Ecumenism in the 1860s

The 1860s were marked by a sense of crisis among many Anglicans who had sought a degree of rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church. There was a fear that if the ultramontane faction gained control of the Vatican, future hope for reunion would disappear. Many Anglo-Catholics therefore sought to do as much as they could to support the more moderate and ecumenically open faction. What success there had been in discussions with Roman Catholics was founded on a common front against the all-pervasive rationalism of the nineteenth century. Edward Bouverie Pusey, the undisputed leader of the Anglo-Catholic movement, played an important role in ecumenical activity in the mid-1860s, producing his first Eirenicon in 1865, and two further volumes in the years leading immediately up to the First Vatican Council, both of which took the form of letters to John Henry Newman. By the 1860s Pusey had grown too old and too busy to travel regularly, which meant that he had to rely on younger friends to promote his interests on the Continent: he did not work in isolation, but he encouraged others in their ecumenical endeavours and foreign trips. This chapter addresses one central figure in this collegial approach to ecumenism: Alexander Penrose Forbes (1817–1875), Bishop of Brechin, a younger colleague and protégé who remained one of Pusey's most devoted followers. Forbes, who, as a Scottish bishop had rather more time at his disposal than an Oxford professor, in some ways functioned as Pusey's eyes and ears in ecumenical encounters in the late 1860s.