Magdalen Goffin, the daughter of E I Watkin is a graduate of St Anne's College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
"A fascinating story." --Catholic Herald
"In the era before the Vatican Council E.I. Watkin was, like
Lambert Beaudouin, Henri de Lubac and John Courtney Murray, a voice
crying in the wilderness. He pleaded that the Church witness in a
more living and general way to a number of values latent in her
more deep-seated and venerable tradition and desperately needed by
the contemporary world, but which had been swept to the margins by
the working imperatives of a more circumscribed vision of the
Christian vocation which temporarily enjoyed the ascendancy. This
he came to call 'ecclesiastical materialism'. The three great
causes for which Watkin contended in order that Catholicism might
attain its fullness were a more general practice of contemplative
prayer, a more widespread participation in the Liturgy and a bolder
stand, particularly by the bishops, in the cause of peace. He was
convinced that his own vocation was not to be a priest or an
organizer, but to give himself entirely to writing. Without setting
out to court trouble, he nevertheless found himself having brushes
with the ecclesiastical censors. Although the issues involved were
not serious, it pained him to have received the attentions of the
church's thought-police whose very existence spread doubts in the
general public about the intellectual integrity of catholic
writers. ... It is good that a man of so many insights and contacts
has received the memorial he deserves. The charm of Mrs. Goffin's
candid biography is that it is written from within the family and
invites the reader to join in with the family. It would be all too
easy to present E.I. Watkin as a lonely eminence, but in fact his
life was thickly populated with relatives and friends, each of whom
treads on the stage here to tell his own story. Mrs. Goffin has
also explained with crystalline clarity all the issues with which
her father became involved and the constantly shifting historical
and social context of each of them. She has indeed written a work
of pietas, but pietas in the Watkin fashion." --Downside Review
"This is a fine and much-needed biography of a remarkable man whose
life and work has been almost forgotten among Catholics today. . .
. This book would be fascinating just for the vivid account of the
vicissitudes of a remarkable family but it is Watkin's intellectual
achievements and the integrity and courage with which he fought for
his beliefs that make it outstanding." --Newman Studies Journal
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