The Quest for Unity: 100 Years of the Catholic League
Judge Michael Yelton, 6th July 2013. St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge
May
I first of all say how honoured I am to have been asked to deliver this short
address to mark the Centenary of the Catholic League, which was for many years
the most important group within the Church of England supporting the cause of
reunion with Rome and in later years has transformed itself into an ecumenical
grouping, albeit one with the same aims. Regrettably I am neither a Doctor nor
a QC, as the initial flier would have you believe, nor indeed the President of
the Anglo-Catholic History Society, but I do know, I hope, a considerable
amount about ecclesiastical thought in the period we are dealing with.
I
well recall some 40 years ago attending a Catholic League mass in St. Mary
Elms, Ipswich, at which Leslie Gray Fisher, the long time secretary and one of
those responsible for the survival of the Society through difficult times,
proclaimed the well worn words: “Rome is the rock from which we were hewn and
the Mother to whom we will return” which is and was an appropriate slogan for
the League.
It
is important however since we are today marking the Centenary to look back at
the beginnings of the Society. I shall concentrate on the early years as they
may be less familiar to those listening, and also because I have no wish to
enter into controversies involving those still with us. The First 50 Years were
chronicled in a pamphlet of the same name by Brian Doolan, which was produced
by the Crux Press, run by Father Clive Beresford, the then Priest Director,
from his somewhat decrepit vicarage in Newborough. It did not appear until 1966
because Father Beresford intended to write it himself but then found he did not
have the time to do so. The 75th Anniversary was marked by a
rewriting of that history by Father Robert Farmer, whose account is shorter but
still includes some additional information. Both have been very helpful to
me.
We
can date with some precision the commencement of what came to be known as
Anglican Papalism, a movement which was embodied in the Catholic League. In
1900 a series of addresses was delivered under the auspices of the Association
for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, which had begun as a meeting
place for Anglicans and Romans but from which Romans had been barred by order
of Cardinal Manning. On the Feast of St. Peter at St. Matthew, Westminster,
Father Spencer Jones, a country clergyman and relative of Keble, delivered one
such address in which he strongly advocated reunion with Rome. Among the
congregation was Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, then still a layman, who was both
impressed and affected by what he heard. Following the delivery of the address
both he and Lord Halifax, who had also been present, urged the speaker to
publish it. In 1902 a rewritten and extended version of Father Jones’ address
appeared as England and the Holy See.
This formed one of the basic documents on which the later leaders of the
Catholic League relied. A new body, the Western Church Association, usually
known as the Association of St. Thomas of Canterbury, was formed, which was to
have annual lectures delivered alternately by an Anglican and a Roman.
In
November 1907 Father Jones, in correspondence with an Episcopalian priest in
the United States, Father Paul James Wattson, suggested the celebration of an
Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, running from the Feast of St. Peter’s
Chair in Rome (18 January ) to the Feast of the Conversion of St.
Paul (25). This began in 1908 and was another important backdrop to the
Catholic League.
Father
Fynes-Clinton was ordained priest in 1902 and in 1906 moved to be curate of St.
Stephen, Lewisham. He was an inveterate founder of organisations, some of which
had a short life, others much longer: he found it much easier to be involved
with societies he ran than with those run by others. Both he and the Revd R.L.
Langford-James, then vicar of St. Mark, Bush Hill Park, were members of the
Guild of the Love of God, one of many Anglo-Catholic groups then in existence and after attempting
to urge that a more definite line being taken by the Guild in relation to
reunion, they led a secession. The two of them, with others, set up the
proposed constitution of the Catholic League, and invited Father Arnold
Biddulph-Pinchard, a well known priest then in Birmingham, to become the
Superior General. In the event he turned down the request. Father
Langford-James was then elected as Superior General and Father Fynes-Clinton as
his Assistant.
A
meeting was then held at the Holborn Restaurant on Wednesday 2 July 1913 at
which the League came formally into existence.
This was a huge establishment on the corner of High Holborn and what is
now Kingsway.
On
Saturday 5 July 1913 the League was ceremonially inaugurated at the church of
St. Mary, Corringham, Essex: it seems unlikely that this venue was chosen at
that late stage and much more probable that it had been suggested in advance:
this is reinforced by the attendance of John Kensit junior, the well known
Protestant ranter. The location was at the instigation of a founder member, A.
Clifton Kelway, who was a well known writer and was a lay reader at Corringham.
He wrote a book describing the work of the Society of the Divine Compassion,
which had a house in nearby Stanford-le-Hope.
Thus
it was that a substantial group met for an early mass at St. Margaret Lothbury
and then travelled, presumably by train to Corringham, where they joined the
patronal festivities presided over by the rector, Father John Greatheed:
Corringham was a family living.
