Issue 70 - The Pilgrim - April 2018 - The newspaper of the Archdiocese of Southwark

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Feature The Pilgrim April 2018 A revolutionary in Catholic communication As the Catholic Truth Society (CTS) celebrates its 150th anniversary, its general secretary Fergal Martin takes a look at its founder, the remarkable Cardinal Herbert Vaughan Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, William Gladstone and many others – those fading sepiatone Victorians have always fascinated me. It must be in their eyes. What is it that moved them? What made them tick? Forty-five years later I’m still staring, this time at eyes that have become more familiar: a rather stiff-looking Victorian clergyman, tall and handsome. He has timid, intelligent, even tired eyes. I think I can see what I’d call determination. Perhaps the eyes of a man who never expected to live to seventy. Yet these are the eyes of someone who longed to be a missionary all his life, and to his probable regret ended his long and furiously energetic life as Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, 1892-1903. These are the eyes of the person who founded the organisation I work for – the CTS 150 years later. Herbert Vaughan had renounced a considerable inheritance, life of ease, and a warm, loving family to pursue his vocation to be a priest. He grew up on the Welsh borders and had long dreamt of being a missionary to Wales. From a wealthy, established Catholic family that had survived penal times, he was the eldest of 13 siblings, most of whom became religious or clergy. Yet his entire life was marked by unstable health due to a weak heart. What is fascinating is that he survived at all, and greater still that he did so much. He was by nature painfully shy, and could and did upset many of his colleagues and contemporaries by his apparent brusqueness. He was by all accounts a genuinely pious and holy man, spending two hours a day in prayer, and painfully aware of his many faults. He was widely known to reconcile with enemies and to ask forgiveness of those he had offended. People came to know that he spoke his mind, and that he did so with no malice but with the utmost sincerity. He was simply put, a Christian man. He had learnt his faith and the truth of it from his mother. Missionary life fascinated him from an early age – he was overcome with the impulse to bring the good news of the gospel to those who were entitled to hear it. All his life he had great devotion to St Joseph and to the Sacred Heart. He had been schooled by the Jesuits and Benedictines, at home and overseas, and enjoyed a long association with the Carmelites. He was a man of the Victorian age, with a broad international view developed by the many travels he took on through most of his adult life. Vaughan it seems was never a parish priest or even a curate, but after training for the priesthood in Rome became vice rector at the new seminary at Ware, where he was popular. During that time, he investigated missionary and priestly training in many different contexts. Juxtaposed between periods of poor health and recuperation there would be intense and prolonged bursts of energy – the fitful energy perhaps of a man racing against the clock. He co-founded a dream of Cardinal Wiseman – a missionary society of diocesan priests (the Oblates of St Charles). This was a very revolutionary idea at the time. After travelling widely in Europe and America (regardless of the Civil War there), investigating missionary societies and seminaries, as well as fundraising which involved considerable personal suffering and anxiety), he founded a new missionary order: the Mill Hill Missionaries. But he was a marked man. At only 40 he was made Bishop of Salford, where he remained for 20 years, visiting all his parishes, and founding the Children’s Rescue Society, St Bede’s Commercial College for Catholic children and countless similar initiatives. In my view, his eyes confirm the story that he felt guilty over the plight of the neglected and poverty stricken Catholic children of Manchester, with little future ahead of them. He had been too busy to help them. This sense of remorse drove him on to further projects despite the intolerable level of his responsibilities. Some say he took on too much – no doubt he would agree. Just a few years before, he had founded the Catholic Truth Society – to become known over time as “the CTS.” It began as a small pamphleteering outfit, inspired by what Vaughan had seen of the power of the Protestant printing press in America and the disinformation he felt was being successfully propagated there. Just as the great communicators and sellers of today find their audiences at their laptops, tablets, iPhones and iPads, thus by-passing as many intermediaries as possible, so Vaughan went direct to his audience: in the parish churches up and down the country. So a rare new breed was born, the “CTS boxtender” – laypeople always at hand in the parish with a small, portable wooden box, opened up to display and sell half-penny booklets to educate and support the faithful and anyone else who dropped by. With James Britten, an Anglican convert and botanist from Kew Gardens, and a few shillings, Vaughan set it up in 1868. Like everything with Vaughan, it was placed in Our Lord’s hands. It proved timely. Perhaps one of the greatest experiments in mass education and social cohesion, Vaughan’s CTS produced thousands of inexpensive, accessible and popular tracts that put Catholicism back in the frame. They were a source of knowledge, spiritual food, catechesis and novelty: Catholics at last belonged. Readership accelerated at unimaginable rates between the 1920s and 1940s as two horrific wars took their ghastly toll on the human spirit and psyche. CTS’s benchmark was the best authors writing on the things that mattered. Readers were encouraged to leave their tracts, once read and digested, on the bus, on a park bench, on a train seat. The great underground movement had begun. The movement’s army then was as it remains today: a combination of readers who could buy CTS booklet Page 6
