Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/161

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
X.]
CONCLUSION
141

designated 'Ultramontane.' The personal attractiveness of Pius IX., who manifested a fatherly confidence in him, the authority which thus accrued to him in the government of the Church, the storm of controversy before and after the Vatican Council—all confirmed him in this attitude. He was more concerned to extend Infallibility than to determine its limits. He seemed to make it a duty of conscience and a point of honour to offend the English Catholics by presenting in uncompromising terms precisely those features of Italian doctrine which scandalised them most. He was well aware of his unpopularity, and consoled himself with an application of the text, If I pleased men I should not be the servant of Christ."

However, Manning pleased men, at least in Rome, where the larger sympathies of Newman were most distasteful, and where a hardy official went so far as to describe him as more Anglican than the Anglicans, and the most dangerous man in England.

Meanwhile Manning is found denouncing the English Jesuits to Rome as sympathisers with a watered version of Catholicism. Thus the Roman Catholics in England were being thoroughly schooled in Ultramontanism, and the Jesuits themselves Romanised by a convert from another Church.

The conclusions to which our investigations lead are: that the Roman Communion in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was Catholic in sentiment as opposed to Ultramontane; that the process of change was wrought by Italian influence, imposing Italianised Bishops upon a reluctant community, and by the suppression of the organs of independent thought, especially those which did not revise the facts of history in the interests of edification; that this conversion of the Roman body to Ultramontane ideas necessitated a rewriting of the English