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| Cardinal Manning by George Frederic Watts National Portrait Gallery, London. In the public domain (source: Wikimedia Commons) |
Today’s post will concentrate on Manning’s remarkable work promoting the temperance and total abstinence movement in nineteenth century England. When we think of ‘bands of
hope’ and other such teetotal societies, we often falsely assume that these ventures where wholly the
preserve of Protestant denominations and sects, such as the Salvation
Army. In Victorian London, though, under the guidance of Henry Manning, it was
the Catholic community that led the way in promoting the teetotal ideal - helping chronic alcoholics to reform and supporting those hurt by the drunkenness of loved ones, which often resulted in societal
problems such as crime, family breakdown, homelessness, violence, unemployment,
and the like.
It amazes me how forgotten Manning has become. His ideas
have shaped the Church in ways that surpass even the greatest of our ecclesial
doctors and saints, yet hardly anyone takes any account of him. As I mentioned in my previous post, both Bl Pope Pius IX
and Pope Leo XIII (why hasn't he been canonised!?) admired and trusted Henry Manning,
so much so that they, in turn, hurried his clerical advancement and listened to his
advice. When Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum in 1891, which is an encyclical that seems to
have opened up a new and essential chapter in the Church’s social doctrine and
theology, it was widely known that the document was practically written by
Manning himself. As the then Bishop John Hedley OSB of Newport and Menevia declared,
with typical English reserve, Rerum Novarum "owe[d] something to the
counsels of Cardinal Manning."
Henry Manning’s concern for the welfare of the poor, the
little brethren of Christ, began during his days as an Anglican and continued
throughout his life. His support for the London dock-workers when they went on
strike in 1889 earned Manning the respect of the city’s underpaid labourers. It was for this reason that
Cardinal Manning’s funeral was the most well attended in Victorian England –
all the ordinary people, the poor, the dispossessed, came out to bid him farewell. But, as Archbishop of
Westminster, Manning’s first important social reform crusade was aimed against the evils of drunkenness. He knew that the poverty suffered by so many of his flock was often the result of
addiction, especially to alcohol and other intoxicating substances.
By challenging drunkenness, Manning sought to help people, and especially lapsed Catholics, to live life and live it to the full (cf Jn 10:10).
Soon after being ordained a Catholic priest, Henry Manning
ministered in Bayswater, London. It was a relatively poor area at
the time, and he immediately began seeking solutions to the poverty suffered by so many of his parishioners – improving the means for his people to help themselves, usually
through social clubs, education, and the promotion of work and industry. But
Bayswater was nothing compared to that part of London now known as central Westminster,
which he moved to upon becoming the Archbishop of Westminster in 1865.
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| Cardinal Manning's House - now housing offices (source: Cardinal Henry Edward Manning Facebook page) |
Directly to the south of his house (which was next to a prison for women and children, the site of which Manning bought and where Westminster Cathedral now stands) was
a vast and criminally charged area, which Charles Dickens once referred to as ‘the
Devil’s acre’. Manning, wanting to get to know his new neighbourhood, took it upon himself
to visit, with one of his priests, the labyrinthine nest of hovels and holes
that stretched from his own house down to the Thames and across to the Palace
of Westminster. He was appalled by what he found, which was the suffering and poverty that burdened so
many of his own children – for many of the poorest inhabitants of the area also happened to be Catholic, in name and baptism at least.
Manning very quickly became convinced that one of the chief causes for lapses from faith, criminality, and
poverty, seemed to be drunkenness and dependency on alcohol. After several
months examining Victoria, Westminster and Pimlico, as well as other parts of
his Diocese, Manning diagnosed the illness that had led to such painful
symptoms for the poor – intoxication. Having come to see the problem, he now decided to find a cure for it.
Shortly after becoming Archbishop of Westminster, the future
Cardinal Manning (he received the red hat in 1875) formed a committee to advise
him on the best way to help those who were burdened by addiction to alcohol. This
group immediately suggested that he adopt the solutions of the famous Irish preacher
of abstinence, Father Theobald Mathew, who had recently died in Cork. This would involve the founding of a temperance society with rules
and a spiritual way of life, as a means of helping those who wished to ‘take
the pledge’ as well as a way of encouraging others to make reparation for the sins of intemperance. Before
deciding on whether or not to adopt Father Mathew’s model, which allowed for partial abstinence as well as total abstinence,
or to follow the counsel of the United Kingdom Alliance, a temperance movement
that campaigned for total abstinence only, Manning decided to ‘test the
waters’, so to speak.
