The row between Bishop Herbert Vaughan of Salford and the Jesuits became a cause celebre in the 1870s and was only settled eventually in Rome after the personal intervention of the pope. While the immediate issue was the provision of secondary education, at stake were key questions of authority that had troubled the English Catholic community for centuries; the solution played a major part in determining the relationship between the newly restored bishops and the Religious Orders. This volume brings together for the first time all the relevant English and foreign archival sources and enables the reader to take a balanced view of the whole issue. The documents and letters [including Vaughan's private diary] paint an intriguing and not always flattering picture of the principal combatants. Bishop Vaughan [later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster] was a determined champion of his own and his fellow-bishops' rights as diocesan bishops. Against him stood the leaders of the Jesuit Order, jealous of their traditional privileges and heirs to centuries of service to the English Catholic community. By the 1870s that community was beginning to develop a commercial and professional middle class who demanded secondary education for their children. Many of them looked to the Jesuits to provide it and they claimed the right to do so, irrespective of the wishes and rights of the bishop. The source material is accompanied by an introduction placing them into their social and historical context, and explanatory notes. It forms an important addition to an understanding of the nineteenth-century English Catholic Church.

Father Martin John Broadley is a priest in the Catholic diocese of Salford; he also lectures at the University of Manchester.