There
was a procession in which the participants sang the Litany of Our Lady and the
Salve Regina, in Latin, and then at the high altar in the small church the
League was dedicated and the Foundation Deed was signed by Fathers
Langford-James and Fynes-Clinton and 95 others. The League was placed under the
patronage of Our Lady of Victory, of St. Joseph and of St. Nicholas of Myra.
The Deed hung in Father Beresford’s study in later years and I saw it about
1972, but regrettably did not photocopy it: it has since been lost. Later
Solemn Vespers of Our Lady were sung before the pilgrims returned to
London.
At
that time, Essex was in the Diocese of St. Albans. The Bishop, Edgar Jacob,
came to hear of what had happened and inhibited the Superior and his Assistant
from officiating in his Diocese. He then threatened disciplinary action against
Father Langford-James unless he resigned his office and indeed his membership,
which he did. Father Fynes-Clinton was certainly forced to step down, although
whether he was made to resign his membership is not clear and if he did it was
only temporarily. Clifton Kelway’s licence was withdrawn.
In
place of those forced to resign, the League elected as its Superior General
Father Edward Secker Maltby, who had with his own resources erected his church
of St. Mary, Bermondsey, now covered by the Millwall football ground.
On
25 October 1913 the League’s first annual festa was held at the long-since
disappeared church of St. Michael, Bingfield Street, Islington at which the
preacher was the brilliant Father Ronald Knox, soon to leave on the Rome
Express. The parish priest of St. Michael, Father J.H. Boudier, was a member of
the League and in later years he had an audience with the Pope in which he
seems to have given the impression that the entire Church of England was ready
and willing to accede to the Vatican’s control. Would that it had been so.
It
was one of Father Fynes-Clinton’s characteristics that he not only founded many
organisations, but founded them as offshoots of others. Thus with the Catholic
League. On 17 February 1914 he and Father Maltby set up the Sodality of the
Precious Blood, under the patronage of St Charles Borromeo. Membership was
restricted to celibate priests without connection to freemasonry and who were
prepared to say the Latin Breviary daily. These requirements excluded many prominent
Papalists who were married and some, such as Father Hope Patten, who had no
command of Latin, probably because he was dyslexic.
The
Sodality reflected Fynes-Clinton’s essential view, which was also reflected in
the League. He believed that the Church of England was truly part of the
Catholic Church, and that reunion should be corporate and should be effected by
an internal revolution within the Anglican Communion, so that all its priests
subscribed to Roman doctrinal and liturgical ideas. In her penetrating book on
the Benedictines of Nashdom, Dr. Peta Dunstan remarks that Abbot Martin Collett's
insistence never to deviate from the Roman way of doing things was "a
profound sharing- not, as his critics would have it, a slavish mimicry. It was
an ecumenical deed more powerful than pages of words".
Father
Maltby did not have the time available to run the League and soon resigned, to
be replaced by the then retired Father W.J. Scott, who had set up the first
Back to Baroque altar in his church at Sunbury Common and was an authority on
railways. Father Maltby remained Director of the Solidarity and Father
Fynes-Clinton was secretary.
No
member of the League had ever been consecrated to the episcopate, although in
1914 Father G. Bown, the Principal of St. Stephen’s House, was appointed as
Bishop of Nassau. However he died before being consecrated.
In
1913 a monthly magazine known as “The Catholic” began: this ceased at the
outbreak of the War but from 1915 the “Messenger” took its place.
In
late 1914 Father Fynes-Clinton moved to be curate of St. Michael, Shoreditch.
He regarded the move as releasing him from the earlier inhibition and was
reappointed as Assistant Superior. He almost immediately set up a new community
for women, which was also integrated with the work of the League. This was the
Community of Our Lady of Victory. This was not to prove his most successful
venture, and, after a period of wandering, in 1928 the two sisters who
persisted had a bungalow built in the grounds of the convent of St. Mary of
Nazareth at Edgware. It ceased to exist with the death of the original sister,
Mother Mary St. John Watson, in 1961.
The
COLV was responsible for the Apostleship of Prayer, which involved daily
decades of the Rosary known as the Living Crown of Our Lady of Victory. It also
organised the Tabernacle Treasury to raise funds for the provision of
monstrances for poor churches.
Father
Scott resigned in 1916 and was replaced by an anonymous group, from which
Father Fynes shortly emerged as sole Priest Director. The League was thereafter
run for many years essentially in accordance with his views.
