in interviews, providing me with additional and numerous elaborations on the questions I posed. Angela and Adrian Cunningham sent me a number of obscure but important publications that I had not been able to track down on my own. Bernard Sharratt and Christopher Calnan were also generous in offering to read over and correct some of my assertions concerning the history of the Catholic Left. Regrettably, Mr. Calnan and Angela and Adrian Cunningham passed away before the publication of this book. Their friendly and informative correspondence will be sadly missed.

    I have been fortunate to have the support of wonderful and dedicated secretaries who always could be counted on to help me through the countless administrative challenges that come from trying to complete a rather lengthy manuscript while overseeing a department of some thirteen energetic faculty members. Thanks to Barbara Storella, Mary Ducharme, and Danielle Vinceguerra. I also wish to express my gratitude to Matthew Hallgren, Boston University’s System Support Specialist, without whom I never could have found my way through the myriad and labyrinthine peculiarities of our computer age. My thanks also go to a former student, Nicholas Epstein, who, after doing research for me on Vatican Council II, claimed to be one of the few Jewish students who could more fully appreciate Catholic social thinking. All this helped to inspire his decision to undertake graduate study in public policy at the University of Chicago. I want to thank Linda Wells, dean of Boston University’s College of General Studies, as well as many supportive colleagues, in particular my teaching teammates and fellow chairs, Peter Busher, Natalie McKnight, Adam Sweeting, and Matthew Parfitt. Their friendship has been crucial for creating a uniquely positive collegial environment that makes both teaching and scholarship rare pleasures. Finally, I have had the good fortune to be blessed with the sharp eye of Rebecca DeBoer, a very kind and forgiving editor who took on the double burden of guiding to publication my previous book with the University of Notre Dame Press as well as the current volume. Of course, any omission and errors that remain in this work are entirely my own.

    Introduction

    The purpose of this study is to examine the evolution of Catholic social thinking from the end of World War II up through the 1960s. Vatican Council II signaled the victory of what can be identified as the Catholic liberal or progressive tradition, the earlier history of which was the subject of my book Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (2002). Thanks to the ground-breaking work of such Catholics as Jacques Maritain, Virgil Michel, Don Luigi Sturzo, George Shuster, Godfrey Diekmann, John Courtney Murray, Hans Küng, and H.A. Reinhold, among others, there was firmly in place by the time of the calling of the Council a platform from which the Church might launch a progressive, reformist approach to the secular challenges of the modern age. These Catholics were champions of liturgical reform, which aimed to reintegrate Christians with the Mystical Body of Christ as a means of extending Christianity into the broader realms of the community.¹ They believed that the ills of excessive capitalism and its opposite, collectivism, could be attenuated by reforming the thought processes and values of modern society. But this was to be a social reconstruction that had to be preceded by a renewal of the Christian spirit, where the doctrine of the Mystical Body uniting Christians with Christ could serve as the link between liturgy and sociology. As noted by Virgil Michel, this would revive and foster determination to carry Christ-life into the social and economic sphere.² As a means to this end, which required a more active participation in the liturgy, these reformers advocated the use of the vernacular in the Mass. This, in conjunction with a number of encyclicals by Pope John XXIII and his successor, Pope Paul VI, encouraged political pluralism, advances in ecumenical outreach, greater participation by the lay community in Church affairs, and religious toleration. The reforms that issued forth from Vatican II marked the high point of Catholic progressivism in terms of engaging the modern world.

    However, in the views of more traditionalist Catholics, the Council’s promise of renewal and a willingness to embrace the modern world appeared to open the gates to radical changes that would only disrupt and undermine the spiritual dimensions of the faith. The resistance of establishment Catholics, namely, the Roman Curia and affiliated clerical hierarchies along with conservative lay men and women, was challenged by another, younger coterie of Catholics who believed that the Council had not gone far enough in satisfying what they saw to be the essential objective of Christ’s teachings: the creation of a community of humanistic socialism. Such Catholics were convinced that liberal and progressive reforms were insufficient, indeed even counterproductive, since they only served to sustain the status quo and the privileges of those who controlled the levers of political and economic power. These were Catholics of the Left, and they sought the creation of a genuine Christian community culminating in the Kingdom of God, which they thought could never be realized through the liberal model of institutional reform. Even with the best of intentions and absent entrenched elites, liberalism rested philosophically on the fundamental principle of privileging the individual for maximizing self-advancement, the core dynamic of capitalism. In their view, reformist liberalism as a political philosophy produced social energies that worked against the creation of an egalitarian community of shared cultural values. Liberalism, according to such radical Catholics, was always willing to offer progressive solutions to social problems but never to go far enough in overturning the institutional structures that caused such problems in the first place. Whereas conservatives were dedicated to preserving social structures as they are, liberals were more insidious and thus more dangerous, since they masked the sources of social dysfunction by simply offering the requisite reforms to make prevailing institutions function more efficiently and humanely.

    Another significant factor that characterized the English Catholic New Left was its membership. Much of the leadership and energy came from a new generation of Irish immigrant families who, thanks to post–World War II educational reforms, gained access to higher education. These Catholics were intellectually restive and had a far more radical view of how their religion could be used to change the perceived inadequacies of English culture than had either their working-class parents or the aristocratic Catholics who assumed a distinctly paternalistic attitude toward their immigrant co-religionists.

