The Catholic Church in England and Wales ( la, Ecclesia Catholica in Anglia et Cambria; cy, Yr Eglwys Gatholig yng Nghymru a Lloegr) is part of the worldwide
Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
in
full communion
Full communion is a communion or relationship of full agreement among different Christian denominations that share certain essential principles of Christian theology. Views vary among denominations on exactly what constitutes full communion, but ...
with the
Holy See
The Holy See ( lat, Sancta Sedes, ; it, Santa Sede ), also called the See of Rome, Petrine See or Apostolic See, is the jurisdiction of the Pope in his role as the bishop of Rome. It includes the apostolic episcopal see of the Diocese of Rome ...
. Its origins date from the 6th century, when
Pope Gregory I
Pope Gregory I ( la, Gregorius I; – 12 March 604), commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, was the bishop of Rome from 3 September 590 to his death. He is known for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome, the Gregori ...
through the
Benedictine
, image = Medalla San Benito.PNG
, caption = Design on the obverse side of the Saint Benedict Medal
, abbreviation = OSB
, formation =
, motto = (English: 'Pray and Work')
, foun ...
missionary,
Augustine of Canterbury
Augustine of Canterbury (early 6th century – probably 26 May 604) was a monk who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 597. He is considered the "Apostle to the English" and a founder of the English Church.Delaney '' ...
, intensified the evangelization of the
Kingdom of Kent
la, Regnum Cantuariorum
, conventional_long_name = Kingdom of the Kentish
, common_name = Kent
, era = Heptarchy
, status = vassal
, status_text =
, government_type = Monarchy ...
linking it to the Holy See in 597 AD. This unbroken communion with the Holy See lasted until
King Henry VIII
Henry VIII (28 June 149128 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages, and for his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disag ...
ended it in 1534. Communion with Rome was restored by
Queen Mary I in 1555 following the
Second Statute of Repeal
The Second Statute of Repeal, an act of the Parliament of England (1 & 2 Ph. & M. c. 8) passed in the Parliament of Queen Mary I and King Philip in 1555, followed the First Statute of Repeal of 1553. The first statute had abolished all religiou ...
and eventually finally broken by Elizabeth I's 1559 Religious Settlement, which made "no significant concessions to Catholic opinion represented by the church hierarchy and much of the nobility."
For two hundred and fifty years the government forced members of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church known as
recusants
Recusancy (from la, recusare, translation=to refuse) was the state of those who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and refused to attend Church of England services after the English Reformation.
The 1558 Recusancy Acts passed in the reign ...
to go
underground
Underground most commonly refers to:
* Subterranea (geography), the regions beneath the surface of the Earth
Underground may also refer to:
Places
* The Underground (Boston), a music club in the Allston neighborhood of Boston
* The Underground (S ...
and seek academic training in Catholic Europe, where exiled English clergy set up schools and seminaries for the sons of English recusant families.
[Robert Parsons]
'' Catholic Encyclopaedia'' (1913). Retrieved 9 July 2008 The government also placed legislative restrictions on Catholics, some continuing into the 20th century, while the ban on Catholic worship lasted until the
Catholic Relief Act 1791
The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 (31 George III, c. 32) is an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain passed in 1791 relieving Roman Catholics of certain political, educational, and economic disabilities. It admitted Catholics to the practice ...
. The ban did not, however, affect foreign embassies in
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, although serving priests could be hounded. During this time, the English Catholic community was divided between the upper classes, aristocracy and gentry, and the working class.
At the 2001 United Kingdom census, there were 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, some 8% of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they represented only 4.8% of the population. In 1981, 8.7% of the population of England and Wales were Catholic.
In 2009, post the
2004 enlargement of the European Union
The largest expansion of the European Union (EU), in terms of territory, number of states, and population took place on 1 May 2004.
The simultaneous accessions concerned the following countries (sometimes referred to as the "A10" countries): ...
, when thousands of Central Europeans (mainly heavily Catholic Poles, Lithuanians, Slovakians and Slovenians) came to England, an
Ipsos Morioka poll found that 9.6%, or 5.2 million people, were Catholics in England and Wales. In the 2021 census, 81.7% of the population of the two countries were white, down from 86% in 2011, with the Christian population (of Catholic, Anglican, non-Conformists, and unaffiliated Christians together) dropping to 46% (about 27.6 million people).
In
North West England
North West England is one of nine official regions of England and consists of the ceremonial counties of England, administrative counties of Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside. The North West had a population of ...
one in five are church adherents, a result of large-scale Irish migration in the nineteenth century as well as the high number of English recusants in
Lancashire
Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated Lancs) is the name of a historic county, ceremonial county, and non-metropolitan county in North West England. The boundaries of these three areas differ significantly.
The non-metropolitan county of Lancashi ...
.
History
Roman Britons and early Christianity
![Saint Alban (cropped)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Saint_Alban_%28cropped%29.jpg)
Much of
Great Britain
Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It is ...
was incorporated into the
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterr ...
in 43 AD, after
Claudius
Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (; 1 August 10 BC – 13 October AD 54) was the fourth Roman emperor, ruling from AD 41 to 54. A member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, Claudius was born to Nero Claudius Drusus, Drusu ...
led the
Roman conquest of Britain
The Roman conquest of Britain refers to the conquest of the island of Britain by occupying Roman forces. It began in earnest in AD 43 under Emperor Claudius, and was largely completed in the southern half of Britain by 87 when the Staneg ...
, conquering lands inhabited by
Celtic Britons
The Britons ( *''Pritanī'', la, Britanni), also known as Celtic Britons or Ancient Britons, were people of Celtic language and culture who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age and into the Middle Ages, at which point th ...
. The indigenous religion of the Britons under their priests the
Druids
A druid was a member of the high-ranking class in ancient Celtic cultures. Druids were religious leaders as well as legal authorities, adjudicators, lorekeepers, medical professionals and political advisors. Druids left no written accounts. Whi ...
was suppressed; most notably
Gaius Suetonius Paulinus
Gaius Suetonius Paulinus (fl. AD 41–69) was a Roman general best known as the commander who defeated the rebellion of Boudica.
Early life
Little is known of Suetonius' family, but it likely came from Pisaurum (modern Pesaro), a town on the Adri ...
launched
an attack on
Ynys Môn in 60 AD and destroyed the shrine and
sacred groves
Sacred groves or sacred woods are groves of trees and have special religious importance within a particular culture. Sacred groves feature in various cultures throughout the world. They were important features of the mythological landscape and ...
there. In the years following this, Roman influence saw the importation of several religious
cults
In modern English, ''cult'' is usually a pejorative term for a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals, or its common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal. This ...
into Britain, including
Roman mythology
Roman mythology is the body of myths of ancient Rome as represented in the literature and visual arts of the Romans. One of a wide variety of genres of Roman folklore, ''Roman mythology'' may also refer to the modern study of these representat ...
,
Mithraism
Mithraism, also known as the Mithraic mysteries or the Cult of Mithras, was a Roman mystery religion centered on the god Mithras. Although inspired by Iranian worship of the Zoroastrian divinity (''yazata'') Mithra, the Roman Mithras is linke ...
and the
imperial cult
An imperial cult is a form of state religion in which an emperor or a dynasty of emperors (or rulers of another title) are worshipped as demigods or deities. "Cult" here is used to mean "worship", not in the modern pejorative sense. The cult may ...
. One of these sects, then disapproved by the Roman authorities, was the
Levant
The Levant () is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is eq ...
ine-originated religion of
Christianity
Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global pop ...
. While it is unclear exactly how it arrived, the earliest British figures considered
saint
In religious belief, a saint is a person who is recognized as having an exceptional degree of Q-D-Š, holiness, likeness, or closeness to God. However, the use of the term ''saint'' depends on the context and Christian denomination, denominat ...
s by the Christians are
St. Alban
Saint Alban (; la, Albanus) is venerated as the first-recorded British Christian martyr, for which reason he is considered to be the British protomartyr. Along with fellow Saints Julius and Aaron, Alban is one of three named martyrs recorded ...
followed by Ss
Julius and Aaron
Julius and Aaron (also Julian) were two Romano-British Christian saints who were martyred around the third century. Along with Saint Alban, they are the only named Christian martyrs from Roman Britain. Most historians place the martyrdom in Cae ...
, all in the 3rd century.
Eventually, the position of the Roman authorities on Christianity moved from hostility to toleration with the
Edict of Milan
The Edict of Milan ( la, Edictum Mediolanense; el, Διάταγμα τῶν Μεδιολάνων, ''Diatagma tōn Mediolanōn'') was the February 313 AD agreement to treat Christians benevolently within the Roman Empire. Frend, W. H. C. ( ...
in 313 AD, and then enforcement as
state religion
A state religion (also called religious state or official religion) is a religion or creed officially endorsed by a sovereign state. A state with an official religion (also known as confessional state), while not secular state, secular, is not n ...
following the
Edict of Thessalonica
The Edict of Thessalonica (also known as ''Cunctos populos''), issued on 27 February AD 380 by Theodosius I, made the Catholic (term), Catholicism of Nicene Christians the state church of the Roman Empire.
It condemned other Christian creeds s ...
in 380 AD, becoming a key component of
Romano-British culture
The Romano-British culture arose in Britain under the Roman Empire following the Roman conquest in AD 43 and the creation of the province of Britannia. It arose as a fusion of the imported Roman culture with that of the indigenous Britons, a ...
and society. Records note that
Romano-British
The Romano-British culture arose in Britain under the Roman Empire following the Roman conquest in AD 43 and the creation of the province of Britannia. It arose as a fusion of the imported Roman culture with that of the indigenous Britons, a ...
bishops, such as
Restitutus
Restitutus () was a Romano-British bishop, probably from Londinium (London), one of the British delegation who attended the church synod or Council held at Arles (Arelate), in Gaul, in AD 314.
The list of those who signed the ''Acta'', the decis ...
, attended the
Council of Arles in 314, which confirmed the theological findings of an earlier convocation held in Rome (the
Council of Rome
The Council of Rome was a meeting of Catholic Church officials and theologians which took place in AD 382 under the authority of Pope Damasus I, the then-Bishop of Rome. According to the (a work written by an anonymous scholar between AD 519 and ...
) in 313. The
Roman departure from Britain
The end of Roman rule in Britain was the transition from Roman Britain to post-Roman Britain. Roman rule ended in different parts of Britain at different times, and under different circumstances.
In 383, the usurper Magnus Maximus withdrew tr ...
in the following century and the subsequent
Germanic invasions
The Migration Period was a period in European history marked by large-scale migrations that saw the fall of the Western Roman Empire and subsequent settlement of its former territories by various tribes, and the establishment of the post-Roman ...
sharply decreased contact between Britain and Continental Europe. Christianity, however, continued to flourish in the
Brittonic
Brittonic or Brythonic may refer to:
*Common Brittonic, or Brythonic, the Celtic language anciently spoken in Great Britain
*Brittonic languages, a branch of the Celtic languages descended from Common Brittonic
*Britons (Celtic people)
The Br ...
areas of Great Britain. During this period certain practices and traditions took hold in Britain and in Ireland that are collectively known as
Celtic Christianity
Celtic Christianity ( kw, Kristoneth; cy, Cristnogaeth; gd, Crìosdaidheachd; gv, Credjue Creestee/Creestiaght; ga, Críostaíocht/Críostúlacht; br, Kristeniezh; gl, Cristianismo celta) is a form of Christianity that was common, or held ...
. Distinct features of Celtic Christianity include a unique monastic
tonsure
Tonsure () is the practice of cutting or shaving some or all of the hair on the scalp as a sign of religious devotion or humility. The term originates from the Latin word ' (meaning "clipping" or "shearing") and referred to a specific practice in ...
and calculations for the date of
Easter
Easter,Traditional names for the feast in English are "Easter Day", as in the '' Book of Common Prayer''; "Easter Sunday", used by James Ussher''The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher, Volume 4'') and Samuel Pepys''The Diary of Samuel ...
. Regardless of these differences, historians do not consider this Celtic or British Christianity a distinct church separate from general Western European Christianity.
Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons
![Athelstan](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Athelstan.jpg)
During the
Heptarchy
The Heptarchy were the seven petty kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England that flourished from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century until they were consolidated in the 8th century into the four kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria, Wess ...
, the
English people
The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language in England, English language, a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language, and share a common history and culture. The English identi ...