In addition to the groups already mentioned, the
structure of the League was complicated by a number of sub-groups, the product
of Fynes-Clinton’s fertile brain. There was a Spiritual Treasury, the Women’s
and Men’s respective Retreat Organisations, the Guard of Honour of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus, the Chantry Fund, and probably others. Some were short lived,
whereas others, such as the Tabernacle Treasury, lasted for many years.
In 1920 the League for the first time held its festa
at the Convent of the Paraclete at Woodside, Croydon, which had been founded by
the imprisoned ritualist, Father Tooth, who after his release was unable to
find a living. During the day, Father
Fynes-Clinton received the profession of a brother of the Society of St.
Augustine (later the Servitors of St. Mary and St. Austin), a Community founded
by him in 1911, which rather like that of the exotic Father Nugée in the
Nineteenth Century, took in men who worked in the world but transformed
themselves into monks when they left the office each night. It had a priory in
Walthamstow for some years, but failed to prosper. In 1925 the annual function
moved to Otford School, which was also a foundation associated with Father
Tooth, and continued there for many years.
On 23 October 1920 yet another sub-group of the League
was founded, when at Holy Trinity, Hoxton, the Rosary Confraternity was
dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary: the
sisters of the Community of Our Lady of Victory were living in the parish at
that time.
Two other significant developments in the progress of
the Catholic League took place in the same year. The first was the adoption by it
of the Profession of Faith of the Council of Trent. In its explanatory booklet
the League said:
“Our present circumstances, then, in these two provinces of Canterbury
and York, are very similar to those of the Western Church as a whole before the
Council of Trent, only that it is with a very much more advanced and virulent
form of the disease that we are beset...So the Catholic League adopts as its
profession of faith THE CREED OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.”
The second such development was the formation of the
Church Unity Octave Committee, which was at that stage another sub-committee of
the League. From 1918 onwards the Church Unity Octave had been supported and
here we see early moves by the League towards unity: it was the first
organisation in the Church of England to promote the Octave. The Committee was
chaired by Fynes-Clinton It then absorbed the pioneering Association for the
Promotion of the Reunion of Christendom, which was apparently wound up by
Athelstan Riley at a meeting on 27 January 1921, on the grounds of the absence
of Roman Catholic involvement, but without, apparently, any consultation with
the wider membership.
As these developments were occurring, Fynes-Clinton
finally acquired a living of his own, and after his institution in 1921 St. Magnus
the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, where we are today, became the centre of the
League’s spiritual activities: from 1923 until the Second World War it also had
an administrative centre in Finsbury from which correspondence came. In 1924
Leslie Fisher, already mentioned, became general secretary, a post he held for
many decades. He was efficient and well organised although the subject of some
mirth because he travelled in ladies’ underwear- as an occupation not a fetish.
In 100 years, the League has only had four General Secretaries.
In 1922 Fynes-Clinton revived the Fraternity of Our
Lady de Salve Regina, which dated originally from 1343, and which held
devotions at midday every day, and in 1924 he aggregated it to the League, thus
providing yet another associated and interlocked group.
In 1926 pilgrimages to Walsingham began and were held
annually.
On All Saints’ Day 1926 a completely new body, the
Confraternity of Unity, was founded by four priests at St. Mary the Virgin, New
York. Its aims were similar to the Catholic League, although the emphasis was
almost exclusively on reunion.
On 5 November 1928 Father T. Bowyer Campbell, one of
the four, who was later to become Professor of History at the University of
Notre Dame, Indiana, addressed the Sodality of the Precious Blood at St.
Magnus, and it was agreed that a secretariat should be opened in England to
promote the Confraternity. On 3 February 1929 this opened at the presbytery of
the church of St. Saviour, Hoxton, with Father Basil Joblin, then a curate at
the church, as its representative in this country. The Confraternity was
correlated with the Catholic League.
Fynes-Clinton joined the new body, but was never very
enthusiastic about organisations which he was not himself running. On the feast
of St. Matthew, 1925, the Council for Observance of the Church Unity Octave was
formed, with Spencer Jones as its President, and on 14 June 1926 this seems to
have become transformed into the Executive Committee of the Church Unity
Octave. In order to bring together the various groups, in 1930 Father
Fynes-Clinton formed the Council for Promoting Catholic Unity, on which were
represented the Catholic League, the Sodality of the Precious Blood, the
Confraternity of Unity, the Association of St. Thomas of Canterbury and the
Catholic Propaganda Society, which had been run by Father Alban Baverstock.
