In Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Grantley Manor, reunited half-sisters Ginevra (an Italian Catholic) and Margaret (an English Protestant) join in prayer together despite their differing creeds. When Margaret asks “Are there prayers that we may say together?” Ginevra has an answer ready: “The one that God himself has made” (Volume I, 244). Together, the sisters pray the Lord’s Prayer, common to Christians across denominational boundaries. A few years later, a similar scene appeared in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette , when Lucy Snowe describes a regular pattern of evening prayers she held with Madame Beck’s young children. “[T]the Lord’s Prayer, and the hymn beginning ‘Gentle Jesus,’ these little Catholics were permitted to repeat at my knee” she explains, though she was staunchly Protestant (Brontë 138). Both scenes suggest a common core to Christianity that could transcend not just denominational barriers, but also national ones. In both scenes, a shared Biblical prayer creates a moment of both ecumenism and cosmopolitanism . I call such an appeal to a religious “universal” Catholicity , and in this book I argue that Victorian novelists—both Catholic and Protestant—used Catholicity as a way of articulating a religious form of cosmopolitanism . A recent body of criticism investigates Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century literature. What critics have not generally discussed is the way that the rhetoric surrounding Roman Catholic conversion was invested in transnational identities or cosmopolitan stances as well as national identities. In this book, I put the work of scholars of religion in conversation with theorist of cosmopolitanism , showing how concepts of the “communion of saints” and the “universal church” helped Victorian writers articulate connections between English Protestants and an often-foreign Roman Catholic Other.
I. “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church”
Historically, Catholicity or universality was one of the marks of the church referenced in the Nicene Creed. Catholicity was not the province of a specific theology. Instead, it could be found in Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, and in Dissenting churches. One of the issues at stake in anti-Catholic rhetoric was the very definition of the term “Catholic.” All parties in the debate strove to claim at least a share in Catholicity , while often denying such a share to their theological opponents. On the one hand, the Roman Catholic Church continued to deny that the Anglican Church was part of the “Catholic Church.” As an Anglican, Newman once endorsed a “three branch” theory of the Catholic (in which the Anglican Church was an equal branch with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches), but he rejected this theory in his 1850 work, Lectures on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans In Submitting to the Catholic Church. In denying that the English Church demonstrated descent from the patristic era, Newman rejected its claim to be the “apostolic church” of the Nicene Creed (5). In denying that it had any connection “to the Church in other lands,” he similarly rejected its claim to be “Catholic” in the sense of universal. A church confined to one nation, unconnected to the churches of other lands, could not properly claim to be universal in the way Newman understood religious universality. Some English Catholics were more optimistic than Newman , seeing in the Tractarian Movement the possibility that the Anglican Church might reunite with the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, in the official Roman Catholic view, the Anglican Church was not at present truly part of the Catholic Church.
To evangelical authors, on the other hand, the Catholic Church included all true Christians; thus, depending on the strictness of the particular author, it might or might not include Roman Catholics. When, as in the extreme branches of evangelicalism , Roman Catholicism was understood to be a form of idolatry rather than Christianity, Roman Catholics were not considered genuinely Catholic at all. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna demonstrates this reclamation of the term “Catholic” in her 1841 tale Falsehood and Truth, in which the staunchly Protestant Roberts family steadfastly refer to Roman Catholics as “Romanists” or “Papists,” with even the children maintaining that it is not right to call Roman Catholics “Catholic” (56). One child’s casual reference to “the great Catholic nobleman, the Earl of Shrewsbury” provokes a rebuke from her brother: “‘Catholic!’ repeated Frederick; ‘I don’t like to hear you use that word so, Jane; for when I profess in the creed, to believe in the Holy Catholic Church, I certainly don’t mean the Pope’s Church’” (76–76). Frederick and his parents not only refuse to grant Roman Catholics exclusive use of the word “Catholic,” but also argue that the Roman Catholic Church was actually a false church, ultimately Christian in name only. Nor was Tonna’s criticism of modern-day idolatry limited to “the Pope’s Church”; she believed that idolatry could be found among Tractarian-minded Anglicans as well. The dedication of Falsehood and Truth bewails the liturgical changes beginning to creep into “the very sanctuary where [English Protestants] worship , and where their fathers for generations past have enjoyed the blessings of a purely Protestant ritual,” as “a heterodox pulpit giving the lie to the orthodox desk; and the modest communion table [lapses] back into an altar fitted for idolatrous service” (vii). For Tonna , the Holy Catholic Church must necessarily be a Protestant church, and though Falsehood and Truth does not identify the Tractarian Movement by name, Tonna clearly saw it as a threat. If an increasing presence of Roman Catholics in England was a “blustering storm above,” the gradual Catholicizing within the Church of England was an “insidious flood stealing on us from beneath” that must be resisted by works such as her own, intended to help prepare children for Catholic-Protestant controversy (vii).
