Tractarian Grits
David Gunn-Johnson, Mamerto Gueritz: A Country Catholic 1823–1912 (Sacristy Press, 2023), ISBN 9781789593105, hardcover, illustrated, xii + 460 pages, available as an ebook.
The nineteenth-century Tractarian/Ritualist priest Mamerto Gueritz knew — like Fiorello Laguardia, Arthur Lichtenberger, Carmino Giuseppe de Catanzaro and countless others — what it is to be an Anglican whose surname betokens other religious belonging. Gueritz was born in Spain to an officer in a Walloon regiment and came to England as a refugee in early childhood, making his surname irrelevant to any of his conscious life but marking him out as a known quantity during his long 89 years. The exemplary new biography by David Gunn-Johnson will go down as one of the best books in the field of Anglican history of the 2020s.
Gueritz (1823–1912) was known as “Grits” by his parishioners over five decades of clerical experience, mainly in one parish in the Devonian countryside of the Diocese of Exeter. Following a degree from Oxford in 1848, he was made deacon in 1848 and ordained priest in 1850. His curacies were at Shepton Beauchamp (1848–1852), Bigbury (1852–1857), and Penzance (1857–1860) before he served as vicar of St. Andrew’s Church, Colyton during a period of major change for English churchmanship: 1860–1901. Colyton is 170 miles from London on modern roads, and 150 miles from Oxford, and it is this very “country catholic” setting that gives the time frame and Gueritz’s activities their significance. Against the two usual and formulaic portrayals of Anglo-Catholicism as a slum phenomenon (Lowder and Mackonochie) or an academic one (Pusey and Liddon) David Gunn-Johnson sketches a rural manifestation in continuities with those of John Keble or Isaac Williams but in considerable ritual and practical development from their activities and viewpoints.
Colyton under Gueritz was a place where a relatively small population came to know of the many changes and practices of their academic or metropolitan kin: the end of rented box-pews, the introduction of missionary sisterhoods, the flourishing of devotional societies such as the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament and the Guild of All Souls. Colyton’s parishioners came to make special offerings for the work of the influential English Church Union and Additional Curates Society, and to know of their vicar’s support of the proto-ecumenical Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom and the Society of the Holy Cross (SSC). Gueritz invited clerical friends from a large network of colleagues and correspondence to conduct missions in his parish for the deepening of spiritual life and introduction of neglected practices such as fasting and confession. His long vicarage of 41 years saw success in achieving free sittings without rates or rent throughout the church, but it took 35 years to reach this goal because of entrenched resistance on the part of his own parishioners.
David Gunn-Johnson is a retired priest of the Church of England and had been Gueritz’s successor in cure at Colyton; the book before us comes from decades of familiarity with its subject’s life and manuscript writings. It is illustrated with fascinating reproductions of photographs and contemporary material, and it includes a helpful series of appendices including a synoptic timeline. Gunn-Johnson does the fine and fun work of tracing the careers and churchly influence of Gueritz’s children, too: two sons in Singapore and Sarawak, another in Scotland, a daughter married to a missionary Anglo-Catholic in New Zealand, an unmarried daughter who died young after a life devoted to Christian education in her father’s country parish. This excellent book lacks only an index to help us navigate its 460 pages of depth and wealth, but that only forces readers to undertake it with more care and attention.
