Senior Research Fellow, NINS, and Associate Editor, NSJ
Shaun Blanchard is Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Newman Studies and Associate Editor, NSJ. He is the author of The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II (OUP, 2020). With Ulrich Lehner, he co-edited The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology (CUA, 2021), and, with Stephen Bullivant, co-wrote Vatican II: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2023). Shaun is currently working on a monograph study of Catholic ecclesiology in the English-speaking world from the Cisalpines to Newman.
When I first read the late Fr. John O’Malley’s survey text What Happened at Vatican II (2008), I was struck by a passage in the conclusion. O’Malley gave a tantalizing rundown of the “ghosts” present on the council floor—the popes, theologians, philosophers, and politicians whose lives and legacies had indelibly marked the Catholic world. These voices from the past had shaped, positively or negatively (sometimes both), the work of the council fathers:
This essay will introduce readers to Lingard, one of the major intellectual lights of the English Catholic community when Newman joined it in 1845 at Littlemore.
