ABSTRACT
During the middle years of the decade, an issue arose that drove a wedge between the English liberal Catholics themselves, and between some of them and Cardinal Vaughan. In 1896, William Barry, a liberal Catholic priest who was conversant with both modern literature and ancient metaphysics, argued that the example of liberal American churchmen attracted young liberal French Catholics because of their own hope for reconciling French Catholicism with the democracy of the Third Republic. The problem in the eyes of other English liberal Catholics was that ecclesiastical authority "lions" were not allowing some liberal Catholic "lambs" to go about their work in peace. Gasquet and Bishop could freely pursue their researches into monastic history and the history of liturgy, two relatively noncontroversial areas within the Church. But Hugel was interested in Biblical criticism, and the Jesuit George Tyrrell was soon to encounter problems with ecclesiastical authorities in publishing theological writings related to his pastoral work.
