Last night I dreamt I went back to Barchester.  In the moonlight beneath the towers of the cathedral I was aware that the old bishop lay dying.  As the old man slowly sighed away, gently leaving this life just as, to use Cicero’s comparison, a ripe fruit falls from the tree, his son sought to influence the Prime Minister regarding the appointment of the next bishop.

Yet, such a decision was left in suspense as one government dissolved and the Crown formed a new one.  So, the late bishop’s son faced a future he disliked, and in sympathy I paced around the cathedral close, wondering what to make of it all, the city and its history.  Surely there was a lesson in it for us today.

From my research in the archives of the cathedral I had found that in former times there had also been awkward and unpleasant moments.  For instance, there was the case of Henry Brewster, Bishop of Barchester around 1514.  His letters reveal a man baffled by his own era, years when everything seemed topsy-turvy.

As his surname implies, his family had long been makers of beer, the name of Brewer having taken on the feminine form of Brewster when in the late 1340s the Black Death claimed another Henry, and his widow had to struggle not only to rear five children, but also to keep the business going.  Family identity thus bore the stamp of that indomitable woman.  (Yet his letters never give her Christian name.)  Oral tradition within the family kept alive the memory of bending tough times to oneself, not the other way round.

Yet Bishop Brewster had to contend with times that seemed tougher than he could ever be.  There was his new chaplain, newly ordained and back from Cambridge and full of new ideas.  For his studies in Sacred Scripture he had attended lectures by a smug little Dutchman, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had set aside the Latin text of Saint Jerome and was using his own edition of the Greek text of the epistles of Saint Paul.  Where these foreign professors got the nerve Bishop Brewster could not imagine.  The bishop had to admit that Adages, Father Erasmus’ collection of proverbs and quotations, was a useful work of reference, but all in all, one could take things a bit too far.

It seemed hard to believe those reports that had it that Erasmus was often a house guest of no less a personage than Thomas More, a bright and devout young man so close to the new King, himself a bright and devout young man.  If so, Erasmus thus moved in a charmed circle; all the more reason for him to behave himself.  The bishop shuddered to think what sort of mischief would next come from the vain professor’s pen.

Brewster of Barchester sat at his desk and scribbled away, letter after letter.  It worried him that so few people seemed to be following Church teaching.  People said they were fed up with scandals in the clergy, scandals of priests not keeping their cassocks on, scandals of his brother bishops living more lavishly than Thomas Becket ever did as Chancellor.

People were saying that because of these scandals and others as well the Church had forfeited her moral authority.  People said that it was one thing to tell them about the mystery of the Eucharist or about the Trinity, but it was another thing entirely to tell them how to live their daily lives.  These people were denying the Church’s competence to teach what she had clearly and consistently taught for more than a thousand years.

Bishop Brewster wondered how to make them see that truth was not contingent upon fallen human nature.  One advantage clever academics like Erasmus had was a new means of communication.  He and others were now making full use of that new invention, the printing press.  The bishop marveled how much that device had changed the way people gathered information, and it had done so in his own lifetime.

For himself, he couldn’t see what was wrong with the old way, taking one’s time and copying things out by hand.  Everyone seemed to be in such a hurry these days.  After all, where would these new contraptions lead society?  And yet, every city in Christendom had several of those machines, and like bizarre stories coming again and again from across the Atlantic Ocean, they seemed here to stay.

Day after day Bishop Brewster wrote to family and friends.  Some of them, alas, were also drifting away.  So many people seemed to be thinking like those odious old heretics, the Cathars, with their contention that it was possible to be a perfectly good Christian, or merely a perfectly nice person, without giving a thought to the teachings or the hierarchy of the one Church that Christ had founded.  They said that they could decide for themselves.  They seemed not to see that each man deciding his own virtue would be as absurd as an egg declaring that each word meant only what he said it meant.  Surely things would never go that far.

Perhaps, he wrote, if the Church were to use the new medium and print books and papers stating again her timeless teachings, perhaps then people would see that the structured love of Church law and custom contain no back-breaking burdens, that they are not Pharisaical, man-made rules and regulations having nothing to do with people’s real lives.  For so people were saying, even to his face.  Among the last lines written by the bishop was in an unfinished letter:  “What if, however,” he had written, “those most in need of the truth do not to read our new books and papers?”

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B., is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.