Caroline’s book

“In this booklet my dearest wife used to write her prayers and her meditations…All the good deeds I could have done, all the goodness in me, I owe it to her”. With these words, written at the twighlight of his life, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892) remembered Caroline Sargent, the young woman with whom he had been happily – albeit briefly – married during his minister as Anglican pastor before converting to Catholicism. Jonathan Luxmoore evoked on the latest issue of the English magazine “The pastoral review”, the figure of this woman who exerted a profound influence on the personality and the spirituality of the future cardinal.From marriage to death. Fourth of the five daughters of John Sargent, the evangelical rector of Lavington and Graffham, two villages under the South Downs, Caroline met Manning in January 1833, when, after having been ordained Anglican pastor, he was appointed curate by the rector Sargent. “I’m afraid that the ladies in the home will make you rest idle all day long”, he had been warned by his Oxford tutor, future Cardinal John Henry Newman. The two immediately established a connection, and when a few months later, Caroline’s father died unexpectedly, Manning understood that that was his place. After the marriage, celebrated in the month of November, four happy years began, harshly interrupted by Caroline’s lung flue, which soon developed into Tuberculosis. “I’m trying to put everything in the hands of God – the young husband wrote to Newman – but it’s very, very hard. No man knows what it means to see his heart’s desire vanish little by little”. On July 24 1837, at the age of 25, Caroline died “like a child, without suffering or becoming delirious”, Manning told Newman. The conversion. The young pastor remained in Lavington for 14 years, during which he was appointed archdeacon of Chichester “and offended Newman with an anti-papal sermon in 1843”, Luxmoore recalled. In 1847, two years after the conversion of Cardinal Newman, he had two private audiences in the Vatican with Pius IX. Here, he realized “the vitality of the Catholic Church”, where, despite he had been indicated as future archbishop of Canterbury, he was officially received in 1851. After two months he was ordained priest. In 1865 he was appointed archbishop of Westminster and ten years later he was appointed cardinal. A friend of Cardinal Newman, Luxmoore recalls, “ironically defined Caroline’s death the most serious catastrophe which hit the English Church, having enabled Manning to continue his carrier in the Catholic one”. A “necessary loss”. The Cardinal’s biographers gave different interpretations to the figure of young Caroline and to Manning’s attitude towards her. Some, Luxmoore refers, devoted little space to her or even ignored her. Others declared that “immediately after her death, Manning was inconsolable”, but later “he seemed to have erased her memory”. According to others, “her death appeared to him as the answer to a divine design”. Manning preserved Caroline’s prayer and meditation book, in addition to the letters, which he was stolen with his luggage during a trip to Rome in 1851. On that occasion, Luxmoore recalled, “he offered the enormous sum of 100 pounds for the ‘lost treasure'”. He later admitted that “that loss was probably necessary to cut all ties with this world”. The spiritual heritage of his wife. What was the spiritual heritage of the young wife? Firstly, claimed the author of the article quoting his biographers, “the devoted Evangelical faith of the Sargent family, which boosted the spirituality” of young Manning, initially “closer to the Anglican Church”. “His interest for Christian education is partly due to Caroline, who had taught in the parish school and brought small gifts to the children of Lavington for Christmas”. “Also long after her death, the young pastor was very close to the children – they recalled in the village – and would have done just anything for them”. “Caroline’s influence – Luxmoore continued – also emerges in the Church’s concept of social responsibility which led the future Cardinal to take the defense of the farmers and shepherds of the village”. Biographers believe that “marriage deepened his humanity”, but also “taught him the rigid control of his emotions”. Caroline’s prayer and meditation book, who on his death bed Manning gave to his successor Herbert Vaughan, was buried with him. “There was not one day since her death – he had confided to Vaughan – in which I didn’t pray or meditate with her book. I wouldn’t know who else to leave it to”.