A Crisis of Authority in English Benedictine History, 1717-21

Abstract

The crisis referred to in the title of this article occurred in the General Chapter of the English Benedictine Congregation (E.B.C.) in 1717, when a certain Father Laurence Fenwick succeeded in getting himself elected quite unworthily as the President of the Congregation for the ensuing quadriennium. It is the purpose of this article to make some study of what is almost certainly the greatest crisis which the English Congregation has ever passed through, a crisis about which there is nothing in print. Whether it is possible to analyse Fenwick’s motives and find out what he was really trying to do remains to be seen, but no man could have manipulated the Chapter in the way that he did single-handed; he must have had accomplices in a scheme that was worked out in advance, and in fact a situation can be seen developing for some time of which no one is likely to have foreseen the outcome, but which was evidence of a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. There was marked unrest and discontent among certain members of the Congregation, which appears to have started soon after the Revolution of 1688. It cannot exactly be proved, but I hope to show that there is almost certainly a connection between these events, and that the root cause of the trouble in the English Benedictines was precisely the departure of James II from the throne and what this implied.