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No 163 - 2000
Page 2
Bishop Austin O'Neill OSB 1841-1911
President of the EBC 1888-96 - Teacher, Benedictine President and Bishop
by Abbot Geoffrey Scott OSB
THE life and affairs of a great Dowegian, Fr Austin O'Neill, as recorded in his papers and voluminous correspondence, are of great importance for throwing light on the English Benedictine Congregation at the turn of the century, because he remained at its centre throughout his life. His gift for making loyal friends means that we are able, through the letters, to continue to enjoy their company from the time we first come across them as young monks and nuns until the time when they are elevated to senior offices in that Congregation. Father Austin always remains behind them, gently encouraging and wisely directing. His life and career thus provide a colourful context in which to position the rather tetchy constitutional wrangling surrounding the adaptation of the English Benedictine Congregation to a growing, contemporary, established Catholic Church.
The closest we get to Fr Austin is through the biographical note of his contemporary, Father Cuthbert Doyle [1842-1932]. Doyle's life has close resemblances to that of O'Neill. They were from similar backgrounds, trained together, and Doyle was influential as Novice Master at Belmont when O'Neill was Junior Master there. He tells us that O'Neill had a tall thin figure, with a broad forehead and prominent nose dominating his face. 'Upright and gentle in his movement, he was clear and gentle in his spirit. He smiled patiently, but somewhat wearily at the world. Something of a listless manner hardly allowed one to see the vigour and persistence of the character beneath... He was a thoughtful philosopher, keenly alive to literature and art, especially to music, very capable of mind; yet so simple and retiring that you had to seek his opinions'.
Early Life [1841-1863]
O'Neill was born on December 22, 1841 and baptised with the name of Peter in January 1842 at the old church of St Mary, Edmund Street, Liverpool, by the Edmundian monk, Austin Wilkinson. His younger brother Charles was to become Prior Oswald O'Neill of St Edmund's, and his sister Anna, a Faithful Companion of Jesus, first at Birkenhead and later a zealous missionary in Canada. According to his secretary, Romanus Bilsborrow, Peter was steered towards the Church by his mother. Nevertheless, he was also attracted as a boy to the sumptuous liturgy at the Benedictine Church in Liverpool where he made efforts to arrive early to hear the canticle Venite, Adoremus Domino sung movingly before High Mass, and where 'the beautiful harmonies of Haydn's and Mozart's masses transported a soul, so young and impressionable, to great heights'. When he was nine, his parents died, perhaps in the typhus epidemic of 1850. Their death was an event which 'seems to have overshadowed his after-life, to have filled him with a spirit of gentle sadness, and given him a tendency ever to look upon the dark side of life's problems'.
After early schooling locally in Liverpool, Peter and Charles were sent by their guardians to be educated at St Edmund's College, Douai, in 1855. Doyle describes O'Neill at this time as being 'a tall, delicate, nervous looking boy of about fifteen'. The Prefect of Studies at that time was Father Benedict Scarisbrick, later Bishop of Port Louis, 'a tall, spare man, taciturn, unbending in his views of, and in his method of dealing with boys whose hearts he filled with terror rather than with love'. It was Scarisbrick's successor, the affable musician Father Cuthbert Murphy, who attracted Peter and rapidly discovered his musical talents. Shortly, Peter was playing the chapel organ at all public services, earning at the age of sixteen, the sobriquet 'Paddy Mozart'. His thorough knowledge of plainsong allowed him to play 'with a smoothness and a variety of accompaniment which charmed even learned musicians'. Those who knew him admitted that 'his interior conscience was like a veiled sanctuary which no one might enter', but 'music for him had accents and expressions which surpassed the restrained limits of language; and the intensity of his devotion could be seen in those melodious harmonies with which he accompanied the words of the psalms. His English essays always had in them some queer conceit, some quaint idea which excited the mirth of the form and of the professor. He avoided rhetoric, but his public utterances were always calm and logical, almost like a proposition in Euclid in the clearness and consecutive reasoning'.
