"The Benefit of All Seven Sacraments"

The splendid Stuart Reid writes:

A couple of weeks ago I visited Cardinal Manning’s tomb in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral, and about time, too. I have been devoted to Manning for quite a little while now, thanks to Robert Gray’s masterly biography, but I have been tardy about paying my respects.

The tomb is in St Edmund’s chapel, the only Gothic part of the otherwise Byzantine cathedral. Above it hangs Manning’s fading, tassled cardinal’s hat; alongside it, and directly beneath the high altar, is the tomb of Cardinal Wiseman, Manning’s predecessor and the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. It was said of Wiseman (but never of the ascetic Manning) that he had a “lobster salad side”, and kept a good table.

I knelt at Manning’s tomb and kissed it. I placed a small crucifix against the marble, so that I now have what I think is known as a tertiary relic; and I prayed after a fashion. Later I felt a bit embarrassed by my conduct; it is not the sort of thing that comes naturally to me. Still, since Manning was above all else a Roman, I thought it appropriate to go through what I take to be Roman – or anyway Irish – motions of piety.

Henry Edward Manning has the distinction of being the first, and only, Cardinal Archbishops of Westminster to have had a wife. He married in 1833 when he was an Anglican rector, but his wife died four years later. Manning’s love for his wife never deserted him. Even after he converted in 1851 and became a Catholic priest he apparently kept her prayer book beneath his pillow and a locket of her hair on a chain about his neck.

To the outside world, however, he seemed a cold fish, and he has never had an especially large fan club among the great and the good. Hilaire Belloc regarded him as “much the greatest Englishman of his time”, but many of his contemporaries had misgivings about his ultramontane convictions.

He and Cardinal Newman, his fellow convert, were not not always on the best of terms. Both were great English Catholics, but Newman was Mary to Manning’s Martha, and each man was capable of being unkind about the other. It is hardly surprising therefore that a taste for Manning is not always accompanied by a taste for Newman.

All the same, one wonders whether Manning may not one day be raised to our altars alongside Newman. There is no sign of it yet. Perhaps the Lytton Strachey hatchet job in Eminent Victorians is so firmly lodged in the national psyche that many find it hard to shake the feeling that Manning was a nasty piece of work. All the more reason to press his case, then. Manning had a very keen social conscience, and was a great champion of Catholic social teaching. He was loved by poor Londoners for the part he played in ending the dockers’ strike in 1889 – on terms favourable to the dockers.

When he died in January 1892 hundreds of thousands of mourners lined the route his coffin took from the Brompton Oratory to Kensal Rise cemetery. It was the biggest funeral London had ever witnessed, and this only 63 years after Catholic Emancipation.

What an example he was, and what an inspiring saint for our age he might make. At a time when Catholic social teaching is being challenged on the Right as well as on the Left, Manning reminds us that at the heart of that teaching is the conviction that life is sacred. In a world in which death and destruction are the staple of television news – and of television entertainment – that teaching has never been more important.

To be sure, Manning was not perfect, but as Robert Gray says in his biography, “if Henry Manning is not saved 70 times seven times, God help the rest of us”. I might add here that Gray is no hagiographer. On the contrary. His elegant, engaging and witty book is often waspish about the cardinal, and even occasionally about our Holy Religion (Gray is not a Catholic), but the Manning who emerges from its pages is all the same a hero.

The biography is out of print, but you can find it, as I did, on Amazon. My copy comes from the Calcasieu Pubic Library, Lake Charles, Louisiania, and was last borrowed on July 2 1992.

In London, there are trade union banners with Cardinal Manning's image on them.