Toasting the Pope—Cardinal Newman and a forgotten controversy
Does an article from The Rambler provide the solution to one of the fiercest Cardinal Newman controversies?
Editors’ Notes
Cardinal John Henry Newman is frequently condemned for his famous comment in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, published in 1875. It was a defence of English Catholics against the charge that Vatican I rendered them the mindless slaves of a foreign ruler (the pope) and that they were therefore dangerous to the nation.
At the end of a chapter on conscience, he wrote:
“I add one remark. Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please,—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”1
As we have argued elsewhere, the implication that this text shows a disloyalty to the papacy or an embrace of liberalism is, while perhaps understandable for those unaware of the context, grotesquely unfair.
The issue of “toasting the pope” had significant political implications, well beyond the knowledge of most today.
In 1958, following criticism of Cardinal Wiseman for toasting the pope, an article in Catholic periodical The Rambler with a few passing paragraphs to the topic. This was then addressed at length a few months later, in 1959.
It even seems possible that Newman was involved, to some degree, in these articles, and that nearly two decades later, he had these articles in mind. For these reasons, and for the sake of Newman’s good name, we are making these texts available and with commentary published simultaneously:
The paragraphs from the 1858 article follow the fuller exposition in the 1859 article.
Toasting the Pope
From
The Rambler, January 1859,
New Series Vol. XI, Part LXI, pp 55-63
Headings and some line breaks added
Some remarks that we made in November on drinking the Pope’s health have attracted some attention, and raised a discussion which tempts us to resume the subject, in order to contribute some elements to the argument, without any pretence of giving a positive decision for or against the practice.
One opinion: religious toasts profane the sacred
The opinion advocated by the ablest of our weekly contemporaries is that if we were beginning afresh, the Pope’s health should decidedly be omitted because the toast is a remnant of barbarism, which will soon be forgotten altogether.
But having introduced it, and, in spite of the indignation of Protestants, having given it precedence over the Queen’s health, to withdraw now would be a sign of weakness, a confession that we had occupied an untenable position, a cowardly compromise, which would render us contemptible in our own eyes and in those of our critics. Proper pride and enlightened self-respect, therefore, would alike protest against such a course.
On this, we observe, first, that it seems admitted that toasts are at least vulgar, absurd, and barbarous; we will add that they are stained with the original sin of a pedigree that fathers them upon a debauched and drunken age, whose lineaments they still preserve. Toasts may be no evidence of debauchery and drunkenness now; but the taste that approves them is founded on habits and customs that had their root in such vices.
An admiration of the Madonnas of Caravaggio is consistent with the greatest purity and gentleness in the individual; yet it is not less true that art follows the moral type which the spirit of the age approves, that a polyphemic art is the legitimate expression of “muscular Christianity”; while spiritualised art, which aims at expressing purity, modesty, patience, and tranquility, is the genuine expression of an age which intellectually and socially approves, if it does not always voluntarily exercise, those virtues.
So with toasts; they have on them the impress of an age of rioting and excess. The smell of tavern life exhales from them; and good taste at least feels repugnance to mixing them up with things for which our enthusiasm ought to be chastened with reverence.
We put down religious toasts in the same category of vulgarisms, only redeemed from profanity by their stupidity, in which we place Mr. Spurgeon’s startling illustrations of Christian truths or heresies, the comic business at the Exeter-Hall May-meetings, the gross carnal excitement of an American revival, or such tavern-signs as the In het hemel-ryk,—“the kingdom-of-heaven tap,”—at Malines, or The Prodigal’s Return (to wit, from temperance to strong drink) at Battersea.
If this is the case, if we have made a mistake in occupying a position too inconsiderately, consideration will be out of place if it prevents our yielding now for fear of consequences. The reign of religion is one that comes not with noise and shouting and clinking of emptied glasses on loaded tables. It gains ten times more by gracefully acknowledging a mistake than by sticking to it for fear of appearing to give way. Humility does not advance by the way of pride
By yielding in such a case we overcome,—we overcome first ourselves, and then our enemies
By sticking to a fault, we are overcome; we first allow our better feelings to be conquered by our pride, and then we find ourselves weakened by occupying an untenable position that cannot do us any good, but exposes us to continual attacks.
