The trials of the Vicars Apostolic in England

By Fr. J. H .Crehan, S. J.
COLLINGR1DGE, by Fr. J. B. Dockery. O.F.M. (Johns, Newport. 25s.).
TO a Jesuit the title of this book
will recall the energetic and resourceful founder of the Driefontein mission in Rhodesia, Er. Edmund Collingridge, Si. (who died in 1934), but actually the book is about his great-uncle. who was Vicar Apostolic of the Western District from 1809 to 1829 and who seems to have possessed Fr. Edmund's directness of speech.
What a time of shortages it was. both of men and money! The episcopal state can be judged from the fact that two rooms were hired for the Bishop in Bristol at the house of a Catholic couple; " and you may either dine with them or have your dinner in your sitting room." The holy oils were blessed " in Mrs. Butler's drawing room."
Collingridge's own transfer from
the post of Provincial of the Franciscans to the charge of the Western District was a sufficient foss to his brethren. but this did not deter him from years of negotiation to secure Fr. McDonnell, 0.F.M.. as his Coadjutor. in spite of the warning that if he was appointed the province would be undone. Apostolic seem to have chosen their own successors by asking Rome for a Coadjutor. and finally Collingridge, failing to secure McDonnell. asked for and obtained the formidable Bishop Baines. One could wish that Fr. Dockery had spared some of the details of his narrative to bring out from the material in the Archives the reasons for that choice.
Similarly he might have explained the action of Collingridge on the fatal First of February (1810) when he. along with two other Vicars Apostolic, but without Milner and the Irish Bishops. assented to a plan of Emancipation that would have given the Government control of the appointment of Bishops Milner was undoubtedly right here. as Coilingridge afterwards came to see. but his sharp polemics made one of his opponents (afterwards a Bishop F OCKERY refers for the
background of his pictures to the darger books by the late Bishop Ward. but it is to be feared that there will be largely inaccessible to the ordinary reader.
He does not make clear the theological climate of the times. when all the English clergy except the " gentlemen of Stonyhurst " were wedded to the Tutiorist system in moral theology and had retained some of the rigorist views of Douai.
Because of the quarrel with Milner. the Vicars Apostolic did not meet together for 15 years a all of them seem to have believed the prophecies and revelations of the Italian stigmatica Sister Mary Agnes (condemned as a fraud in 1816). who once in an interview mistook Milner for Collingricte with striking results,
It was an unhappy time. but one which had lasting effects on the course of English Catholicism for a century.
Mr. Johns of Newport has for the third time done wonders with the printing and illustrations to produce such a large work for the price. Mr. Scudamore's map of the Catholic churches of London in that time is especially welcome.