Henry Edward Manning (15 July 1808 – 14 January 1892) was an English prelate of the Catholic Church, and the second Archbishop of Westminster from 1865 until his death in 1892. He was ordained in the Church of England as a young man, but converted to Catholicism in the aftermath of the Gorham judgement.

Early life

thumb|left|Copped Hall, Hertfordshire

Manning was born on 15 July 1808 at his grandfather's home, Copped Hall, Totteridge, Hertfordshire. He was the third and youngest son of William Manning, a prominent merchant and slave owner, who served as a director and (1812–1813) as a governor of the Bank of England and also sat in Parliament for 30 years, representing in the Tory interest Plympton Earle, Lymington, Evesham and Penryn consecutively. Manning's mother, Mary (died 1847), daughter of Henry Lannoy Hunter, of Beech Hill, and sister of Sir Claudius Stephen Hunter, 1st Baronet, came from a family of French Huguenot extraction.

Manning spent his boyhood mainly at Coombe Bank, Sundridge, Kent, where he had for companions Charles Wordsworth and Christopher Wordsworth, later bishops of St Andrews and Lincoln respectively. He attended Harrow School (1822–1827) during the headmastership of George Butler, but obtained no distinction beyond playing for two years in the cricket eleven. However, this proved to be no impediment to his academic career.

Manning matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1827, studying Classics, and soon made his mark as a debater at the Oxford Union, where William Ewart Gladstone succeeded him as president in 1830. At this date he had ambitions of a political career, but his father had sustained severe losses in business and, in these circumstances, having graduated with first-class honours in 1830, he obtained the year following, through the 1st Viscount Goderich, a post as a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial Office. on 7 November 1833, in a ceremony performed by the bride's brother-in-law, the Revd Samuel Wilberforce, later Bishop of Oxford and Winchester. Manning's marriage did not last long: his young wife came of a consumptive family and died childless on 24 July 1837. When Manning died more than half a century later, it was found that despite his having by then been a celibate Catholic cleric for many decades, he still wore around his neck a chain with a locket containing Caroline's picture.

Though he never became an acknowledged disciple of John Henry Newman (later Cardinal Newman), the latter's influence meant that from this date Manning's theology assumed an increasingly High Church character and his printed sermon on the "Rule of Faith" publicly signalled his alliance with the Tractarians.

In 1838 he took a leading part in the church education movement, by which diocesan boards were established throughout the country; and he wrote an open letter to his bishop in criticism of the recent appointment of the ecclesiastical commission. In December of that year he paid his first visit to Rome and called on Nicholas Wiseman, the Rector of the English College, in company with Gladstone.

In January 1841 Philip Shuttleworth, Bishop of Chichester, appointed Manning as the Archdeacon of Chichester, and entering into the role, he began a personal visitation of each parish within his district, completing the task in 1843. In 1842 he published a treatise on The Unity of the Church and given his established reputation as an eloquent and earnest preacher, he was in the same year appointed select preacher by his university, thus being called upon to fill from time to time the pulpit which Newman, as vicar of St Mary's, was just relinquishing.

Four volumes of Manning's sermons appeared between the years 1842 and 1850 and these had reached the 7th, 4th, 3rd and 2nd editions respectively in 1850, but were not afterwards reprinted. In 1844 his portrait was painted by George Richmond, and the same year he published a volume of university sermons, omitting the one he had preached on the Gunpowder Plot. This sermon had annoyed Newman and his more advanced disciples, but it was proof that at that date Manning was loyal to the Church of England.

The following year, on 6 April 1851, Manning was received into the Catholic Church in England and then studied at the academia in Rome where he took his doctorate, and on 14 June 1851 was ordained a Catholic priest at the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street. Given his great abilities and prior fame, he quickly rose to a position of influence. He served as provost of the cathedral chapter under Cardinal Wiseman.

