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The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780-1850 . By Chinnici Joseph P.. Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos Press, 1980. xii + 261 pages. $24.95.

The Patmos Press has made another of its recent contributions to Roman Catholic studies by publishing this study of Joseph P. Chinnici of the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley. The revision of his D. Phil. Dissertation at Oxford, it uncovers the English contingent of a scarcely acknowledged international movement, the "Catholic Enlightenment." Together with a handful of French studies and with Leonard Swidler's Au/kldrung Catholicism 1780-1850 (Scholars Press, 1978), it puts us in the position of being able to gauge the significance of the first Catholic response to full-blown modernity which accepted the passing of "Christendom" (the political aspect of the "medieval synthesis") with equanimity. This is a revisionist undertaking, since the movement in question was swamped in the nineteenth century in the romantic tide and, within the Catholic Church, by a militant Ultramontanism. It has been customary, therefore, to overdraw the Catholic Enlightenment's limitations and neglect its positive aspects. The author puts the writings of John Lingard, the priest-historian, in the context of the short-lived English Catholic Cisalpine tendency. Lingard agreed in all characteristic points with the somewhat older fellow alumni of the English College at Douai who were prominent in the defense of civil rights for Catholics in the late eighteenth century. These traits, summarized several times, especially in the Preface (pp. x-xi) and Epilogue (189), included a rethinking of doctrine about grace and church to accommodate and improve upon Locke's ideas on limited government, tolerance and separation of Church and State. A parallel with John Courtney Murray a century and a half later is not out of place. Lingard exhibited some of the shortcomings of Enlightenment rationality, such as the assumption that what is authoritative in church teaching and practice can only be that which was delivered originally at the hand of the apostles. On the other hand, he was a paradigm of good ecumenical sense and historiographical probity in a time when such virtues were only spottily acknowledged as such. Every scholar interested in modern Catholicism will be grateful for the existence of this study; every library supporting Catholic studies should have a copy. For a young student who is not accustomed to the uses of a historical monograph it would presuppose too much familiarity with the era to be profitable. Experienced readers, however, can, with the aid of the very satisfactory index and bibliography, watch the first act of the drama of Catholicism after the Tridentine era take place in a cultural setting closely related to our own.