Anxious to restore the English hierarchy at the earliest opportune time, Blessed Pius IX, in 1850, created Bishop Nicholas Patrick Wiseman Cardinal (1802-1865), appointing him to head the Church in England as Archbishop of the newly created See of Westminster. Although English Protestant leaders were not hanging, beheading, disemboweling, and quartering Catholics in the nineteenth century, as they had in the past, their personal disdain for the Pope, and the Church he pastored, would surface by way of the media whenever a relevant occasion presented itself. Now they had one. In calling Father Wiseman to Rome in 1850 to receive the red hat, the young theologian assumed that he was going to remain in the eternal city at some Vatican post. Blessed Pope Pius IX had other designs. Hearing about this “papal aggression” the Anglicans were indignant. The Times of London vented: “It is the greatest act of folly and injustice which the court of Rome has perpetrated since the Crown and people threw off its yoke. . . . Its only meaning is to insult the Church and Crown of England.” The vitriolic column continued: “Dr. Wiseman is an English subject who has entered the service of a foreign power and accepts its spurious indignities. The elevation of Dr. Wiseman to the imaginary Archbishopric of Westminster signifies no more than to confer on the editor of The Tablet [the English Catholic Weekly] the rank and title of Duke of Smithfield.” When he came back from Rome as Cardinal the prelate was hooted by mobs and his carriage pelted by stones. Ironically, by the time he died fifteen years later, all of this hatred had disappeared; and, strange as it seems, he was lauded in the very paper that had previously maligned him. The funeral took place, the paper noted “amid such tokens of public interest, and almost of sorrow, as do not often mark the funerals even of our most illustrious dead.”
