MANNING, HENRY EDWARD

Cardinal, archbishop of westminster; b. Copped Hall, Totteridge, Hertfordshire, July 15, 1808; d. London, Jan. 14, 1892. He was descended from a family of merchant-bankers. His father, William Manning, was a member of Parliament, and married twice. Henry was the youngest son of William's second wife, Mary, daughter of Henry Leroy Hunter of Reading. At 14 the boy entered Harrow Public School and matriculated (1827) at Balliol College, Oxford. There he distinguished himself in the debating society and in studies, taking a first-class degree in classics (1830). In 1832 he was elected to a fellowship at Merton College and was ordained to the Anglican ministry. The following year he was presented to the rectory of Lavington-with-Graffham in Sussex and married Caroline, daughter of the Rev. J. Sargent of Lavington. His wife died, childless, in 1837.

Anglican Career. Manning's original destination was politics. Briefly in 1831 he worked in the colonial office, but attractions of an ecclesiastical career proved irresistible. Soon he established himself as one of the leading Anglican thinkers of his day. Before reaching the age of 33 he became archdeacon of Chichester. His reforming influence was quickly felt. Life in a country parish had removed him from direct contact with the oxford move ment, but he kept in touch with its leading protagonists. At the same time he kept developing a keen perception of contemporary social evils. In his pastoral "charges" he attacked the abuses of wealth, the poverty of the agricultural poor, the lack of educational provision for the new middle classes, the practice of reserved family pews in the Anglican Church. He warred relentlessly against rationalism. Unceasingly he urged the clergy to personal sanctification. By 1848 a note of disillusionment had crept into the charge he delivered in defense of his creed upon Renn Hampden's appointment to the See of Hereford. This uneasiness spread until in 1851, as a direct result of the Gorham Judgment by the judicial committee of the privy council, he became a Catholic. The privy council had ordered the bishop of Exeter to appoint the Calvinist theologian George Gorham to the living of Brampford Speke despite the bishop's grave misgivings concerning Gorham's views on baptismal regeneration. This decision was palpable proof to Manning of the supremacy of the temporal over the spiritual in the Church of England.

Catholic Years. Manning was received into the Church (April 6, 1851) at the Jesuit Church, Farm Street, London. Within ten weeks Cardinal wiseman ordained him to the priesthood. In the autumn he proceeded to Rome, where he spent three years at the Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici, which he entered at the wish of PiusIX.

Wiseman in 1856 appointed Manning diocesan inspector of schools. In this, his first important post after conversion, he began the long, successful career in education that is perhaps his most permanent claim to fame. This career enabled him to organize a network of elementary schools throughout the Archdiocese of Westminster and to make the first provision for university education for Catholics, besides special training courses, chiefly in science, for Catholics of the middle class. Honors and work went hand in hand. By 1854 Manning had received the degree of D.D. from the Pope and had succeeded Dr.R. Whitty as provost of the Metropolitan Chapter. At the instigation of Wiseman, he established (1851) in England the oblates of st. charles. At the new church of St. Mary of the Angels, Bayswater, Manning was the first superior. Many "old Catholic" families manifested great jealousy of his rapid advancement. They also resented his endeavors to arouse Catholics from their long torpor. Despite these attacks, Manning always regarded his eight years as superior of the infant community as the happiest of his life. In 1860 Pius IX made him a prothonotary apostolic and domestic prelate in recognition of his staunch defense of the papal temporal power, at that time seriously threatened.

One of Manning's heaviest crosses was imposed by the titular archbishop of Trebizond, Dr. Errington, whose attacks on the Oblates flowed from a desire to remove from the diocesan seminary those professors who had entered the new community. Manning defended his group with spirit at Rome. Complicating the dispute was the poor relationship between Wiseman and Errington, his coadjutor, who had led the Metropolitan Chapter in open revolt against the archbishop. Manning, as provost and adherent of Wiseman, necessarily became involved. The incident caused much unhappiness and led eventually to Pius IX's removal of Errington from the coadjutorship.

Archbishop of Westminster. Two months after the See of Westminster fell vacant through the death of Wiseman (February 1865), Pius IX appointed Manning his successor. The London Times greeted the news with contempt; but the Pope's choice proved admirable, for Manning became one of the outstanding occupants of the see, which he occupied for 27 years. His constant effort was to make the Church more social-conscious and to bring English Catholics into the full stream of national life. He made friends with all the public figures of his day, men as diverse as William booth, John Burns, gladstone, Archbishop croke, ruskin, w. g. ward, and J. E. C. Bodley.