(referred to as the
Anglo-Saxons
The Anglo-Saxons were a Cultural identity, cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo- ...
) were converted to Christianity from
Anglo-Saxon paganism
Anglo-Saxon paganism, sometimes termed Anglo-Saxon heathenism, Anglo-Saxon pre-Christian religion, or Anglo-Saxon traditional religion, refers to the religious beliefs and practices followed by the Anglo-Saxons between the 5th and 8th centurie ...
, from two main directions:
*
Iona
Iona (; gd, Ì Chaluim Chille (IPA: iːˈxaɫ̪ɯimˈçiʎə, sometimes simply ''Ì''; sco, Iona) is a small island in the Inner Hebrides, off the Ross of Mull on the western coast of Scotland. It is mainly known for Iona Abbey, though there ...
, through its subordinate house
Lindisfarne
Lindisfarne, also called Holy Island, is a tidal island off the northeast coast of England, which constitutes the civil parish of Holy Island in Northumberland. Holy Island has a recorded history from the 6th century AD; it was an important ...
(founded by
Aidan of Lindisfarne
Aidan of Lindisfarne ( ga, Naomh Aodhán; died 31 August 651) was an Irish monk and missionary credited with converting the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity in Northumbria. He founded a monastic cathedral on the island of Lindisfarne, known as Lindis ...
), linking the
Northumbria
la, Regnum Northanhymbrorum
, conventional_long_name = Kingdom of Northumbria
, common_name = Northumbria
, status = State
, status_text = Unified Anglian kingdom (before 876)North: Anglian kingdom (af ...
n element of the Church (and subsequently
Mercia
la, Merciorum regnum
, conventional_long_name=Kingdom of Mercia
, common_name=Mercia
, status=Kingdom
, status_text=Independent kingdom (527–879)Client state of Wessex ()
, life_span=527–918
, era=Heptarchy
, event_start=
, date_start=
, ye ...
through
Chad of Mercia
Chad of Mercia (died 2 March 672) was a prominent 7th-century Anglo-Saxon Catholic monk who became abbot of several monasteries, Bishop of the Northumbrians and subsequently Bishop of the Mercians and Lindsey People. He was later canonised ...
) to the culture of the
Church in Ireland; and
*in the south, first through
Kent
Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...
and then spreading out to
Wessex
la, Regnum Occidentalium Saxonum
, conventional_long_name = Kingdom of the West Saxons
, common_name = Wessex
, image_map = Southern British Isles 9th century.svg
, map_caption = S ...
, the
Gregorian mission
The Gregorian missionJones "Gregorian Mission" ''Speculum'' p. 335 or Augustinian missionMcGowan "Introduction to the Corpus" ''Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature'' p. 17 was a Christian mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 596 to conver ...
of the late 6th century, when
Pope Gregory the Great
Pope Gregory I ( la, Gregorius I; – 12 March 604), commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, was the bishop of Rome from 3 September 590 to his death. He is known for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome, the Gregoria ...
sent
Augustine of Canterbury
Augustine of Canterbury (early 6th century – probably 26 May 604) was a monk who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 597. He is considered the "Apostle to the English" and a founder of the English Church.Delaney '' ...
(at the time, Prior of the Abbey of St. Andrew or
San Gregorio Magno al Celio
San Gregorio Magno al Celio, also known as San Gregorio al Celio or simply San Gregorio, is a church in Rome, Italy, which is part of a monastery of monks of the Camaldolese branch of the Benedictine Order. On 10 March 2012, the 1,000th annive ...
) and 40 missionaries directly from Rome. This element, linked to the Continent through marriage alliances, had more of a Romano-
Frankish
Frankish may refer to:
* Franks, a Germanic tribe and their culture
** Frankish language or its modern descendants, Franconian languages
* Francia, a post-Roman state in France and Germany
* East Francia, the successor state to Francia in Germany ...
orientation. Although the
Celtic Britons
The Britons ( *''Pritanī'', la, Britanni), also known as Celtic Britons or Ancient Britons, were people of Celtic language and culture who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age and into the Middle Ages, at which point th ...
(known mainly from the Middle Ages onwards as the
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
) ''de facto'' retained their Christian religion even after the Romans pulled out, unlike the Gaels and the Romans the Welsh did not make any significant effort to evangelise the pagan Anglo-Saxons and indeed greatly resented them, as is related by
Bede
Bede ( ; ang, Bǣda , ; 672/326 May 735), also known as Saint Bede, The Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable ( la, Beda Venerabilis), was an English monk at the monastery of St Peter and its companion monastery of St Paul in the Kingdom o ...
in his ''
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
The ''Ecclesiastical History of the English People'' ( la, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), written by Bede in about AD 731, is a history of the Christian Churches in England, and of England generally; its main focus is on the conflict be ...
''.
The
Gregorian mission
The Gregorian missionJones "Gregorian Mission" ''Speculum'' p. 335 or Augustinian missionMcGowan "Introduction to the Corpus" ''Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature'' p. 17 was a Christian mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 596 to conver ...
, as it is known, is of particular interest in the Catholic Church as it was the first official Papal mission to found a church. With the help of Christians already residing in
Kent
Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...
, particularly
Bertha
Bertha is a female Germanic name, from Old High German ''berhta'' meaning "bright one". It was usually a short form of Anglo Saxon names ''Beorhtgifu'' meaning "bright gift" or ''Beorhtwynn'' meaning "bright joy".
The name occurs as a theonym, s ...
, the
Merovingian
The Merovingian dynasty () was the ruling family of the Franks from the middle of the 5th century until 751. They first appear as "Kings of the Franks" in the Roman army of northern Gaul. By 509 they had united all the Franks and northern Gauli ...
Frankish
Frankish may refer to:
* Franks, a Germanic tribe and their culture
** Frankish language or its modern descendants, Franconian languages
* Francia, a post-Roman state in France and Germany
* East Francia, the successor state to Francia in Germany ...
consort of the then pagan King
Æthelberht, Augustine established an archbishopric in
Canterbury
Canterbury (, ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and UNESCO World Heritage Site, situated in the heart of the City of Canterbury local government district of Kent, England. It lies on the River Stour, Kent, River Stour.
...
, the old capital of Kent. Having received the
pallium
The pallium (derived from the Roman ''pallium'' or ''palla'', a woolen cloak; : ''pallia'') is an ecclesiastical vestment in the Catholic Church, originally peculiar to the pope, but for many centuries bestowed by the Holy See upon metropolit ...
earlier (linking his new diocese to Rome), Augustine became the first in the series of Catholic
archbishops of Canterbury
The archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and a principal leader of the Church of England, the ceremonial head of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. The current archbishop is Justi ...
, four of whom (
Laurence
Laurence is an English and French given name (usually female in French and usually male in English). The English masculine name is a variant of Lawrence and it originates from a French form of the Latin ''Laurentius'', a name meaning "man from ...
,
Mellitus
Saint Mellitus (died 24 April 624) was the first bishop of London in the Saxon period, the third Archbishop of Canterbury, and a member of the Gregorian mission sent to England to convert the Anglo-Saxons from their native paganism to Chris ...
,
Justus
Justus (died on 10 November between 627 and 631) was the fourth Archbishop of Canterbury. He was sent from Italy to England by Pope Gregory the Great, on a mission to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons from their native paganism, probably arrivin ...
and
Honorius) were part of the original band of
Benedictine
, image = Medalla San Benito.PNG
, caption = Design on the obverse side of the Saint Benedict Medal
, abbreviation = OSB
, formation =
, motto = (English: 'Pray and Work')
, foun ...
missionaries. (The last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury was
Reginald Pole
Reginald Pole (12 March 1500 – 17 November 1558) was an English cardinal of the Catholic Church and the last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, holding the office from 1556 to 1558, during the Counter-Reformation.
Early life
Pole was born a ...
, who died in 1558.)
During this time of mission, Rome looked to challenge some different customs which had been retained in isolation by the Celts (the Gaels and the Britons), due in part to their geographical distance from the rest of Western Christendom. Of particularly importance was the
Easter controversy
The controversy over the correct date for Easter began in Early Christianity as early as the 2nd century AD. Discussion and disagreement over the best method of reform of the date of Easter, computing the date of Easter Sunday has been ongoing eve ...
(on which date to celebrate it) and the manner of monastic
tonsure
Tonsure () is the practice of cutting or shaving some or all of the hair on the scalp as a sign of religious devotion or humility. The term originates from the Latin word ' (meaning "clipping" or "shearing") and referred to a specific practice in ...
.
Columbanus
Columbanus ( ga, Columbán; 543 – 21 November 615) was an Irish missionary notable for founding a number of monasteries after 590 in the Frankish and Lombard kingdoms, most notably Luxeuil Abbey in present-day France and Bobbio Abbey in pr ...
, his fellow countryman and churchman, had asked for a papal judgement on the Easter question, as did abbots and bishops of Ireland. This was particularly important in Northumbria, where the issue was causing factionalism. Later, in his ''
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
The ''Ecclesiastical History of the English People'' ( la, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), written by Bede in about AD 731, is a history of the Christian Churches in England, and of England generally; its main focus is on the conflict be ...
'',
Bede
Bede ( ; ang, Bǣda , ; 672/326 May 735), also known as Saint Bede, The Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable ( la, Beda Venerabilis), was an English monk at the monastery of St Peter and its companion monastery of St Paul in the Kingdom o ...
explained the reasons for the discrepancy: "He
olumbaleft successors distinguished for great charity, Divine love, and strict attention to the rules of discipline following indeed uncertain cycles in the computation of the great festival of Easter, because far away as they were out of the world, no one had supplied them with the synodal decrees relating to the Paschal observance." A series of
synod
A synod () is a council of a Christian denomination, usually convened to decide an issue of doctrine, administration or application. The word ''wikt:synod, synod'' comes from the meaning "assembly" or "meeting" and is analogous with the Latin ...
s were held to resolve the matter, culminating with the
Synod of Whitby
In the Synod of Whitby in 664, King Oswiu of Northumbria ruled that his kingdom would calculate Easter and observe the monastic tonsure according to the customs of Rome rather than the customs practiced by Irish monks at Iona and its satellite ins ...
in 644. The missionaries also introduced the
Rule of Benedict
The ''Rule of Saint Benedict'' ( la, Regula Sancti Benedicti) is a book of precepts written in Latin in 516 by St Benedict of Nursia ( AD 480–550) for monks living communally under the authority of an abbot.
The spirit of Saint Benedict's Ru ...
, the continental rule, to Anglo-Saxon monasteries in England.
Wilfrid
Wilfrid ( – 709 or 710) was an English bishop and saint. Born a Northumbrian noble, he entered religious life as a teenager and studied at Lindisfarne, at Canterbury, in Francia, and at Rome; he returned to Northumbria in about 660, and ...
, a Benedictine consecrated archbishop of York (in 664), was particularly skilled in promoting the Benedictine Rule. Over time, the Benedictine continental rule became grafted upon the monasteries and parishes of England, drawing them closer to the Continent and Rome. As a result, the pope was often called upon to intervene in quarrels, affirm monarchs, and decide jurisdictions. In 787, for example,
Pope Adrian I
Pope Adrian I ( la, Hadrianus I; died 25 December 795) was the bishop of Rome and ruler of the Papal States from 1 February 772 to his death. He was the son of Theodore, a Roman nobleman.
Adrian and his predecessors had to contend with periodic ...
elevated
Lichfield
Lichfield () is a cathedral city and civil parish in Staffordshire, England. Lichfield is situated roughly south-east of the county town of Stafford, south-east of Rugeley, north-east of Walsall, north-west of Tamworth and south-west of B ...
to an archdiocese and appointed
Hygeberht
Hygeberht (died after 803) was the Bishop of Lichfield from 779 and Archbishop of Lichfield after the elevation of Lichfield to an archdiocese some time after 787, during the reign of the powerful Mercian king Offa. Little is known of Hygeberht ...
its first archbishop. Later, in 808,
Pope Leo III
Pope Leo III (died 12 June 816) was bishop of Rome and ruler of the Papal States from 26 December 795 to his death. Protected by Charlemagne from the supporters of his predecessor, Adrian I, Leo subsequently strengthened Charlemagne's position b ...
helped restore King
Eardwulf Eardwulf or Eardulf is an Anglo-Saxon male name. Notable people with the name include:
* Eardwulf of Northumbria, (floruit late 8th/early 9th century), ruler of Northumbria
* Eardwulf of Kent (floruit middle 8th century), ruler of Kent
* Eardwulf, B ...
of
Northumbria
la, Regnum Northanhymbrorum
, conventional_long_name = Kingdom of Northumbria
, common_name = Northumbria
, status = State
, status_text = Unified Anglian kingdom (before 876)North: Anglian kingdom (af ...
to his throne; and in 859,
Pope Leo IV
Pope Leo IV (790 – 17 July 855) was the bishop of Rome and ruler of the Papal States from 10 April 847 to his death. He is remembered for repairing Roman churches that had been damaged during the Arab raid against Rome, and for building the Leon ...
confirmed and anointed
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great (alt. Ælfred 848/849 – 26 October 899) was King of the West Saxons from 871 to 886, and King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 until his death in 899. He was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf and his first wife Osburh, who bot ...
king, according to ''
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
The ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' is a collection of annals in Old English, chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the ''Chronicle'' was created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alf ...
