‘Libera nos Domine’? 81
Chapter 4 ‘Libera nos Domine’?: The Vicars Apostolic and the Suppressed/Restored English Province of the Society of Jesus
Thomas M. McCoog, SJ
It would have been much to the interests of the Church if her history had not included the story of such difficulties as those which are the subject of this chapter. Her internal dissensions, whether on a large or small scale, bear the same relation to the evils inflicted on her from without, as diseases do to wounds won in honourable fight.
Thus did Edwin H. Burton open the chapter ‘The Difficulties between the Vicars Apostolic and the Regulars’ in his work on Bishop Challoner.1 The absence of such opposition may have made the history of the post-Reforma- tion Roman Catholic Church in England more edifying, but surely would also have deprived subsequent scholars of fascinating material for dissertations and monographs. In his doctoral thesis Eamon Duffy remarked that, although tension between Jesuits and seculars was less than in previous centuries, ‘the bitterness … which remained was all pervasive … No Catholic in England escaped untouched’.2 Basil Hemphill, having noted that ‘most unfortunate jealousies persisted between the secular and the regular clergy … and with an intensity which seems incredible to us today’, considered their explication essential if history wished to be truthful ‘and if it be not truthful it is of no use at all’.3 A brief overview of uneasy, volatile and tense relations between Jesuits and secular clergy in post-Reformation England will contextualize the eigh- teenth-century problem.
1 Edwin H. Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner, 2 vols (London, 1909), vol. 1, 245. 2 Eamon Duffy, ‘Joseph Berington and the English Catholic Cisalpine Movement, 1772–1803’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Cambridge University (1973), 34. 3 Basil Hemphill, The Early Vicars Apostolic of England 1685–1750 (London, 1954), viii.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004325678_006 82 Mccoog
Jesuits, Archpriests and Vicars Apostolic
Rome’s decision against the nomination of successors to the exiled or impris- oned Marian bishops left Catholics in England without an institutional structure. William (later Cardinal) Allen served as a prefect; he oversaw the English colleges and seminaries on the continent, and approved the secular clergy sent to England. But within the kingdom the only ecclesiastical struc- ture was the Society of Jesus whose superior welcomed incoming priests (Jesuit and secular), arranged for their distribution and collected funds for their support. After Allen’s death in 1594, demands of the secular clergy for an English hierarchy intensified because of their apprehension that Jesuits, espe- cially Robert Persons, ambitioned Allen’s role. This reached boiling point with the Archpriest/Appellant Controversy when Rome did not grant the requests submitted by some secular clergy – and indeed some Jesuits – for a bishop. Instead in 1598 Rome appointed an archpriest who must consult the Jesuit superior on important matters. Shocked that such a novel structure would be established despite their desire for a bishop, and worried that the archpresby- terate was the brainchild of a cardinal friendly to the Jesuits and not the pope, some English clergy appealed the decision. In collusion with the Crown, these Appellants sought at least a clarification regarding the archpriest’s appoint- ment and his liberation from any Jesuit influence, or at most the removal of Jesuits from the administration of seminaries in Rome and Spain, and their expulsion from the mission itself. The controversy ended in 1602 with the Society still in control of the seminaries and still working on the mission, but whose superior no longer served as an ex officio consultor to the archpriest. Instead some Appellant clergy played that role.4 Proposals for a bishop continued to be fiercely resisted by the Jesuits and their supporters until Rome appointed William Bishop as bishop. He was con- secrated at Paris on 4 June 1623 with the title Bishop of Chalcedon. He died a year later, but not before erecting a chapter with 24 members under a dean, and dividing the kingdom into archdeaconries and deaneries, though the regu- lar clergy remained outside his jurisdiction. John Bossy characterised Bishop’s successor Richard Smith as ‘a doctrinaire hierocrat’ secure in his authority and untroubled by doubt regarding his jurisdiction.5 His attempt to exercise this
4 Although I discuss this controversy in The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1589–1597. Building the Faith of Saint Peter upon the King of Spain’s Monarchy (Farnham, 2012) and The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598–1606: “Lest Our Lamp Be Entirely Extinguished” (Leiden, forthcoming), it merits further investigation. 5 John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), 54.