Social Work. Manning always claimed that to work for the good of the soul it was necessary also to work for amelioration of social ills. Many lived vicious lives, he held, because of evil social conditions. He considered education one of the best remedies. Much of his energy was devoted to promoting total abstinence, better education, improved labor relations, and social welfare in Ireland. His intervention in 1889 ended the Great Dock Strike. He rejoiced that he lived to welcome Leo XIII's social encyclicals immortale dei and rerum novarum.

Relations with Newman. The great aim of Manning's life was his determination to ally the new scientific liberalism to the Church and thus to Christianize it. This brought him into conflict with newman, a conflict never fully resolved. Newman's refusal to have anything to do with London University or with the Metaphysical Society, his distrust of a scientific education, and his sympathy with the old privileged Catholic families alienated Manning. The lack of sympathy between the two men cannot simply be explained as a clash of personalities. It owed more to the deep and fundamental philosophical conflict that divided them.

Religious Orders. Manning's desire to enhance the status of the pastoral clergy, many of whom were of Irish

extraction, led him into conflict with the religious orders and not least with the jesuits, whom he described as "a mysterious permission of God for the chastisement of England." Yet the papal document Romanos Pontifices (1881), which regularized relations between the English bishops and religious, was largely due to Manning's influence.

Vatican Council I. Manning was one of the leading figures in vatican council i. His activities in promoting the definition of papal primacy and infallibility have been criticized severely. His motivation was not personal ambition, but a conviction that a principle of authority was the only satisfactory antidote to the excesses of Continental nationalism, the attacks of French anticlericals, and the widespread decline in moral standards. He fought for his "principle of authority" with characteristic thoroughness, alienating many by his firmness. Later he defended the conciliar decisions against the attack by Gladstone.

In 1875 he was raised to the cardinalate. At the conclave in 1878 he supported from the start Cardinal Pecci, who emerged as Leo XIII.

Administrator, Preacher, Writer. Manning's administrative talents were of a very high order. As a society preacher he was always in demand. His writings were voluminous and sufficiently popular to be translated into several languages during his lifetime. The Eternal Priesthood, dealing with the rights and duties of the pastoral clergy, is still widely read.

Character. Manning has emerged from the pages of Lytton Strachey as a cold, ruthless schemer and an austere ascetic. His physical appearance was gaunt and emaciated, but the exterior was deceptive. Ruskin testified to his warmth of heart and to his qualities as a host in glowing terms.

Bibliography: j. e. c. bodley, Cardinal Manning and other Essays (London 1912). j. fitzsimons, ed., Manning, Anglican and Catholic (London 1951). a. w. hutton, Cardinal Manning (London 1892) contains complete list of Manning's publications. s. leslie, Henry Edward Manning: His Life and Labours (London 1921). v. a. mcclelland, Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence, 1865–1892 (New York 1962). e. s. purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, 2 v. (4th ed. London 1896).

[v. a. mcclelland]

Henry Edward Manning

The English prelate Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892) was directly responsible for the efflorescence of English Catholicism in the first half of the 20th century.

Henry Manning was born on July 5, 1808, at Totteridge, Hertfordshire, into a family that belonged to the Anglican High Church. He studied at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford, and became president of the Oxford Union in 1829. Graduating with high honors in classics, he entered the Colonial Office in 1830 but returned to Merton College, Oxford, in 1832 to receive Anglican orders. A deacon in 1832, a priest in 1833, an archdeacon in 1840, Manning did not become a Roman Catholic until April 1851.

As a curate at Lavington, Surrey, Manning married a daughter of his rector. When she died, Manning felt profoundly disenchanted and gave himself to a thorough reading of the early Christian Fathers of the Church. At Oxford he had known John Henry Newman, whose Development of Christian Doctrine he found to be an unassailable thesis justifying the historical development of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Roman Catholic Church. During a protracted visit to Rome in 1847, he had occasion to study the governmental structure of the Roman Church. His conversion was precipitated by a single incident. An Anglican divine, G. C. Gorham, was suspected of holding unorthodox views. The bishop refused to institute proceedings against Gorham, but the Privy Council of Laymen overruled this refusal. Manning, who abhorred all lay interference in ecclesiastical affairs, was shocked. After a short period he was received into the Roman Church by Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman in April 1851, ordained a priest 2 months later, and sent to Rome to study theology.