The Pilgrim April 2018 Feature CTS Bookracks very cheaply and donors who gave generously to support the CTS mission to evangelise and to keep it going. Vaughan went on to buy The Tablet and the Dublin Review and was at the heart of Catholic communications for what they were in those days, since the reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850. For many years this often involved writing and editing articles and proofs at his desk long into the night. His working motto was essentially that the truth itself has an overwhelming attraction, and must be communicated no matter how unpopular it might seem. When he became Archbishop of Westminster, he raised funds to build Westminster Cathedral, surprising everyone by the sheer size of the project, its style and grandeur. He wanted to put Catholicism back on the map, not just for the world to see, but to inspire and encourage his flock after centuries of being forced into the shadows – as Christ had been. The first liturgy in the almost finished cathedral was his own requiem. He died at Mill Hill among his Missionary Order confreres on 19th June 1903, after a long illness, aged 71. On CTS’s 150th birthday this year, perhaps we should all be grateful to Herbert Vaughan for his impulse to evangelise, his commitment to the truth, and for his life of love and service. By Fergal Martin and Glynn MacNiven We at the CTS have always gone straight to our customers and sold leaflets, pamphlets and booklets in the parishes. In the beginning, this was managed by parish volunteers, who brought out a box of CTS publications to sell at the end of Mass. This is where the term “boxtenders” originates, a term that was used until very recently for the CTS parish reps. The Catholic community was thirsty for the information and encouragement the CTS provided, having been starved of affordable, reliable Catholic publications. As the CTS grew, we began publishing books as well as pamphlets, and arranging lectures and magic lantern shows (amongst other things), but always remained rooted in the parishes. Interest was such that in the mid 20th century boxtenders had barrows they pushed into the streets outside. Modern traffic makes this an impractical option for today. After a while, the churches began to have permanent bookracks for CTS booklets, so they could be accessed by people who came in during the week for Mass or to pray. It is particularly important that booklets, which can comfort or encourage, be available where and when they are needed. A few years ago CTS produced a series of Perspex racks which were lightweight, modern and enabled people to see the booklets easily. Generally, the sale of booklets worked (and often still does) on an honesty system where people paid by putting money into a box built into the rack. The early racks had to have different sized slots because the booklets were different sizes so there was great relief when, in the 1990s, CTS booklets became standard sizes. So many people have told us how they found their faith again or were helped through a crisis through picking up a CTS booklet from the back of their parish church. We are so grateful for our CTS Reps some of whom have been looking after their parish racks for over 40 years. They are true evangelists choosing the titles needed in their particular parish and following the liturgical year. Tom Rittner, general secretary of the CTS and a committee member at the printing of the CTS Bible in the 1960s. Old bookrack outside a church. CTS Onefifties By Fergal Martin and Glynn MacNiven To mark 150 years of publishing, the Catholic Truth Society released a series of rediscovered gems from its extensive archives. We have delved into our archives of thousands of titles and uncovered the huge range and diversity of CTS publishing across a century and a half. The CTS archive represents a unique and valuable resource chronicling the changing concerns of the Catholic population of the British Isles and beyond over the last 150 years. Exploring real issues faced by real people, CTS Onefifties take us from Victorian England through the two great wars; from the certainties of 19th century piety to the 1968 sexual revolution. The Onefifites include some great names – Robert Louis Stevenson, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Cardinal Newman, Ronald Knox, Robert Hugh Benson and Jean Cardinal Danielou; Catholic household names from the mid 20th century: Francis Ripley, Bede Jarrett, Vincent McNabb and Martin D’Arcy; and historians of the calibre of Herbert Thurston SJ, Christopher Dawson and Christopher Hollis. Fascinating pieces are included – an eye-witness account of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s robust defence of Fr Damien de Veuster’s heroic work among the lepers of Molokai. To give readers real value, one minibook often contains two or more original titles from different periods, which can make for fascinating comparisons. Here are great testimonies of faith, sparkling apologetics, struggles with the big and smaller issues of the day, as well as quaint and inspiring insights into the meaning of life with all its hopes and challenges; above all the story of faith that has shaped the lives of generations. • The Onefifties booklets are in classic CTS pocket-size format, and priced at 150p (£1.50) to mark the anniversary. Page 7
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Issue 70 - The Pilgrim - April 2018 - The newspaper of the Archdiocese of Southwark

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