A Scotsman’s Midnight Train Journey To The Catholic Faith

By JAMES MONTI

Good books have a way of taking us on totally unexpected journeys. Quite recently I had an experience of this sort with a small volume dating from 1570 in the rare books room of the seminary library where I work as a book clerk.
Entitled Axioms Concerning the Sacraments of the Church, this slender volume of less than ninety pages is a concise summary of the sacramental theology of St. Thomas Aquinas arranged in ninety-six axioms drawn from the saint’s Summa Theologiae by Augustine Hunnaeus (1521-c. 1578), a theologian and professor at the University of Louvain.
Biographical details of Hunnaeus’ life are scant, yet from his pen we learn the “one thing necessary” about who he was. In his introduction to a complete edition of the Summa Theologiae published in 1575, Hunnaeus stresses the need of preserving authentic texts of the Church fathers and doctors in order to refute false readings of these venerable writers that were being circulated by heretics, some of whom were even physically destroying Catholic libraries:
“Since therefore we see the enemies of the Catholic faith inflamed with so eager a desire to destroy the ancient monuments [manuscripts] of the Fathers of the Church, and to blot them forever from the eyes and souls of men (because they hinder the dissemination of heretical dogmas), that cause (in my opinion) ought to have great weight in exciting all partisans of the Church, and in particular Bishops and Cardinals, to preserve them with all possible care and vigilance from perishing.”
It was in the course of searching the Internet for more about Hunnaeus and his book that I stumbled upon a curious mid-nineteenth-century English translation of his volume, added as an appendix to an 1867 work entitled, A Digest of the Doctrine of St. Thomas on the Sacraments. It became clear from reading the introduction that the author of this Digest, who identifies himself on the title page as a “missionary priest of the diocese of Brechin” named William Humphrey, was a vociferous and ardent admirer of St. Thomas and of Hunnaeus’ summary of the Summa’s sacramental doctrines.
Yet I sensed that this was not the work of a Catholic priest. While my surmise proved to be true, it was by no means the end of the story.
After searching the Internet to learn more about who William Humphrey was, I found another book authored by him, an 1896 autobiography entitled Recollections of Scottish Episcopalianism. There was something entirely new about his name on the title page: “Father Humphrey, SJ,” with the Jesuit “IHS” logo below it. Fr. Humphrey begins his account by relating how just a few months earlier in a secondhand book shop he had stumbled upon a copy of the aforementioned Digest of the Doctrine of St. Thomas on the Sacraments, sitting side by side with a second book he had also written shortly afterward, A Digest of the Doctrine of Saint Thomas on the Incarnation. Unlike the sacraments volume, the digest on the Incarnation bore no name whatsoever on the title page; as Fr. Humphrey puts it, “Hereby hangs a tale” (Recollections of Scottish Episcopalianism, London, Thomas Baker, 1896, p. 1).
The unexpected discovery in the bookshop had brought back for Fr. Humphrey vivid memories of the most decisive day in his life and the strange course of events that had led up to it. Born into a Scottish Episcopalian family in 1839, William Humphrey studied for the Episcopalian ministry at the College of the Holy Ghost on Scotland’s Isle of Cumbrae. It was at this college that Humphrey first laid eyes upon the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas. He continued his divinity studies at Trinity College in Glenalmond, having procured his own copy of the Summa to take with him.
It was at Glenalmond that Humphrey experienced an episode that brought before his eyes the absurd contradictions that High Church Episcopalians entangled themselves in to justify staying out of the Catholic Church despite their advocacy of many Catholic beliefs. In the course of a theological lecture, the warden of the college affirmed as Episcopalian doctrine the real and objective Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. During the Q and A session that followed, Humphrey asked the warden whether in light of this the Church of England did thereby acknowledge the propriety of Eucharistic adoration. The warden replied:
“By no means. The Church of England teaches two truths — the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament — and that no adoration is to be given to the Sacrament….It follows therefore that her teaching is that, while Christ is really present in the Sacrament, He is present in such a way that He is not therein to be adored” (ibid., p. 14).
In relating this convoluted assertion that left him as a theology student reeling, Fr. Humphrey adds with a touch of wry humor, “This utterance threw some light on the Warden’s habitually leaving a litter of crumbs on and about the communion-table after his celebration of the Lord’s Supper” (ibid.).
There is a deep humanity about Fr. Humphrey’s narrative in speaking of his former co-religionists, frankly relating both their good qualities and their failings with great charity. Of this very same warden who had baffled him with his strange Eucharistic reasoning, Fr. Humphrey speaks with gratitude, for it was the warden who lent him — “on condition that I should not show it to any of the other students” — St. John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua (ibid.).
In addition to reading Cardinal Newman’s book, Humphrey consulted other works by English converts to Catholicism. He was beginning to develop an understanding of the Catholic faith, albeit a defective one, and went so far as to speak to the Episcopalian bishop of Brechin, Dr. Alexander Forbes, about his growing attraction to the Catholic Church and the questions it raised for him:
“The Bishop heard most patiently what I had to say. He then remained for some moments apparently absorbed in thought. He broke his silence by saying slowly, and as if soliloquizing, and following by himself alone the current of his thought — ‘What a marvelous creation is the Roman Church — so strong at its extremities, and so rotten at its center.’ Turning to me, he then said most feelingly: ‘My dear fellow, they will make you miserable….You, dear friend, have been captivated by the beauty of a glorious ideal. I cannot give you hope that you will find the ideal that has presented itself to you realized in the Church of Rome. The unity that you imagine, does not exist in the Roman Church’” (pp. 15-16).
Thinking himself naive in the face of Dr. Forbes’ claims of a deeper familiarity with “the Church of Rome” than himself, Humphrey stepped back from his Catholic leanings and settled into the sedate life of an Episcopalian parson in the village of Cove, on the Scottish coast. Yet here too, St. Thomas Aquinas was still the most cherished companion of his thoughts, interplaying with the bucolic beauty of his surroundings:
“The Summa was my daily bread. It was always lying open on the table before me, and when I looked up from its pages, there lay before me the German Ocean. The outlook from my study was like that from the stern of a ship…from the window I saw no land, but only the sea before me…sometimes the sea was studded with a fleet of fishing-boats” (p. 18).
Humphrey speaks with great sympathy of the fishermen and their wives with whom he became deeply acquainted (tragically, years later, 189 of these fishermen were to perish in an 1881 storm at sea). He noticed certain customs of theirs that he would come to recognize as the tattered remnants of traditions handed down from their long-dead Catholic forebears. He noticed too that there was some mysterious harmony between the simple lives of the fishing families and his ongoing study of Aquinas. It was at this time that he produced the book, A Digest of the Doctrine of St. Thomas on the Sacraments.

