ENGLISHMAN AT THE VATICAN

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27309, 27 March 1954, Page 3

ENGLISHMAN AT THE VATICAN

BIOGRAPHY OF A CARDINAL

[Reviewed by. T.J.L.} Cardinal Gasquet. By Shane Leslie. Burns Oates. 273 pp.

Sir Shane Leslie has given us a book of rich human interest, free from long wearisome quotations and extracts that make so many biographies tiresome to one who reads for interest rather than study. The main events in the progress of the Catholic Church in England from the Victorian era to modern times were so often a personal part of Cardinal Gasquet’s own life that the book’s main interest lies in just that. The young monk of Downside became Lord Abbot and he imagined that he had found his life’s work in restoring to England the tradition oi the Abbey Schools. Without his labour Downside, Ampleforth, Belmont, Buckfast and the other monastic schools of England would not enjoy the fame and renown that is rightly theirs today. It was largely through his efforts that the English Abbeys rose again in power and beauty. “From his haven in Rome he could see the great tower of Saint Gregory the Great from which rolled the thunder of bells across the pastures and meadows of the West. It was more than the ghost of Glastonbury. It was one of the great abbeys rearisen ... as though Glastonbury were restored, rebuilt for England.” Illness was the accident that changed that abbot schoolman into the abbot historian. He was driven to explore the past and to his great work of finding and publishing contemporary writings and reports previously inaccessible to Catholics. By this simple expedient he drew his co-religionists and his fellow monks from the cloud of false history and libel under which the Church had laboured since the religious changes of the sixteenth century. Gasquet’s knowledge of English history too, came to his aid in the controversy over Anglican Orders. The book treats the question with interesting details, recording the reaction of Pope Leo XIII, of Cardinals, Archbishops and noblemen. Gasquet was able to point out that the whole key to the dispute lay in the letters of Cardinal Pope, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, who saw he problem from a contemporary viewpoint with local knowledge of the facts.

In 1914, the red hat crowned Gasquet’s work to date, and for 15 years more he was to represent England in the Senate of the Church. During this time he showed himself essentially English, never comprehending Italian ways, not even mastering the language. Bewildered by Irish politics, and being typically English, he misunderstood the whole Irish Question: “He seemed quite to understand that the present troubles In Dublin are nothing.” Then druing the 19141918 war he was, in the beginning, the only voice of the Allies at the Vatican. “The British Missiofi to the Holy See . . . was certainly due in great part to the initiative of Cardinal Gasquet. Until its arrival he was virtually the sole representative of British interests in the Roman ecclesiastical world, and against him on the enemy side were two 1 men of considerable prestige. . .” It was due to him that England was given permanent diplomatic representation at the Holy See. “With the Armistice of 1918 Cardinal Gasquet found himself standing like a victor on the scene of an immense diplomatic battlefield. The lonely fight in the Vatican corridors had been won. His voice was now the most influential of the Cardinals jvith the Pope.” From then on the bitter struggles were over. “The figures Of two Popes come upon the scene—Benedict XV and Pius XI. Pius comes to tea to San Calisto a few days before he became Pope. The King and Queen of England are shown the Vatican Library. Diplomats pass and repass from England . . . the flower of the Foreign Office come and. Congregations of Cardinals meet over the perpetual business of the Church. . . The everlasting Folios of the Vulgate (which he was comissioned to revise) flutter under his fingers.” Death came quietly on April 5, 1929, and the mortal remains of monk, schoolman, builder, preacher, historian, diplomat and Cardinal were carried to his beloved England and laid to rest in the Abbey of Saint Gregory. The story in these pages is vividly and often amusingly told, but scarcely any mention is made of that inner spiritual life that was his and which gave form and colour and motive to all his activities.