‘Stirring up the Pool’, Bishop Thomas Joseph Brown OSB (1798–1880) and the Dispute between the Hierarchy and the English Benedictines’

Abstract

In November, 1850, in his first Pastoral Letter as Bishop of Newport and Menevia, Thomas Joseph Brown OSB described the unfavourable reactions to the recent restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy as ‘… wild passions that are agitating the land,’ but confidently prophesied that ‘a reaction will succeed, favourable to the progress of Catholic truth, as followed the healing of diseases from the stirring up of the pool of Bethsaida’. ‘Stirring up the pool’ was a well chosen image not only for the Restoration of the Hierarchy, but also for the ensuing controversy it unleashed between the new hierarchy and the regular clergy and specifically the English Benedictine Congregation, to which Brown belonged.