The dilemma into which this vulgarity has placed Catholics
But in this case, the matter is not quite so simple. The “Pope’s health,” and its position in the series of toasts, is not a thing to be argued only on its own merits, but also on the principles of which the practice has been made the symbol. When Catholics get together as Catholics, the first thing they look for is a convenient form of expressing their Catholic enthusiasm.
When they dine together, they naturally adopt the dinner forms usual in England and allow their enthusiasm to express itself in toasts. And until we can provide another form for this expression, to suppress religious toasts is so far to suppress the expression of enthusiasm. But public dinners are got up for the very purpose of expressing this feeling on some point connected with religion; to cut out the toasts is to expunge the part of Hamlet from the play.
Again, though among us there are some quiet souls who would withdraw all that relates to religion from the rough and coarse company of toasts and clap-trap after-dinner oratory, yet in the mass we are not so refined; we cannot subsist without embodying our principles in sensible signs. We must have our meetings and our means of expressing our feelings. All Catholics, then, except the small minority just referred to, wish to toast the Pope in their convivial réunions.
But here a divergence manifests itself. Among us, there may be some who forget the spiritual, the eternal, the divine character of the Church, and think of it only as an external organization, secondary in time and in importance to the social organization of society and the State.
The rest of us may view it as the divinely-appointed organ and expression of religion and truth; and as such, universal, separate in its sphere from any other possible human society, and supreme in interest and importance above all. Each of these views manages to express itself by the place which it assigns to the toast of the Pope.
Now then, are we prepared either to give up all expression of enthusiasm for our religion, or to postpone our religion to our family and country?
If not, how can we either omit to toast the Pope; or toast the Queen before him, as Protestants, and perhaps some few Catholics, require us to do? It is evidently impossible unless we can find another way of expressing our feelings and our principles.
Realism about the duties of Catholics in a non-Catholic country
But it would be well worth finding such another way, both for our own sakes and for the sake of our opponents, with whom our present practice engages us in so many trivial quarrels. Social life is founded on forbearance and mutual respect; not on any accommodation of principles to suit our neighbour’s whims or tyranny—for how can we expect to retain his respect, by throwing our own self-respect to the winds?—but on a certain reserve in the expression of offensive principles, when such expression is not a duty.
Now, as it is not a duty for a Catholic to plunge into a religious argument every time he enters an omnibus full of Protestants, so neither, perhaps, is it always the duty of meetings, whose proceedings are sure to receive every publicity through the press, to assume and maintain the attitude of continual hostility to the rest of the society in which our lot is cast.
The terms of silence and the terms of expression must be, to a certain extent, a matter of compromise, which moderates the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified, unseasonable manifestations; a compromise that respects, not the prejudices of the Pharisee, who pretends to be scandalised at our very existence, and who would not be content with any moderation on our part short of self-immolation, but that respects the invincible ignorance and the traditional suspicions of the mass of our countrymen.
Whatever is traditional should always be dealt with tenderly; reason itself runs into the mould of tradition, and forms prejudices which cannot be conquered by the common battery of arguments, but require the patient insinuation and development of new and true principles—prejudices which must be won, not by the coarse opposition of rival toasts and convivial rhetoric, but by the magnet of example and stimulants of appeals to conscience.
What does it really mean, to toast the Pope?
It may be worth while to analyse the signification of this toast; for though such discussion may not lead us straight to any determination, yet the vacillation of knowledge, and the alternations of a mind that has weighed both sides of an argument, are both wiser and more tolerant than the dogmatism and narrow-minded self-assertion of ignorance.
The ignorant man’s conclusion may be right, and the conclusion of the student, who in the course of his argument is sometimes swayed to one side, sometimes to another, may be right or wrong. Yet, after all, one is the conclusion of ignorance, the other of knowledge; and the wrong conclusion of the student is much nearer to wisdom than the right conclusion of the ignorant.
When we toast the Pope, we have either a personal or a public and official meaning.
If we toast the office of Pope, it is either in a religious or political sense.
‘The Pope’ as a political toast
If we mean the toast to be a political one, our objection to it as a religious toast falls to the ground; but not without still graver objections against it. Toasts, like all other manifestations of opinion, are either objective or subjective:
Objective, when we intend to express our admiration of a thing, an institution, or a person, quite independently of our connection with it
Subjective, when the thing spoken of is only a symbol of our state of mind, a test of our party feeling, a declaration of our own thought.