The way the Archbishop sought to see how receptive his
people would be to the idea of total and / or partial abstinence was ingenious.
In 1867, Manning, aware that drunkenness seemed particularly common amongst the Irish
members of his flock, especially during St Patrick’s Day, decided to urge all
the Irishmen and women of London to give up alcohol for the eve, feast, and
the day following the feast of St Patrick. He called this three day alcoholic abstinence
the “Truce of St Patrick.” It was an enormous success! That year, the police
reported that alehouses and law courts throughout London were practically
empty for the whole period covering 16-18 March!
One of the reasons Manning’s ‘truce’
was so well observed seems to be due to the fact that the Archbishop had
obtained a special Indulgence from Pope Pius IX, which was granted to all Irishmen
who met the usual conditions and also abstained from intoxicating drink during those three days. This Indulgence continued
to be granted and sought well after Cardinal Manning’s death, and the Truce of
St Patrick had become a very popular devotion by the turn of the twentieth
century.
After further consultations with the United Kingdom
Alliance and others, such as the newly founded Salvation Army, as well as further visits to the
slums within his diocese, Henry Manning finally decided that total abstinence (as opposed to partial abstinence) should be promoted amongst Catholics, especially the poor and / or those given to
drink. He soon published a Pastoral Letter encouraging abstinence from
intoxicating liquor during Lent. Then, in 1872, he inaugurated his own total abstinence
movement, called the League of the Cross, which borrowed heavily from the
ideals of Father Mathew and the United Kingdom Alliance movement.
The League of the Cross was probably one of the most
successful and positive social movements within the history of the Church in Britain. Not only did it have a dramatic effect on the lives of London’s
poor (Catholics and non-Catholics alike), but it also helped the Church to gain
a certain respectably which it had, until then, been denied – Protestants would
sometimes look down on Catholics, whom they thought were too enamoured by
the luxuries of this world. Within two years, 28,000 people had taken the pledge
and joined Manning’s League, and within 20 years there were nearly 50 chapters
of the League within the Diocese of Westminster alone. In fact, by the end of
Cardinal Manning’s life, intemperance amongst the Catholic clergy, which had
once been a grave scandal to many, had become a thing of the past! (cf The
Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London by Lynn Hollen Lees, Manchester
University Press 1979, p 211)
Henry Manning became utterly devoted to the work of his
League, so much so that some of his enemies, especially during the
early days, accused him of Jansenism. Surely, Catholics are supposed to be given
to the joys of the world and the flesh, aren’t they? No, said Manning, he saw total abstinence,
for a few at least, as something necessary for the work of salvation and sanctification.
Had not St Paul warned the Corinthians that ‘drunkards’ would not inherit the
Kingdom of Heaven (cf 1 Cor 6:10)? Yet, accusations that Manning’s theology was
becoming Jansenist continued, and Rome eventually had to intervene. He was
required to send a report of his activities to the Holy See. After careful consideration of the facts,
the reply came back from Rome: “in the Lord’s name, continue the work!” (cf “Cardinal
Manning and his Social Work” by Rev A B Swift, Westminster Cathedral Chronicle,
1952 bound edition, p 22). Manning, though, confided to a friend that he
understood the opposition to his work in this field, but that he was more than
content to be a ‘fool for Christ’s sake’ when it came to the matter
of temperance and total abstinence.
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| The Crystal Palace in 1854 by Philip Henry Delamotte In the public domain (source: Wikimedia Commons) |
Support from the Pope helped Manning’s campaign against
drunkenness. By the time he was created Cardinal in 1875, the second Archbishop of Westminster had
enrolled thousands into his League and had addressed countless numbers of
Londoners at annual open air meetings in Clerkenwell Green,
London Fields, Tower Hill, and Trafalgar Square. His kind manner, his ascetic
appearance, and his charismatic preaching, caused scenes of great enthusiasm - which were often reported with excitement by the press.