    Representative of this more radical Catholic thinking was the English writer Terry Eagleton, who proclaimed that Christian progressivism was at root parasitic on the social system that it was intended to oppose. The liberal Catholic critique, Eagleton asserted, was an exploration that avoided engaging with outside sociological and philosophical theories and, even when it attempted to do so, was co-opted by the liberal or ‘social welfare’ styles of developed capitalism. This meant that liberal or progressive Catholicism could never challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of bourgeois society, since it was readily preempted by the ruling establishment in order to modernise and consolidate a profoundly conservative system.³ This was the process that Eagleton and his associates saw to be currently at work within the Christian Church. Their objective was to move the Church into more revolutionary channels, thereby pushing to the limits how far one could go and still remain of the faith.

    I have chosen as a case study of such radical Christianity the experience of the English Catholics, in particular those who associated themselves with the New Left. Unlike their American counterparts, the English radical Catholics succeeded in developing a coherent theological philosophy of revolution based on a synthesis of the New Theology that inspired Vatican II and radical economic and social theory, a good deal of which was inspired by the insights of Karl Marx and American and European sociologists and literary theorists.

    The driving force behind what came to be called the English Catholic New Left was a periodical called Slant. The young Catholics who were affiliated with this publication and several other associated leftist organizations devoted themselves as Christians to the mission of advancing socialism, which they saw to be the ultimate incarnation of the Kingdom of God. Slant as the avant-garde of this radical agenda intended to liberate the post–World War II generation of English Catholics from what its writers considered to be the stultifying and anti-intellectual world of immigrant Catholicism as well as the pusillanimity of the liberal political and economic thinking that served to assure the continuity of corporate capitalism. In this endeavor the Left Catholics put forth a new set of sociological and religious ideas that provided a framework for the emergence of a more sophisticated theological consciousness that would challenge capitalism and all its assorted evils.

    Although the English Catholic New Left did not succeed in meeting their revolutionary objectives, the bold and imaginative efforts made in explicating their positive vision were a source of inspiration to many younger Catholics, who had begun to question the relevance of what they saw as an antiquated religion out of touch with modern times. The Catholic Left offered a perspicacious synthesis of the most seminal socioeconomic and philosophical theories of the modern era and demonstrated how this could be integrated within the framework of Western civilization’s oldest religious tradition. All this certainly underscores the observation of theologian Fergus Kerr, O.P., who wrote that the Catholic Church is not the monolithic entity that her enemies and most zealous members believe.

    This book is divided into three separate but integrated parts so as to better explicate the transformation from progressive religious reformism to revolution. Part I, The English Cultural Setting, provides the historical backdrop for understanding the nature of Catholicism in England. We see here the roots of a small, conservative, and ultramontane Church that ultimately had to accommodate itself to a Protestant and secularized mainstream culture and, by the early nineteenth century, find space for the influx of Irish immigrants. A considerable gulf developed between the old recusant aristocratic Catholics and their working-class brethren. However, both were culturally conformist and showed no proclivity for challenging the prevailing order. Although they preferred to stay beneath the political radar, in the early decades of the new century a different breed of Catholic emerged, consisting of a more politicized coterie, spurred on in large part by a number of influential converts to the creed (G.K. and Cecil Chesterton, Eric Gill, Christopher Hollis, Arnold Lunn, and Douglas Woodruff, among others). It was this group that sowed the seeds of social activism, some elements of which would later culminate in the revolutionary positions of the Catholic New Left. Yet by the end of World War II and well into the 1950s, this more politicized Catholicism had waned, and the English Catholics once again returned to the earlier preference for conformity, conservatism, subcultural separatism, and religious quietude.

    Part II, The Reformers, expands the historical context for discussing trends in Catholicism from England to Europe, where there were broader and more systematic theological efforts to bring the Catholic Church into the modern age. The ultimate success of the reformers, reflected in the papacy of John XXIII and Vatican Council II, came after a long and difficult struggle to overcome the legacy of what was anathematized as modernism and the influential integralist forces that demanded that all public and private life be guided by the authority of Rome. Closely bound up with maintaining the monarchical structures of the Church seen to be challenged by modernism was the Vatican’s battle against all facets of liberalism, which in some ways was considered more lethal than communism itself. This model of Church governance reached its maturation in the papacy of Pius XII.

    In order to transform the Church and make its existence more relevant to modern life, it was necessary for reformers to overcome two pillars of papal authoritarianism: the theological monopoly of neoscholastic Thomistic orthodoxy, and the Congregation of the Roman Curia, the bureaucratic agents of Vatican business. What opened the doors to progressive voices was the failure of the Church to provide sufficient leadership through the testing of the fascist totalitarianism that had resulted in world war and the social, economic, and political chaos that followed. Now was the time for a new theology that could more realistically address the changes of the postwar world. This burden was undertaken by a group of theologians, many of whom were associated with the University of Tübingen in Germany, and these were joined by younger Jesuit and Dominican theologians from France and Belgium. Out of their writings emerged the so-called New Theology that initiated a more imaginative and historical understanding of Scripture, an opening up of Church governing structures, and greater lay participation through liturgical renewal. The new theologians and their ideas about reforming Church teachings and institutional structures so as to better serve the needs of the modern era found a sympathetic ear in Pius XII’s successor, Pope John XXIII, who in turned launched the Second Vatican Council.

    Finally, Part III, The Revolutionaries, describes and analyzes the English Catholic New Left, an increasingly radicalized group of young intellectuals who viewed the liberal reforms of Vatican II as insufficient to achieve what they saw to be the ultimate purpose of the Gospels: a revolutionary transformation of society toward the creation of a humanistic socialism. Their story completes the circle of progressive theological aspirations, which produced a revolutionary reaction, but one that the Left always believed was a turning back to the original intention of scripture.