As a subjective political toast, “the Pope” is only a badge of party, a challenge to Protestants, an intended insult to their prejudices, a military banner displayed to mock their threats and to show our contempt for their power. As such, it has no more sense than trailing our coat-tails through Donnybrook, and inviting any gentleman to tread on them at his peril.
As an objective political toast, the Pope’s health can only mean an admiration of his government in his own states, or an affirmation of his right over other countries, and an aspiration that he may soon have his rights.
The first sense [admiration of his government in his own states] is one about which Catholics are not, and need not be, agreed. There are among us those who, like Mr. Maguire, can see nothing but wisdom in the organisation of the government of the Roman states; nothing but prosperity in their development; nothing but peace and safety in their prospects.
But all Catholics do not, and, what is more, are not bound as Catholics to take this view. And, in fact, most English Catholics, accustomed to English freedom, do not approve of the continental régime, common to Rome with most other continental states. Most of us are far from thinking the Roman government as good as our own. If we defend the government, it is at the expense of the people; as the friends of Louis Napoleon defend his tyranny by maintaining that all Frenchmen are half tigers, half monkeys, and must be treated as such.
So we defend the Italian governments at the expense of the honour and good sense of the Italians; we say it is good enough for them, or as good as they will permit to exist. We declare them to be unfit for self-government, unable to appreciate or preserve freedom. Therefore we can scarcely insist on drinking the Pope’s health with this meaning.
Neither can we mean the toast as an affirmation of his political rights over other States, or an aspiration that he may speedily recover them. The Pope’s political rights over princes were voluntarily ceded to him by the princes themselves, and afterwards retracted. He was by European consent the arbiter of national disputes, and the judge of international quarrels. His rights, which were never very secure or firm, were afterwards completely reversed by the act of the representatives of those who had ceded them. Princes would no longer submit to his decision; so they had to cede to revolution and the block.
Despotisms, which refused to be tempered by papal remonstrance, are tempered by assassination: imprisonment, banishment, and the scaffold have taken the place of the penances which Popes used to impose. Princes have renounced his fatherly rod, and have been taken in hand by the people. We do not pronounce any opinion on this change; it is a fact of the age; politically the Pope has no rights out of the Roman state: if we assert he has, we assert what is notoriously false; if we hope he may have, we set up our wishes against the emphatic voice of history.
Our only sensible plan is to accept the situation, and make the best of it.
“The Pope,” says Dr. Brownson, “as temporal prince, has no more authority over me than the Emperor of Austria.”
It is a fact; and all proof that he once claimed such authority, that he gave away Ireland, that he deposed and restored John, and offered Philip II the throne of Elizabeth, is too little to show that the authority either exists or can be claimed now.
Besides, do not the majority of our clergy, and all our men and public men, abjure this doctrine solemnly on oath? We have no right to assert it in their presence by toasts, and thus to involve them in the suspicion of insincerity, even if we are weak enough to make ourselves the enthusiastic partisans of a departed doctrine in private assemblies, where none but men of like opinions congregate.
As a political manifesto, then, the toast of the Pope’s health is senseless, except we mean it as a party watchword; and then it only ceases to be senseless to become offensive—offensive, as making what should be the symbol of peace into the shibboleth of war; and offensive, as dragging into party questions a person who, as the common father of the faithful, should be above all party.
‘The Pope’ as a personal toast
To toast the Pope with an intention purely personal, is not likely to be the practice in this country.
But in 1846 and 1847 the Italian and other radicals threw up their caps and shouted Evviva Pio Nono; but could never be induced to cry out Evviva il Santo Padre; because they hated the office and loved the individual, and only so long as they thought him the instrument of their views.
With us just the reverse holds good. We may, and in the present case we do, esteem and love the man for his virtues; but it is always the Pope whom we reverence and obey.
But Protestants, when they hear us first toasting “his Holiness Pope Pius IX,” and then “her Majesty Queen Victoria,” are naturally misled into the idea that as their loyalty to the Queen is personal, and as they esteem not her only, but her rule and the whole constitution, with her at the head of it, quite otherwise than they esteemed George IV and the same constitution and government when he administered it, so we expend our ecclesiastical loyalty on Pius IX and his entourage of Cardinals, ready at the same time to criticise and abuse Clement XIV, or Pius VII, or Urban VIII, or the successor of Pius IX; keeping our affections for certain persons, certain measures, or certain leanings in the papacy, and not for the papacy itself.
