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CaswallCatholicism

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 12 months ago

Edward Caswall & Catholicism

Contributed by Valerie Kerslake for St Peter's Church Millennium Festival, 2000

 

Caswall and Newman, who was 13 years older, never met at Oxford but did so later in the house of Lord Shrewsbury. Newman's writings had a profound influence upon Caswall even in his undergraduate days, and a poem Caswall wrote years later, Hail! fount of light! hail! energy sublime! was a tribute to his friend. By the early 1840s Newman was having doubts about his membership of the Anglican church and in 1845 began his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. He worked on it for nine months while his doubts about Catholicism disappeared one by one, and before reaching the end he had resolved to join the Roman Catholic church. Caswall, who had also been agonising about whether to leave the Anglican church, felt impelled to become a Catholic after he and his wife read the unfinished book four times, and following this momentous decision he resigned his living at Stratford-sub-Castle in 1846. Shortly afterwards they both went to Rome and were received into the Roman Catholic church.

 

The Caswalls at Mudeford

The Caswall's first home in England after leaving Stratford-sub-Castle was at Mudeford, close to Christchurch on the south coast, and it is from Mudeford on 14th May 1846 that he wrote the foreword to Sermons on the Seen and Unseen, published the same year. Sermons made popular reading in the 19th century, but the twenty-six in this volume must have been of particular interest to his former Anglican colleagues and friends, written as they were by one teetering between the Church of England and the Roman Church. One does not know how many of these friends he now lost; certainly some. Newman, after his conversion, found a rift between him and many of his former Oxford Movement colleagues and he never returned to Oxford. No doubt Caswall and others who converted to Catholicism about this time experienced the same loss. Crossing over to Rome was seen as a deeply shocking betrayal.

 

Edward Caswall continued to write and translate hymns, and in 1849 published Lyra Catholica which contained 197 translations from the Roman Breviary and other sources. But sadly, this was also the year in which his wife died of cholera while they were on holiday in Torquay, after only eight years of marriage.

 

NEXT: Caswall enters Birmingham Oratory

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