''. Individual Benedictines seemed to play an important role throughout this period. For example, before Benedictine monk
St. Dunstan
Saint Dunstan (c. 909 – 19 May 988) was an English bishop. He was successively Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, later canonised as a saint. His work restored monastic life i ...
was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury in 960;
Pope John XII
Pope John XII ( la, Ioannes XII; c. 930/93714 May 964), born Octavian, was the bishop of Rome and ruler of the Papal States from 16 December 955 to his death in 964. He was related to the counts of Tusculum, a powerful Roman family which had do ...
had him appointed legate, commissioning him (along with
Ethelwold and Oswald) to restore discipline in the existing monasteries of England, many of which were destroyed by Danish invaders.
Norman Conquest of England and Wales
![Our Lady of Walsingham detail I](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Our_Lady_of_Walsingham_detail_I.JPG)
Control of the English Church passed from the Anglo-Saxons to the
Normans
The Normans (Norman language, Norman: ''Normaunds''; french: Normands; la, Nortmanni/Normanni) were a population arising in the medieval Duchy of Normandy from the intermingling between Norsemen, Norse Viking settlers and indigenous West Fran ...
following the
Norman conquest of England
The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Normans, Norman, Duchy of Brittany, Breton, County of Flanders, Flemish, and Kingdom of France, French troops, ...
. The two clerics most prominently associated with this change were the continental-born
Lanfranc
Lanfranc, OSB (1005 1010 – 24 May 1089) was a celebrated Italian jurist who renounced his career to become a Benedictine monk at Bec in Normandy. He served successively as prior of Bec Abbey and abbot of St Stephen in Normandy and then ...
and
Anselm, both Benedictines. Anselm later became a
Doctor of the Church
Doctor of the Church (Latin: ''doctor'' "teacher"), also referred to as Doctor of the Universal Church (Latin: ''Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis''), is a title given by the Catholic Church to saints recognized as having made a significant contribu ...
. A century later,
Pope Innocent III
Pope Innocent III ( la, Innocentius III; 1160 or 1161 – 16 July 1216), born Lotario dei Conti di Segni (anglicized as Lothar of Segni), was the head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 8 January 1198 to his death in 16 J ...
had to confirm the primacy of Canterbury over four
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
churches for many reasons, but primarily to sustain the importance of the Gregorian foundation of Augustine's mission.
During mediaeval times, England and Wales were part of western Christendom: monasteries and convents, such as those at
Shaftesbury
Shaftesbury () is a town and civil parish in Dorset, England. It is situated on the A30 road, west of Salisbury, near the border with Wiltshire. It is the only significant hilltop settlement in Dorset, being built about above sea level on a ...
and
Shrewsbury
Shrewsbury ( , also ) is a market town, civil parish, and the county town of Shropshire, England, on the River Severn, north-west of London; at the 2021 census, it had a population of 76,782. The town's name can be pronounced as either 'Sh ...
, were prominent institutions, and provided lodging, hospitals and education. Likewise, centres of education like
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
and
Cambridge University
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
were important. Members of
religious orders
A religious order is a lineage of communities and organizations of people who live in some way set apart from society in accordance with their specific religious devotion, usually characterized by the principles of its founder's religious practi ...
, notably the
Dominicans and
Franciscans
, image = FrancescoCoA PioM.svg
, image_size = 200px
, caption = A cross, Christ's arm and Saint Francis's arm, a universal symbol of the Franciscans
, abbreviation = OFM
, predecessor =
, ...
, settled in both universities and maintained houses for students. Archbishop
Walter de Merton
Walter de Merton ( – 27 October 1277) was Lord Chancellor of England, Archdeacon of Bath, founder of Merton College, Oxford, and Bishop of Rochester. For the first two years of the reign of Edward I he was - in all but name - Regent of England d ...
founded
Merton College
Merton College (in full: The House or College of Scholars of Merton in the University of Oxford) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, ch ...
, Oxford and three different popes –
Gregory IX
Pope Gregory IX ( la, Gregorius IX; born Ugolino di Conti; c. 1145 or before 1170 – 22 August 1241) was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 19 March 1227 until his death in 1241. He is known for issuing the '' Decre ...
,
Nicholas IV, and
John XXII
Pope John XXII ( la, Ioannes PP. XXII; 1244 – 4 December 1334), born Jacques Duèze (or d'Euse), was head of the Catholic Church from 7 August 1316 to his death in December 1334.
He was the second and longest-reigning Avignon Pope, elected by ...
– gave Cambridge the legal protection and status to compete with other European
medieval universities
A medieval university was a corporation organized during the Middle Ages for the purposes of higher education. The first Western European institutions generally considered to be universities were established in present-day Italy (including the ...
.
Augustinians
Augustinians are members of Christian religious orders that follow the Rule of Saint Augustine, written in about 400 AD by Augustine of Hippo. There are two distinct types of Augustinians in Catholic religious orders dating back to the 12th–13 ...
also had a significant presence at Oxford. Osney Abbey, the parent house of the college, lay on a large site to the west, near the current railway station. Another Augustinian house, St Frideswide's Priory, later became the basis for
Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church ( la, Ædes Christi, the temple or house, '' ædēs'', of Christ, and thus sometimes known as "The House") is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, the college is uniqu ...
.
Pilgrimage was a prominent feature of mediaeval Catholicism, and England and Wales were amply provided with many popular sites of pilgrimage. The village of
Walsingham
Walsingham () is a civil parish in North Norfolk, England, famous for its religious shrines in honour of Mary, mother of Jesus. It also contains the ruins of two medieval Christian monasticism, monastic houses.Ordnance Survey (2002). ''OS Exp ...
in Norfolk became an important shrine after a noblewoman named
Richeldis de Faverches
Richeldis de Faverches, also known as Rychold, was a devout Catholic Church in England and Wales, English Catholic noblewoman who is credited with establishing the original shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. The story of the vision of "Rychold" wa ...
reputedly experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1061, asking her to build a replica of the
Holy House
Sacred describes something that is dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity; is considered worthy of spiritual respect or devotion; or inspires awe or Reverence (emotion), reverence among believers. The property is often asc ...
at
Nazareth
Nazareth ( ; ar, النَّاصِرَة, ''an-Nāṣira''; he, נָצְרַת, ''Nāṣəraṯ''; arc, ܢܨܪܬ, ''Naṣrath'') is the largest city in the Northern District of Israel. Nazareth is known as "the Arab capital of Israel". In ...
. Some of the other holiest shrines were those at
Holywell
Holywell may refer to:
* Holywell, Flintshire, Wales
* Holywell, Swords, Ireland
* Holywell, Bedfordshire, England
* Holywell, Cambridgeshire, England
* Holywell, Cornwall, England
* Holywell, Dorset, England
* Holywell, Eastbourne, East Susse ...
in Wales which commemorated St
Winefride
Saint Winifred (or Winefride; cy, Gwenffrewi; la, Wenefreda, Winifreda) was a Welsh virgin martyr of the 7th century. Her story was celebrated as early as the 8th century, but became popular in England in the 12th, when her hagiography was fi ...
, and at Westminster Abbey to
Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor ; la, Eduardus Confessor , ; ( 1003 – 5 January 1066) was one of the last Anglo-Saxon English kings. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 to 1066.
Edward was the son of Æth ...
. In 1170,
Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket (), also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas of London and later Thomas à Becket (21 December 1119 or 1120 – 29 December 1170), was an English nobleman who served as Lord Chancellor from 1155 to 1162, and then ...
, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his cathedral by followers of
King Henry II and was quickly canonised as a martyr for the faith. This resulted in
Canterbury Cathedral
Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury, Kent, is one of the oldest and most famous Christian structures in England. It forms part of a World Heritage Site. It is the cathedral of the Archbishop of Canterbury, currently Justin Welby, leader of the ...
attracting international pilgrimage and inspired the ''
Canterbury Tales
''The Canterbury Tales'' ( enm, Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's ''magnum opus' ...
'' by
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He wa ...
.
![Pope_Hadrian_IV](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Pope_Hadrian_IV.jpg)
An Englishman, Nicholas Breakspear, became
Pope Adrian IV
Pope Adrian IV ( la, Adrianus IV; born Nicholas Breakspear (or Brekespear); 1 September 1159, also Hadrian IV), was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 4 December 1154 to his death in 1159. He is the only Englishman t ...
, reigning from 1154 to 1159. Fifty-six years later,
Cardinal
Cardinal or The Cardinal may refer to:
Animals
* Cardinal (bird) or Cardinalidae, a family of North and South American birds
**''Cardinalis'', genus of cardinal in the family Cardinalidae
**''Cardinalis cardinalis'', or northern cardinal, the ...
Stephen Langton
Stephen Langton (c. 1150 – 9 July 1228) was an English Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and Archbishop of Canterbury between 1207 and his death in 1228. The dispute between King John of England and Pope Innocent III over his ...
, the first of
English cardinals
This is a list of cardinals of the Catholic Church from England. It does not include cardinals of non-English national origin appointed to English ecclesiastical offices such as the cardinal protectors of England.
Dates in parentheses are the da ...
and later Archbishop of Canterbury (1208–28), was a pivotal figure in the dispute between
King John King John may refer to:
Rulers
* John, King of England (1166–1216)
* John I of Jerusalem (c. 1170–1237)
* John Balliol, King of Scotland (c. 1249–1314)
* John I of France (15–20 November 1316)
* John II of France (1319–1364)
* John I o ...
and Pope Innocent III. This critical situation led to the signing and later promulgation of the ''
Magna Carta
(Medieval Latin for "Great Charter of Freedoms"), commonly called (also ''Magna Charta''; "Great Charter"), is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by the ...
'' in 1215, which, among other things, insisted that the English church should be free of ecclesiastical appointments fixed by the king.
Tudor period and Catholic resistance
![Banner of the Holy Wounds (Pilgrimage of Grace)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Banner_of_the_Holy_Wounds_%28Pilgrimage_of_Grace%29.svg)
The dynamics of the pre-Reformation bond between the Catholic Church in England and the Apostolic See remained in effect for nearly a thousand years. That is, there was no doctrinal difference between the faith of the English and the rest of Catholic Christendom, especially after calculating the date of Easter at the
Council of Whitby
In the Synod of Whitby in 664, King Oswiu of Northumbria ruled that his kingdom would calculate Easter and observe the monastic tonsure according to the customs of Rome rather than the customs practiced by Irish monks at Iona and its satellite ins ...
in 667 and formalizing other customs according to the See of Rome. The designation "English Church" (''Ecclesia Anglicana'' in Latin) was made, but always in the sense of the term as indicating that it was part of one Catholic Church in communion with the Holy See and localised in England. Other regions of the church were localised in Scotland (''Ecclesia Scotticana''), France (''Ecclesia Gallicana''), Spain (''Ecclesia Hispanica''), etc. These regional cognomens or designations were commonly used in Rome by officials to identify a locality of the universal church but never to imply any breach with the Holy See.
When
King Henry VIII
Henry VIII (28 June 149128 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages, and for his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disag ...
"suddenly became alerted to the supposedly ancient truth" that he was truly the "Supreme Head of the Church within his dominions", he backed a series of legislative acts through the English Parliament between 1533 and 1536 that initiated an attack on papal authority and English Catholics. "The centrepiece of the new legislation was an Act of Supremacy of 1534." In some cases those adhering to
Catholicism
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
faced
capital punishment
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...
.
