OUP Life of the Day: Father D'Arcy
Temporarily at least, the ODNB life of Martin Cyril D'Arcy is available free on the OUP website. He was the Jesuit at Farm Street who instructed Evelyn Waugh, among many others.
A couple of extracts:
Complementary with this ideal of a Jesuit contribution to English Christian humanism was an attachment to an English Catholic past, hazily and romantically conceived, and an addiction to the English Catholic gentry. He took innocent pleasure in an 11 foot long genealogical table, written in 1617 and illuminated with numerous coats of arms and two coronets, which allegedly traced his family back to the Norman conquest.
...
In 1945 D'Arcy left Oxford to become provincial of the English Jesuit province. He formed imaginative plans for influencing the life of a country newly restored to peace, though his term of office is sometimes best remembered for his proclivity towards purchasing old houses with Catholic associations. Unfortunately he neglected the routine paperwork of administration, preferring to achieve results by personal contact...
The last twenty-six years of D'Arcy's life were something of a protracted dark night. He was out of sympathy with post-war Oxford and England. He saw no merit in the type of analytical philosophy then in the ascendant; the changes in the liturgy and theology of his church left him with a sense of betrayal.
I am sure that Anthony Merrick must have known him.
A couple of extracts:
Complementary with this ideal of a Jesuit contribution to English Christian humanism was an attachment to an English Catholic past, hazily and romantically conceived, and an addiction to the English Catholic gentry. He took innocent pleasure in an 11 foot long genealogical table, written in 1617 and illuminated with numerous coats of arms and two coronets, which allegedly traced his family back to the Norman conquest.
...
In 1945 D'Arcy left Oxford to become provincial of the English Jesuit province. He formed imaginative plans for influencing the life of a country newly restored to peace, though his term of office is sometimes best remembered for his proclivity towards purchasing old houses with Catholic associations. Unfortunately he neglected the routine paperwork of administration, preferring to achieve results by personal contact...
The last twenty-six years of D'Arcy's life were something of a protracted dark night. He was out of sympathy with post-war Oxford and England. He saw no merit in the type of analytical philosophy then in the ascendant; the changes in the liturgy and theology of his church left him with a sense of betrayal.
I am sure that Anthony Merrick must have known him.