    PART ONE

    The English Cultural Setting

    ONE

    The Church in England

    British Catholicism after World War II can best be described as authoritarian and paternalistic in structure, leadership, and teaching. The old aristocratic recusant families that had dominated the Church had been obliged to give way to Vatican ultramontane power with the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850, and gentry influence was further compromised by the huge infusion of Irish immigrants seeking employment in England’s industrial cities.¹ Since the time of Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808–92), one of the main concerns of the English Catholic leadership was to serve the spiritual and communitarian needs of the Irish laboring class, a group fundamentally alienated from mainstream English culture. Catholicism had been more than a religion for the Irish working people; rather, it defined their cultural identity. In an environment that made immigrants feel strange and different, there had been a natural tendency for them to pull inward, embracing those cultural traditions that gave them the comfort of place. Here is where the familiar religion of Catholicism provided both an anchor of certitude and a regular clerical supply of moral leadership. There were two factors that gave shape to Irish Catholic separatism: the discriminatory and alien English culture itself, and a religion with its unique rituals and institutions that supplied a sense of community independent of the larger society in which it was located.

    The immigrant Irish subculture of Catholicism, represented by a close network of primary socialization, allowed participants to locate themselves within a meaningful particularistic tradition from which they might find access to the wider English mainstream culture. But this was a subculture conditioned by deference to authority and undergirded by a heavy dose of spiritual trepidation. Cardinal Archbishop John C. Heenan of Westminster highlighted the efficacy of sin through the confessional box for keeping Catholics in line. Catholics attended Mass, he admitted, rather because of fear than the love of God: knowing the faithful as a mother knows her children, the Church tells them what to do for their own good. Catholic adults were like children and had to be told what to do.² How all this impacted on the consciousness of the individual Catholic was captured by the novelist David Lodge in his book How Far Can You Go?: Up there was Heaven; down there was Hell. It was like Snakes and Ladders: sin sent you plummeting down towards the Pit; the sacraments, good deeds, acts of self-mortification, enabled you to climb back towards the light. Everything you did or thought was subject to spiritual accounting.³ Those who faltered might even be punished by the very means through which they were supposed to communicate with their Savior. One London priest, for example, imposed a collective penance of saying three Hail Mary’s when members of his church failed to attend a meeting on Catholic education.⁴

    The former Jesuit Peter Hebblethwaite related the story told to him by a Mr. John Holland of Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, who described what it was like to attend the local Catholic school. The parish priest who came into the school on Sunday mornings greeted students with his inquisition: Hands up, those who were at the 9:30 Mass? There was no communion at the 11:00 service, meaning that only the lazy and less devout attended. The second and devastating question was, And which of you missed holy mass? After a pause, the Clegg children raised their hands. The family had no shoes. The MacDermotts and the Haydens also had missed the service. The MacDermotts had a drunken father, and the Haydens had no dad at all. These were the scholars who were lashed by the priest’s invective, explained Holland, who called upon God to witness the disgrace in which they stood. . . . There was nothing for them . . . but eternal punishment for their damned souls unless they mended their ways. By the time the priest had finished, Holland concluded, each scholar was petrified with fear—not of God but of the priest.

    Not surprisingly, in the hearts and minds of young Catholics the combination of fear and clerical authoritarianism could inspire grim visions of the Apocalypse. The literary critic Terry Eagleton recalled the school retreats from his youth in the working-class community of Salford, when one of the priests depicted in vivid detail the three dark days of Satan’s rampage, where only holy candles would burn. Ashen-faced and subdued, wrote Eagleton, I lived in constant fear of the Second Coming, which was somehow merged with the threat of Russian invasion—Christ and Khrushchev rolled into one. There was at least some solace for the young Eagleton, however, since with low neo-scholastic cunning he had worked out that it could not happen before 1960, the year when the pope was to open the letter containing the message from Our Lady of Fatima. How could God blow the whistle before then?

    Generally speaking, English bishops and priests had not distinguished themselves as intellectuals. Until recently they had been the products of educational training purposely isolated from the main institutions of higher learning. The clergy who served the Irish community were not trained as administrators, diplomats, or university scholars. Their education took place in Ireland and was geared to parish ser vice. The guiding purpose of the parish priest, as Lodge has observed, was to provide pastoral care to a predominantly working-class and lower-middle-class community who, it was assumed, needed to be shielded from the corrosive influence of modern ideas in the arts and sciences through obedience to clerical authority.⁷ In the words of England’s highest-ranking prelate before World War II, Cardinal Archbishop Arthur Hinsley of Westminster, it was the existence of separate Catholic schools alone that could save the young people from the easy descent into the depths of paganism.