In 1534, during the reign of Henry VIII, the English church became independent of the Holy See for a period as a "local church" with Henry declaring himself its Supreme Head. This breach was in response to the Pope's refusal to annul Henry's marriage to
Catherine of Aragon
Catherine of Aragon (also spelt as Katherine, ; 16 December 1485 – 7 January 1536) was Queen of England as the first wife of King Henry VIII from their marriage on 11 June 1509 until their annulment on 23 May 1533. She was previously ...
. Although Henry did not himself accept
Protestant
Protestantism is a Christian denomination, branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Reformation, Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century agai ...
innovations in doctrine or liturgy, he nevertheless extended toleration, and even promotion, to clergy with Protestant sympathies in return for support for his break with Rome. On the other hand, failure to accept this break, particularly by prominent persons in church and state, was regarded by Henry as treason, resulting in the execution of
Thomas More
Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He also served Henry VIII as Lord ...
, former Lord Chancellor, and
John Fisher
John Fisher (c. 19 October 1469 – 22 June 1535) was an English Catholic bishop, cardinal, and theologian. Fisher was also an academic and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He was canonized by Pope Pius XI.
Fisher was executed by o ...
,
Bishop of Rochester
The Bishop of Rochester is the ordinary of the Church of England's Diocese of Rochester in the Province of Canterbury.
The town of Rochester has the bishop's seat, at the Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was foun ...
, among others. The
See of Rome Act 1536
An Act extinguishing the authority of the bishop of Rome (''28 Hen.8 c. 10'') was an Act of Parliament passed by the Parliament of England in 1536. It consisted mostly of a violent attack on the authority of the Pope and his followers, and declare ...
legitimised the separation from Rome, while the
Pilgrimage of Grace
The Pilgrimage of Grace was a popular revolt beginning in Yorkshire in October 1536, before spreading to other parts of Northern England including Cumberland, Northumberland, and north Lancashire, under the leadership of Robert Aske. The "most ...
of 1536 and
Bigod's Rebellion of 1537, risings in the North against the religious changes, were bloodily repressed.
All through 1536–41, Henry VIII engaged in a large-scale
dissolution of the Monasteries in order to gain control of most of the wealth of the church and much of the richest land. He disbanded
monasteries
A monastery is a building or complex of buildings comprising the domestic quarters and workplaces of monastics, monks or nuns, whether living in communities or alone (hermits). A monastery generally includes a place reserved for prayer which ...
,
priories
A priory is a monastery of men or women under religious vows that is headed by a prior or prioress. Priories may be houses of mendicant friars or nuns (such as the Dominicans, Augustinians, Franciscans, and Carmelites), or monasteries of monk ...
,
convent
A convent is a community of monks, nuns, religious brothers or, sisters or priests. Alternatively, ''convent'' means the building used by the community. The word is particularly used in the Catholic Church, Lutheran churches, and the Anglican ...
s and friaries in England, Wales and Ireland, appropriated their income, disposed of their assets, sold off artefacts stolen from them, and provided pensions for the robbed monks and former residents. He did not turn these properties over to his local Church of England. Instead they were sold, mostly to pay for the wars. The historian G. W. Bernard argues that the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s was one of the most revolutionary events in English history. There were nearly 900 religious houses in England, around 260 for monks, 300 for regular canons, 142 nunneries and 183 friaries; some 12,000 people in total, 4,000 monks, 3,000 canons, 3,000 friars and 2,000 nuns. One adult man in fifty was in religious orders. In the Catholic narrative, Henry's action was sacrilegious, a national violation of things consecrated to God, and evil. The fate of the English Carthusians was one of the worst of the period. Thomas Cromwell had them "savagely punished" with their leaders "hanged and disembowelled at Tyburn in May 1535, still wearing their monastic habits." Even today, Henry's act is still considered controversial. Anglicans like Giles Fraser have noted that the property "was stolen" from the Roman Catholic Church and that "this theft of land is the really dirty stuff – the original sin of the Church of England." Nevertheless, Henry maintained a strong preference for traditional Catholic practices and, during his reign, Protestant reformers were unable to make many changes to the practices of his local church, the Church of England. Indeed, this part of Henry's reign saw the trial for heresy of Protestants as well as Catholics who resisted his policies.
The 1547 to 1553 reign of the boy
King Edward VI
Edward VI (12 October 1537 – 6 July 1553) was King of England and King of Ireland, Ireland from 28 January 1547 until his death in 1553. He was crowned on 20 February 1547 at the age of nine. Edward was the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour ...
saw the Church of England become more influenced by Protestantism in its doctrine and worship. In 1550,
John Laski
John is a common English name and surname:
* John (given name)
* John (surname)
John may also refer to:
New Testament
Works
* Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John
* First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John
* Second ...
—a
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent
* Polish chicken
*Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
ex-Catholic cleric and nephew of the Polish primate, whose Catholic career came "to an abrupt end in 1540 when he married", and who later become a
Calvinist
Calvinism (also called the Reformed Tradition, Reformed Protestantism, Reformed Christianity, or simply Reformed) is a major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice set down by John Ca ...
—arrived in London and became superintendent of the
Strangers' Church of London. He, among other Protestants, became an associate of
Thomas Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He helped build the case for the annulment of Henry' ...
and of
John Hooper. He had some influence on ecclesiastical affairs during the reign of Edward VI. For instance, the
Tridentine Mass
The Tridentine Mass, also known as the Traditional Latin Mass or Traditional Rite, is the liturgy of Mass in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church that appears in typical editions of the Roman Missal published from 1570 to 1962. Celebrated almo ...
was replaced by the (English) ''
Book of Common Prayer
The ''Book of Common Prayer'' (BCP) is the name given to a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion and by other Christian churches historically related to Anglicanism. The original book, published in 1549 in the reign ...
'', representational art and statues in church buildings destroyed, and Catholic practices which had survived during Henry's reign, such as public prayers to the Virgin Mary, e.g. the ''
Salve Regina
The "Salve Regina" (, ; meaning 'Hail Queen'), also known as the "Hail Holy Queen", is a Marian hymn and one of four Marian antiphons sung at different seasons within the Christian liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. The Salve Regina ...
'', ended. In 1549 the Western Rising in Cornwall and Devon broke out to protest against the abolition of the Mass – the rebels called the 1549 Holy Communion Service, "commonly called the Mass", a Christian game. The rebellion—resistance to Protestantism—was put down ruthlessly.
Reign of Mary I
![Mary I by Master John](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Mary_I_by_Master_John.jpg)
Under
Queen Mary I
Mary I (18 February 1516 – 17 November 1558), also known as Mary Tudor, and as "Bloody Mary" by her Protestant opponents, was Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 and Queen of Spain from January 1556 until her death in 1558. Sh ...
, in 1553, the fractured and schismatic English Church was linked again to continental Catholicism and the See of Rome through the doctrinal and liturgical initiatives of
Reginald Pole
Reginald Pole (12 March 1500 – 17 November 1558) was an English cardinal of the Catholic Church and the last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, holding the office from 1556 to 1558, during the Counter-Reformation.
Early life
Pole was born a ...
and other Catholic reformers. Mary was determined to return the whole of England to the Catholic faith. This aim was not necessarily at odds with the feeling of a large section of the populace; Edward's Protestant reformation had not been well received everywhere, and there was ambiguity in the responses of the parishes.
Mary also had some powerful families behind her. The Jerningham family together with other East Anglian Catholic families such as the Bedingfelds, Waldegraves, Rochesters together with the Huddlestons of
Sawston Hall
Sawston Hall is a Grade I listed Tudor manor house in Sawston, Cambridgeshire dating from the 16th century. It has many fine features, such as the magnificent Great Hall complete with Elizabethan panelling and a large Tudor fireplace with fireback ...
were "the key to Queen Mary's successful accession to the throne. Without them she would never have made it." However, Mary's execution of 300 Protestants by burning them at the stake proved counterproductive as this measure was extremely unpopular with the populace. For example, instead of executing
Archbishop Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He helped build the case for the annulment of Henry's ...
for treason for supporting
Queen Jane, she had him tried for heresy and burned at the stake. ''
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
The ''Actes and Monuments'' (full title: ''Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church''), popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, is a work of Protestant history and martyrology by Protestant Engli ...
'', which glorified the Protestants killed at the time and vilified Catholics, ensured her a place in popular memory as ''Bloody Mary'', though some recent historians have noted that most of the Protestants Foxe highlights in his book, who were tried for heresy, were primarily Anabaptists, which explains why mainstream Protestants like Stephen Gardiner and William Paget (who were members of Philip's "consejo codigo") went along with it. These historians also note that it was Bartolome Carranza, an influential Spanish Dominican of Philip II's workforce, who insisted that Thomas Cranmer's sentence be put into effect. "It was Carranza, not Mary, who insisted that the sentence against Cranmer be carried out."
For centuries after, the idea of another reconciliation with Rome was linked in many English people's minds with a renewal of Mary's fiery stakes. Ultimately, her alleged harshness was a success but at the cost of alienating a fairly large section of English society which had been moving away from some traditional Catholic devotional practices. These English were neither Calvinist nor Lutheran, but certainly leaning towards
Protestant reformation
The Reformation (alternatively named the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation) was a major movement within Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church and in ...
(and by the late sixteenth century, were certainly Protestant).
Reign of Elizabeth I
When Mary died and
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I (7 September 153324 March 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. Elizabeth was the last of the five House of Tudor monarchs and is sometimes referred to as the "Virgin Queen".
El ...
became queen in 1558, the religious situation in England was confused. Throughout the alternating religious landscape of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, a significant proportion of the population (especially in the rural and outlying areas of the country) were likely to have continued to hold Catholic views, or were conservative. Nevertheless, Elizabeth was a Protestant and the "very rituals with which the parish had celebrated her accession would be swept away". Thus Elizabeth's first act was to reverse her sister's re-establishment of Catholicism by
Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity.
The Act of Supremacy of 1558 made it a crime to assert the authority of any foreign prince,
prelate
A prelate () is a high-ranking member of the Christian clergy who is an ordinary or who ranks in precedence with ordinaries. The word derives from the Latin , the past participle of , which means 'carry before', 'be set above or over' or 'pref ...
, or other authority, and was aimed at abolishing the authority of the
Pope
The pope ( la, papa, from el, πάππας, translit=pappas, 'father'), also known as supreme pontiff ( or ), Roman pontiff () or sovereign pontiff, is the bishop of Rome (or historically the patriarch of Rome), head of the worldwide Cathol ...
in England. A third offence was
high treason
Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplo ...
became punishable by death. The
Oath of Supremacy
The Oath of Supremacy required any person taking public or church office in England to swear allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Failure to do so was to be treated as treasonable. The Oath of Supremacy was ori ...
, imposed by the Act of Supremacy 1558, provided for any person taking public or church office in
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
to swear allegiance to the monarch as
Supreme Governor
The supreme governor of the Church of England is the titular head of the Church of England, a position which is vested in the British monarch. Queen and Church > Queen and Church of England">The Monarchy Today > Queen and State > Queen and Churc ...
of the
Church of England
The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain ...
. Failure to so swear was a crime, although it did not become treason until 1562, when the Supremacy of the Crown Act 1562 made a second offence of refusing to take the oath treason.
During the first years of her reign from 1558 to 1570 there was relative leniency towards Catholics who were willing to keep their religion private, especially if they were prepared to continue to attend their parish churches. The wording of the official prayer book had been carefully designed to make this possible by omitting aggressively "heretical" matter, and at first many English Catholics did in fact worship with their Protestant neighbours, at least until this was formally forbidden by
Pope Pius V
Pope Pius V ( it, Pio V; 17 January 1504 – 1 May 1572), born Antonio Ghislieri (from 1518 called Michele Ghislieri, O.P.), was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 8 January 1566 to his death in May 1572. He is v ...
's 1570 bull, ''
Regnans in Excelsis
''Regnans in Excelsis'' ("Reigning on High") is a papal bull that Pope Pius V issued on 25 February 1570. It excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England, referring to her as "the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime", declared h ...
'', which also declared that Elizabeth was not a rightful queen and should be overthrown. It formally excommunicated her and any who obeyed her and obliged all Catholics to attempt to overthrow her.
