LITMIR.BIZ

       NICHOLAS, CARDINAL WISEMAN

       First Archbishop of Westminster: ‘the only [English Roman Catholic] who had earned for himself a wide and lasting reputation for ability and learning.’

      15 FEBRUARY 1865

      WE REGRET TO learn that the long illness of his Eminence Cardinal Wiseman has at length reached a fatal termination. He died yesterday, at the comparatively early age of 62.

      Nicholas Wiseman was the son of the late Mr. James Wiseman, merchant, of Waterford and of Seville, in which latter city the late Cardinal was born on the 2nd of August, 1802. The family of Wiseman is one of considerable antiquity, and they appear to have had lands in the county of Essex since the reign of Edward IV. Soon after the Reformation Sir John Wiseman, who had been one of the Auditors of the Exchequer under Henry VIII, and was knighted for his bravery at the Battle of Spurs, acquired by purchase Much Canfield-park in that county. His grandson, William, who married into the noble family of Capel, afterwards Earls of Essex, was created a baronet by King Charles I in 1628, and a younger brother of the second baronet was Lord Bishop of Dromore. The title has continued in a direct line of succession down to the present time and is now represented by Sir William Saltonstall Wiseman, eighth baronet, who is a captain in the Royal Navy. From a younger branch of this family the late Cardinal traditionally claimed descent. His Eminence’s mother, whose maiden name was Strange, and whose family, in spite of large confiscations of their property under Oliver Cromwell, is still seated at Aylward’s Town Castle, in the county of Kilkenny, lived to see her son elevated to a Cardinal’s hat, and died full of years in 1851.

      Though born upon Spanish soil, young Nicholas Wiseman, when he was little more than five years old, was sent to England. He arrived at Portsmouth in January, 1808, in the Melpomene frigate, Captain Parker, and was sent, while still very young, to a boarding school at Waterford. In March, 1810, he was transferred thence to the Roman Catholic College of St. Cuthbert, at Ushaw, near Durham, where he remained until 1818. In that year he obtained leave to quit Ushaw for Rome, where he arrived in the December of that year and became one of the first members of the English College, then recently founded at Rome. In the next year he had the honour of preaching before the then Pope, Pius VII, and, having pursued with diligence the usual course of philosophical and theological studies, he maintained a public disputation on theology, and was created a doctor in Divinity July 7, 1824, shortly before the completion of his 22nd year.

      In the following Spring he received holy orders, and in 1827 was nominated Professor of Oriental languages in the Roman University, being at that time Vice-Rector of the English College, to the rectorship of which he was promoted in the year 1829. He had already distinguished himself, not merely as a theologian, but also as a scholar, for in 1827 he composed and printed a learned work, entitled Horoe Syriacæ chiefly drawn from Oriental manuscripts in the Library of the Vatican.

      Dr. Wiseman returned to England in 1835, and in the winter of that year delivered a series of lectures, during the season of Advent, at the Sardinian Chapel in Lincoln’s-inn fields. In the Lent of the following year, at the request of the late Bishop Bramston, then Vicar-Apostolic of the London District, he delivered at St. Mary’s, Moorfields, another course of lectures, in which he vindicated, at considerable length, the principal doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, and with such success, that the Roman Catholics of the metropolis presented him with a gold medal, commemorative of their gratitude and of their high regard for his talents and acquirements. These ‘Lectures’ were speedily followed by a ‘Treatise on the Holy Eucharist,’ which occasioned a theological controversy with Dr. Turton, the late Bishop of Ely, and by another work, in two volumes, entitled ‘Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion.’ In the Lent of the year 1837, when he happened to be in Rome, he delivered four lectures on the ‘Offices and Ceremonies of Holy Week,’ which were afterwards given to the world as a separate publication.

      In 1840 the late Pope Gregory XVI increased the number of his Vicars Apostolic in England from four to eight, and Dr. Wiseman was appointed coadjutor to the late Bishop Walsh, then Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, being at the same time elevated to the Presidency of St. Mary’s College, Oscott, near Birmingham. While there he took the deepest interest in the theological movement at Oxford which is associated with the names of Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey, and which has furnished Rome with such an abundant store of recruits. In 1848, on the death of Bishop Griffiths, Dr. Wiseman became Pro-Vicar-Apostolic of the London district, and subsequently was nominated coadjutor to Dr. Walsh, cum jure successionis on the translation of that prelate to London. Bishop Walsh survived his translation but a short time, and on his death, in 1849, Bishop Wiseman succeeded him as Vicar Apostolic.

      The next stage in Dr. Wiseman’s life is that which, as it has been more controverted than any other, so also is that by which his name will be longest remembered. In August, 1850, Bishop Wiseman was summoned to Rome to the ‘threshold of the Apostles,’ by his Holiness Pope Pius IX, who on the 29th of the following September issued his celebrated ‘Apostolical Letter,’ re-establishing the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, at the same time issuing a ‘Brief’ elevating Dr. Wiseman to the ‘Archbishopric of Westminster.’ In a private consistory, held the following day, the new ‘Archbishop’ was raised by the Sovereign Pontiff to the dignity of a Cardinal Priest, the ancient church of St. Pudentiana, at Rome, in conformity with the ecclesiastical custom, being selected by him as his title. His Eminence was the seventh Englishman who has been elevated to the hat of a Cardinal since the Reformation, his predecessors in this respect having been Cardinal Pole, Cardinal Allen, Cardinal Howard, Cardinal York, Cardinal Weld and Cardinal Acton.

      The name of Cardinal Wiseman was well known in that portion of the literary world which interests itself in controversy, as one of the most frequent and able contributors to the Dublin Review, of which he was for some years the joint editor. Among other productions of his pen which appeared in that periodical we may name his Strictures on the High Church Movement in Oxford, which were reprinted by the Catholic Institute about 20 years ago for circulation in a cheap form, under the attractive title of High Church Claims. His Eminence’s Essays and Contributions to the Dublin Review were collected and published, with a preface by the author, in 3 volumes 8vo. in 1853. It is also understood that he contributed to the Penny Cyclopaedia the article which treats on the ‘Catholic Church.’ Among the best known of his Eminence’s other controversial and miscellaneous publications are his Fabiola, a tale of the Early Christians; his Reminiscences of the Four last Popes; A Letter on Catholic Unity, addressed to the late Earl of Shrewsbury; A Letter to the Rev. J. H. Newman, on the Controversy relating to the Oxford Tracts for the Times; and A Letter addressed to John Poynder, Esq., upon his Work entitled ‘Popery in Alliance with Heathenism.’ To these must be added his Appeal to the Reason and Good Feeling of the People of England, respecting the Papal aggression, in which he endeavoured to prove that the matter at issue was merely a question relating to the internal and spiritual organization of the English Roman Catholics and in no sense a temporal measure, or one which involved any practical assault on the freedom of Protestants.

      To the London world and to the public at large Cardinal Wiseman’s name was rendered most familiar by his frequent

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