Book Review

Cabin boy who became a bishop

William Bernard Ullathorne 1806-1889: a different kind of monk

Ullathorne of Birmingham, partly because of the anecdotes that are associated with his life and death, is one of the few Victorian Catholic bishops whose name is remembered. He wrote an autobiography and was the subject of a two-volume study by Abbot Cuthbert Butler published in 1926. His reputation is still, however, largely confined to the margins of Victorian church history, a character with a walk-on part as Newman's diocesan bishop. When he died in 1889 he was damned with faint praise by the anonymous obituarist of The Tablet. The Downside monk who had become the first Bishop of Birmingham in 1850 was, the writer declared, "a man of the cloister and the library", a "memory of the past in many ways", "not mixing in society and rarely seen in London". He was, in other words, a man of the provinces and not in the mainstream represented by his great contemporaries Wiseman, Manning and Newman.

Judith Champ's detailed reassessment is more than a biographical study. It shows that it is too easy to dismiss Victorian Catholics, and churchmen in particular, as inhabitants of an inward-looking "Fortress Church".

Ullathorne was a man of the British Empire as well as a long-term citizen of Birmingham, a city witnessing ebullient expansion encouraged by a sense of self-confident municipal pride. The parallel building up of the Catholic Church in the city and diocese was a vital part of the re-evangelisation of the country which Ullathorne saw as his call. There was nothing inward-looking about his mentality. Ullathorne could not be described as "provincial" in any pejorative sense. He was the most widely travelled of Victorian bishops and one of the most prolific in his published writings. He took an important part (well discussed in this book) in the First Vatican Council. He was a significant pioneer in the temperance movement, one of those campaigns which transcended denomination and class in Victorian England.

William Bernard Ullathorne, from a Yorkshire recusant family, had served as a cabin boy on a merchant vessel before going to try his vocation as a monk. His Benedictinism, as Judith Champ shows, was crucial to his character and work and the key to much of his success. He saw the two core values of the English Benedictine as stability and freedom and he lived them both to the full in his long life. Downside captured his romantic imagination not least on account of the dedication of several members of the small community, in its first years in Somerset, not only to the rediscovery of the monastic ideal but to the mission in Australia.

Ullathorne made his name in Australia, soon to be the first Catholic archbishopric in the Empire under its Benedictine archbishop Bede Polding, who was his first mentor at Downside. Some new insights are provided in this study of those formative years. He worked among the convicts and laid the foundations of a new church. His pastoral work in Coventry, which might seem an anti-climax, is shown as a period of fulfilment, the building up of a "parish" as a diocese in miniature. He was consecrated as the vicar apostolic of the Western District in 1846 and made some bold initiatives including the movement of the district's centre from Bath to Bristol. It was in Birmingham, from 1850, that he found his life's work.

He had a high view of the episcopal office which he saw not only as a guarantee of order but as the encourager of mission. In Birmingham he was much concerned with the creation of a cathedral with a proper chapter and a seminary to provide an educated

clergy. His ideal was in some ways more medieval than tridentine and he was not a blinkered ultramontane. "Indeed," Champ suggests, "he was a determined opponent of fashion in all things, but especially in Church government: ‘A bishop ought to see through Our Lord's eyes, and should be free from the spirit of the age in which he lives, which is but the passing fashion of the passing world.'"

Ullathorne was more, however, than a model bishop. In some of his ideas and achievements he was singular and far-seeing, prophetic in his judgements. His encouragement of women Religious is particularly emphasised by the author of this book who breaks ground in this area. His sympathy and care for the enclosed Benedictine nuns was part of his outreach but equally important was his collaborative ministry, as it might now be called, with active Religious. His joint initiatives with the Dominican Margaret Hallahan, in Coventry, Bristol and the Midlands, were the high point of his collaboration but he had a vision of the Church in which the role of women was seen as crucial.

His interest in moral issues and his lack of interest in party politics made him an impressive spokesman on the great questions of the age, a real elder statesman, and it was not surprising that when Wiseman died his name was prominent on the list of potential archbishops of Westminster.

His direct manner and his lack of polish as well as the fact that he was a monk rather than a secular may not have fitted into what was already being seen as an "Establishment" role, he was "not one of us". It was as a diocesan bishop that his greatness was shown and the author sees him rather as Manning described St Charles Borromeo of Milan: "A great pastor, a ruler, a lawgiver, a guide and a judge in the church of God."

This readable biography of an inspiring Victorian bishop is a model of revisionist study; building up, almost entirely based on original archival sources and contemporary accounts, sermons and speeches, a rounded picture of a man who was one of the principal architects of the modern English Catholic Church. It provides an essential balance to the existing library of works on the Victorian cardinals. It shows that even someone "rarely seen in London" can be of major significance.

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