The Pope and England's Primary Patron: Objections when the Pope Named St Peter as Patron Saint of England, 1893
There was an outbreak of Anti-Catholic comment when Pope Leo XIII directed that England should be reconsecrated as "Mary's Dowry" and with St. Peter as patron saint.
From The Spectator 3 June 1893
IT is curious to note the mild recrudescence during this last week of the feeling which took such complete possession of England forty-three years ago, when Cardinal Wiseman wrote his celebrated letter from the Flaminian Gate of Rome, and announced to the English people that Pio Nono bad revived the English Episcopate and had divided all England into Roman Catholic dioceses, beginning from that of Westminster. Such a titular division of England amongst Roman Catholic Bishops seemed, to the greater part of the nation, an act of gratuitous usurpa- tion which affected their liberties and the very attitude of English souls. To claim episcopal rights over all the Catholics in England was somehow regarded as hand- mg. over the Protestants of England to a sort of silken chain from which they would not be able to disentangle them- selves; and the abortive Ecclesiastical Titles Act, one of the absurd results of a perfectly senseless panic, was passed in haste, though it had to be repented at leisure as one of the indiscreet ndiscreet acknowledgments of the strenuously denied power of the Bishop of Rome to fetter our liberty, of which a panic-struck people had ever been guilty. Dr. Newman described in one of his most effective lectures how all the Church belle went off into hysterical peals,—a concert of bobs, bobs royal, and triple bobs major, in defiance of the Pope's assumption of power to create English dioceses. The bells rang out denunciations to "the Popish aggression" as "insolent and insidious," "insidious and insolent," "insolent and atrocious," "atrocious and insolent," "atrocious, insolent, and un- grateful," and so forth; and it was not till some years after, that England discovered the rather obvious truth that no power at all passed to Rome under that act of Pio Nono's except what the individual English Catholics voluntarily and spontaneously rendered.
A very faint copy of . the same wave of feeling has been observable as the result of the Cardinal Archbishop's and Catholic Bishops' pastoral to the English Catholics, read last Sunday in all the Catholic Churches, notifying to them that Pope Leo XIII. had directed that England should be reconseerated to the service of the Virgin Mary,—as whose "dowry," Archbishop Arundel, in 1339, asserted that England was everywhere regarded,—and to St. Peter, the "primary patron" of the Kingdom. Men went about asking each other what had become of St. George who figures on the coinage ; whether the Pope claims the right to dispossess him of any privileges he may have as patron-saint of England ; whether St. Peter and the Blessed Virgin had gained now rights over them ; and whether they ought not to feel aggrieved at being handed over in this uncere- monious way by a foreign potentate to the care of a "primary patron" to whom they had never been accustomed. Some of them apparently felt aggrieved on behalf of the Dragon, to whose image they had also been accustomed as cowering under the stroke of St. George's spear. More of them felt as if St. Peter had somehow rivetted upon them the power of Rome, instead of Rome having rivetted upon them the power of St. Peter ; and altogether, there was a thrill visible, which seemed more of a tribute to the secret homage which England still appears to feel for Rome, than those who felt it would at all care to admit.
Good Catholics, however, were perfectly conscious that the reconsecration of England to the minus of the -Virgin Mary and the Prince of the Apostles, did not mean quite so much as the suspicions of Protestants supposed. It did not mean that either St. George or the Dragon was to be formally deposed. Saints are not envious of each other. The patronage of a saint is not supposed to exclude the patronage of a brother-saint. Rather does that sort of patronage attract than repel any like influence. Nor does even a Pope claim any right to determine how the higher powers are to be dis- tributed in the world above. It meant nothing except that reverent Catholics are to be encouraged by the revival of the old ecclesiastical traditions, and the example of the head of their Church, to ask more often and more devoutly, for the future, the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, and the intercession of St. Peter, on behalf of England, whenever they pray especially for their country and endeavour to avert from it, by their prayers, the great evils which sometimes appear to be threaten- ing it. It meant, for instance, that devout Gladstonian Catholics would do well, if they pray for the success of Home-rule in promoting the "Union of Hearts," to ask for the in- tercession of the Virgin Mary and St. Peter on behalf of Mr. Gladstone's measure ;—and that Catholic Unionists, who take the opposite view, would do equally well to pray for the same intercession against the success of that dangerous attack on the unity of the Kingdom. If this formal reconseention of England to the Virgin Mary and St. Peter means anything new to Catholics at all, it only means that they have not attached enough importance to intercessory prayer on behalf of their country as a country, and that the Mother of our Lord, and the chief of the apostles, ought to stand first with them when they ask for human intercession of any kind. As for St. George, if there are any Catholics who feel a special devotion to that rather mythical and unhistorical saint, they are certainly in no way prohibited from asking for his inter, cession also. He is recognised by their Church, though the outlines of his history are very far from distinct or certain ; and St. George, if a St. George there be who ever fought with a dragon on our behalf, will not pray the less earnestly for us, but much the more so, for knowing that St. Peter prays for us too, and that he is regarded by the Catholic Church as having still more " influence " in the counsels of the Most High, than the warrior-saint himself.