In 1858, having completed most of his studies, but while still a schoolboy, Peter was sent to the Congregation's common novitiate and house of studies at Belmont, near Hereford, to serve as organist, and was heard performing by that distinguished master of plainsong, and sanitary reformer, Sir John Lambert, a highly accomplished musician, who commented: 'He will do; that is excellent'. After some months at Belmont, Peter was clothed as Brother Austin, for St Edmund's, on November 29, 1860. In 1902 he remembered complaining of the frequent hunger he endured in that strict novitiate. 'We had to go from dinner-time to breakfast next morning, a period of seventeen or eighteen hours, with no break but tea and bread and butter at 7pm. For growing youths it was not enough. Dinner was spoiled for those far down the tables, by the system of carving. The youngest (and the hungriest) had to wait ten minutes or more'. A year later, he began his studies, and was naturally attracted to Father Bede Vaughan's philosophy lectures, although he would have preferred these to have been more solidly Thomist and less 'eclectic'.
Teaching at St Edmund's, Douai 1863-1879
Brother Austin returned to Douai in August 1863. He was solemnly professed there on December 15, 1864 by Prior Stanislas Holahan. He taught at first in the Lower School, but 'small boys were always a difficulty to him. He was unable to rivet their attention or to keep them in order', and he moved to the Higher School, where he felt at home, teaching Latin and Greek. In April 1867, ordination by Bishop Bernard Collier followed. At Douai, he was Sub-Prefect of Discipline [1866-67] and Prefect of Studies [1868-77]; in 1873 he became Subprior. In 1868 he composed his Jubilee Ode to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Edmundians settling at Douai. He was a gifted and sensitive musician and under him, the choir of the college achieved 'a high degree of efficiency, and he exploited his musical talent in inventing operettas for performance by the boys'. During the following years, he wrote operettas, settings for poems to be performed at the Christmas festivities (in those days pupils did not go home for Christmas) and much liturgical music, including accompaniments for the Cassinese tones, the Saturday night litany of Our Lady, and the lovely melody to the Carol, See, Amid the Winter's Snow, all still sung at Douai.
Professor at Belmont, 1879-1888
When a vacancy for a professor of philosophy occurred at Belmont in 1878, O'Neill was sent back there as professor. His career takes on a more serious aspect from this time. As a teacher of philosophy, 'nothing gave him greater pleasure than to have a thoroughly good objection put before him', and this single-minded determination to find the right answer, even if it required becoming a patient agent of reconciliation, was to be reflected in the way he acted in the Congregation's later Constitutional disputes. He became a Canon of the Cathedral Chapter of Newport and Menevia in 1879 (Belmont Abbey Church was at that time the cathedral for the diocese).
His philosophy course at Belmont was up-to-date. He seems to have been a committed neo-scholastic at this time. Besides his teaching work, he gave retreats to priests, religious and schoolboys, and was a promoter of devotion to the Holy House of Loretto. He was also Junior Master, responsible for the general care and welfare of the younger professed monks in training in the House.
By the time he reached Belmont, a dispute about the true nature of the EBC was coming to a head. Two distinct trends in its development during the second half of the nineteenth century had given rise to this: the growth of larger parishes and the strong provincial structure which oversaw them; and at the same time the growing self-sufficiency of the monasteries, and the desire for independence and monastic reform. The reformers wanted to do away with the old provincial system and attach parishes to monasteries, while their conservative opponents wished parishes to remain independent of monasteries, which might interfere in their affairs. In other words, was the EBC a missionary body in which the monasteries acted as seminaries for the missions, or a real monastic congregation of autonomous reformed monastic houses?
The English bishops, too, were uneasy with the prevailing situation, for the Benedictine parishes, of which by this time there were more than fifty, were outside their control, although operating within their dioceses. They had petitioned Rome, and in May of 1881 through the Bull, Romanos Pontifices, they had managed to establish a degree of control over the Benedictine missions. Moreover, the Pope had ordered a visitation of the Congregation, which was carried out by the Prior of Monte Cassino in the summer of that same year. At this time O'Neill was in favour of retaining the traditional system, but called for 'an exact return to the observance of our constitutions'; he looked forward to a time when all mission work would be centred on Mission Priories.
In 1883, as a result of the visitation, Rome issued the rescript Cliftonien, which set up an EBC Commission to revise the Constitutions, counselled that the Missions become more monastic, insisted that monastic superiors live in their monasteries, and advised the reform of the course of studies at Belmont. This last became the immediate task of O'Neill.