Father
Fynes was also less than enthusiastic about some of those responsible for the
1933 Oxford Movement Centenary- he regarded many of them as being the
contemporary equivalent of Affirming Catholicism, or in other words not being
sufficiently committed to the true principles of the Catholic Revival and to
reunion in particular. It was to counter what were seen as these liberal
tendencies within the wider Anglo-Catholic movement that the leaders of the
Papalist Movement issued their Centenary Manifesto (dated 1 October 1932) and
then the League arranged for the publication of a series of Oxford Movement
Centenary Tractates, entitled The Church
of England and the Holy See.
The
eighth was the work of Father Fynes-Clinton (Part I) and Father W.R. Corbould,
vicar of Carshalton, (Part II). Entitled What
are we to say? it gave an unequivocal answer, namely that the Church of
England should accept the claims of Rome and move towards union as soon as
possible. Father Fynes-Clinton declared confidently:
“We have to insist, against all the insular prejudices carefully
fostered by an interested officialdom, that the Church of England has no
legitimate existence except as part of the Catholic world and therefore
dependant on the Holy See.”
The
main activity of the League in 1933 was the organisation of a pilgrimage to
Rome to celebrate the Holy Year. The pilgrims first went to Turin, where they
attended the Solemn Exposition of the Holy Shroud, and then went on to Rome
where they followed the prescribed course of visiting the four major basilicas:
they then had a special audience with Pope Pius XI during which they presented
him with a copy of the Tractates, elaborately bound. On 22 January 1934 there
was a meeting at the Caxton Hall under the slogan: “Modernism the Enemy: Rome
the Remedy.”
In 1934 Father Maltby died and was replaced as
Director of the Sodality by Father Wilmot Phillips, rector of Plaxtol, but he
died a year later and was replaced by Father Fynes himself.
1935 was also notable for the publication, albeit not
under the auspices of the League but of yet another group, the Society for
Catholic Reunion, of Catholic Reunion: an
Anglican Plea for a Uniate Patriarchate and for an Anglican Ultramontanism,
written by Father Clement (J.T. Plowden-Wardlaw). He argued for the recognition
by Rome of an English Uniate Patriarchate, probably with a celibate priesthood,
and probably also leaving behind “modernists, irreconcilable protestants, and
those obsessed by the state connection.” The book is interesting in that the
author, who was a prolific pamphleteer and vicar of St. Clement, Cambridge
(calling his letters Clementine Tracts),
envisaged that reunion with Rome might envisage a split in the Church of
England, a prospect many did not feel able to contemplate. Do we see in that
the beginnings of an idea which has led in more recent times to the
establishment of the Ordinariate?
In
1936 there was a further reorganisation among the reunion Societies. The
Council for Promoting Catholic Unity set up the Society for Promoting Catholic
Unity which thereafter published The Pilot. The SPCU was responsible also for
the Council of the Church Unity Octave, which was particularly appropriate
since the new Society had been set up during the Octave of 1936. Father
Corbould became the President of the SPCU, the many-hatted (perhaps
many-birettad?) Fynes-Clinton the Treasurer.
Although
the leaders of the Catholic League had taken no direct part in the Malines
Conversations in the mid 1930s the leaders of the Papalist party began to
correspond with Abbé Paul Couturier in France: he was in touch with Father
Jones, Father Fynes-Clinton, and Abbot Martin Collett of Nashdom. In 1936 Dom
Benedict Ley, the novice master of Nashdom, visited the Abbé in Lyons and then
went to Ars and to Paray-le-Mondial, the scene of the apparitions to St.
Margaret Marie Alacoque; four months later Fynes-Clinton himself went over to
France together with Dom Gregory Dix of Nashdom, and they were able to speak in
French at various meetings they attended. The following year Couturier returned
the visit, and was met in London by Fynes-Clinton, who acted as his host
throughout. Fynes-Clinton asked the elderly and infirm Father Spencer Jones to
lunch at St. Ermin’s, Westminster, where he lived in a service flat, and the
Abbé was delighted to meet him. Couturier came again to England in 1938, and on
this occasion broadened his contacts into those who were not wholly committed to
the Roman cause.
These
contacts appear retrospectively to be rather unimportant in the life both of
the Church of England of the Roman Catholic Church but their significance is
that they happened.
In
1937 the Shrine Church at Walsingham was extended. The League was short of
money, as it had been throughout is existence, until left a generous legacy
shortly after the War by a founder member, Miss Evelyn Few (known as “The
Faithful Few”). Father Fynes-Clinton therefore suggested that the chantry
chapel he was endowing should also be the chapel of the League and in turn it
was decided that a statue of Our Lady of Victory, patroness of the League, be
erected in it: however this did not take effect until 1949.
Bombing
in the war destroyed a number of League centres and St. Magnus itself was badly
damaged. However the witness of the League continued much as before, and
finances were much eased by Miss Few’s legacy.