In response, the "Act to retain the Queen's Majesty's subjects in their obedience", passed in 1581, made it high treason to reconcile anyone or to be reconciled to "the Romish religion", or to procure or publish any papal Bull or writing whatsoever. The celebration of Mass was prohibited under penalty of a fine of two hundred
marks
Marks may refer to:
Business
* Mark's, a Canadian retail chain
* Marks & Spencer, a British retail chain
* Collective trade marks, trademarks owned by an organisation for the benefit of its members
* Marks & Co, the inspiration for the novel '' ...
and imprisonment for one year for the celebrant, and a fine of one hundred marks and the same imprisonment for those who heard the Mass. This act also increased the penalty for not attending the Anglican service to the sum of twenty pounds a month, or imprisonment until the fine was paid or until the offender went to the Protestant Church. A further penalty of ten pounds a month was inflicted on anyone keeping a schoolmaster who did not attend the Protestant service. The schoolmaster himself was to be imprisoned for one year.
England's wars with Catholic powers such as France and Spain, culminated in the attempted invasion by the
Spanish Armada
The Spanish Armada (a.k.a. the Enterprise of England, es, Grande y Felicísima Armada, links=no, lit=Great and Most Fortunate Navy) was a Spanish fleet that sailed from Lisbon in late May 1588, commanded by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, an aris ...
in 1588. The Papal bull had unleashed nationalistic feelings which equated Protestantism with loyalty to a highly popular monarch and made Catholics "vulnerable to accusations of being traitors to the crown." The
Rising of the North
The Rising of the North of 1569, also called the Revolt of the Northern Earls or Northern Rebellion, was an unsuccessful attempt by Catholic nobles from Northern England to depose Queen Elizabeth I of England and replace her with Mary, Queen of ...
, the
Throckmorton plot and the
Babington plot
The Babington Plot was a plan in 1586 to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I, a Protestant, and put Mary, Queen of Scots, her Catholic cousin, on the English throne. It led to Mary's execution, a result of a letter sent by Mary (who had been impris ...
, together with other subversive activities of supporters of
Mary, Queen of Scots
Mary, Queen of Scots (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, was Queen of Scotland from 14 December 1542 until her forced abdication in 1567.
The only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scot ...
, all reinforced the association of Catholicism with treachery in the minds of many, notably in middle and southern England.
The climax of Elizabeth's anti-Catholic legislation was in 1585, two years before the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, with the
. This statute, under which most of the
English Catholic martyrs were executed, made it high treason for any Jesuit or any seminary priest to be in England at all, and a felony for any one to harbour or relieve them.
The last of Elizabeth's anti-Catholic laws was the Act for the Better Discovery of Wicked and Seditious Persons Terming Themselves Catholics, but Being Rebellious and Traitorous Subjects. Its effect was to prohibit all
recusants
Recusancy (from la, recusare, translation=to refuse) was the state of those who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and refused to attend Church of England services after the English Reformation.
The 1558 Recusancy Acts passed in the reign ...
from going more than five miles from their place of abode, and to order all persons suspected of being Jesuits or seminary priests, and not answering satisfactorily, to be imprisoned until they did so.
![Mary, Queen of Scotland, legitimist pretender to England, Ireland and France (crop)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Mary%2C_Queen_of_Scotland%2C_legitimist_pretender_to_England%2C_Ireland_and_France_%28crop%29.jpg)
However, Elizabeth did not believe that her anti-Catholic policies constituted religious persecution, though "she strangled, disembowelled, and dismembered more than 200" English Catholics and "built on the actions of Mary." In the context of the uncompromising wording of the Papal Bull against her, she failed to distinguish between those Catholics in conflict with her from those with no such designs. The number of English Catholics executed under Elizabeth was significant, including
Edmund Campion
Edmund Campion, SJ (25 January 15401 December 1581) was an English Jesuit priest and martyr. While conducting an underground ministry in officially Anglican England, Campion was arrested by priest hunters. Convicted of high treason, he was ...
,
Robert Southwell, and
Margaret Clitherow
Margaret Clitherow (1556 – 25 March 1586) was an English saint and martyr of the Roman Catholic Church, known as "the Pearl of York". She was pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea to the charge of harbouring Catholic priests. She was c ...
. Elizabeth herself signed the regicidal death warrant of her cousin,
Mary, Queen of Scots
Mary, Queen of Scots (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, was Queen of Scotland from 14 December 1542 until her forced abdication in 1567.
The only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scot ...
. As MacCulloch has noted, "England judicially murdered more Roman Catholics than any other country in Europe, which puts English pride in national tolerance in an interesting perspective." So distraught was Elizabeth over Catholic opposition to her throne, she was secretly reaching out to the Ottoman Sultan
Murad III
Murad III ( ota, مراد ثالث, Murād-i sālis; tr, III. Murad; 4 July 1546 – 16 January 1595) was Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1574 until his death in 1595. His rule saw battles with the Habsburgs and exhausting wars with the Saf ...
, "asking for military aid against Philip of Spain and the 'idolatrous princes' supporting him."
Because of the persecution in England, Catholic priests were trained abroad at the
English College in Rome
The Venerable English College (), commonly referred to as the English College, is a Catholic seminary in Rome, Italy, for the training of priests for England and Wales. It was founded in 1579 by William Allen on the model of the English College, ...
, the
English College in Douai, the
English College at Valladolid in Spain, and at the English College in Seville. Given that Douai was located in the
Spanish Netherlands
Spanish Netherlands (Spanish: Países Bajos Españoles; Dutch: Spaanse Nederlanden; French: Pays-Bas espagnols; German: Spanische Niederlande.) (historically in Spanish: ''Flandes'', the name "Flanders" was used as a ''pars pro toto'') was the Ha ...
, part of the dominions of Elizabethan England's greatest enemy, and Valladolid and Seville in Spain itself, they became associated in the public eye with political as well as religious subversion. It was this combination of nationalistic public opinion, sustained persecution, and the rise of a new generation which could not remember pre-Reformation times and had no pre-established loyalty to Catholicism, that reduced the number of Catholics in England during this period – although the overshadowing memory of Queen Mary I's reign was another factor that should not be underestimated (the population of the country was 4.1 million). Nevertheless, by the end of Elizabeth's reign probably 20% of the population were still Catholic, with 10% dissident "Puritan" Protestants and the remainder more or less reconciled to the Anglican church as "parish Anglicans". By then most English people had largely been de-catholicised but were not Protestant. Religious "uniformity," however, "was a lost cause," given the presence of Dissenting, Nonconformist Protestants, and Catholic minorities.
Stuart period
The reign of
James I James I may refer to:
People
*James I of Aragon (1208–1276)
*James I of Sicily or James II of Aragon (1267–1327)
*James I, Count of La Marche (1319–1362), Count of Ponthieu
*James I, Count of Urgell (1321–1347)
*James I of Cyprus (1334–13 ...
(1603–1625) was marked by a measure of tolerance, though less so after the discovery of the
Gunpowder Plot
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, was a failed assassination attempt against King James I by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby who sought ...
conspiracy of a small group of Catholic conspirators who aimed to kill both King and Parliament and establish a Catholic monarchy. A mix of persecution and tolerance followed:
Ben Jonson
Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for t ...
and his wife, for example, in 1606 were summoned before the authorities for failure to take communion in the Church of England, yet the King tolerated some Catholics at court; for example George Calvert, to whom he gave the title
Baron Baltimore
Baron Baltimore, of Baltimore, County Longford, was a title in the Peerage of Ireland. It was created in 1625 and ended in 1771, upon the death of its sixth-generation male heir, aged 40. Holders of the title were usually known as Lord Baltimo ...
, and the
Duke of Norfolk
Duke of Norfolk is a title in the peerage of England. The seat of the Duke of Norfolk is Arundel Castle in Sussex, although the title refers to the county of Norfolk. The current duke is Edward Fitzalan-Howard, 18th Duke of Norfolk. The dukes ...
, head of the
Howard family
The House of Howard is an English noble house founded by John Howard, who was created Duke of Norfolk (third creation) by King Richard III of England in 1483. However, John was also the eldest grandson (although maternal) of the 1st Duke of the ...
.
The reign of
Charles I Charles I may refer to:
Kings and emperors
* Charlemagne (742–814), numbered Charles I in the lists of Holy Roman Emperors and French kings
* Charles I of Anjou (1226–1285), also king of Albania, Jerusalem, Naples and Sicily
* Charles I of ...
(1625–49) saw a small revival of Catholicism in England, especially among the upper classes. As part of the royal marriage settlement Charles's Catholic wife,
Henrietta Maria
Henrietta Maria (french: link=no, Henriette Marie; 25 November 1609 – 10 September 1669) was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland from her marriage to King Charles I on 13 June 1625 until Charles was executed on 30 January 1649. She wa ...
, was permitted her own royal chapel and chaplain. Henrietta Maria was in fact very strict in her religious observances, and helped create a court with continental influences, where Catholicism was tolerated, even somewhat fashionable. Some anti-Catholic legislation became effectively a dead letter. The
Counter-Reformation
The Counter-Reformation (), also called the Catholic Reformation () or the Catholic Revival, was the period of Catholic resurgence that was initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation. It began with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) a ...
on the continent of Europe had created a more vigorous and magnificent form of Catholicism (i.e.,
Baroque
The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...
, notably found in the architecture and music of Austria, Italy and Germany) that attracted some converts, like the poet
Richard Crashaw
Richard Crashaw (c. 1613 – 21 August 1649) was an English poet, teacher, High Church Anglican cleric and Roman Catholic convert, who was one of the major metaphysical poets in 17th-century English literature.
Crashaw was the son of a famous A ...
. Ironically, the explicitly Catholic artistic movement (i.e., Baroque) ended up "providing the blueprint, after the fire of London, for the first new Protestant churches to be built in England".
While Charles remained firmly Protestant, he was personally drawn towards a consciously "High Church" Anglicanism. This affected his appointments to Anglican bishoprics, in particular the appointment of
William Laud
William Laud (; 7 October 1573 – 10 January 1645) was a bishop in the Church of England. Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Charles I in 1633, Laud was a key advocate of Charles I's religious reforms, he was arrested by Parliament in 1640 ...
as
Archbishop of Canterbury
The archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and a principal leader of the Church of England, the ceremonial head of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. The current archbishop is Justi ...
. How many Catholics and Puritans there were is still open to debate.
Religious conflict between Charles and other "High" Anglicans and
Calvinists
Calvinism (also called the Reformed Tradition, Reformed Protestantism, Reformed Christianity, or simply Reformed) is a major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice set down by John Ca ...
– at this stage mostly still within the Church of England (the
Puritans
The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. P ...
) – formed a strand of the anti-monarchical leanings of the troubled politics of the period. The religious tensions between a court with "
Papist
The words Popery (adjective Popish) and Papism (adjective Papist, also used to refer to an individual) are mainly historical pejorative words in the English language for Roman Catholicism, once frequently used by Protestants and Eastern Orthodox ...
" elements and a Parliament in which the Puritans were strong was one of the major factors behind the
English Civil War
The English Civil War (1642–1651) was a series of civil wars and political machinations between Parliamentarians (" Roundheads") and Royalists led by Charles I ("Cavaliers"), mainly over the manner of England's governance and issues of re ...
, in which almost all Catholics supported the King. The victory of the Parliamentarians meant a strongly Protestant, anti-Catholic regime, content for the English Church to become "little more than a nationwide federation of Protestant parishes."
The restoration of the monarchy under
Charles II (1660–85) also saw the restoration of a Catholic-influenced court like his father's. However, although Charles himself had Catholic leanings, he was first and foremost a pragmatist and realised the vast majority of public opinion in England was strongly anti-Catholic, so he agreed to laws such as the
Test Act
The Test Acts were a series of English penal laws that served as a religious test for public office and imposed various civil disabilities on Roman Catholics and nonconformists. The underlying principle was that only people taking communion in t ...
requiring any appointee to any public office or member of Parliament to deny Catholic beliefs such as
transubstantiation
Transubstantiation (Latin: ''transubstantiatio''; Greek: μετουσίωσις ''metousiosis'') is, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, "the change of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the Body of Christ and of th ...
. As far as possible, however, he maintained tacit tolerance. Like his father, he married a Catholic,
Catherine of Braganza
Catherine of Braganza ( pt, Catarina de Bragança; 25 November 1638 – 31 December 1705) was List of English royal consorts, Queen of England, List of Scottish royal consorts, Scotland and Ireland during her marriage to Charles II of England, ...
. (He would become Catholic himself on his deathbed.)
