Waugh and Pearce

For the second time today, I’m apologizing for an act of self-indulgence. This time it’s the faux pas implied by coupling my name with the great Evelyn Waugh. Unkind people might suggest that such a juxtaposition is the joining of the sublime to the ridiculous! My only excuse is the inability to resist an inviting pun when it crosses my path. In any event, I was amused to read in the new issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies that my Foreword to A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes warrants a health warning to liberal Catholics. Needless to say, I consider the criticism to be a compliment. Here’s the review:

REVIEWS

Tried and True

A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes.

3rd Expanded Edition, ed. Alcuin Reid. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011.123 pp. Paperback. US$15.00.

Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, James Cook University

A Bitter Trial is a knowledgeably edited and well-produced little book that every Wavian will wish to own. At its heart is a cache of letters between Evelyn Waugh (four) and Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster (five). Professor Stannard published two of Cardinal Heenan’s letters and referred to others in No Abiding City 1939-1966 in 1992, but the Waugh letters have never before seen the light of day. The correspondence began when Cardinal Heenan wrote to Waugh in praise of ‘The Same Again, Please’, Waugh’s dramatic challenge (published in the secular press) to the Progressive programme put to the Second Vatican Council, and stating, by contrast, what in his view the ordinary Catholic might hope from it. Heenan was a Conservative, whose interventions in the Council debates had attracted criticism from the Liberal-Progressive lobby, and he found ‘nothing [in Waugh’s article] with which I don’t agree.’ Encouraged, Waugh sent him a copy of ‘Changes in the Church: Questions for the Progressives’, a long letter to the Catholic Herald written in his idiosyncratic fighting style (e.g., ‘Do they [the progressive priests] want to marry and beget other little progressives?’). Heenan invited Waugh to dinner, where he assured him that certain proposed changes would not be introduced. Inevitably the changes were introduced, because in a climate in which all innovation allegedly owed its origin to ‘the dynamism of the Holy Spirit’, no Archbishop could be allowed to deviate from what, sadly, had by then taken on some of the characteristics of a Party Line.

Heenan again invited Waugh to a ‘nice anti-progressive dinner’. Waugh’s reply ignored the invitation while pointedly noting: ‘The assurances you gave me when you very kindly invited me to see you in London have been disappointed’. In his diary for Easter 1965 he wrote: ‘Cardinal Heenan has been double-faced in the matter.’

This exchange of letters, while ending unhappily, gives an enlightening insight into the relationship between Archbishop and novelist. It was not a coldly formal encounter between a layman seeking an outcome and an Archbishop who could not, or would not, deliver it. On the contrary, it was a meeting of like minds initiated by the Archbishop. From my limited experience of hierarchs, Waugh was extremely fortunate to have had dealings with a bishop as frank, friendly and simpatico as Heenan.

A Bitter Trial assembles around the Waugh-Heenan letters a body of supporting works. From Waugh there is the signature article, ‘The Same Again, Please’; letters to the Catholic Herald and The Tablet; and extracts from his diaries and from correspondence with intimate friends. All of these pieces are currently available in Waugh’s published Letters, Diaries, and Essays, Articles and Reviews; but reading them in a collection where they are mutually illuminating is very helpful. From Cardinal Heenan there are two Pastoral Letters, an Intervention at the Council and a letter to the then Pope, all of which were new to me. I found them refreshingly open. The colourful convert, Joseph Pearce, provides a spirited Foreword; the Shakespeare scholar Clare Asquith, Countess of Oxford, provides a gracious and informative Afterword. Part of the panegyric by Waugh’s friend, Father Philip Caraman, SJ, is included, as is the list of ‘Distinguished Scholars and Artists’ (most non-Catholic) who successfully petitioned the Pope to ‘Spare the Traditional Latin Mass’ in England—Agatha Christie’s name among them is said to have moved the Pope, a fan, to grant the petition. I find it a little strange that the editor did not print even one of the anti-aggiornamento letters Waugh wrote to the American journal, Commonweal. And my instinct would have been to include ‘An Appreciation of Pope John’, a masterpiece of indirection in which Waugh conveys a warm feeling towards the lovable Conservative man and bishop while undercutting, by pointed omission, his reputation as a Reforming Pope.

WARNING: Liberal Catholic academics and members of diocesan school boards may suffer severe shock on encountering the Foreword to this book. They are advised to proceed to the next section. As addicts of vehement denunciation of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, they could become severely disoriented on reading Joseph Pearce’s  paean of praise for them: ‘A spirit of restoration had been heralded in 1978 by the election of John Paul II…. Tradition began to show signs of resurrection…. Yet would the next Pope exercise his power to exorcise the darkness?… Faithful Catholics around the world leapt for joy when they heard the news that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had been elected Pope.’

Nobody can doubt that the changes to the Catholic Church around Vatican II and, even more, some of the extreme proposals that never came to fruition, caused Waugh intense anguish. Nor could anyone doubt the ‘nerve’ (as Clare Asquith so happily puts it) required for a layman in the 1960s publicly to challenge the institutional Church; or the strength of the conviction that drove Waugh, when ‘enfeebled’ (his word), to write three articles and thirteen letters to editors in opposition to aggiornamento—his longest press campaign. And yet, while sympathetic to Waugh’s position and supportive of retaining the Latin Mass for those who prefer it, I do have two tentative reservations.

