Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Susan M. Griffin

Abstract

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 94 of Arnold, and it says little about the endless attacks on Newman that Arnold seems to have taken as his mission in life. It is little wonder that Charles Kingsley admired Arnold as he did. The essay on modern Scottish Catholicism by Bernard Aspinwall is clogged with learning but its content was a delightful surprise. The Scottish apparently did not agree with each other, except for their loyalty to the church. When I was a student at the university in Edinburgh, the novel Maria Monk (1836) was commonly displayed in the booksellers’ windows and a fellow parishioner told me that the Catholics had suffered much during his lifetime. For those who don’t know, Maria Monk was a novel that “depicted” life in a convent. No detail was too absurd not to be believed by theVictorian reader and it was just one in a series of such novels. One point, the work of Fr. Hadley ought to have been expanded upon since it is a wonderful description of life for the Irish immigrants in Scotland in the nineteenth century. Rene Kollar’s essay on Sister Barbara Ubryk—the insane nun of Cracow—was also a revelation to me. Of course, the Victorians thrived on such material and nuns were perhaps the most pitied of all the victims of the Catholic church. The Catholic nuns of this period may have been the most slandered of any Catholic group and the Maria Monk novel and the “Nuns” of Cracow were vital tools in the Protestant arsenal. (On the subject of “nun,” I hope some scholar might do a study of the conversion rate among the “Puseyite” convents.) I am a bit uncomfortable with the two essays on the Oxford Movement. The first volume of the Tracts for the Times (1–20) was addressed to the question of Erastianism, or state-control of the church. If the state had the last word on the matters of doctrine and discipline,other questions were irrelevant. Yes,the appeal to the seventeenth-century divines was used to validate the Catholic claims put forward by Newman, Keble, and Froude, but it can be argued that those divines were more Protestant than not, and Laud died professing his own Protestantism. For critics of the Oxford Movement, starting with Dr. Arnold, Catholicism meant one religion— modern paganism or worse—but no other. With all that might be said on behalf of Ritualism and Christian Socialism,orT.S.Eliot’s own brand of Catholicism (the subject of Pearce’s fine essay on literary converts), the principle of dogma was pretty much lost after Newman’s conversion in 1845. Yet every religion has its own history,and it is pointless to quarrel with it. John R. Griffin Colorado State University–Pueblo Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. By Susan M. Griffin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pages: 284. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 0–521–83393–0. Consider this scenario: a young Jesuit, Father Eustace, Irish by birth but capable of passing as an English gentleman, is sent by the Jesuit general in Rome to rent a country house in England where his assignment is to attract a young, Protestant 95 heiress in order to convert her to Roman Catholicism and then to persuade her to become a nun and to give her inheritance to the Jesuits. The girl’s father was a Catholic, her mother a Protestant. Upon the death of her father, his Jesuit confessor persuaded the daughter to give him a casque of jewels for masses that would lessen her father’s time in Purgatory; those jewels were then delivered to the Jesuit general in Rome. Both the old confessor and the Father Eustace have access to the general through a secret entrance in the back of a tobacco shop. While not quite an automaton, Father Eustace is in the grip of a carefully cultivated obedience and, therefore, almost selfless.The control that the Jesuit general has over men like Father Eustace is one tactical element in a broader strategy:“Our mission be no less than our holding an universal superintending rule, spiritual and intellectual, over all the nations of the earth, even as vicegerents...