A History of Blackfriars and New Blackfriars

In 1920 Father Bede Jarrett, then provincial of the English Dominicans, wrote to a friend saying that he had just bought the Catholic Review for the province. The Catholic Review was a quarterly journal edited first by Father Benedict Williamson and then by Father Henry Rope. The new publication was to be called Blackfriars. In the view of its first editor, Father Bernard Delany OP (1890-1959), Father Bede had wasted the forty pounds he had paid for it since the journal was defunct and there was to be only a notional continuity between it and the one that was to replace it. In purchasing the title Father Bede was fulfilling a long-cherished ambition to establish a Catholic periodical which would express a specifically and characteristically Dominican voice in England.As early as 1910 a similar project had been mooted by Father Hugh Pope OP (1869-1946), a celebrated apologist and exegete who had taught at the Dominican house of studies in Hawkesyard, Staffordshire, but who was then teaching Scripture at the Angelicum, the Order’s Roman university.’ In the Hawkesyard Review, an in-house journal mostly edited by the Hawkesyard students, Father Hugh argued the case for a Dominican review suggesting that, in the contemporary world, it would be a sign of the Order’s commitment to the ministry of the Word. In the midst of the Modernist crisis, whatever Scripture scholars wrote was of interest to those in higher authority and was often carefully scrutinised. It was for this reason that Pope’s article in an obscure English Dominican publication with a tiny circulation attracted the attention of the Master of the Order, Father Vincent Cormier (1832-1916).