In 1857, he established at Wiseman's direction the mission of St Mary of the Angels, Bayswater, to serve labourers building Paddington Station. There he founded, at Wiseman's request, the Congregation of the Oblates of St. Charles. This new community of secular priests was the joint work of Cardinal Wiseman and Manning, for both had independently conceived of the idea of a community of this kind, and Manning had studied the life and work of Charles Borromeo in his Anglican days at Lavington and had, moreover, visited the Oblates at Milan, in 1856, to satisfy himself that their rule could be adapted to the needs of Westminster. Manning became superior of the congregation.

Among his accomplishments as head of the Catholic Church in England were the acquisition of the site for Westminster Cathedral, but his focus was on a greatly expanded system of Catholic education,

Manning used this goodwill to promote a modern Catholic view of social justice. Several scholars consider Manning to be a key contributor to the papal encyclical Rerum novarum issued by Pope Leo XIII, which marks the beginning of modern Catholic social justice teaching.

For part of 1870, he was in Rome attending the First Vatican Council. and was instrumental in settling the London dock strike of 1889 He played a significant role in the conversion of other notable figures including Elizabeth Belloc, mother of famous British author Hilaire Belloc, upon whose thinking Manning had a profound influence. Manning did not, however, support enfranchising women. In 1871, at St. Mary Moorfield, he said he hoped English womanhood would "resist by a stern moral refusal, the immodesty which would thrust women from their private life of dignity and supremacy into the public conflicts of men."

View of the priesthood

In 1883, Manning published The Eternal Priesthood, his most influential work. In the book, Manning defended an elevated idea of the priesthood as, "in and of itself, an outstanding way to perfection, and even a 'state of perfection'". In comparison to his polemical writings, The Eternal Priesthood is "austere" and "glacial",

Animal welfare

Manning was an anti-vivisectionist and founding member of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection. He was a vice-president of the Society. At the annual meeting of the Victoria Street Society in June 1881, he denounced vivisection as inhumane and of doubtful benefit to science. In 1887, Manning commented that vivisection is not "the way that the all-wise and all-good maker of us all has ordained for the discovery of the healing arts".

Death and burial

Manning died on 14 January 1892, at which time his estate was probated at £3,527. He received a formal burial at St Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green. Some years later, in 1907, his remains were transferred to the newly completed Westminster Cathedral.

Works

  • Rule of Faith (1839)
  • Unity of the Church (1842)
  • A charge delivered at the ordinary visitation of the archdeaconry of Chichester in July (1843)
  • Sermons 4 vols. (1842–1850)
  • The Present Crisis of the Holy See (1861)
  • The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost or Reason and Revelation by Henry Edward Archbishop of Westminster. London: Longmans Green and Co. (1865)
  • Rome and the Revolution (1867)
  • Christ and Antichrist (1867)
  • Petri Privilegium (1871)
  • The Glories of the Sacred Heart (1876)
  • The True Story of the Vatican Council (1877)
  • The Eternal Priesthood (1883)
  • The Little Flowers of Saint Francis (Manning's translation from the Italian published 1863)

See also

  • Catholic Church in England and Wales
  • Oblates of St. Charles

Notes

References

Further reading

  • McClelland, Vincent Alan. Cardinal Manning: the Public Life and Influences, 1865–1892. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. xii, 256 p.
  • Player, Robert. Lets Talk of Graves, of Worms, of Epitaphs, a fictionalised version of Manning's life, largely based on the famous acerbic polemic of Lytton Strachey in his Eminent Victorians.
  • Henry Edward Cardinal Manning www.catholic-hierarchy.org
  • Henry Edward Manning collection, 1826-1901(letters, sermons, and transcriptions) at Pitts Theological Library, Candler School of Theology
  • , a sardonic polemic deflating Manning and other prominent men of his time.

;Individual works

  • The rule of faith: a sermon, preached in the cathedral church of Chichester, June 13, 1838; at the primary visitation of the right Reverend William, Lord Bishop of Chichester (1839)
  • Sermons on ecclesiastical subjects: with an introduction on the relations of England to Christianity (1869)
  • The fourfold sovereignty of God (1872)
  • Lytton Strachey's essay on Manning from Eminent Victorians is available at http://www.bartleby.com/189/100.html
  • poem by Dunstan Thompson