    For years the hierarchy had restricted young Catholics in any effort to expand their intellectual horizons through higher education. Cardinal Manning’s successor at Westminster, Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, regarded English universities as centers of infidelity and worldliness. It was not until 1895, nearly twenty-five years after the lifting of religious tests for Catholics at Oxford, that the Vatican (after a reluctant petition by Vaughan) gave permission for Catholics to attend the nation’s elite secular universities. Even as late as the 1960s, Catholic chaplaincies at British universities were unable to receive sufficient support from the Church.⁹ For the most part, young Catholics were taught to conform. Yet what they received in return did not linger long on their intellectual palate. Lodge has written that religious instruction consisted of memorizing the Penny Catechism and monotonously recounting the Ten Commandments and the sacraments. He could not recall being exposed to any other religious textbook, and seldom was any reference even made to the Old and New Testaments.¹⁰ Desmond Fisher, editor of the London Catholic Herald during the years of Vatican Council II, noted that Catholics in the 1950s listened to sermons that had no relevance to their real lives, failed to understand the Latin rituals, and only attended church out of habit, fearing the consequences if they did not.¹¹ Intellectual life itself was an exotic rarity among the working-class Irish. Eagleton pointed out that literacy was not the strong point in his childhood community in industrial Salford, a world which would no more have understood how you make a living by writing books than how you could make one by picking wax from your ears.¹²

    Despite the criticisms of Lodge, Eagleton, and others, it would be a mistake to assume that all Catholics inhabited an intellectual wasteland. A number of English bishops up to the 1940s received at least part of their higher education for the priesthood in Rome. This certainly was a rigorous intellectual experience, yet it served to mitigate national and parochial perspectives, strengthening instead ultramontane tendencies and devotion to the Vatican. As Cardinal Heenan of Westminster put it, Romanità, or the Roman spirit, with its encounters with St. Peter’s Basilica, audiences with the Vicar of Christ, and the solemn pontifical ceremonies, exercise an imperceptible but permanent effect upon the young clerics. These experiences above all made the priest especially conscious of being one of the Pope’s men.¹³ The effect of such educational and spiritual conditioning was to bind very strongly the English bishops to a Catholic subculture of separateness, and the ties that bound the hierarchy to Rome partly explain why the English church lagged behind its European and American counterparts in pushing for theological and social reform in the years leading up to Vatican Council II.¹⁴

    On the other hand, Catholics had certainly made their mark on British cultural life. The Chesterton brothers, Hilaire Belloc, Eric Gill’s Guild of Catholic Craftsmen, Graham Greene, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Dawson, and many others had greatly enriched the fabric of British arts and letters, but for the most part these men were converts to the altar and embraced the faith because it was exotic and in opposition to the prevailing spirit of modern secularism and English Protestantism. They were part of what the historian Adam Schwartz has identified as the Third Spring, a generation of Catholics distinct from the Second Spring that John Henry Newman had called his fellow converts W.G. Ward, George Tyrrell, and others.¹⁵ As opposed to Newman’s group, the Catholics of Chesterton’s era were less interested in integrating their faith with the times than in using it as a means of attacking the cultural distortions of modernization. And unlike Newman’s generation, they found comfort in Vatican authority. Although the Third Spring intellectuals came to Catholicism from varying backgrounds and experiences, what they had in common was the need to find authoritative spiritual and moral security in a world of vanishing standards and beliefs. Many embraced Catholicism not only because it provided an answer to these personal longings, but also because its ancient verities could serve as the source of rejuvenation for an age rapidly sliding into what they saw as the miasmic confusions of cultural relativism.

    These men had an enormous impact on non-Catholics, but some critics question whether their work was of permanent service to the Church itself.¹⁶ Even Schwartz himself, an admirer of the Third Spring Catholics and a critic of the secular trajectory of the modern age, laments that the seeds of their fruit seem to have fallen on rocky soil. The British Catholic historian John Lynch at the end of the 1950s wrote that Chesterton, in spite of flashes of insight, has presently no influence on the younger generation in or outside the Church and does not have any relevance to the society in which they live. Nor do they go to the idiosyncratic Belloc for an understanding of British history. As for Greene and Waugh, their writings, Lynch claimed, say little about the nature of English Catholicism, and as writers they are sui generis and not at all typically representative of their religious affiliation. Indeed, the romantic conservatism of Waugh, Lynch has argued, with its eccentric devotion to Arcadian aristocratic and antiquated values of privilege, has no meaning whatever to proletarian Catholics.¹⁷ Lodge has asserted that the world-famous partnership that George Bernard Shaw dubbed ‘the Chesterbelloc’ has had a great fall, and few seem interested in putting it together again; the ideas for which they labored have largely lost their relevance.¹⁸

    The Catholic Church had a certain appeal for the converts and the Irish working class because of its separation from mainstream English culture. Brian Wicker, one of the leaders of the Catholic New Left in the 1960s, commented that when he converted in 1950, it felt like joining something which put a strange gulf between oneself and the world as one knew it.¹⁹ For those Irish immigrants who felt keenly the boot of English prejudice, the Friday abstinence provided a common sense of community. In the words of the cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas, a meatless Friday was no empty symbol: it means allegiance to a humble home in Ireland and to a glorious tradition in Rome.²⁰ Such connections could be a source of pride in the subculture of humiliation and poverty that were the lot of the unskilled Irish worker.