![James II (Ann Killigrew)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/James_II_%28Ann_Killigrew%29.jpg)
Charles' brother and heir James, Duke of York (later
James II James II may refer to:
* James II of Avesnes (died c. 1205), knight of the Fourth Crusade
* James II of Majorca (died 1311), Lord of Montpellier
* James II of Aragon (1267–1327), King of Sicily
* James II, Count of La Marche (1370–1438), King C ...
), converted to Catholicism in 1668–1669. When
Titus Oates
Titus Oates (15 September 1649 – 12/13 July 1705) was an English priest who fabricated the " Popish Plot", a supposed Catholic conspiracy to kill King Charles II.
Early life
Titus Oates was born at Oakham in Rutland. His father Samuel (1610 ...
in 1678 alleged a (totally imaginary, a hoax) "
Popish Plot
The Popish Plot was a fictitious conspiracy invented by Titus Oates that between 1678 and 1681 gripped the Kingdoms of England and Scotland in anti-Catholic hysteria. Oates alleged that there was an extensive Catholic conspiracy to assassinate C ...
" to assassinate Charles and put James in his place, he unleashed a wave of parliamentary and public hysteria which led to the execution of 17 Catholics on the scaffold, and the death of many more over the next two years, which Charles was either unable or unwilling to prevent. Throughout the early 1680s the
Whig element in Parliament attempted to remove James as successor to the throne. Their failure saw James become, in 1685, Britain's first openly Catholic monarch since Mary I (and last to date). He promised religious toleration for Catholic and Protestants on an equal footing, but it is in doubt whether he did this to gain support from
Dissenters
A dissenter (from the Latin ''dissentire'', "to disagree") is one who dissents (disagrees) in matters of opinion, belief, etc.
Usage in Christianity
Dissent from the Anglican church
In the social and religious history of England and Wales, and ...
or whether he was truly committed to tolerance (contemporary Catholic regimes in Spain and Italy, for example, were hardly tolerant of Protestantism, while those in France and Poland had practised forms of toleration).
James earnestly tried "to improve the position of his fellow Catholics" and did so "in such an inept way that he aroused the fears of both the Anglican establishment and the Dissenters. In the process, he encouraged converts like the poet
John Dryden
''
John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate.
He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the per ...
, who wrote "
The Hind and the Panther
''The Hind and the Panther: A Poem, in Three Parts'' (1687) is an allegory in heroic couplets by John Dryden. At some 2600 lines it is much the longest of Dryden's poems, translations excepted, and perhaps the most controversial. The critic Marg ...
", to celebrate his conversion. Protestant fears mounted as James placed Catholics in the major commands of the existing standing army, dismissed the Protestant Bishop of London and dismissed the Protestant fellows of Magdalen College and replaced them with a wholly Catholic board. The last straw was the birth of a Catholic heir in 1688, portending a return to a pre-Reformation Catholic dynasty. Observing this was Princess Mary, James' daughter by his first wife, and her husband 'Dutch William,' whose wife stood to lose her future thrones through this new arrival."
William and Mary and the Catholic Church
In what came to be known as the
Glorious Revolution
The Glorious Revolution; gd, Rèabhlaid Ghlòrmhor; cy, Chwyldro Gogoneddus , also known as the ''Glorieuze Overtocht'' or ''Glorious Crossing'' in the Netherlands, is the sequence of events leading to the deposition of King James II and ...
, Parliament deemed James to have abdicated (effectively deposing him, though Parliament refused to call it that) in favour of his Protestant daughter and son-in-law and nephew,
Mary II
Mary II (30 April 166228 December 1694) was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, co-reigning with her husband, William III & II, from 1689 until her death in 1694.
Mary was the eldest daughter of James, Duke of York, and his first wife ...
and
William III William III or William the Third may refer to:
Kings
* William III of Sicily (c. 1186–c. 1198)
* William III of England and Ireland or William III of Orange or William II of Scotland (1650–1702)
* William III of the Netherlands and Luxembourg ...
. Although this affair is celebrated as solidifying both English liberties and the Protestant nature of the kingdom, some argue that it was "fundamentally a coup spearheaded by a foreign army and navy".
James fled into exile, and with him many Catholic nobility and gentry. The
Act of Settlement 1701
The Act of Settlement is an Act of the Parliament of England that settled the succession to the English and Irish crowns to only Protestants, which passed in 1701. More specifically, anyone who became a Roman Catholic, or who married one, bec ...
, which remains in operation today, established the royal line through
Sophia, Electress of Hanover
Sophia of Hanover (born Princess Sophia of the Palatinate; 14 October 1630 – 8 June 1714) was the Electress of Hanover by marriage to Elector Ernest Augustus and later the heiress presumptive to the thrones of England and Scotland (later Grea ...
, and specifically excludes any Catholic or anyone who marries a Catholic from the throne. In 2013, this law was partially changed when the disqualification of the monarch marrying a Catholic was eliminated (along with male preference in the line of succession). The law was also changed to limit the requirement that the monarch "must give permission to marry to the six persons next in line to the throne." Still, Catholics today once again are permitted to hold Wolsey and More's office of Lord Chancellor as did Catholics before the Reformation. Cardinal
Henry Benedict Stuart
Henry Benedict Thomas Edward Maria Clement Francis Xavier Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York (6 March 1725 – 13 July 1807) was a Roman Catholic cardinal, as well as the fourth and final Jacobite heir to publicly claim the thrones of Great Brit ...
, the last
Jacobite heir to publicly assert a claim to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland, died in Rome in 1807. A
monument to the Royal Stuarts
The Monument to the Royal Stuarts is a memorial in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City State, the papal enclave surrounded by Rome, Italy. It commemorates the last three members of the Royal House of Stuart: James Francis Edward Stuart (d. 17 ...
exists today at Vatican City. In the 21st century,
Franz, Duke of Bavaria
Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria Herzog von Bayern (born 14 July 1933), commonly known by the courtesy title Duke of Bavaria, is the head of the House of Wittelsbach, the former ruling family of the Kingdom of Bavaria. His great-grandfather Ki ...
, head of the Wittelsbach family, is the most senior descendant of King Charles I and is considered by Jacobites to be heir of the Stuarts. Though direct descendant of the House of Stuart, Franz has said being king is not a claim he wishes to pursue.
Recusants and moves towards Emancipation
The years from 1688 to the early 19th century were in some respects the lowest point for Catholicism in England. Deprived of their dioceses, four
Apostolic Vicariates were set up throughout England until the re-establishment of the diocesan episcopacy in 1850. Although the persecution was not violent as in the past, Catholic numbers, influence and visibility in English society reached their lowest point. The percentage of the population that was Catholic may have declined from 4% in 1700 (population 5.2 millions) to 1% 1800 (population of 7.25 million) with absolute numbers halved. By 1825, however, the Bishop of Chester estimated that there were "about a half a million Catholics in England." Their civil rights were severely curtailed: their right to own property or inherit land was greatly limited, they were burdened with special taxes, they could not send their children abroad for Catholic education, they could not vote, and priests were liable to imprisonment. Writing about the Catholic Church during this time, historian
Antonia Fraser
Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, (' Pakenham; born 27 August 1932) is a British author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction. She is the widow of the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Harold Pinter (1930–2008), and pr ...
notes:
The harsh laws and the live-and-let-live reality were two very different things. This world was divided into the upper classes, the aristocracy and the gentry, and what were literally the working classes. Undoubtedly, the survival of Catholicism in the past p until 1829
P, or p, is the sixteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''pee'' (pronounced ), plural ''pees''.
History
The ...
was due to the dogged, but hopefully inconspicuous, protection provided by the former to the latter. Country neighbours, Anglicans and Catholics, lived amicably together in keeping with this "laissez-faire" reality.
There was no longer, as once in Stuart times, any notable Catholic presence at court, in public life, in the military or professions. Many of the Catholic nobles and gentry who had preserved on their lands among their tenants small pockets of Catholicism had followed James into exile, and others, at least outwardly in cryptic fashion, conformed to Anglicanism, meaning fewer such Catholic communities survived intact. For "obvious reasons", Catholic aristocracy at this time was heavily intermarried. Their great houses, however, still had chapels called "libraries", with priests attached to these places (shelved for books) who celebrated Mass, which worship was described in public as "Prayers". Interestingly, one area where the sons of working class Catholics could find religious tolerance was in the army. Generals, for example, did not deny Catholic men their Mass and did not compel them to attend Anglican services, believing that "physical strength and devotion to the military struggle was demanded of them, not spiritual allegiance". Fraser also notes that the role of the working class among themselves was important:
...servants of various degrees and farm workers, miners, mill workers and tradesmen, responded with loyalty, hard work and gratitude for the opportunity to practice the faith of their fathers (and even more importantly, in many cases, their mothers). Their contributions should not be ignored, even if it is for obvious reasons more difficult to uncover than that of their theoretical superiors. The unspoken survival of the Catholic community in England, despite Penal laws, depended also on these loyal families unknown to history whose existence is recorded as Catholics in Anglican parish registers. That of Walton-le-Dale parish church, near Preston in Lancashire in 1781, for example, records 178 families, with 875 individuals as 'Papists'. Where baptisms are concerned, parental occupations are stated as weaver, husbandman and labourer, with names such as Turner, Wilcock, Balwin and Charnley.
A bishop at this time (roughly from 1688 to 1850) was called a
vicar apostolic
A vicar (; Latin: ''vicarius'') is a representative, deputy or substitute; anyone acting "in the person of" or agent for a superior (compare "vicarious" in the sense of "at second hand"). Linguistically, ''vicar'' is cognate with the English pref ...
. The officeholder was a
titular bishop
A titular bishop in various churches is a bishop who is not in charge of a diocese.
By definition, a bishop is an "overseer" of a community of the faithful, so when a priest is ordained a bishop, the tradition of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox an ...
(as opposed to a diocesan bishop) through whom the pope exercised jurisdiction over a
particular church
In metaphysics, particulars or individuals are usually contrasted with universals. Universals concern features that can be exemplified by various different particulars. Particulars are often seen as concrete, spatiotemporal entities as opposed to a ...
territory in England. English-speaking
colonial
Colonial or The Colonial may refer to:
* Colonial, of, relating to, or characteristic of a colony or colony (biology)
Architecture
* American colonial architecture
* French Colonial
* Spanish Colonial architecture
Automobiles
* Colonial (1920 au ...
America came under the jurisdiction of the
Vicar Apostolic of the London District
The Apostolic Vicariate of the London District was an ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. It was led by a vicar apostolic who was a titular bishop. The apostolic vicariate was created in 1688 and was disso ...
. As titular bishop over Catholics in British America, he was important to the government not only in regard to its English-speaking North American colonies, but made more so after the
Seven Years' War
The Seven Years' War (1756–1763) was a global conflict that involved most of the European Great Powers, and was fought primarily in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. Other concurrent conflicts include the French and Indian War (1754 ...
when the
British Empire
The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts esta ...
, in 1763, acquired the French-speaking (and predominantly Catholic) territory of Canada. Only after the
Treaty of Paris Treaty of Paris may refer to one of many treaties signed in Paris, France:
Treaties
1200s and 1300s
* Treaty of Paris (1229), which ended the Albigensian Crusade
* Treaty of Paris (1259), between Henry III of England and Louis IX of France
* Trea ...
in 1783, and in 1789 with the consecration of
John Carroll John Carroll may refer to:
People Academia and science
*Sir John Carroll (astronomer) (1899–1974), British astronomer
*John Alexander Carroll (died 2000), American history professor
*John Bissell Carroll (1916–2003), American cognitive sci ...
, a friend of
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin ( April 17, 1790) was an American polymath who was active as a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher. Encyclopædia Britannica, Wood, 2021 Among the leading inte ...
, did the U.S. have its own diocesan bishop, free of the Vicar Apostolic of London, James Robert Talbot.
![Distribution of English Recusant Catholics, 1715-1720](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Distribution_of_English_Recusant_Catholics%2C_1715-1720.png)
The introduction of Vicars Apostolic or titular bishops in 1685 was very important at the time and ought not be misprized. For example, when John Leyburn, formerly of the English College, Douai, was appointed as Vicar Apostolic of England, it was the first time a Catholic bishop had been present in England for nearly sixty years. Up until that time,
Archpriest
The ecclesiastical title of archpriest or archpresbyter belongs to certain priests with supervisory duties over a number of parishes. The term is most often used in Eastern Orthodoxy and the Eastern Catholic Churches and may be somewhat analogous ...
s were overseeing the church.
