The Henson Journals

[59]

Saturday, January 2nd, 1926.

The real strength of the Catholic Movement is that the pressure comes from below.

v. Church Times. January 1st. 1926.

This pronouncement of the Anglo–Catholick journal has the unusual distinction of being true.

I worked at a sermon for tomorrow, but sermon composition is for me almost a lost art, & I made but little progress.

The Rev. N. J. Burgess came to see me, & remained to lunch. I said that, in negotiating with any incumbent, he was bound to tell the story of his departure from Marley Hill two years ago. I said also that when he had completed five years in good service, I should consider that he had purged his record, & had regained his position in the ranks of the working clergy.

After lunch four of us – Linetta, Fearne, Ernest, and I – walked round the park with Beck.

The Revd J. C. M. Collier, who is changing from the curacy of S. Margaret's, Durham, to that of Stanhope, came to spend the week end [sic]. He has been in Orders since 1914, and might well be sent to a benefice, but he is shy, not physically robust, and without ambition.

[60]

Loisy gives a woeful account of the Roman Catholic Religion as it now exists in France, with the Papacy enthroned on the ruins of Gallican Liberty, with the French bishops reduced to complete helplessness, lesson–bound by the ecclesiastical newspapers. La Croix and Le Pélerim embarrassed by the failure of Ordination candidates, and committed against their own judgment to a conflict with the State which is as unnecessary as it is ruinous. He accuses the Papacy as being the very "fous mabram". He describes Lourdes as the very citadel of "the new Catholicism". It is "une poussée de basse religiosite où la suggestion à haute dose produit certains effets extraordinaires, mais dont la résultat le plus clair, le plus immédiat, la plus général, le plus certain, est un avilissment de la religion".

He seems to admit the expediency of having a French ambassador at the Vatican in order to facilitate the arrangement in affairs in Alsace–Lorraine & in the East: but he resents the existence of a Nuncio in Paris, because it seems to imply a recognition of the Pope's claim to interfere in the internal affairs of the Republic. It is clear enough that the Papacy is too potent to be ignored.

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