    Other writers have also remarked on the intransigent separateness from the world that seemed to define British Catholics. In 1950, Archbishop George A. Beck of Brentwood had posited that the ‘otherworldliness’ in a Catholic must always be his dominant, if not immediately evident, characteristic.²¹ The Roman Catholic sense of separateness was promoted by such peculiarities as the Latin Mass, prohibitions against eating meat on Fridays, pilgrimages, and devotion to novenas. Indeed, disappointed with the Vatican’s efforts to modernize its liturgy through Vatican II, the writer Arnold Lunn wondered whether he would have even converted to Catholicism if at the time the Church had embraced the vernacular.²² Bernard Wall wrote to Tom Burns, publisher of The Tablet, scolding him for highlighting the ideas of progressive theologians who gave shape to Vatican II, namely, Hans Küng, Cardinal Leon Suenens, Cardinal François Marty, and others. These men, wrote Wall, were hopelessly out of touch with the modern world. Giving publicity to their alien ideas, he claimed, was harming our culture and religion at a time when the situation is desperate. In Wall’s view the prohibition of the old Mass was a totalitarian action and likely to achieve the very end which it is intended to avoid—namely a schismatic situation.²³

    The endurance of an independent Catholic subculture made it difficult for the Irish to assimilate into mainstream English society. From the outset the strength of the Irish inheritance was a formidable barrier to overcome. Even in the mid-nineteenth century there were working-class districts in the Midlands where the immigrants still spoke Irish routinely. In particular, very few of the women knew how to speak English, and most Irish immigrants who landed in the shipping ports scarcely understood the language.²⁴ Studies of ethnic assimilation in the United States indicate that the process is expedited when the minority group makes concessions to the linguistic, educational, and social norms of their new environment. The object is to abandon some of the more alien features that mark one as different to facilitate acceptance, yet also to maintain sufficient elements of tradition to sustain personal and community identity. In the case of Jews in both Britain and America, for example, as well as other ethnic minorities coming to the United States, the identity anchor has been religion.²⁵ Yet what stands out in the case of assimilation regarding Jews in Britain and other ethnics in America is that these groups had a strong desire to become an integral part of their host culture. A conscious desire to assimilate, however, was not initially present in the Irish Catholic community in Britain. As the sociologist John Hickey has shown, getting too close to English culture was considered disloyal to the historical struggles of the Irish homeland, and its state religion of Protestantism was too threatening to the Catholic faith. This isolation, he points out, was not only endured but deliberately encouraged.²⁶ In fact, when Catholics did begin to merge more readily into English mainstream culture after World War II, it was largely the result of the breakdown in religious and social isolation rather than of any conscious effort or positive course of action on their part.²⁷

    Another factor that contributed to the making of Catholic separatism was the Irish working class itself. From the beginning of the large-scale immigration, Irish workingmen showed little interest in social and political reform. For example, they assiduously opposed the Chartist movement of the 1830s, the first effort to emancipate the working class politically through parliamentary reform. When peaceful efforts failed to advance their cause, several prominent Chartists, most conspicuously the Irishman Feargus O’Connor, moved to more direct, even violent, methods to advance the cause. Irish workers remained largely aloof from the Chartists and roundly condemned their insurgency when it became disruptive. In fact, in Manchester, Irish workers broke up Chartist meetings during the anti–Corn Law campaign in the early 1840s and were largely responsible for the defeat of Chartism in that city.²⁸

    The Irish opposition to a working-class movement can be partly explained by the same reason that recent immigrants to America have failed to gravitate to unions: the necessity of finding employment quickly regardless of the level of wages. The conditions from which the Irish workers had fled were far worse than what they found in Britain, and the requisites of subsistence or helping a family back in Ireland compelled them to work for nearly any wage. Thus it was imperative to protect a regular source of income from what was seen to be the reckless behavior of working-class activists.

    In addition to the calling of subsistence, there were political reasons for Irish aloofness from the early English working-class movement. The leading champion of the Irish cause, Daniel O’Connell, MP, was himself opposed to both the Chartist disturbances (he believed that its Irish supporters undermined their people’s efforts to earn respectability) and trade unionism. The activities of trade unionists antagonized the managerial classes and compromised O’Connell’s efforts to unite all sections of Irish society in repealing the Act of Union.

    Economic and political considerations therefore served to isolate the Irish working class from mainstream English trade-union activism. Whatever political interests they had were essentially channeled into efforts to achieve Home Rule for Ireland and support for the Fenian movement. However, this struggle for Irish independence did not require cooperation or the development of strategic linkages with English trade unionists.²⁹

    There were exceptions to this political separateness from working-class action for social justice, but for the most part they concerned individuals such as Cardinal Manning in the London dock strike of 1889 and the Distributist groups, who threw their support to revolutionary syndicalist action in the pre–World War I years. These were unique cases, largely outside the general Catholic political trajectory, and their influence altogether was not long lasting. Manning’s success in gaining concessions from the employers during the London dock strike made him a hero to the workingmen. However, the exceptionalism of Manning’s actions was noted by one of his Catholic admirers, who wrote that the cardinal’s efforts lit up as with a splendid, contrasting, solitary flare the long waste of his Catholic contemporaries’ general indifference to the question of social rights.³⁰

    Such progressive impulses were of short duration. Herbert Vaughan, the successor to Manning (the People’s Cardinal), was a son of England’s old Catholic aristocratic tribe with a pedigree that went so far back in time that it lost itself in the twilight of fable.³¹ This gentry background, along with his education in Continental Catholic colleges, contributed to Cardinal Vaughan’s conservative Tory instincts. Unlike Manning, Vaughan was ill at ease with the immigrant working-class Irish. His view of them illustrated the enormous gap in England between aristocratic perceptions and the laboring masses. To Vaughan the working class appeared to be broad-backed powerful animals. With words of the coarsest, foulest, and most degrading meaning, the workers are flesh and blood, and they think and speak of nothing else.³² A delegate from the National Committee of Organised Labour, who met with Vaughan to discuss his support for the group’s pension scheme, related how the cardinal was gracious, refined, and regal, yet somehow out of touch with the world of workingmen: He wanted to be sympathetic, but did not quite know how, and moved uneasily in dealing with our subject, as one who travels on unfamiliar ground.³³

    Although Cardinal Vaughan admitted a moral and intellectual debt to Manning, he openly criticized his predecessor’s public political activity, in particular his role in the London dock strike, and frankly disapproved of many of Manning’s radical social policies. Reflecting the assumptions of the old Catholic traditions, Cardinal Vaughan preferred to address social problems through Catholic institutions under the direction of the official hierarchy, rather than to work for change through public organizations in cooperation with any people who shared his objectives (even Protestants!), a modus operandi with which Manning had been perfectly comfortable.