If this were so—if we toasted Pius IX. in a way in which we should not have toasted Gregory XVI—if we spent our affections on the man Ferretti, or Ganganelli, or Borghese, and not on the successor of St. Peter and Vicar of Christ—then assuredly we should have no right to toast him before the Queen; for he could, in that case, represent only a line of ecclesiastical policy, or a philosophical or dogmatic bias, whereas the Queen represents to us social life, the safety of families, public justice, civil freedom, and the defence of our country—more important objects than the ebb and flow of theories and the changing lines of administration, even though they affect the organisation of the Church.
‘The Pope’ as a religious toast—and the inappropriateness of such toasts
As we cannot, then, mean “the Pope’s health” for a political or a personal toast, it remains that we intend it as a religious toast; as such it is only just tolerable, not because our chief veneration is not due to him, but because the toast is a very objectionable mode of testifying that veneration.
But if the Pope’s health is a bona-fide religious toast, then let us consider what is intended by it. It is drunk as a method of manifesting and exalting our enthusiasm towards our religion, and the Holy Father who is the head of it. It is an article of our creed translated into the language of our cups.
So far as it is a mere confession of faith, it is superfluous; because as a religious toast it can only be drunk in exclusively Catholic assemblies, where the fact of being present is quite as good a general profession of the same dogma.
So far as it is an instrument of exalting our feelings and drawing out our enthusiasm for our faith, let us consider whether the peculiar kind of enthusiasm brought out is not rather fitted for “muscular religion” than for Christianity; whether it is not rather the flushed face, the quickened pulse, and excited brain of the dancing dervish, or the bacchanalian, than the sober resolution of the Catholic.
The vexed question of the order of the toasts
But again, the place that the Pope’s health occupies in the series of toasts has a religious significance; it testifies to our belief that the pontificale is over the regale, and serves as a protest against all lax Catholics who disbelieve that truth.
It may be so; but then it may be questioned whether it would not be better to wash our dirty linen en famille, and to avoid discussing our own differences in a way that is sure to gain the attention and to invite the partisanship of those without.
To drink the Pope’s health first is our way of attaining the politico-religious object of putting lax Catholics to shame. Surely we could find some other way of paying this delicate compliment to our own brethren (who, mistaken as they are, are still within the pale of the Church), without bringing down on ourselves the whole body of the Protestants of England, who mistake our intention, and take that for a political manifesto, directed against themselves, which we, it appears, only mean for a religious protest against some of our fellow-Catholics.
What are the alternatives?
Still, it remains that, in spite of all drawbacks, we ought on all public occasions to make profession of our loyalty to the Holy Father, and to testify our enthusiasm towards him in a way at least as remarkable as that in which we testify our loyalty to the Queen, our veneration for the lord mayor, or our enthusiasm for the hounds. And how is this to be done but by toasting him?
Certainly, the answer is difficult. It might be said, Why not divide the sphere of religion from that of politics and life, and refuse to use the same modes of manifestation for the two? And it might be replied, that we cannot live two distinct lives in this world; our nature cannot be divided against itself; the same feelings of love, reverence, and gratitude, which move us in our earthly relations must move us also in our heavenly relations.
And the same feelings in both their uses must be ministered to by the same organs: we have not different knees to kneel to the Queen and to kneel to God; we have not different tongues to shout for Prince Albert and for the Pope; we must be content to make the same outward manifestations in both cases, leaving the intention to determine their fundamental difference.
Nevertheless, as toasts are now considered a remnant of barbarism, and are likely soon to be relinquished in well-conditioned public meetings, as they are already in private society, might it not be better to loosen the cords that unite them with our religious feelings, and find some other way of expressing them?
Some concrete suggestions for alternatives
We own that it is hard to find a substitute for them. We suggested that the Pope might come in with the grace: as we thank God for a good dinner, we might as well thank Him also for having made us Catholics; as we pray for the souls of the departed, we might as well pray for the spread of our religion and the success of the Holy Father’s wishes.
The chairman, too, might make it a rule to say that as religion comes before politics, the Pope must come before the Queen, if his health is drunk at all; but that as it would be indecent to propose as a toast “the Catholic Church and the See of St. Peter,” or “the Vicar of Christ,” so the name “Pope,” which is only another word for the same thing, does not agree very well with wine and spouting, and is more honoured by being simply mentioned with reverence than by being roared out, even with all the honours.