As the engine of reform began to gather speed, O'Neill found himself in the control room through his election, at the General Chapter of 1883, as Third Definitor of the Regimen (that is, a close assistant to the President of the Congregation). This Chapter carried out most of the recommendations of Cliftonien, including that of establishing a commission (heavily biased towards the conservatives) to revise the Constitutions The President at this time was a fellow Edmundian, the conservative-minded Anselm O'Gorman, and O'Neill found himself trying to work with him and at the same time hold the middle ground between reformers and traditionalists.
The revision of the Constitutions was completed by 1886, and approved by the Pope the following year. O'Neill realized that these were too biased towards the conservatives, and that no effective changes had been made sufficient to bring about greater harmony in the Congregation ('tinkering,' as he said, 'is useless'), especially since the reforming party had been strengthened by the election of one of their group, Edmund Ford, to be Prior of Downside. As O'Neill saw it, the 'tap-root of our chief troubles' lay in the relations between the Houses and Provinces, and between the Houses and Belmont. The disconnection between Houses and Provinces, caused by the Reformation, meant that the Provinces begrudged supporting the Houses financially, while the Houses thought the Mission were 'a mere escape from Monastic observance, a temptation to be lax'. He recommended, therefore, that each House had its own Province, Downside the South Province, Ampleforth most of the North Province, and Douai a new Province of St Edmundsbury, keeping its current missions and taking on the missions in the eastern counties. It was not yet time, in his opinion, to have 'Prior and Provincial pulled into one as Abbot'.
His continuing support for the old system of Provinces, albeit modified, upset his old acquaintance, Cuthbert Butler, later Abbot of Downside. In their correspondence, in answer to one letter, Butler, commented sadly: 'Somehow or other your letter seemed to me to have a different ring from those you used to write to me five or six years ago; I did not seem to recognise the Fr Austin with whom I used formerly to speak so intimately & to find so sympathetic on these matters'.
President of the English Benedictine Congregation 1888-1896
O'Neill had returned to Douai in 1886, owing to ill-health and became Subprior in 1888, only to be elected President General by General Chapter on July 23, 1888. To mark this appointment, he was granted the honorary title of Abbot of St Albans. During his time as President, he usually resided at Ampleforth. Those eight years were to be the most turbulent of his life, thanks to the problems he inherited. Dom Justin McCann, the Ampleforth historian, best summarises Austin O'Neill at this juncture: 'In respect of the controversies regarding the reform of the system of the Congregation he was not unalterably attached to the old regime, but may be described as a moderate, of open mind, who was prepared to carry out such reforms as Rome desired. His appointment as President at this juncture was of great value to the Congregation, for although he did not in his eight years of office achieve a final solution of the constitutional problem, yet his tactful rule, marked by a strong distaste for ruthless methods, provided a transitional period wherein it became generally clear that reform was inevitable'.
President O'Neill quickly brought peace to the English Benedictine nuns of Stanbrook Abbey, near Worcester, who had been in difficulties over a plan to adopt the Solesmes Constitutions, which included the election of Abbesses for life. This had for years been fiercely resisted by a minority of the nuns. He signalled his favour of the new Constitutions and supported Abbess Dubois, who was blessed as abbess for life in November 1895, with O'Neill present and wearing, with the local Bishop's permission, a mitre. In October, he was bringing to an end another inherited problem when he agreed, at Parkminster, that Fort Augustus, by then separated from the EBC, should be allotted some Congregational funding. In November 1888, he travelled to Rome to clarify the position of the Congregation. Here he was dismayed to find that the Pope, whom he met on December 20, 1888, wished all the missions to be worked from the monasteries and not from the provinces, as the conservatives had managed to insert among the clauses of the new Constitutions.
Amid continuing conflict, O'Neill called another General Chapter, this time at Ampleforth in July 1889, at which he urged decisiveness if the Congregation's affairs were not to be taken out of its hands and controlled by Rome. 'Our body', he told the fathers, 'is neither a Benedictine Congregation nor a Modern Province. The system is bad, and if you ask me where is the flaw, I say at once that it lies in the abnormal position of our Missions, which puts us in the fatal position of a kingdom divided against itself'. But this Chapter was inconclusive, and so O'Neill trekked wearily once again to Rome. After a delay of some months, during which two Consultors studied the case, Rome promulgated the bull Religiosus Ordo, which ordered the abolition of the Provincial system, the division of the missions among the three monasteries, Downside, Ampleforth and Douai, and a revision of the Constitutions. The Bull implied that essentially, the EBC was monastic rather than missionary in character, and in approving of it, perhaps O'Neill conceded that the future lay with the reformers.
