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No. II .
FATHER AUGUSTINE BAKER'S TREATISE OF THE ENGLISH BENEDICTINE MISSION 1635-6
(THE HISTORICAL PORTION ) CONTRIBUTED BY DOM HUGH CONNOLLY , O.S.B.
The historical portion of Fr. Baker's Treatise of the English
Benedictine Mission forms only the concluding section and amounts to less than one- sixth of the whole . The rest of the work has a moral purpose , and was written to impress upon the younger monks the spiritual dangers of the mission in England, and to induce them to choose the safer way by living, if possible, always in their monasteries : the mission was to be accepted as a work of obedience , the individual was not to seek it for himself. The Treatise was finished on 15 January 1636, but most even of this latter part would appear to have been written in the year 1635. can only be regretted that the historical part of the work is somewhat meagre . Fr. Baker gives a good general survey of the condition of English Catholics in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign , with here and there an interesting detail ; he deals at
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length with the English Benedictine movement in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, and follows closely the course of events which led to the grant of missionary faculties to the monks in 1602; he gives also a valuable account of how the line of continuity with the old Benedictine body in England was saved, in 1607, by means of Fr. Sigebert Buckley, a survivor of the community restored at Westminster under Queen Mary . But he has left nothing like a consecutive history of the English Benedictine Congregation to the date at which he wrote. This no doubt is due largely to the fact that he was writing for his own day and not for future generations , and that he assumed in his readers a knowledge of many things that can now be learned only from such other records as the years have spared . Yet in spite of these limitations Fr. Baker's narrative remains as one of the most valuable sources for the history of the English Benedictines in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries . The present English Congregation , strictly so called , has been in existence since the year 1619, at which date there were engaged in the mission about 130 monks . These monks belonged to three distinct bodies , namely to the Italian or Cassinese Congregation of St. Justina; to the Congregation of Spain , which till about the year 1610 was called the Congregation of San Benito of Valladolid, or simply the Valladolid Congregation ; and to what was now officially recognized as the old English Congregation . The Cassinese , though they exercised an important influence on the course of events and have the entire credit of securing the succession through Fr. Buckley, had never been many, and at this time were no more than six or seven.