Adherents to the Tractarian Movement offered a third alternative: that the Church of England was truly Catholic, not Protestant. For Charlotte Yonge, as a High Church Anglican, “Church” meant several things at once. First, it was a mystical body of believers, both living and deceased, all sharing in the communion of saints . The church as communion of saints was universal (catholic), encompassing Christians around the world in all denominations, including the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. At the same time, “the Church” meant a hierarchical, institutional body, one with visible authority structures that could trace their succession back to the days of the Apostles. In this sense, the Catholic Church was present in the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and in the English Church, all of which, as Yonge explains in a tract entitled Reasons Why I am a Catholic and Not a Roman Catholic, were branches of the visible Church (2–3, 6). In Yonge’s view, the English Church represented the purest branch of the visible Church, offering the purest form of Catholicism (Reasons 10, 15). Further, since Yonge understood the English Church to be the means by which the Catholic Church was to be embodied in England , at times she uses the word “Church” to mean the Anglican Church and its hierarchy, not the whole three-part visible church.
For some Victorians, the Catholicity of the church could also be seen in its (supposed) ability to transcend the boundaries of social class. As John Shelton Reed demonstrates in Glorious Battle, some of the earliest Tractarian churches were built in London slums, starting in the 1840s. Many of these “slum churches” became involved in later controversy, including no-popery rioting in 1850 (152, 168). As result of this early and continued involvement among the urban poor, “a popular conception of slum ritualism emerged” that became accepted even by the enemies of Ritualism (149). James Craigie Robertson seems to suggest, in an 1867 Quarterly Review essay on “Ultra-Ritualism,” that Ritualists themselves cited this class outreach as part of the definition of their party or movement (164). Robertson refers to Ritualists’ claim that “whereas ‘Tractarianism’ in its earlier phases was only ‘a religion for gentleman’” now, in its Ritualist phase, the Movement has “taken a shape which will enable it to wrest the middle classes from dissent” and “to civilize and Christianize those poorer classes which have hitherto been neglected altogether, or approached in a manner which had no effect on them” (164). Ritualists were more concerned with liturgy than some of the early Tractarians, but they also understood themselves to be more missional than their predecessors.
In fact, for Ritualists such as Frederick Littledale, work among the lower classes was central to the movement because it was part of what made the movement seem genuinely catholic/universal. In his essay on “The Missionary Aspect of the Ritualism ,” published in an 1866 collection entitled The Church and the World, Littledale claimed that “the true idea of an effective Church, that idea which is formulated in the word Catholic, is, that it should not merely be fully capable of adaptation to the habits of all climates and nations, but that in each nation it should meet the wants of all classes of society and types of mind” (32). This concept of Catholicity clearly included a transnational/cosmopolitan element, but it also was understood to be fundamentally democratic, in the sense of being a religion for the populace rather than merely the elite. Ritualists believed that their movement alone, out of the major parties in the Anglican Church , successfully embodied this class-based conception of Catholicity . Tractarian and Ritualist church designers sought to embody these principles in their churches, by doing away with the box pews rented by wealthy families and replacing them with “democratic woo...