Anglo-Catholicism, the ‘Crisis in the Church’ and the Cavalier Case of 1899

1991 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-258
Author(s):  
Martin Wellings

Much of the history of the late nineteenth-century Church of England is dominated by the phenomenon of Anglo-Catholicism. In the period between 1890 and 1939 Anglo-Catholics formed the most vigorous and successful party in the Church. Membership of the English Church Union, which represented a broad spectrum of Anglo-Catholic opinion, grew steadily in these years; advanced ceremonial was introduced in an increasing number of parish churches and, from 1920 onwards, a series of congresses was held which filled the Royal Albert Hall for a celebration of the strength of the ‘Catholic’ movement in the Established Church. In the Church Times the Anglo-Catholics possessed a weekly newspaper which outsold all its rivals put together and which reinforced the impression that theirs was the party with the Church's future in its hands. Furthermore, Anglo-Catholicism could claim to be supplying the Church of England with many of its saints and with a fair proportion of its scholars. Slum priests like R. R. Dolling and Arthur Stanton gave their lives to the task of urban mission; Edward King, bishop of Lincoln, was hailed as a spiritual leader by churchmen of all parties; Charles Gore, Walter Frere and Darwell Stone were scholars of renown, while Frank Weston, bishop of Zanzibar, combined academic achievements and missionary zeal with personal qualities which brought him an unexpected pre-eminence at the 1920 Lambeth Conference. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, therefore, Anglo-Catholicism was the party of advance, offering leadership and vision and presenting the Church of England with a concept of Catholicity which many found attractive.

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 314-327
Author(s):  
Rowan Strong

In the 1840s the Church of England, through the agency of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), established an official chaplaincy to emigrants leaving from British ports. The chaplaincy lasted throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. It was revitalized in the 1880s under the direction of the SPCK in response to a surge in emigration from Britain to the colonies. This article examines the imperial attitudes of Anglicans involved in this chaplaincy network, focusing on those of the 1880s and 1890s, the period of high imperialism in Britain. It compares these late nineteenth-century outlooks with those of Anglicans in the emigrant chaplaincy of the 1840s, in order to discern changes and continuities in Anglican imperialism in nineteenth-century Britain. It finds that, in contrast to the imperialist attitudes prevalent in Britain during the late nineteenth century, Anglicans in this chaplaincy network focused more on the ecclesiastical and pastoral dimensions of their work. Indeed, pro-imperial attitudes, though present, were remarkably scarce. It was the Church much more than the empire which mattered to these Anglicans, notwithstanding their direct involvement with the British empire.


1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Elliott

At the Reformation, three possibilities faced English Catholics. They could continue to be Catholics and so suffer the penalties of the penal laws; they could conform to the Church of England; or they could adopt a middle course and become Church Papists. The Nevills of Nevill Holt, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, went through all three phases. In the reign of Edward VI, Thomas Nevill I became a Protestant. His grandson, Thomas Nevill II, became a Church Papist under James I; and Thomas II’s son, Henry Nevill I, continued to be one at the time of the Civil War. But Henry l’s son William was definitely a Catholic and went into exile with King James II, while William’s son, Henry Nevill II, was an open Catholic under Charles II. Henry Nevill II’s descendants continued to be Catholics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until they left Nevill Holt in the late nineteenth century.


1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 371-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Aidan Bellenger

One of the soldiers asked him what religion he was of. He readily answered, ‘I am a Catholic’ ‘What!’ said the other, ‘a Roman Catholic?’ ‘How do you mean a Roman?’ said Father Bell, ‘I am an Englishman. There is but one Catholic Church, and of that I am a member.’These words of a Franciscan priest, Arthur Bell, executed at Tyburn in 1643, could have been taken as his own by Dom Bede Camm, the Benedictine martyrologist, who was one of the great propagandists of those English and Welsh Catholic martyrs who died in the period from the reign of Elizabeth to the Popish Plot. The lives of the martyrs were familiar to English Catholics through the writings of Richard Challoner (1691–1781), whose Memoirs of Missionary Priests had been available in various forms since its publication, as a kind of Catholic reply to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in two volumes in 1741–2, but in the late nineteenth century, as the English Catholics, reinforced by many converts from the Church of England, grew more combative in controversy following the relative calm of the Georgian period, the martyrs came more to the forefront. The church authorities sought recognition of the English martyrs’ heroic virtue. In 1874 Cardinal Manning had put under way an ‘ordinary process’, a preliminary judicial inquiry, to collect evidence to elevate the ‘venerable’ martyrs to the status of ‘beati’. In 1895, and again in 1929, large batches of English martyrs were declared blessed. In 1935 Thomas More and John Fisher were canonized. It was not until 1970 that forty of the later martyrs, a representative group, were officially declared saints.


1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 517-527
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Murray

James Cooper, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Glasgow University and a prominent High Churchman, once remarked that one of the main reasons for the Catholic revival in the Church of Scotland in the late nineteenth century was the renewed study of the history of the Scottish Church. The Catholic revival, or Scoto-Catholic movement, found expression in the formation of the Scottish Church Society in 1892. The High Churchmen who formed the Society considered that a Catholic position was no novelty in the Kirk. According to Henry J. Wotherspoon, one of the leading theologians of the movement, the Presbyterian was from the first ‘the High Catholic of Puritanism’, and it followed that the material for a catholic revival lay at hand in the traditions of the Church. In its classic form and confessional position, he said, Presbyterianism discerned the Kingship of Christ; it asserted the Church as a Divine imperium, ‘visible, universal, and divinely ordered’, independent and autonomous; it maintained Episcopate, none the less that it was Episcopate put into commission; it asserted for the Presbyterate Apostolic Succession; it held a very distinct sacramental system, cumbered only by the endeavour to combine it with a doctrine of election; it exercised a vigorous discipline; it adhered to the oecumenical creeds in every term of their definitions and on that ground claimed to be acknowledged as Catholic.