    After Cardinal Vaughan’s death in 1903, there were sporadic attempts to organize Catholics to promote social reform. One of the more long-lasting campaigns was associated with an organization founded in 1906 called the Salford Diocesan Federation, whose mission was to coordinate efforts of the clergy and laity to train Catholics for participation in the political process. The Federation lasted until 1928. One of its major victories was to convince the Labour Party to delete from its platform a clause demanding secular education in public elementary schools. The organization also established a National Conference of Catholic Trade Unionists, which worked to prevent the Labour Party from adopting a socialist agenda.

    In the long run, what dissipated Irish Catholic political involvement was the granting of Home Rule in 1922. Afterward, with few exceptions, Catholics remained largely apolitical. The Catholic Social Guild (established in 1909) was dedicated to advancing Catholic social doctrine as outlined in the teachings of the great labor encyclicals. It also founded the Catholic Workers’ College (Plater Hall) at Oxford. The guild and college did not achieve notable success, owing largely to the inability of overcoming deeply ingrained Catholic indifference to political and social questions.

    The persistence of a Catholic subculture largely divorced from significant political involvement prevailed up to the end of World War II. It was a subculture of separateness enforced through insistence on marital endogamy, an authoritarian clergy, strict adherence to the Vatican monarchical power structure, and religious socialization in separate schools. The hierarchy was highly sensitive to the need to protect its people, especially the young, from the secularizing forces of the wider culture, which by the 1950s was itself going through massive changes in moral values and social outlook. Here the Church committed itself to charity work in terms of saving souls, but there was less said about putting into practice the social teachings of the Gospels, and any sort of involvement in matters of politics for the most part was avoided. The authoritarian clerical structure of the English Catholic Church also discouraged involvement of the laity in religious affairs. As one observer of the Catholic situation in England noted, John Henry Newman’s essay in the July 1859 issue of The Rambler, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, had made a case for restoring lay participation, but Newman’s plea was ignored by the hierarchy for well over a hundred years.³⁴

    It must be said that by the early 1960s Catholics had largely failed to make a distinctive mark on either English popular or political culture. There certainly was no clear Catholic line on either domestic or international affairs. Catholic members of Parliament were indistinguishable from their fellow party members, or else they did not remain long at Westminster. For the most part, it appears that many Catholics who came of age politically after 1945 simply absorbed the thinking and values of the social class to which they belonged.³⁵

    Catholics were also not well represented in Parliament in proportion to their numbers. In the 1960s, for instance, there were roughly the same number of Jewish MPs as Catholic ones, even though they were less than one tenth of the Catholic population.³⁶ This may have been a lingering legacy of historical bias against Catholics since the Reformation and of the siege mentality of the recusants, who deemed it prudent to stay below the political radar. Yet another factor that might explain the apolitical tendency of English Catholics related to the theological dualism that pervaded Catholic education (a Platonic separation of the higher spiritual realm from the mundane) and its consequent antiworld attitudes. Bishop George A. Beck, chairman of the Catholic Education Council after World War II, cited H.O. Evennett’s assessment of Catholic education with approval. The hierarchy of values taught by Catholicism, wrote Evennett, runs counter to much of modern social and moral ideology. It teaches that Life is a preparatory stage and its values are secondary . . . the quintessential that is left by a Catholic education is a lasting consciousness of the fact and meaning of death. Moreover, to pass through the gateway of death in the best possible disposition towards God . . . is the very object of life itself.³⁷ This does not represent a mind-set especially attuned to addressing the troubles of the secular realm.

    Such was the nature of the English Catholic Church and its community up to the 1960s: insular, apolitical or at least politically conformist, highly authoritative, and out of touch with what was transpiring among Catholic theologians on both the Continent and in the United States. The Catholic hierarchy may have succeeded in the task of ministering to the spiritual needs of its growing community and of constructing churches and schools. But it was not equipped to deal with the myriad intellectual and social challenges of a rapidly changing modern culture. Yet there had been a number of lay Catholics who did recognize the imperative of using their religious beliefs as a vehicle for changing prevailing orthodoxies in a progressive, even radical direction. Their legions were small but highly significant in terms of creating an intellectual template from which a later generation might have drawn to advance their own program for transforming the sociopolitical landscape. The roots of this religious radicalism go back to the early twentieth century with the founding of the Christian Socialist Movement, out of which evolved the seminal social and political thinking of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and their followers.

