Evangelical Abolitionists Influence Catholic Social Teaching?
Amy Welborn notes today that all but one of William Wilberforce’s sons converted to Catholicism as adults. They were influenced, as many thoughtful Christians were, by the rise of the Oxford Movement within Anglicanism in the 1830’s. The abolition of slavery had been the work of an earlier generation. But the influencing did not move only in one direction.
Beside his zeal in the cause of elementary religious education, Cardinal Manning spent a good deal of his later years working on behalf of the poor and outcast. Florence Nightingale, the great Anglican health care reformer, was a life-long friend. He was invited to join the commission for the better housing of the working classes, he founded his League of the Cross for the promotion of temperance, and the "Cardinal's Peace" recalls the success of his efforts at mediation between the strikers and their employers at the time of the great London Dock Strike in 1889.
Cardinal Manning was very influential in setting the direction of the modern Roman Catholic Church. His warm relations with Pope Leo XIII and his ultramontane views gained him the trust of the
So the views and experiences of William Wilberforce and his friends in the abolition movements may well have directly affected the development of Catholic social teaching.
posted by Sherry W @ 2:12 PM
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Some time during the 1870s, a twenty something woman by the name of Bessie Parkes sought help from Cardinal Manning and she had a short interview with the Cardinal. Bessie Parkes was from a family of Unitarian style agnostics but their philosophy annoyed Parkes who became interested in Catholicism. Manning recommended some reading matter for Parkes and left it at that. Parkes converted and in her late thirties was holidaying in France where she stayed in a house owned by a Madam Belloc. The long and the short of it was that Bessie Parkes soon married the woman's son. The couple had two children, a daughter and a son. The son was baptized Joseph Hilaire. Yes he went on to become the prominent English Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc - author of such classics as that marvelous travel story The Path To Rome as well as The Cautionary Tales poems, also The Cruise of The Nona, The Mercy of Allah and a whole crop of other books both fiction (mostly satire) and non fiction.
It's a small world ain't it?
Hi Stephen!
The upper class world of serious, educated English Christians was, in fact, pretty small. Quite naturally, many knew, were related to and/or influenced one another.
Actually, your comments reminds me of my astonishment on finding that the lay Co-Director of our Institute down under personally knows and is friends just about every major playor in Australian Catholicism from Bishops to theologians. I told her I was jealous.
She was very matter of fact. "We all went to university together. We knew then that we were the leaders of the future. Who else was there?"
In Australia, most of the highly committed and theologically educated Catholics know each other personally in much the same way that most of the players in Victorian Catholicism knew one another.
That's the difference between a small Church of 5 million, of which only 750,000 attend Church once a month and a huge Church of 69 million like the US with a much higher level of practice.
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