In Leyburn's combined tour north and visitation to administer Confirmation, in 1687, some 20,859 Catholics received the sacrament. Most Catholics, it could be said, retreated to relative isolation from a popular Protestant mainstream, and Catholicism in England in this period was politically invisible to history. However, culturally and socially, there were notable exceptions.
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...
, owing to his literary popularity, was one memorable English Catholic of the 18th century. Other prominent Catholics were three remarkable members of the Catholic gentry:
Baron Petre
Baron Petre (), of Writtle, in the County of Essex, is a title in the Peerage of England. It was created in 1603 for Sir John Petre. His family has since been associated with the county of Essex. He represented Essex in parliament and served ...
(who wined and dined
George III
George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 173829 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two kingdoms on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Br ...
and
Queen Charlotte
Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (Sophia Charlotte; 19 May 1744 – 17 November 1818) was Queen of Great Britain and of Ireland as the wife of King George III from their marriage on 8 September 1761 until the union of the two kingdoms ...
at Thorndon Hall),
Thomas Weld Thomas Weld may refer to:
* Thomas Welde (1594/5–1661), first minister of the First Church of Roxbury, Massachusetts
* Thomas Weld (of Lulworth) (1750–1810), of Lulworth castle, Catholic philanthropist
* Thomas Weld (cardinal)
Thomas W ...
the bibliophile, (and friend of
George III
George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 173829 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two kingdoms on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Br ...
) who in 1794 donated his
Stonyhurst estate to the Jesuits to establish a college, along with 30 acres of land, and the Duke of Norfolk, the Premier
Duke
Duke is a male title either of a monarch ruling over a duchy, or of a member of royalty, or nobility. As rulers, dukes are ranked below emperors, kings, grand princes, grand dukes, and sovereign princes. As royalty or nobility, they are ran ...
in the
peerage
A peerage is a legal system historically comprising various hereditary titles (and sometimes non-hereditary titles) in a number of countries, and composed of assorted noble ranks.
Peerages include:
Australia
* Australian peers
Belgium
* Belgi ...
of England and as
Earl of Arundel
Earl of Arundel is a title of nobility in England, and one of the oldest extant in the English peerage. It is currently held by the Duke of Norfolk, and is used (along with the Earl of Surrey) by his heir apparent as a courtesy title. The e ...
, the Premier
Earl
Earl () is a rank of the nobility in the United Kingdom. The title originates in the Old English word ''eorl'', meaning "a man of noble birth or rank". The word is cognate with the Scandinavian form ''jarl'', and meant "chieftain", particular ...
. In virtue of his status and as head of the Howard family (which included some Church of England, though many Catholic members), the Duke was always at Court. It seemed the values and worth of aristocracy "trumped those of the illegal religion". Pope, however, seemed to benefit from the isolation. In 1713, when he was 25, he took subscriptions for a project that filled his life for the next seven years, the result being a new version of Homer's ''
Iliad
The ''Iliad'' (; grc, Ἰλιάς, Iliás, ; "a poem about Ilium") is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the ''Odysse ...
''.
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. The ''Oxford ...
pronounced it the greatest translation ever achieved in the English language. Over time, Pope became the greatest poet of the age, the
Augustan Age, especially for his mock-heroic poems, ''
Rape of the Lock
''The Rape of the Lock'' is a mock-heroic narrative poem written by Alexander Pope. One of the most commonly cited examples of high burlesque, it was first published anonymously in Lintot's ''Miscellaneous Poems and Translations'' (May 1712) ...
'' and ''
The Dunciad
''The Dunciad'' is a landmark, mock-heroic, narrative poem by Alexander Pope published in three different versions at different times from 1728 to 1743. The poem celebrates a goddess Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring ...
''.
Around this time, in 1720,
Clement XI
Pope Clement XI ( la, Clemens XI; it, Clemente XI; 23 July 1649 – 19 March 1721), born Giovanni Francesco Albani, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 23 November 1700 to his death in March 1721.
Clement XI w ...
proclaimed Anselm of Canterbury a Doctor of the Church. In 1752, mid-century, Great Britain adopted the
Gregorian calendar
The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most parts of the world. It was introduced in October 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years dif ...
decreed by Pope
Gregory XIII
Pope Gregory XIII ( la, Gregorius XIII; it, Gregorio XIII; 7 January 1502 – 10 April 1585), born Ugo Boncompagni, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 13 May 1572 to his death in April 1585. He is best known for ...
in 1582. Later in the century there was some liberalization of the anti-Catholic laws on the basis of Enlightenment ideals.
![East Lulworth, church built to look like a house - geograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/East_Lulworth%2C_church_built_to_look_like_a_house_-_geograph.org.uk_-_474257.jpg)
In 1778 the
Catholic Relief Act
The Roman Catholic Relief Bills were a series of measures introduced over time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before the Parliaments of Great Britain and the United Kingdom to remove the restrictions and prohibitions impose ...
allowed Catholics to own property, inherit land and join the army, provided they swore an oath of allegiance. Hardline Protestant mobs reacted in the
Gordon Riots
The Gordon Riots of 1780 were several days of rioting in London motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment. They began with a large and orderly protest against the Papists Act 1778, which was intended to reduce official discrimination against British ...
in 1780, attacking any building in London which was associated with Catholicism or owned by Catholics. The
Catholic Relief Act 1791
The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 (31 George III, c. 32) is an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain passed in 1791 relieving Roman Catholics of certain political, educational, and economic disabilities. It admitted Catholics to the practice ...
provided further freedoms on condition of swearing an additional oath of acceptance of the Protestant succession in the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was a sovereign state in the British Isles that existed between 1801 and 1922, when it included all of Ireland. It was established by the Acts of Union 1800, which merged the Kingdom of Great B ...
. This allowed Catholic schooling and clergy to operate openly and thus allowed permanent missions to be set up in the larger towns.
[Gerard, John, and Edward D'Alton. "Roman Catholic Relief Bill." The Catholic Encyclopedia]
Vol. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 18 March 2020 Stonyhurst College
Stonyhurst College is a co-educational Catholic Church, Roman Catholic independent school, adhering to the Society of Jesus, Jesuit tradition, on the Stonyhurst, Stonyhurst Estate, Lancashire, England. It occupies a Grade I listed building. Th ...
, for example, was able to be established in 1794, as the successor establishment for the fleeing English Jesuits, previously at the
Colleges of St Omer, Bruges and Liège
The Colleges of St Omer, Bruges and Liège were successive expatriate institutions for Roman Catholic higher education run by the Jesuits for English students.
Founded in 1593 by Father Robert Parsons SJ as the College of Saint-Omer in Artoi ...
, due to a timely and generous donation by a former pupil,
Thomas Weld (of Lulworth)
Thomas Bartholomew Weld (1750–1810), known as Thomas Weld of Lulworth Castle, was a member of the English Catholic gentry, landowner, philanthropist and bibliophile. He was connected to many of the leading Catholic families of the land, such ...
, as Europe became engulfed in war.
In 1837,
James Arundell, 10th Baron Arundell of Wardour
James Everard Arundell, 10th Baron Arundell of Wardour (3 November 1785 – 21 June 1834), styled The Honourable James Arundell between 1808 and 1817, was an English peer.
Arundell was born at Clifford Street, St. James's, London, the son of Jame ...
, bequeathed to Stonyhurst the Arundel Library, which contained the vast Arundel family collection, including some of the school's most important books and manuscripts such as a Shakespeare ''
First Folio
''Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies'' is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is cons ...
'' and a manuscript copy of Froissart's ''Chronicles'', looted from the body of a dead Frenchman after the
Battle of Agincourt
The Battle of Agincourt ( ; french: Azincourt ) was an English victory in the Hundred Years' War. It took place on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day) near Azincourt, in northern France. The unexpected English victory against the numerica ...
. Yet Catholic recusants as a whole remained a small group, except where they stayed the majority religion in various pockets, notably in rural
Lancashire
Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated Lancs) is the name of a historic county, ceremonial county, and non-metropolitan county in North West England. The boundaries of these three areas differ significantly.
The non-metropolitan county of Lancashi ...
and
Cumbria
Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. Cumb ...
, or were part of the Catholic aristocracy and squirearchy. Finally, the famous recusant
Maria Fitzherbert
Maria Anne Fitzherbert (''née'' Smythe, previously Weld; 26 July 1756 – 27 March 1837) was a longtime companion of George, Prince of Wales (later King George IV of the United Kingdom). In 1785, they secretly contracted a marriage that was i ...
, who during this period secretly married the
Prince of Wales
Prince of Wales ( cy, Tywysog Cymru, ; la, Princeps Cambriae/Walliae) is a title traditionally given to the heir apparent to the English and later British throne. Prior to the conquest by Edward I in the 13th century, it was used by the rulers ...
,
prince regent
A prince regent or princess regent is a prince or princess who, due to their position in the line of succession, rules a monarchy as regent in the stead of a monarch regnant, e.g., as a result of the sovereign's incapacity (minority or illness ...
, and future
George IV
George IV (George Augustus Frederick; 12 August 1762 – 26 June 1830) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover from the death of his father, King George III, on 29 January 1820, until his own death ten y ...
in 1785. The
British Constitution
The constitution of the United Kingdom or British constitution comprises the written and unwritten arrangements that establish the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a political body. Unlike in most countries, no attempt ...
, however, did not accept it and George IV later moved on. Cast aside by the establishment, she was adopted by the town of Brighton, whose citizens, both Catholic and Protestant, called her "Mrs. Prince". According to journalist Richard Abbott, "Before the town had a
atholicchurch of its own, she had a priest say Mass at her own house, and invited local Catholics", suggesting the recusants of Brighton were not very undiscovered.
In a 2009 study of the English Catholic community, 1688–1745, Gabriel Glickman notes that Catholics, especially those whose social position gave them access to the courtly centres of power and patronage, had a significant part to play in 18th-century England. They were not as marginal as one might think today. For example, Alexander Pope was not the only Catholic whose contributions (especially, ''Essays on Man'') help define the temper of an early English Enlightenment. In addition to Pope, Glickman notes a Catholic architect,
James Gibbs
James Gibbs (23 December 1682 – 5 August 1754) was one of Britain's most influential architects. Born in Aberdeen, he trained as an architect in Rome, and practised mainly in England. He is an important figure whose work spanned the transi ...
, who built
Radcliffe Camera
The Radcliffe Camera (colloquially known as the "Rad Cam" or "The Camera"; from Latin , meaning 'room') is a building of the University of Oxford, England, designed by James Gibbs in neo-classical style and built in 1737–49 to house the Radcl ...
and returned baroque forms to the London skyline, and a Catholic composer,
Thomas Arne
Thomas Augustine Arne (; 12 March 17105 March 1778) was an English composer. He is best known for his patriotic song "Rule, Britannia!" and the song "A-Hunting We Will Go", the latter composed for a 1777 production of ''The Beggar's Opera'', whic ...
, who composed "Rule Britannia". According to reviewer
Aidan Bellenger
Dominic Terence Joseph "Aidan" Bellenger, (born 21 July 1950) is an English historian and former Benedictine monk and schoolmaster. He was headmaster of Downside School from 1991 to 1995 and later Abbot of Downside Abbey from 2006 to 2014.
Early ...
, Glickman also suggests that "rather than being the victims of the Stuart failure, 'the unpromising setting of exile and defeat' had 'sown the seed of a frail but resilient English Catholic Enlightenment'." University of Chicago historian
Steven Pincus
Steven Pincus is the Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History at the University of Chicago, where he specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and European history.
Education and career
In 1990, Pincus received a PhD in h ...
likewise argues in his book, ''1688: The First Modern Revolution'', that Catholics under William and Mary and their successors experienced considerable freedom.
Nineteenth century and Irish immigration
![Daniel O'Connell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Daniel_O%27Connell.png)
After this moribund period, the first signs of a revival occurred as thousands of French Catholics fled France during the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considere ...