The conservatives nevertheless continued to be obstructive, straining O'Neill's conciliatory nature to its limits. Finally, in July 1892, a General Chapter, ordered by Rome, was called at Downside to begin the task of Constitutional reform. It must have been disheartening for O'Neill to see that the Commission elected to draw up these new Constitutions was made up of conservatives.
Their first submission in February 1893 revealed a very conservative draft, so O'Neill, fearing that Rome would reject it and take matters to itself, formulated an alternate set of Constitutions in 1894, which was circulated, and which infuriated the drafters. Rome realised that EBC divisions were still deep and therefore ordered the Abbot Primate, the head of the whole Benedictine confederation, to make a Visitation of the EBC in the late summer 1895. It was his report to Rome in December 1897, after O'Neill had resigned from the Presidency, that formed the basis of the 1899 Bull Diu Quidem, which raised the monasteries to the rank of abbeys, settled election procedures and revised the powers given to General Chapter. President. O'Neill had resigned in 1896 and returned to St Edmund's, 'a somewhat tired and disheartened man', as McCann later wrote, 'who escaped from the conflict to which his patience and conciliatory temper had failed to find a solution'.
Throughout this turbulent period, O'Neill still found time to travel, attend to the other affairs of the Congregation, give retreats and write articles for the Douai Magazine.
Bishop of Port Louis, Mauritius, 1896-1909
His release from the burdens of office was, however, to be short-lived. The diocese of Port Louis in Mauritius had had English Benedictine Bishops for a number of years, and the see was at the time vacant. It was Bishop Hedley who forwarded O'Neill's candidature for this post to the Congregation of Bishops in Rome. He was appointed in June 1896, thus relinquishing the post of President General before his full term was completed. Portraits of him, presumably in his new pontificalia, were soon despatched to his friends. His diary of his pre-consecration retreat at Malvern records his 'terrors' at being offered a bishopric; it dwells on the clauses of the oath to the pope, and lists points for meditation in typically Ignatian fashion. He was consecrated by Cardinal Vaughan, assisted by Archbishop Scarisbrick and Bishop Hedley, at Belmont on June 29, 1896, taking the motto "prodesse magis quam proesse" (It is better to be of use than to dominate). He arrived in Mauritius with his secretary, and successor as bishop, Romanus Bilsborrow, in October 1896.
During his time as bishop, O'Neill was active in three areas:firstly in Mauritius, in what was his first experience of pastoral work; secondly, in the English Benedictine Congregation, where, despite his being overseas, his advice continued to be sought and the ties of friendship maintained; and, thirdly, his involvement, as a Benedictine bishop, in the international affairs of the Order.
On O'Neill's appointment as bishop, letters of congratulation, acknowledging his 'valuable services and edifying example' flooded in from members of the Congregation. Abbots wrote to him, and all the nuns of Stanbrook, including one who penned an encomium beginning 'Hail Pontiff! Th'anointed hands outspread'. The Abbot Primate, Hildebrand de Hemptinne, admitted the Congregation's loss when O'Neill was appointed bishop: 'Indeed, contradictions were many, but I really believe you have done good work'. De Hemptinne continued to inform O'Neill of progress towards Diu Quidem, and when it eventually appeared in 1899, he praised O'Neill's contribution: 'God will give the proper share of merit to each one and I feel sure that your portion will be larger indeed than mine. You stepped in at a critical moment and the whole of the present development is a consequence of it'. This document, as has been seen, established in its essentials the structure of the EBC as we know it today, thus bringing to an end the years of contention and dispute that had marred the history of the Congregation in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Even Bishop Hedley, that redoubtable champion of the old Anglo-Benedictinism grudgingly admitted to O'Neill that for all his objections, 'it has brought peace...I have been trying quietly to get people to accept it all ex animo '.
Other letters of 1896 from English monks, and written in the context of his episcopal appointment and the establishment of Sant' Anselmo, demonstrated concerns about a possible centralisation forced on the EBC. One mission father wrote: 'I never talk about these matters to the brethren in these parts. They prefer a fool's paradise...What will happen to our dear old English Benedictine Congregation?' Another topic of popular debate was Catholic education. Hedley's letters to O'Neill are full of the wrangling preparatory to the passing of the 1902 Education Act and of the establishment of chaplaincies in Oxbridge. St Edmund's, Douai, was, at this time, extremely worried about its settlement in France, and from 1901, we find Bishop O'Neill protesting to the English Government on its behalf against its threatened expulsion from France. He was unsuccessful, and the community transferred to the cramped conditions 'for 70 boys, not 120, the present number' at Woolhampton in 1903.
