Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II

Jay P. Corrin

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780268023102, 9780268204150
• eBook ISBN: 9780268077006
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: 20th Century History

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.

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.5

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”?6

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.”8

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 fa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One. The English Cultural Setting
• Part Two. The Reformers
• Part Three. The Revolutionaries
• Notes
• Bibliography