    TWO

    The Sources of English Catholic Radicalism

    Although English Catholicism in the post–World War II years was clearly politically and socially conformist, there had been an earlier episode of Catholic-inspired radicalism associated with the Distributist ideas of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc that had fundamentally challenged the English ruling establishment. Chesterton and Belloc were two of the best-known and most prolific writers of their generation; each published more than one hundred books and contributed to nearly every major British periodical of the day. Before 1914 and during the interwar years they launched an unconventional assault on the evils of capitalist-industrial society that had a significant influence not only on Catholic writers but also on the secular political left (G.D.H. Cole, R.H. Tawney, and the Guild Socialists).¹ As such, the ideas of Chesterton and Belloc that formed the core of what was called Distributism established a legacy of radical socioeconomic thinking that might have served as a philosophical grid for those future Catholics who would advocate overturning the corporate capitalist political order. Radical Distributism had its origins in Christian Socialism and the rise of the labor movement in pre–World War I Britain.

    English Catholics had never been especially enamored of socialism or radical politics. Although there had been a momentary surge in political and social activism under Cardinal Manning, this changed with the leadership of his successor, Archbishop Herbert Vaughan. Efforts to galvanize Catholics for social action did not take place until after the death of Vaughan in 1903, and the inspiration for this uphill struggle came from laymen rather than from the Catholic hierarchy. Leslie Toke, one of the leaders of the mildly reformist and short-lived Catholic Social Union, claimed that the organization collapsed in no small part due to the fact that its name was supposed in some occult manner to connect it with that dreadful Socialism.² Toke published a highly critical essay in the Dublin Review (1907) condemning the apathy toward social problems of the old wealthy Catholics as well as their antipathy to anything suggesting socialism. The vast majority of educated Catholics, claimed Toke, not only were ignorant of papal social teachings but were also as benighted regarding political and economic questions as were their French noble counterparts on the eve of the Revolution.³

    Leslie Toke, Virginia Crawford, and a few other stalwarts launched the Catholic Social Guild (CSG) in 1909. One of its major projects was to popularize the social principles outlined in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. The CSG worked closely with the Fabian Society and sought to permeate the consciousness of the working classes through Catholic social teachings. Yet the CSG also made it clear that it would follow a moderate course of action and make special efforts to avoid political controversy.⁴ This policy was also applied to other organizations that grew out of the CSG. The Catholic Evidence Guild, for example, established to teach the faith to non-Catholics, was forbidden to incorporate politics into its platform: The rule is extended in practice to the avoidance of controversial questions of a social and economic nature, which though not strictly political yet might easily distract the meeting from its true aim, which is religious.

    The laymen chiefly responsible for moving their co-religionists to radical social and political action prior to World War II through the program of Distributism were first nurtured not in Catholic circles but rather in the company of Anglican social activists. Most of the major players in the Distributist movement—Cecil and G.K. Chesterton, A.J. Penty, Maurice Reckitt, Eric Gill, and others—had entered the political arena from the traditions of Christian and guild socialism. The early careers of these writers had been influenced by Christian socialists, referring to a group of activists from across denominations who were inspired by the work of F.D. Maurice to apply the Gospels to Britain’s social problems. Maurice had been a critic of the Victorian churches’ narrow insistence on confining religion to personal morality and salvation. The Kingdom of God, said Maurice, includes the whole of His creation, embracing man in all his parts, secular and religious.

    The economic thinking of the early English Christian socialists (notably J.M. Ludlow, the founder of the movement, and the novelist Charles Kingsley) derived from French Catholic socialists, some of whom were associated with Frédéric Ozanam. Ludlow had studied the teachings of the Catholic convert and socialist P.-J.-B. Buchez in Paris. Like Ozanam, Buchez had worked for a reconciliation between Catholicism and popular democracy. Buchez believed that a major mechanism for essentially Christianizing the forces unleashed by the French Revolution would be a clergy prepared in the traditions of social deaconry (the recognition that the clergy, in addition to their sacramental responsibilities, had an obligation to perform welfare work to improve the social life of the community).⁷ Buchez and other French Catholic socialists preached that capitalism was parasitic and destructive of God’s worldly design. However, they were optimists, firmly believing in the rationality of man and convinced that historical progress was possible through the expansion of democratic, participatory government.

    For their part, the English Christian socialists were convinced that such progress could not take place while the working classes were alienated from religion. This problem, they believed, was due to the failure of the Victorian churches, whose leaders, in the words of historian K.S. Inglis, cared less about the material and spiritual welfare of the working classes than the workers allegedly cared about religion.

    One of the important offsprings of Christian socialist thinking was the Christian Social Union (CSU), founded during the London dock strike of 1889. Its birth was marked by the publication of a book edited by Charles Gore called Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation. The book attempted to explain the importance of Christianity for addressing the central moral and intellectual issues of the day. In addition, the authors, most of whom were radical Anglicans embarrassed by their church’s failure to promote social and economic reform, emphasized the responsibility of owning private property, which, they insisted, must be recognized as a public trust involving explicitly social obligations. It was the book’s insistence on applying Christianity to political and social matters that led to the establishment of the CSU. Its purpose was to study and publicize social and economic problems, and its members were prepared to draw on Pope Leo XIII’s labor encyclical to drive home their arguments.

    Another issue that galvanized the energies of the Christian Social Union was British imperialism, in particular, the South African Boer War of 1899–1902. Two leading figures of the CSU, Charles Gore and Scott Holland, were especially disturbed by the jingoism that fueled Britain’s overseas expansion. Their criticisms were joined by those of several other young members of the CSU, notably Conrad Noel, whose powerful sermons against munitions makers led to threats to blow up his church,⁹ and G.K. Chesterton. These men believed that the Boer War was the product of a plot carried out by international mining interests. It was a classic example of what the journalist J.A. Hobson at the time called economic imperialism, a redolent Marxist argument highlighting the capitalists’ ravenous search for new markets and investments.

