Out Of Due Time : Wilfrid Ward And The Dublin Review

Wilfrid Ward (1856-1916), the great biographer of Cardinal Newman, was a leading Catholic voice in English society during the early twentieth century. Friend to many of its major intellectual figures and a frequent writer in its most prestigious journals, he was also the editor of the Dublin Review, the leading Catholic journal in the English speaking world. Founded by Daniel O'Connell and Nicholas Wiseman in 1836, the Dublin Review was edited by Ward from 1906 to 1916, and under his guidance it entered its golden age, attracting the best of England's Catholic writers and much attention outside the household of faith. Under his editorship, the journal featured well-known contributors such as G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, Herbert Thurston, C. C. Martindale, and Robert Hugh Benson.

Ward's lifetime goal was the reconciliation of the Church with the mind of the age, and his editorship of the Dublin was the culmination of his efforts. It was a time when the English Catholic Church had reached a certain maturity and depth that made her universalistic ambitions a real possibility. It was also a time of conflict within the Church about how far she could adapt herself to modernity. It was while he was editor that the Modernist Crisis erupted―a crisis with which he was intimately involved.

Following the tradition of the great literary quarterlies, the journal discussed every aspect of human endeavor, and Out of Due Time offers a fine opportunity to view the best of the Catholic mind in an extraordinary period. It is a book for both the specialist and the general reader. Unsympathetic to extreme views, Ward was much misunderstood in his own time and is generally ignored in our own. This volume seeks to give him and his work due recognition.

Paschal Scotti, O.S.B., is a teacher in the Portsmouth Abbey School and chairman of the Christian Doctrine Department.