During his stay in Rome Manning was brilliant in theology, and he successfully cultivated the friendship and the esteem of Pius IX and his cardinals. Manning grew to appreciate the Roman style of government; he liked its authoritarian character, its secretiveness, and its immunity, and he developed an almost fanatic devotion to the papal cause. On his return to England, he became provost of the Westminster Cathedral Chapter. He founded a new religious congregation, the Oblates of St. Charles (Borromeo), and became its first superior. Manning's rapid rise in power and his obvious influence with Roman offices of the Vatican provoked much opposition to him, so much so that Cardinal Wiseman had to defend Manning by letter to Rome. Wiseman's preference, Manning's obvious capabilities, and his devotion to the papacy influenced the Pope, and he chose Manning as Wiseman's successor in 1865 to be archbishop of Westminster.

Manning's policy as archbishop was extremely ultramontanist: he wished to model the English Church as closely as possible on Rome. He was an extremely authoritarian man, was deeply liked by his priests, and brooked no opposition. He clashed with the Jesuits over jurisdictional matters and with Newman over doctrinal issues, particularly the authority of Rome. For Manning the hierarchy was all-sacred, could be overridden by no one except the pope, and deserved extreme forms of obedience. Manning participated very actively in the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), being one of the leaders of the "infallibilists" (the supporters of the definition concerning the pope's infallibility), but the final definition of papal infallibility did not live up to his extremist wishes.

Created a cardinal in 1875, Manning attained much prestige in England. He was a member of the Royal Housing Commission in 1884. In his own diocese, he had particularly cared for child education and for the welfare of the homeless, building schools, orphanages, and shelters. He mediated successfully in the great London dock strike of 1889 (a goodly number of dock workers were Irish Roman Catholics). But he aroused many bitter controversies and made personal enemies among both the hierarchy and lay people by his apparent high-handedness, his resort to backstairs influence in Rome, and his extreme devotion to Roman wishes. More than any other modern churchman of the English Roman Catholic establishment, Manning contributed to the development of the conservative character that English Catholicism showed until well into the middle of the 20th century. Manning died in London on Jan. 14, 1892.

Further Reading

Biographies of Manning include Arthur Wollaston Hutton, Cardinal Manning (1892); Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (2 vols., 1896); Shane Leslie, Henry Edward Manning: His Life and Labours (1921); and V. A. McClelland, Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence, 1865-1892 (1962). Manning is discussed in E. E. Reynolds, Three Cardinals: Newman, Wiseman, Manning (1958). For background see Georgiana Putman McEntee, The Social Catholic Movement in Great Britain (1927).

Additional Sources

Fitzsimons, John, Manning, Anglican and Catholic, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Gray, Robert, Cardinal Manning: a biography, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Newsome, David, The parting of friends: the Wilberforces and Henry Manning, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans; Leominster, U.K.: Gracewing, 1993.

Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England; New York: Penguin Books, 1986; New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989, 1988. □

Manning, Henry Edward (1808–92). Roman Catholic cardinal. Initially an Anglican and archdeacon of Chichester, he became attracted to the Oxford Movement and wrote Tract 78 of Tracts for the Times. Following the Gorham Judgement in 1851, he became a convert to Roman Catholicism, and (his wife having died in 1837) he was ordained priest. He founded the Oblates of St Charles Borromeo, and became archbishop of Westminster in 1865. He was ultramontane in his sympathies and a strong defender of papal infallibility. In 1889, he mediated successfully in a dock strike. He was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, but was reburied in Westminster Cathedral which he had helped to found.

Manning, Henry Edward (1808–92). Cardinal. Manning was born in Hertfordshire, son of a wealthy banker and MP. Educated at Harrow and at Balliol College, Oxford, he was president of the Union in 1829. An enigmatic and complex figure, he was an Oxford high churchman and gained ecclesiastical preferment rapidly, becoming archdeacon of Chichester in 1840, where he remained until his conversion to catholicism ten years later. The strong ideas expressed in The Unity of the Church (1842) helped him into a powerful position in English catholicism. He voiced strong support for the papal states and was the chief proponent of papal infallibility at the first Vatican Council (1869–70). From 1865 Manning was the second cardinal-archbishop of Westminster. He was, and remains, a contentious figure, accused by some of scheming and power-mongering. Yet he was much loved as a champion of Irish Home Rule and as the hero of the working classes in London. His intervention in the bitter London dock strike of 1889 has been called ‘the crowning act of his archiepiscopate’.

Judith Champ