A Rail Journey

Not long afterwards, Humphrey was given a new assignment, a parsonage in Dundee. It was while there that he received word from a friend in London that he had entered the Catholic Church. The two had an exchange of letters about this in which Humphrey politely told his friend that he himself “had never felt less inclined to leave the Church of England for the Church of Rome than [he] did at that moment.” His friend’s response to this was brief but cordial, ending with the comment that he had “a strong feeling” that Humphrey was not going to die outside the Catholic Church (pp. 40-41).
As Humphrey read this letter while taking his breakfast, it scarcely fazed him, and afterward he headed to his desk, where he resumed checking the proofs of his second digest of St. Thomas’ theology, with the Summa, as usual, lying open before him. Yet try as he may, he could not focus his mind on the task at hand. His friend’s concluding remark was beginning to haunt him.
His inner turmoil grew to such a fever pitch that he resolved to head for London by train that very night to talk this out with his friend. It was during that rail journey in the dead of night that quite suddenly Humphrey’s tormented soul at last found rest:
“When the night was at its darkest the day began to dawn. Slowly from out the chaos in my mind of contending Churches — Roman, Greek, and Anglican, and parties in conflict within the latter — there rose up the Divine idea in all its beauty of the one and only Church of Christ — the one Body with the one Spirit — as not only one and undivided, as in the ages before the division between East and West, but as one and indivisible. This I now knew that it ever was, and ever would be, if for no other reason than because it ever must be….The supreme moment — which is the first moment after the last moment of unbelief — had come — the grace of God had been vouchsafed to me — and with actual faith I at last believed in the One, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church of God, as the one visible and indivisible Church of Christ upon the earth” (p. 42).
It was in London that Humphrey was received into the Catholic Church by Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, and at the cardinal’s invitation began studies for the priesthood. As a Jesuit priest, Fr. Humphrey penned a series of works explaining and defending the Catholic faith. The zeal of Augustine Hunnaeus three centuries earlier to preserve unsullied the words of Thomas Aquinas had borne fruit in guiding a great Scotsman to the Catholic faith.