The Tablet celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 1890 by gleefully scoffing at the “decrepitude” of the Church of England and reproducing page after page of stories of conversions to Rome. “Until the sea give up the dead that are in it, no rendering-up shall be quite so marvellous as that made by Protestantism to Catholicism during the last fifty years. From the Dead Sea of Anglicanism have arisen, in that period, multitudes to be the passengers and the mariners of St Peter’s bark.”
Two years later the paper’s owner, Herbert Vaughan, succeeded Manning as Archbishop of Westminster, receiving the cardinal’s red hat in 1893. The indefatigable Vaughan, then a priest of the diocese of Westminster, had bought the paper in 1868 for £900. In his history of The Tablet, Michael Walsh recounts that Vaughan “once told of the cramp he had suffered, working late at night translating papal documents … cramp in his fingers from holding the pen and cramp in his legs because he could not stretch them out while his sub-editor was curled up asleep under the table”.
13 August 2020, The Tablet
Word from the Cloisters: Backward glances…
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