Away from EBC tensions, O'Neill in Mauritius had been able to establish cordial relations with the Governor, who thanked him for his profession of loyalty to Britain during the Boer War. The Bishop entertained British naval officers, composed patriotic addresses to the King and Emperor, and ordered the Te Deum on Feasts of St Louis to please the French. Circulars, published casus conscientiae, and visitations followed. Plague was a frequent visitor to the island, and a number of his circulars detail how clergy were to react following an outbreak. Much of his modest income was given to the poor in Mauritius; he was heard to say that 'he was a poorer man than he had been as President of the English Benedictine Congregation'. O'Neill, whose interest in educational philosophy stemmed from his Belmont days, set himself up as a champion to secure the Catholics an 'atmosphere' within schools in a colony predominantly Catholic but ruled by a Protestant government. He had the typical ghetto-mentality of Catholics of his time: 'However friendly we may be to individual non-Catholics', he wrote to a disciple, 'we must remember that their religious organisations are, in their very essence, hostile to the Church of Christ. They exist for the purpose of mutilating His laws'.
In international Benedictine affairs, O'Neill followed closely the development of the College of Sant' Anselmo in Rome. The Primate would write to him: 'At Sant' Anselm's things go on right enough...It is always the money question'. Numbers there had dropped by 1905, when de Hemptinne told O'Neill that he had pleaded with the English Congregation to send more young monks to study. O'Neill was invited to the consecration of the Church at Sant' Anselmo, but was unable to attend. De Hemptinne reported the event to him: 'It was a comfort with me to witness all the newly appointed and blessed Abbots of the English Congregation taking part in the proceedings. The Abbot of St Edmund's (Lawrence Larkin, first Abbot of Douai 1900-1904) was extremely kind and open.'
Titular Bishop of Isionda, 1909-1911
O'Neill left Mauritius for England in May 1909, finding the climate oppressive and believing his mind was failing and that he was not up to the task. On August 2, 1909, he tendered his resignation to Propaganda, 'sick, confused in mind & weak in body', and finding administration distasteful. Hedley always felt O'Neill exaggerated his 'nervousness'. From the age of thirteen, O'Neill admitted, he had lived in monasteries and never had charge of temporal affairs, nor had he experienced the parochial ministry. He felt he had a timid character, and had been wearied as President by the struggles of the Congregation Once in England, he went first to Ormskirk, to stay with his brother, who was himself to die in June 1910, and then sojourned briefly in the Monastery at Great Malvern, returning to Woolhampton when the Douai juniors left Malvern. Here, he taught dogma and returned to composing liturgical settings, and to revising his operettas. He had been recommended for a titular archbishopric, but he was in fact appointed as titular Bishop of Isionda in Perge, a lesser title, which he preferred. The new administrator, later bishop, of Port Louis, his secretary, Romanus Bilsborrow, then persuaded him to return to Mauritius on the suggestion that it might improve his health. His old pupil, Cuthbert Butler, wrote in farewell at the end of May 1911: 'You know all I would say of the affectionate remembrance I retain of our relations since the old days at Belmont & how much I feel I owe to you of the most valuable things I have'. He and his travelling companion, Father Raphael Ludford, were welcomed back to Mauritius at the end of July 1911, but O'Neill's cancer returned, and following an unsuccessful operation, he died November 6, 1911. After a Requiem Mass in the cathedral attended by a thousand people, the coffin was carried by a body of Creole workers on foot to its temporary resting place (see photograph below), from where it was later transferred to the cathedral in Port Louis.
Perhaps Dom Basil Whelan, the Benedictine annalist, should have the last word. 'He will always be remembered for his gentleness and repose of manner, which stood out the more in that his lot was cast in an unusually stormy period in the history of the Congregation, when feelings and sometimes tempers ran high on points of constitutional controversy. sTo him the E.B.C. owes much.
IndexAn English Monk in India by Fr Edmund Power OSB
On Sabbatical in Dublin by Fr Finbar Kealy OSB