This finely-edited volume in the Catholic Record Society’s longstanding Records Series allows an intimate insight into the concerns of an English bishop in the second half of the nineteenth century. The restoration of the hierarchy in 1850 may have been a decisive moment that helped define the modern church but it posed as many questions as it answered. As Peter Doyle remarks, ‘England and Wales had, in one sense, rejoined the visible family of the institutional church, but it was still a junior member, not fully trusted to act as an adult’ (p. xvii). There were questions over the exact role of the Metropolitan and of Provincial Synods, the division of funds, the training of priests, the individual rights of bishops and their relations with Rome. The clergy hankered for increased freedom, which they seldom received, while the laity probably felt little novelty beyond more regular pastoral letters, visitations and fundraising appeals. The hierarchy may have been restored but it would take decades for many of these issues to be settled.
The Correspondence contains a selection of 449 letters from the many that are kept in the Lancashire Record Office, the archives of the Archbishop of Liverpool, Ushaw College and numerous other collections. Arranged chronologically, with detailed and clear footnotes, they span the Victorian period, starting with a letter to John Lingard in 1850 and concluding with one to John Henry Newman in 1871.
Alexander Goss was born in Ormskirk in July 1814 and educated at Ushaw and the English College, Rome. Ordained in 1841, he spent a year as curate at Mawdesley before moving to St Edward’s College, Liverpool as Vice-President. In June 1853 he was appointed coadjutor to the ailing Bishop George Hilary Brown, the former Vicar Apostolic of the Lancashire District and first Bishop of Liverpool. Brown was distrustful of his youthful coadjutor, seeing him not only as a sort of personal chaplain, with no episcopal authority in his own right, but as a potential threat. He refused to grant him faculties to carry out a visitation of the diocese and sufficient funds to support his work. Goss was forthright in his criticisms of the stalemate that ensued: ‘I cannot but admire,’ he wrote to Brown, ‘the ingenious, if not ingenuous shifts to which your Lordship condescends in order to evade giving a direct answer to a plain question’ (Letter 23). In the end, it was left to Propaganda to sort out the mess.
Once bishop in his own right, Goss was concerned with the bread and butter work of opening missions, appointing priests and raising funds. According to one of his closest co-workers, Goss ‘had no thought nor care for anything but his Diocese’. In order to advance the Faith he was not afraid to enter into public disputes and controversies, as Manning put it, with ‘his usual rough violence – the crozier, hook and point.’ He was an impressive if rather lonely figure, living frugally, wearing his student cassock even as bishop and using the train rather than a private carriage as he moved around the diocese. He once confessed that ‘when not engaged in actual work, I live at the quiet address which heads my letter, amusing myself with collecting materials for a Catholic history of my Diocese’ (Letter 432). He never finished his planned history of Lancashire Catholicism, though he prepared historical texts for publication by the Chetham Society and Manx Society. In the brave new world of a restored hierarchy, he never lost sight of the community’s historical roots.
The letters cover a wide range of subjects but a number of common themes stand out. Goss had to increasingly safeguard his independence from the pretensions of the Archbishop of Westminster. Relations with Wiseman deteriorated: Goss accused him of not being ‘propitiated but by having the hierarchy prostrate before him’ (n. 601) and dealing with the Holy See ‘by secret communication at which we cannot get, often on the grounds of official documents’ (Letter 338). A central issue was Ushaw. Goss stressed that, as the successor of Douay in the north, it was the common seminary of the dioceses of Beverley, Hexham and Newcastle, Liverpool, Salford, and Shrewsbury, while the bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, in whose diocese it was located, saw it primarily as a diocesan college and believed he had exclusive control over its funds. Wiseman was supportive of this view, as both Metropolitan and Apostolic Visitor – partly because he aimed for control over Ushaw’s sister college at Old Hall Green. Though the Provincial Synod of 1859 settled in favour of joint episcopal control, Wiseman tried to circumvent them by using his standing in Rome. Goss was a leader of the opposition and eventually won in this, and in similar disputes with the college over the Sherburne Trust.
He was also concerned to limit the interference of an increasingly centralised Roman curia and to ensure English solutions for English problems. ‘The Italian officials about the Pope,’ he complained to Newman in 1869, ‘treat every body as school boys & children…if any man dares to speak honestly upon open questions he is denounced to Rome as a Gallican’ (Letter 432). He thought the definition of papal infallibility inopportune and remained suspicious of Manning’s ultramontanism. However, he respected the pope’s authority and raised £8,000 in a diocesan collection to help the papal struggle for temporal sovereignty in 1859. He was furious when Propaganda accused him in 1870 of refusing permission for his clergy and laity to sign a protest against the invasion of Rome, for he had always ‘defended the cause of the Supreme Pontiff, perhaps more forcefully then elegantly’ (Letter 446).
Matters of high ecclesiastical politics mix with more mundane pastoral matters, providing an insight into mid-nineteenth century parochial life and Victorian sensitivities. The letters mention the need for the segregation of the sexes in church (Letter 46), the order against dances in school rooms (Letter 54), ‘clerical interference in elections’ (Letter 207) or the strange custom at a Preston convent of ‘a live infant, lying in a crib to represent the Birth of the Son of God’ (Letter 394). The clergy are encouraged to maximise church attendance by preaching rather than scolding and starting services punctually (Letter 399) and to live observantly in the presbytery: ‘all wines and spirits to be kept under lock and key, and no one to be allowed possession of the key except the Senior Priest’ (Letter 410). Some letters sound surprisingly contemporary: ‘there is not a church in Liverpool which would not be benefitted by an additional priest’ (Letter 53).
Peter Doyle has already written widely on the history of north-western Catholicism and this volume succeeds in bringing its second bishop to life. In a period too-often dominated by events in Westminster, it helps restore the balance and raises many future avenues of research, not only in Liverpool but other diocesan archives. It is an essential tool for any student of the period.