But if we do still retain the toast, we might try the effect of changing the mode of giving it. The word “Pope” has come to be disgusting to Protestant Englishmen; they attach to it a mixed idea, partly pretender to the crown, partly revolutionary agitator, and the rest crafty upholder, for political purposes, of a superstition he does not believe. Hence, when we toast the Pope, we are traitors; when we toast him before the Queen, we are regicides and cannibals. “Pope” means in England what “political parson” means in America.
“Holy Father,” “Vicar of Christ,” “Successor of St. Peter,” are terms that are not yet spoiled; if we toasted them, people would see more clearly that we only intended to profess our faith, and not to insult the English constitution. The only question is for ourselves, whether these terms are not as yet too religious in sound to be profaned by union with a toast.
As to the question, whether to retire altogether, and to give up the toast without any substitute—it might seem an inglorious compromise; but then, it is to be remembered that compromises, even in religion, are of continual occurrence.
Every concordat is a compromise; the excommunication of every one that attempts to convert a Mahometan in Syria is a compromise; every concealment, every reticence of Catholics under stress of penal laws, is a compromise; the withdrawal of the Litany of Loretto from our public worship, and the making our chapels look as much like Protestant places of worship as possible, was a compromise now happily no longer needed. The Church is continually making compromises with regard to the externals of religion, when less harm results from the breach than from the observance of certain positive laws.
The compromise of leaving out the toast would be nothing as important as this: we should relinquish no principle, weaken no conviction; we should simply give up an irrational practice, that we adopted without consideration, to express a truth that might be as well expressed in another way. Still, until another way of expressing it is invented and adopted, we are far from deciding dogmatically that the toast should be given up.
From The Rambler, January 1859. See below for the paragraphs from the November 1858 article on the same topic.
Further Reading:
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The Confessional
From
The Rambler, November 1858
New Series Vol. X, Part LIX, pp 302-3
The article begins by listing the different objections, complaints and prejudices which Englishmen held towards the Catholic Church. The below extract comes from the first page.
… We have no objection to the Catholic religion as a religion, says the lawyer, only we English have an invincible prejudice that your rulers make religion the pretext for political meddling: we do not think you mean it, but you are tools of deep conspirators; and whenever we hear of your drinking the Pope’s health before the Queen’s, or showing too much hot blood in defending foreign despotisms, our suspicions are confirmed in spite of ourselves, visions of "priestcraft" and "deposing powers" flit before our eyes, and we feel more alienated than ever from that which, in another aspect, had exerted a powerful attraction over us.
Most men like Popery for some quality or other, though numbers find some objection to it as a whole. These objections neutralise each other by their variety, as each man giving himself the first place gives a majority to none, but leaves each nowhere; and the Catholic system, in which each man finds some positive peg to hang his admiration on, like Themistocles, who was universally voted to be second best, is proved by an easy arithmetic to "have the cry."
We do not intend to speak here of the political prejudices against us; only we observe in passing that the difficulty about the precedence of the Pope’s or the Queen’s health seems to us both dishonest and puerile.
There are many Catholics who do not happen to think that the relations in which we stand to the Holy Father can be placed in the same category as those in which we stand to the Queen, the royal family, the army and navy, the ladies, the hunt, and the ocean telegraph, but who would yet be the last to quarrel with anyone who thinks differently and chooses to retain the obnoxious pre-eminence of the toast.
Englishmen in general, if they really understood the sentiments of Catholics, would be just as indifferent. If we drink religious toasts at all, they must come first. When both are present, we must place the supernatural before the natural, religion before politics, Pope before Queen; in principle, Protestants do the same when they say, not "State and Church," but "Church and State."
We think of the Pope as the embodiment of our religion, the head and symbol of Catholicity; not as a foreign potentate who wishes to obtain a political footing in England, and to use the Catholics as his tools.
Not that we should grieve if the toast was altogether omitted; for the same reasons of reverence which prevent us drinking first "to the glory of God," might excuse the omission of all mention of the Catholic Church and Pope, unless they could be brought in decorously with the grace.
The rest of the article goes on to discuss the English attitude towards “The Confessional” and the sacrament of penance.
John Henry Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, 1875, p 261. Published in Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered, Vol. II. Longmans, Green, and Co., London, 1900. Available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/section5.html