It must have been quite an extraordinary thing to have witnessed one of Manning’s
total abstinence addresses, to hear only one of the “innumerable speeches
delivered by him in crowded halls or standing bareheaded on a van or
costermonger’s cart surrounded by a dense and, always friendly, crowd.” (ibid,
p 22). Edmund Sheridan Purcell recorded Manning’s style during these outdoor
rallies, writing: “As a platform speaker he was never dull. The ringing
applause gave him additional animation; he was put out by no interruption; irritated
by no angry words; he had always a ready retort at hand, or a good-humoured
suggestion.” (The
Life of Cardinal Henry Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, Vol II, MacMillan
& Co 1896, p 596.)
In a short biographical memo (cf ibid, p 594), Cardinal
Manning wrote fondly of his League, which it seems was for him the crowning achievement
of his reign as Archbishop of Westminster. He saw the venture as the least he
could do as shepherd of souls and a man charged with the salvation of the
people of London. But the League also developed into a kind of lay apostolate, or 'sect' even, of which
he was the leader and chaplain – with the Bishop of Newport and Menevia
(both men would spend their summer holidays preaching total abstinence all around
the industrial cities of England: Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, etc).
The
League, according to Manning's above mentioned note, even had “its four festivals”, which were: “St
Patrick, Whit-Monday, [the annual] Procession to the Crystal Palace, and Father
Mathew’s Birthday.” These unofficial holy days of the Catholic temperance
movement were, said the great Cardinal, “like the four Solemnities of
the Church” to him. In fact, for many Londoners, the various processions and
rallies associated with the League of the Cross were their only real contact
with the Church, often leading them into a deeper appreciation of the Catholic
faith.
Mentioned above is the “Procession to the Crystal Palace”.
It would be true to say that this annual event occupied an extremely special
place in Cardinal Manning’s heart. He was devastated when old age and infirmity
eventually conspired to stop him from attending this particular ‘festival’ of
total abstinence. According to Father Swift (cf op cit, p 22), “Public
attention was drawn by the Procession. Thousands of men, marshalled by their
officers (the ‘Cardinal’s bodyguard’ as they were called, distinguished by the
red sashes they wore) marched from the Thames Embankment to the Crystal Palace.
The march past the Cardinal [when he was too ill to make the journey to the Crystal
Palace] was always the cause of great enthusiasm for him, the sight of these
vast numbers led by bands and carrying banners, must have been a great
consolation. On no other occasion did the Crystal Palace ever see such enormous
crowds as on this annual procession.” (Comments in parenthesis, mine)
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| Cardinal Manning, artist unknown, c 1880 (source: Cardinal Henry Edward Manning Facebook page) |
Cardinal Manning himself took the pledge just before the official founding of the League in 1872, and against the advice
of his doctors, who thought it prudent for the Archbishop to drink a little wine
every day. He had
wondered whether or not he should make this radical commitment to total abstinence, realising that he, like many people, could easily drink alcohol in moderation. But two things convinced him to take the pledge: the
first being the fact that he did not want to ask others to do something that he
himself seemed unwilling to do, and the second being an encounter he had with some
workers in Southwark, who had themselves resolved to give up ‘the demon drink’.
When asked by one of the workers whether he had taken the pledge, Manning said that
he wanted to, but that his doctors would not allow him. On hearing this, one
of the men cried out, “Never mind the doctors, come and see what good it has
done us in our homes!” On hearing these words, Cardinal Manning never again touched strong drink. (cf Purcell, op cit, p 596).
One wonders how members of today’s Church would react to
Cardinal Henry Manning’s crusade of abstinence? Would he choose to do battle with the demon
drink were he alive nowadays, or are we more prone to other addictions – just as
destructive and corrosive: sex, drugs, money, gambling? Manning knew that in
his day, alcohol led men and women away from the Church, away from salvation. I
am sure that, given the binge-drinking culture that exists in modern-day
Britain, the case remains the same, even if there are also many other
temptations and weeds choking society’s soul.
Towards the end of his life, two
anti-Catholic newspapers had been won over by Manning’s total abstinence
crusade: The Times and the Standard (which had been opposed to him in all other
matters!). Yet, for Cardinal Manning, his type of abstinence movement expressed his deeply
rooted zeal for souls, rather than a purely socio-political ideal. He once wrote, reflecting on the work of the League
of the Cross: “Every day tells me that I never did anything better for the
saving of souls.” By encouraging so many people to give up a life dependent upon alcohol and drunkenness, Manning opened the
doors of Heaven to a vast multitude now enjoying the beatific vision of God.
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