1970 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 553-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Saunders

This paper attempts to reassess the general significance of the Thembu church by setting it in its political context. It examines the early career of Nehemiah Tile and the origins of this earliest of independent churches in southern Africa. In the 1880s Tile was not only the leader of the church, but also the chief figure behind a movement of political protest which sought to free Thembuland from Cape magisterial control. After his death, the church continued, and whites saw it as a real threat to their interests. But in the late 1890s the history of the church became increasingly obscure. There is some evidence to suggest that the church was less completely ‘tribal’ than usually maintained. The paper concludes that the church should be seen both as an expression of African reaction to the imposition of white rule on the Cape eastern frontier and as an element in the development of African nationalism.


1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 408-418
Author(s):  
Frances Knight

In 1910, the Royal Commission on the Church of England and the Other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouth revealed that the Church of England was the largest religious body in Wales, and attracted over a quarter of all worshippers. This indicated a significant improvement in the Church’s fortunes in the previous half century, and a different picture from that which had emerged from the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, which had suggested that the established Church had the support of only twenty per cent of Welsh worshippers. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light upon the Church’s improving fortunes between 1851 and 1910 by exploring the liturgical patterns which were evolving in a particular Welsh county, Montgomeryshire, in the late nineteenth century. Montgomeryshire is part of the large rural heart of mid-Wales, bordered by Radnor to the south, Cardigan and Merioneth to the west, Denbigh to the north, and Shropshire to the east. The paper considers the annual, monthly, and weekly liturgical cycles which were developing in the county, and how the co-existence of the Welsh and English languages was expressed in different styles of church music and worship.


Author(s):  
Grayson Carter

Did Evangelicalism influence the beginnings—and nature—of the Oxford Movement? There were, in fact, a number of close associations between the two movements, and several of the leading personalities of the Oxford Movement were raised in Evangelicalism, but eventually came to reject the more extreme ‘gospel religion’ found in Oxford during the 1820s and 1830s. As this chapter illustrates, there were powerful political, spiritual, and social forces and counter-forces at work in England at the time, propelling young men and women in different ecclesial directions. The Evangelical background to the Oxford Movement is an important, but often overlooked, feature of the history of the Church of England during the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Matthew Bradley

Anglo-Catholicism, the nineteenth-century movement within the Church of England that sought to reassert many of the forms and rituals of Roman Catholicism, exerted a significant shaping influence upon the religious aesthetics of English decadent writing. While the space that Anglo-Catholicism offered for a decadent performance of sexual difference has been examined before, this article offers a complementary argument, emphasizing a strand within decadence arising from the role of personality in reconceptualizing, and possibly distorting, religious orthodoxy. The first part provides a history of the discourse of degeneracy around the early Oxford Movement and the mediation of Anglo-Catholic ideas into English decadence through the writings of Walter Pater. It then discusses the ways in which decadent writing in England explored a distorting excess of personality through the aesthetics of religious ritual and asceticism.


2007 ◽  
pp. 465-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Slobodan Curcic

The article explores a virtually unknown episode in the history of Gracanica Monastery, a late nineteenth-century restoration of the monastery church. The results of this undertaking were still visible during the conservation of the church conducted in the 1960s and early 1970s. At that time the nineteenth-century interventions were only partially recorded before some of them were removed and permanently lost. The nineteenth- century refurbishing of the frescoes in the main dome was signed by one Mihail Iourokosk Debrel and is dated 1898. More significant, now lost and hitherto unpublished, was the refurbishing probably by the same Mihail, of an arcosolium in the south wall of the church. This arcosolium, whose original function is unknown, was painted and inscribed with a lengthy inscription indicating that the remains of Prince Lazar (who died in the Battle of Kosovo, on June 15, 1389) was temporarily deposited in this tomb before being moved to the monastery of Vrdnik - Ravanica on Fruska Gora. While the content of the inscription is a total fabrication, its implications are nonetheless interesting in several ways. The mastermind behind the project was probably the Metropolitan of Ra{ka - Prizren, Dionisije, who died on Dec. 5, 1900. In accordance with his own wishes, he was buried in the very arcosolium identified as the ?temporary burial place? of Prince Lazar. The rising importance of the cult of the Saintly Prince Lazar around 1900 provides the background for this historical fabrication whose construction was actually made up of several disparate elements, each marked by a degree of historical accuracy in its own right thus collectively contributing to its general relevance.


1974 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-37
Author(s):  
Philip Barrett

An important feature of the ecclesiastical history of the Church of England since the Reformation has been the unique and precious tradition of a choir of men and boys singing daily choral services in the cathedrals of this country. There have been several studies of this tradition and the music written for cathedral services, but there has not yet been a full account of cathedral choirs in the last century. There have been useful brief surveys by Owen Chadwick and Bernarr Rainbow, but these have been only parts of larger works whose main emphasis is elsewhere. Plenty of material exists, however, and the contemporary conditions which led S. S. Wesley to write his polemical pamphlet A Few Words on Cathedral Music in 1849 demand detailed investigation.


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