The first reservation concerns this book’s unqualified lament for the loss of ‘splendour and mystery’ in the old Mass, which Clare Asquith calls a ‘beautiful human artefact comparable with the great cathedrals’. Having been privileged to witness the liturgy at its best, I sympathize with those who strive to preserve it: anthems like ‘Montes Gelboe’ or the alternative ninth lesson of Tenebrae are some of the most thrilling music ever written. But the experience of many Catholics from the 1930s to the 1950s, when this writer grew up, could be starkly different. In a busy city parish where Sunday Masses took place on the hour every hour from 6:00 am to 12:00 noon, there were always popular priests who said Mass, distributed 300 communions, gave a sermon, cried about money, and excoriated the boys in the back pews reading the Sporting Globe—all in thirty-five minutes. Those priests still had the rugged virtues that commanded the loyalty of ordinary working Catholics—but ‘splendour and mystery’? Waugh found it unimportant if he failed to ‘catch every word’ the priest uttered. But when Mass was rushed in the way described, all that could be heard was a frantic drone. Many Catholics found it unedifying—Protestants could be deeply shocked—when the ‘beautiful human artefact’, the Mass, which is designed as a communal ceremony with a role for laypeople, was so travestied. I suggest, contra Waugh et al., that it was not only ‘cranks’ and ‘archaeologists’ (and there were too many of those) who were dissatisfied with the status quo; so too were many ordinary folk who wanted something better.

The second reservation concerns the emphasis the book places on liturgy, which is inevitable because it deals with correspondence about ‘innovations’ (shades of Edmund Burke) in the Mass and retaining Latin. Nevertheless, the emphasis could give a wrong impression of Waugh’s main focus. Waugh’s fundamental objection to tinkering with the Mass was not, as he himself explained, ‘aesthetic’. It was rather a case of ‘Untune that string, and hark what discord follows.’ He feared that the proposed liturgical changes, ‘harmless in themselves’, were a symptom of ‘grave ill’, and to prove it he quoted recent Protestant and Catholic writings published in hitherto reputable sources that contradicted basic Christian belief. He was also at odds with popular thinking about the role of a Council. Most saw it as a chance for ‘updating’ the Church. As a proudly self-styled Conservative, Waugh argued fiercely that the primary role of the Council and of the Church itself was to ‘conserve’, i.e., to define and pass on revealed truth whole and uncorrupted. And the rhetoric became stronger: gradually it embraced the Church’s historic need to defend itself against ‘traitors from within’ as well as ‘enemies from without’ and came to encompass warnings against a ‘conspiracy’ and an ‘underground movement’ (i.e., a secret subversive organization) within the Church.

This was a very difficult time for Waugh, when his health was poor and his spirits low. Was the talk of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘underground’ the rambling of a paranoid reactionary? Perhaps, but some very strange developments gave Conservatives real cause for concern. The Progressive movement in the Church was at the time extremely well organized and surprisingly well funded. One facet of its structure and activities, if I may oversimplify hugely, was IDO-C (International Centre of Information and Documentation concerning the Conciliar Church), an incorporated body, independent of any religious organization, and extending into about thirty countries. Its brief included ‘horizontal’ communication within the Catholic Church and between the institutional Catholic Church and public opinion. Its real achievement in the United Kingdom—where it was relatively benign—was to capture almost all major journals (e.g., the formerly conservative Tablet) and publishers (e.g., Burns & Oates). It also made itself the principal voice of Catholicism for the mainstream media. Curiously, the fifteen members of the governing body of IDO-C in the UK included a leading Communist, Jack Dunman (1911-1972), a gifted organizer and tactician, who had lately taken up Marxist-Christian dialogue. The body also included four members of Slant, a Cambridge organization dedicated to reconciling Catholicism and left-wing politics, which was in close touch with the ‘Catholic’ Churches sponsored by Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. Naturally, Conservative Catholics—by then strictly marginalized and largely silenced—talked to each other about ‘conspiracy’. I suspect, but cannot prove, that Waugh was in touch with some of those groups; his language certainly parallels theirs. Whatever of that, the spread within the Catholic Church of theological notions well outside the parameters of Vatican II, a development against which Waugh had warned, was remarkably rapid.

Finally, Clare Asquith attributes to Waugh a statement that he surely did not make: ‘As Waugh pointed out, it was for the old rite rather than their Christian belief that the Elizabethan martyrs had died….’ With the greatest respect, Waugh nowhere says that; nor did he believe it. The Elizabethan martyr, Edmund Campion, explained his mission without a single reference to rite or Mass. His ‘charge’, as stated in his Brag, was ‘to preach the Gospel, to minister the sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors … foul vice and proud ignorance.’

Two small details. The commas in ‘Fides, Quaerens, Intellectum’ on page 82 are impossible. And in the quotation, ‘inimici hominis domestici scies’ on page 62, ‘scies’ must be wrongly transcribed. Matthew 10:36 in the Vulgate reads: ‘inimici hominis domestici eius’, i.e., ‘a man’s enemies will be members of his own household.’