In
1950 the Holy Year was celebrated with a pilgrimage to Rome by Fathers
Fynes-Clinton and Ivan Young, accompanied by Mr. Fisher. The two priests were
received in private audience by Pope Pius XII, who blessed the work of the
Council for the Church Unity Octave. It is not clear how influential visits
such as this were in Rome: it is however apparent that in that year there were
very few other contacts with the Church of England.
It
now seems clear that there was a lack of impetus behind the movement for union
under the Pope in the years following 1950, and before the mood in Rome began
to change. After the South India controversy, which took up a great deal of
time to little avail, Anglo-Catholicism was on the back foot, responding to
initiatives from others with which its adherents disagreed, but not setting
forward a positive programme which would attract new support.
Father
Fynes-Clinton was getting older. He resigned as director of the Sodality in
1953 in favour of Father Joblin, as director of the Apostleship of Prayer in
1955 in favour of Father Peter Sanderson of Poundstock, Cornwall, and as
chairman of the Church Unity Octave Council in January 1958 in favour of Father
Mervyn Pendleton of Wollaston, Northamptonshire. Then on 4 December 1959 he
died: an era had ended.
Although
an age had come to an end, there was an unpleasant episode shortly before that,
following the death of Father Corbould and then a spat between Bishop Mervyn
Stockwood of Southwark and one of the League’s longest serving members, Father
Rice Alforth Evelyn Harris, whose views were such that he had never held a
living in the Church of England. This embittered many.
Father
Fynes-Clinton was replaced by Father Clive Beresford, a man for whom the word
eccentric seems an understatement. I am indebted to one of his successors,
Father Philip Gray, for telling how when processing on a very hot day, the glue
with which he had attached various decorations to his cope began to lose its
hold and the ornamentation began to curl. He did however devote a great deal of
time to the League (to the detriment of his parish) and in particular raised
its profile outside London. He also used his printing press to great effect,
starting a strongly worded newsletter entitled Crux.
By
this time the Church Unity Octave, with its uncompromisingly Papalist position,
was being overtaken by the much more widely-based Week of Prayer for Christian
Unity, which had been backed by Abbé Couturier and more surprisingly by Gregory
Dix. The annual Call to Prayer for Unity, which was issued to coincide with the
Octave, was made for the last time in 1964.
It
is ironic however that in 1960, the year after Fynes-Clinton’s death, Pope John
and Archbishop Fisher finally met face to face. The propaganda of the Catholic
League had almost certainly had more effect on the former than the latter, as
it was reported that the Holy Father knew all about the revival of the
Walsingham pilgrimage, an interest which Fisher did not share.
In
1962 Father Beresford and 11 other priests of the League and Sodality met Pope
John in private audience in 1962 then Fisher’s more sympathetic successor
Michael Ramsey met the Pope in 1966, and was received warmly. In 1970 Pope Paul
VI said at the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales: “There
will be no seeking to lessen the legitimate prestige and usage proper to the
Anglican church when the Roman church...is able to embrace firmly her
ever-loved sister in the authentic communion of the family of Christ.” Then in
1982 Pope John Paul II came to England and was received by Archbishop Runcie at
Canterbury.
Those
events would have seemed inconceivable to Father Fynes and those who with him
had laboured so long and with so few tangible results for reunion between Rome
and Canterbury. The two churches have never appeared closer than at the time of
the Papal visit in 1982, but this proved to be a missed opportunity. The
Anglican episcopate had a lack of vision and no willingness to take bold steps:
rather their reaction was constantly to retreat into the suffocating committee
structure of the Church of England.
The
reform of the liturgy by Rome also left many Anglicans, including initially
perhaps the League, lacking direction. In due course however the tradition of
following precedents set down by the Pope prevailed in the Catholic League and
the new forms were adopted after an initiative by Father Raymond Avent, who
became priest director in 1974 and was one of a new generation.
I
have deliberately not dealt with some of the more recent developments within
the League but the most far reaching has been the transformation of the Society
from an Anglican Papalist pressure group into an ecumenical group.
The League was one of many organisations which offered strong resistance to the deeply flawed proposals for union between the Anglican and Methodist churches. However once that dragon had been slain, far more worrying proposals began to be aired. The ordination of women, which was irregular by standards of orthodoxy, meant that in the foreseeable future corporate reunion of the Church of England with Rome became impossible. While the Catholic League’s witness remains, it is now only possible to do that which Father Plowden-Wardlaw suggested so many years ago: in other words to persuade only those who have continued to hold, in the face of great pressure, the historic discipline of Christianity, that the Unity of all Christians is an important, indeed vital, objective.
