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.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

"An absorbing study of Wilfrid Ward. . . . Scotti is extraordinarily well-read in the wider history of his period, as well as in Ward's Roman Catholic background—the erudition of the work is most impressive, especially in its biographical aspect of summarizing briefly the lives of the contributors to the Dublin. . . . The work offers an interesting perspective on the public life of England for the period it surveys, and a critical view upon the scope and limitations of the Dublin's coverage of it."—Sheridan Gilley, University of Durham

"Out of Due Time is full of fascinating facts about the intellectual climate of Edwardian and early Georgian England—and, specifically, about the Catholic contribution to that climate as expressed in the pages of the Dublin Review under Wilfred Ward's editorship." — Joseph Pearce, First Things

"Scotti's study of Ward's editorship gives the reader an absorbing portrait of the era. He also uncovers interesting vignettes about many of the now-forgotten figures who dominated Church life in the years leading up to the First World War." — David McLaurin, The Tablet

"Out of Due Time, by Dom Paschal Scotti (Catholic University of America Press, 2006, $69.95), is a study of Wilfred Ward and the Dublin Review, perhaps the leading Catholic journal in the English-speaking world." — Robert G. Lowery, Irish Literary Supplement

"Wilfrid Ward would have good reason to be pleased with this magnificently-written and informative examination of his tenure (1906-16) as editor of the Dublin Review, the leading Catholic journal in the British Isles. . . . After two superb chapters on the earlier life of Ward and the previous history of the journal, [the author] carefully studies its contents in seven chapters, extensive excerpts being provided from many of the articles. . . . The editing of the book is flawless, and the work of

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