    G.K. Chesterton gained a large public profile because of the brilliance of his writings on the evils of British imperialism. He soon locked horns with George Bernard Shaw and the imperialist Fabians, who defended the Boer War on the grounds that it would advance civilization. Chesterton asserted that imperialism was the enemy of liberty, since it negated the deepest of democratic principles—it denied the equality of man by imposing our standards on another nation, yet learning nothing from them.¹⁰ In addition, Chesterton believed that imperialism destroyed true liberty, which he was convinced could be attained only within a defined sphere of activity and by wielding power over small things.

    The radical members of the Christian Social Union, including Chesterton and Noel, ultimately became dissatisfied with the failure to move the establishment to social and economic reform through mere speeches and the writing of papers. Out of this frustration was born the Christian Socialist League (CSL) in 1906 by those who wanted a movement primarily devoted to socialist political action and more liberal in matters of religion. Membership in the CSL was now open to persons of all faiths and to those who were willing to commit themselves to a democratic commonwealth founded on economic socialism, in which wealth would be owned collectively by the community.

    The members of the CSL varied widely in the radicalism of their political and social views and included such diverse people as George Lansbury, the future leader of the Labour Party; Conrad Noel, who would become known as the red priest of Thaxted; J.N. Figgis, the father of political pluralism and a major influence on the later development of Guild Socialism; and the brothers Cecil and G.K. Chesterton. The CSL soon became involved in the wave of working-class unrest that swept England in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I. Noel, a close friend of the Chestertons and a stalwart warrior in many of the causes for which the brothers so ardently crusaded, was typical of the political militancy of the association when he wrote in 1912 that the main hope of the future was in the revolt of the people against their ‘leaders’ as manifest in sympathetic strikes and the general labour unrest.¹¹

    Noel’s views were undergirded by Christian teaching. He claimed that he was an advocate of Catholic Socialism, the seeds of which were found in the teachings of the early Church fathers, who, he believed, were radical revolutionaries committed to the sharing of property and full-scale democracy.¹² Perhaps the most radical of the Christian Socialist Leaguers, a group whom the Anglican bishops called dangerous men, was Cecil Chesterton. As the leader of the League’s militant wing, Chesterton vigorously opposed the association’s dealings with the Liberal Party and urged that only candidates who were avowedly socialist should be given CSL support.¹³

    One of these dangerous men, G.K. Chesterton, came to have the greatest impact on modern English Catholicism. G.K.C., as he was popularly known, converted to Catholicism in 1922. In his well-known book Orthodoxy (1908), a precursor to his conversion, Chesterton argued that Christian theology was the source from which his own liberal sympathies and orientations had evolved. The book was an explanation of how liberalism as a creed could reach its fullest potential in a democratic environment of limited government (the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves)¹⁴ founded on Christian religious principles. Here, Chesterton touched on one of the most salient features of Catholic social theory adumbrated in the teachings of Pope Leo XIII and more formally set down in 1931 in Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno and later in Pope John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris, as well as Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes. This is the principle of subsidiarity. In addition to recognizing that the individual and the family precede the state, subsidiarity affirms that governments and larger organizations should never undertake activities that are better suited to either individuals or smaller social associations.

    Chesterton’s politics evolved from a moderate version (Christian socialism) to a radical one (anarcho-syndicalism on the eve of World War I). As early as 1900, however, he recognized a disturbing pattern in parliamentary politics: the parties tended to curb the views of their more unconventional members so as not to disturb the political establishment.¹⁵ Within a few years, Chesterton became disillusioned with the Liberal Party and the entire political system. He noted that once the Liberals were in power, articles critical of the government ceased to appear in the newspapers for which he wrote, even though they had previously led the charge against corruption within the Conservative government. When his own essays were censored, Chesterton concluded that the press, like the political parties themselves, had fallen under the control of a few rich men who were dedicated to the preservation of the status quo.

    In addition to the evils of parliamentary government, Chesterton also became alarmed during the first decade of the new century by the threat to individual liberties inherent in the advancement of socialism. He feared that socialism, if followed to its logical collectivist end, would sacrifice the individual to the machinery of the state. This trajectory was manifest in the programs of the Fabian Society, which aimed to centralize the political powers of the state and to turn over governance to bureaucratic experts trained in the science of efficiency. Moreover, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the major forces behind the Fabians, had a lingering distaste for and suspicion of the laboring classes and thought it necessary to discipline them in order to maintain social order. For Sidney Webb, the masses were apathetic, dense, unreceptive to any unfamiliar idea.¹⁶ Indeed, the Webbs’ social ideal later became the Soviet Union. In 1935, after a visit to Russia where they saw Stalinism in action, the Webbs published two exuberant volumes on the Soviet system and hailed it as the dawn of a new civilization. Chesterton presciently contended that the Fabians were working not for a classless society but rather for a planned society via the introduction of a bureaucratic form of socialism. His prognostications later materialized in the fulsome disquisitions of the Webbs on Soviet communism. Another of Chesterton’s targets was H.G. Wells, who had complained that Marx’s notion of socialism was unattractive to people who had any real knowledge of administration. Wells was grateful for the Fabian Society’s conversion of Revolutionary Socialism into Administrative Socialism.¹⁷

    Chesterton ultimately condemned socialism for two reasons. First, it addressed the issue of reform from the top, in the form of state bureaucrats deciding for individuals, the little men, what was best for them. Second,

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