His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore
His Eminence Cardinal Sancha y Hervas, Archbishop of Toledo
His Eminence Cardinal Logue, Archbishop of Armagh
His Eminence Cardinal Ferrari, Archbishop of Milan
His Eminence Cardinal Mercier, Archbishop of Mechlin
A word about Cardinal Mercier from Belgium.
ReplyDeleteIn the 1930's, he participated in the "Malines conversations" which was an attempt to reconcile the Anglican Church with Rome. The dialogue was conducted primarily with Lord Halifax and unfortunately by-passed the now Cardinal Bourne of Westminster (himself from a convert family of Anglicans).
What these conversations indicate is an astonishing ignorance of continental Catholicism in respect of the progress of the Catholic Church throughout the Anglo-Saxon World including of course the UK and its Empire plus presumably, by extension, the progress of the Church in the United States of America (even if ethnically Catholics in the latter case were not strictly speaking "anglo").
If anything, Bourne and his fellow Catholics were something of a mild irritation to Mercier. Who revealed further, a total ignorance of the 'broad church' model as praticed within Anglicanism, believing that Anglo-Catholics like Lord Halifax were the norm.
It is my contention that similar attitudes to Mercier's prevailed at the Second Vatican council and American Bishops, in particular, bore the brunt of it.
We are talking about men representative of the most generous, wealthy and powerful nation on earth whose troops had liberated vast tracts of Western Europe being dictated to by French and German theologians.
The Malines conversations are interesting introduction to this dynamic for Cardinal Bourne found himself similarly insulted, compromised and humiliated less than 30 years before that.