The real difficulty which we have no doubt that Catholics feel, as Protestants certainly do, when they come to examine the nature of intercession with any care, lies in that word "influence." How can any short-sighted human being have " influence " with the Creator, who knows what the intercessor will pray for long before the prayer enters his mind, and if the prayer be a good one, himself inspires it ? In what sense can we ascribe any trace of independent authority to the in- tercession of a finite being, when we know perfectly well that if his petition is in any way mistaken, God will regard only its right intention, and not its erroneous form ; and that if it be not mistaken, God in his mercy would, as we always venture to hope, usually at least, have granted it even if it had not been offered? Do we not believe that the purer an intercessory prayer is, the more certainly it will drop all those elements of human weakness which disfigure most human prayers, and therefore will the less represent what i've ourselves are probably hoping that the intercessor will ask on our behalf P For example, suppose that a hearty Unionist asks for St. Peter's intercession against the success of the proposal to disentegrate the United Kingdom, or a hearty Gladstonian asks for it in favour of the successful self-government of Ireland, can we suppose, or even wish, that either prayer, if it is mistaken, should be granted only because we have obtained some powerful " intercession " for it; or that the intercessor, if he knows a good deal more of what is good for the country than the human being who asks his inter- cession, will echo a mistaken petition simply on the, ground that it has been pressed upon him ? The whole notion of intercession is embarrassed by this difficulty,—it assumes that God's providence assigns a certain definite weight to the wishes of his creatures ; and yet we know that the more earnest and passionate those wishes are, the more likely are those who feel them to shrink from asking the very gifts which would be the highest, and to interpose themselves as a Fort of shield between the divine purpose and the severity of the means by which that purpose is so often best accomplished. Is not the very popularity of the Virgin Mary's intercession due to the feeling that she will have even more sympathy with human weakness than Christ himself P Is not the charm of St. Peter the impression which his impetuous life gives us that he could understand our hot and cold fits, our perfect confi- dence that we could never deny our Lord, even though it pre- ceded by but a few hours the actual denial we had scouted as simply impossible? And if so, do we not really court most eagerly the intercession of those who, when on earth, were disposed to make most allowance for what is weak in us, and were most likely to intercede that we might not suffer for that weakness,—which, if they do intercede for us at all, they would, in the higher and purer light of a better state of being, most certainly refuse to do ?
We believe that as intercessory prayer is approved, and, indeed, enjoined by the Christian revelation, there must be real advantage in it, not only to those who offer it, but to those for whom it is offered. But it is worth noting that as regards human beings, the most earnest intercessory prayer is always offered for those who are most closely united to us by the ties of affection ; and that even as regards the intercessory prayer for which the Catholic Church pleads as the natural outcome of the doctrine of the communion of saints, it is always the intercession of that saint towards whose human career the worshipper is most strongly drawn, that he most earnestly desires. We do not, therefore, regard Leo XIII.'s apparent disregard of St. George,—who is, after all, a mere fable to most Englishmen, —as in the least inconsistent with the earnestness of his recommendation of special devotion to the intercession of St. Peter ; for, unquestionably, St. Peter is a very impressive and attractive human figure who is much more likely to interest the devout affections of Englishmen than the legendary warrior. We imagine that the main reason why intercessory prayer is enjoined is that it is the most natural mode of opening the heart to God. If we do not pray with our hearts, we do not pray at all; and we cannot pray with our hearts without taking the line of some one of our deepest and most devout affections. That is why the entreaty for the intercession of the Virgin Mary is so popular throughout Europe, and that is why we can well understand that entreaty for the intercession of St. Peter is a very much more natural channel for the patriotic prayers of religious Englishmen than the intercession of the fabulous St. George. We know at least what St. Peter suffered on behalf of his country from one of his country's rulers ; we know what he thought of the duty of obedience to the civil power; we know how, in his impetuosity, he could even re- prove his Master, and how he suffered for the collapse of his own courage and loyalty. In fact, we know enough of him to love him, and to be more or less encouraged by his example to pour out such feelings as we think he would approve. And that is, we suppose, the chief value of all intercessory prayer. No one would ever think of asking for the intercession of a pure stranger; no one would ever think even of interceding for a pure stranger who had gained no hold on his pity or affections. We take it that the real im- portance of intercessory prayer is to interest and awaken the human affections so as to make the communion with God more hearty, simple, and, so to say, confidential. And though we are bound to believe that wherever he sees it to be possible without injury to us, God gives such weight to human prayers in the decrees of his providence as he righteously can, in order that our hearts may not be frozen when we turn towards him, still the chief value of intercessory prayer will always be that it does open the hearts of many who could not pray equally freely without the help of some kind of human sympathy, and, therefore, that the interposition of some familiar human figure between ourselves and God, makes prayer to God a more real and unaffected and genuine act than it would otherwise be. After all, the great end of intercession is to bring those who intercede, and those who are interceded for, nearer to the Being to whom all prayer is ultimately addressed.
Source:
From The Spectator 3 June 1893
http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/3rd-june-1893/9/the-pope-and-englands-primary-patron
This text is part of the Internet
Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and
copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.
Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright.
Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational
purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No
permission is granted for commercial use of the Sourcebook.
© Paul Halsall, April 2023
