Tongues, Emotionalism, and the Catholic Sobriety and Hilarity of Father Rutler

Do not misunderstand. Father Rutler is not condemning genuine enthusiasm, just the affected sham that is its evangelical counterfeit.

Crisis Magazine, Fr. George Rutler: The amiable classicist, John Bird Sumner, was the Protestant archbishop of Canterbury from 1848 to 1862. Amid theological controversies about baptismal regeneration and the like, his opposition to a parliamentary bill removing Jewish disabilities was unquestionably retrograde, but he assumed the progressive mantle in approving obstetric anesthesia which was opposed by some Christian fundamentalists, whose misogyny was not alien to current Muslim advocates of female circumcision. It will be allowed that he had little choice after Queen Victoria had been anesthetized for the birth of Prince Leopold. As a son of Cambridge rather than Oxford, his propensities were more Evangelical. Nonetheless, he is said to have blessed missionaries to India in the imperial radiance of the Raj with the counsel that they were to “convert the heathen and discourage Enthusiasm.” Read the rest here.