. The leaders of the Revolution were virulently anti-Catholic, even singling out priests and nuns for
summary execution
A summary execution is an execution in which a person is accused of a crime and immediately killed without the benefit of a full and fair trial. Executions as the result of summary justice (such as a drumhead court-martial) are sometimes include ...
or massacre, and England was seen as a safe haven from
Jacobin
, logo = JacobinVignette03.jpg
, logo_size = 180px
, logo_caption = Seal of the Jacobin Club (1792–1794)
, motto = "Live free or die"(french: Vivre libre ou mourir)
, successor = Pa ...
violence. Also around this time (1801), a new political entity was formed, the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was a sovereign state in the British Isles that existed between 1801 and 1922, when it included all of Ireland. It was established by the Acts of Union 1800, which merged the Kingdom of Great B ...
, which merged the Kingdom of Great Britain with the
Kingdom of Ireland
The Kingdom of Ireland ( ga, label=Classical Irish, an Ríoghacht Éireann; ga, label=Modern Irish, an Ríocht Éireann, ) was a monarchy on the island of Ireland that was a client state of England and then of Great Britain. It existed from ...
, thus increasing the number of Catholics in the new state. Pressure for abolition of anti-Catholic laws grew, particularly with the need for Catholic recruits to fight in the
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European states formed into various coalitions. It produced a period of Fren ...
.
Despite the resolute opposition of
George IV
George IV (George Augustus Frederick; 12 August 1762 – 26 June 1830) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover from the death of his father, King George III, on 29 January 1820, until his own death ten y ...
,
which delayed fundamental reform, 1829 brought a major step in the liberalisation of most anti-Catholic laws, although some aspects were to remain on the statute book into the 21st century. Parliament passed the
Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829
The Catholic Relief Act 1829, also known as the Catholic Emancipation Act 1829, was passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1829. It was the culmination of the process of Catholic emancipation throughout the United Kingdom of Great Br ...
, giving Catholic men almost equal civil rights, including the right to vote and to hold most public offices. If Catholics were rich, however, exceptions were always made, even before the changes. For example, American ministers to the
Court of St. James's
The Court of St James's is the royal court for the Sovereign of the United Kingdom. All ambassadors to the United Kingdom are formally received by the court. All ambassadors from the United Kingdom are formally accredited from the court – & ...
were often struck by the prominence of wealthy American-born Catholics, titled ladies among the nobility, like Louisa (Caton), granddaughter of
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Charles Carroll (September 19, 1737 – November 14, 1832), known as Charles Carroll of Carrollton or Charles Carroll III, was an Irish-American politician, planter, and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. He was the only Catholic sign ...
, and her two sisters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth. After Louisa's first husband (
Sir Felton Bathurst-Hervey) died, Louisa later married the
son
A son is a male offspring; a boy or a man in relation to his parents. The female counterpart is a daughter. From a biological perspective, a son constitutes a first degree relative.
Social issues
In pre-industrial societies and some current c ...
of the Duke of Leeds, and had the
Duke of Wellington
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, (1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852) was an Anglo-Irish soldier and Tory statesman who was one of the leading military and political figures of 19th-century Britain, serving twice as prime minister of ...
as her European protector. Her sister Mary Ann married the Marquess of Wellesley, the brother of the Duke of Wellington; and her other sister Elizabeth (Lady Stafford) married another British nobleman. Although British law required an Anglican marriage service, each of the sisters and their Protestant spouses had a Catholic ceremony afterwards. At Louisa's first marriage, the Duke of Wellington escorted the bride.
In the 1840s and 1850s, especially during the
Great Irish Famine
The Great Famine ( ga, an Gorta Mór ), also known within Ireland as the Great Hunger or simply the Famine and outside Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a ...
, while much of the large outflow of migration from Ireland was headed to the United States to seek work, hundreds of thousands of Irish people also migrated across the channel to England and Scotland and established communities in cities there, including London,
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a popul ...
,
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
and
Glasgow
Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...
, but also in towns and villages up and down the country, thus giving Catholicism in England a numerical boost.
Re-established dioceses
At various points after the 16th century hopes have been entertained by many English Catholics that the "reconversion of England" was at hand. Additionally, with the arrival of Irish Catholic migrants (Ireland was part of the UK until the partition, in 1922), some considered that a "second spring" of Catholicism across Britain was developing. Rome responded by
re-establishing the Catholic hierarchy in 1850, creating 12 Catholic dioceses in England from existing
apostolic vicariates and appointing diocesan bishops (to replace earlier titular bishops) with fixed sees on a more traditional Catholic pattern. The Catholic Church in England and Wales had had 22 dioceses immediately before the Reformation, but none of the current 22 bear close resemblance (geographically) to the 22 earlier pre-Reformation dioceses.
The re-established Catholic episcopacy specifically avoided using places that were sees of the Church of England, in effect temporarily abandoning the titles of Catholic dioceses before Elizabeth I because of the
Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851
The Ecclesiastical Titles Act 1851 was an Act of the British Parliament (14 & 15 Vict. c. 60) which made it a criminal offence for anyone outside the established "United Church of England and Ireland" to use any episcopal title "of any city, to ...
, which in England favoured a state church (i.e., Church of England) and denied
arms
Arms or ARMS may refer to:
*Arm or arms, the upper limbs of the body
Arm, Arms, or ARMS may also refer to:
People
* Ida A. T. Arms (1856–1931), American missionary-educator, temperance leader
Coat of arms or weapons
*Armaments or weapons
**Fi ...
and legal existence to territorial Catholic sees on the basis that the state could not grant such "privileges" to "entities" that allegedly did not exist in law. Some of the Catholic dioceses, however, took the titles of bishoprics which had previously existed in England but were no longer used by the Anglican Church (e.g. Beverley – later divided into Leeds and Middlesbrough, Hexham – later changed to Hexham and Newcastle). In the few cases where a Catholic diocese bears the same title as an Anglican one in the same town or city (e.g., Birmingham, Liverpool, Portsmouth, and Southwark), this is the result of the Church of England ignoring the prior existence there of a Catholic see and of the technical repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act in 1871. The Act applied only to England and Wales, not Scotland or Ireland; thus official recognition afforded by the
grant of arms
A grant of arms or a governmental issuance of arms are actions, by a lawful authority such as an officer of arms or State Herald, conferring on a person and his or her descendants the right to bear a particular coat of arms or armorial bearings. ...
to the
Archdiocese of St Andrews
The Archdiocese of St Andrews (originally the Diocese of St Andrews) was a territorial episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in early modern and medieval Scotland. It was the largest, most populous and wealthiest diocese of the mediev ...
and Edinburgh, brought into being by Lord Lyon in 1989, relied on the fact that the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851 never applied to Scotland. In recent times, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister
John Gummer
John Selwyn Gummer, Baron Deben, (born 26 November 1939) is a British Conservative Party politician, formerly the Member of Parliament (MP) for Suffolk Coastal and now a member of the House of Lords. He was Conservative Party Chairman from 1983 ...
, a prominent convert to Catholicism and columnist for the ''
Catholic Herald
The ''Catholic Herald'' is a London-based Roman Catholic monthly newspaper and starting December 2014 a magazine, published in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and, formerly, the United States. It reports a total circulation of abo ...
'' in 2007, objected to the fact that no Catholic diocese could have the same name as an Anglican diocese (such as London, Canterbury, Durham, etc.) "even though those dioceses had, shall we say, been borrowed".
Converts
![John_Henry_Newman_by_Sir_John_Everett_Millais,_1st_Bt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/John_Henry_Newman_by_Sir_John_Everett_Millais%2C_1st_Bt.jpg)
A proportion of the Anglicans who were involved in the
Oxford Movement
The Oxford Movement was a movement of high church members of the Church of England which began in the 1830s and eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement, whose original devotees were mostly associated with the University of O ...
or "Tractarianism" were ultimately led beyond these positions and converted to the Catholic Church, including, in 1845, the movement's principal intellectual leader,
John Henry Newman
John Henry Newman (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was an English theologian, academic, intellectual, philosopher, polymath, historian, writer, scholar and poet, first as an Anglican ministry, Anglican priest and later as a Catholi ...
. More new Catholics would come from the Anglican Church, often via high Anglicanism, for at least the next hundred years, and something of this continues.
As anti-Catholicism declined sharply after 1910, the church grew in numbers, grew rapidly in terms of priests and sisters, and expanded their parishes from inner city industrial areas to more salubrious suburbs. Although underrepresented in the higher levels of the social structure, apart from a few old aristocratic Catholic families, Catholic talent was emerging in journalism, literature, the arts, and diplomacy.
A striking development was the surge in highly publicised conversion of intellectuals and writers including most famously
G. K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the "prince of paradox". Of his writing style, ''Time'' observed: "Wh ...
, as well as
Robert Hugh Benson
Robert Hugh Benson AFSC KC*SG KGCHS (18 November 1871 – 19 October 1914) was an English Catholic priest and writer. First an Anglican priest, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1903 and ordained therein the next year. He wa ...
and
Ronald Knox
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (17 February 1888 – 24 August 1957) was an Catholic Church in England and Wales, English Catholic priest, Catholic theology, theologian, author, and radio broadcaster. Educated at Eton College, Eton and Balliol Colleg ...
,
Maurice Baring
Maurice Baring (27 April 1874 – 14 December 1945) was an English man of letters, known as a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator and essayist, and also as a travel writer and war correspondent, with particular knowledge of Russia. During Wo ...
,
Christopher Dawson
Christopher Henry Dawson (12 October 188925 May 1970) was a British independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and Christendom. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century ...
,
Eric Gill
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill, (22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' describes Gill as ″the greatest artist-cra ...
,
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquir ...
,
Manya Harari
Manya Harari (née Manya Benenson) (8 April 1905 – 24 September 1969)P. J. V. Rolo"Harari , Manya (1905–1969)" ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2011. was a British translator of ...
,
David Jones,
Sheila Kaye-Smith
Sheila Kaye-Smith (4 February 1887 – 14 January 1956) was an English writer, known for her many novels set in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent in the English regional tradition. Her 1923 book ''The End of the House of Alard'' became a best- ...
,
Arnold Lunn
Sir Arnold Henry Moore Lunn (18 April 1888 – 2 June 1974) was a skier, mountaineer and writer. He was knighted for "services to British Skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations" in 1952. His father was a lay Methodist minister, but Lunn was an agn ...
,
Rosalind Murray
Rosalind Murray (1890–1967, aged 76-77) was a British-born writer and novelist known for ''The Happy Tree'' and ''The Leading Note''.
Murray's parents were the classical scholar Gilbert Murray (1866-1957) and Lady Mary Henrietta Howard (1865 ...
,
Alfred Noyes
Alfred Noyes CBE (16 September 188025 June 1958) was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright.
Early years
Noyes was born in Wolverhampton, England the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes. When he was four, the family moved to Abe ...
,
William E. Orchard,
Frank Pakenham
Francis Aungier Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, 1st Baron Pakenham, Baron Pakenham of Cowley, (5 December 1905 – 3 August 2001), known to his family as Frank Longford and styled Lord Pakenham from 1945 to 1961, was a British politician and ...
,
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English war poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both describ ...
,
Edith Sitwell
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell (7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964) was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess ...
,
Muriel Spark
Dame Muriel Sarah Spark (née Camberg; 1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006). was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist.
Life
Muriel Camberg was born in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh, the daughter of Bernard Camberg, an ...
,
Graham Sutherland
Graham Vivian Sutherland (24 August 1903 – 17 February 1980) was a prolific English artist. Notable for his paintings of abstract landscapes and for his portraits of public figures, Sutherland also worked in other media, including printmaking ...
,
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...
,
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford (né Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer ( ); 17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals ''The English Review'' and ''The Transatlantic Review'' were instrumental in ...
, and
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires ''Decli ...
. Pre-1900 famous converts included Cardinals Newman and
Henry Edward Manning
Henry Edward Manning (15 July 1808 – 14 January 1892) was an English prelate of the Catholic church, and the second Archbishop of Westminster from 1865 until his death in 1892. He was ordained in the Church of England as a young man, but con ...
, the less famous like
Ignatius Spencer
Ignatius of St Paul (21 December 1799 – 1 October 1864), born as George Spencer, was a son of the 2nd Earl Spencer. He converted from Anglicanism to the Roman Catholic Church and entered the Passionist religious order in 1847 and spent his ...
as well as the leading architect of the
Gothic Revival
Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...
,
Augustus Pugin
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin ( ; 1 March 181214 September 1852) was an English architect, designer, artist and critic with French and, ultimately, Swiss origins. He is principally remembered for his pioneering role in the Gothic Revival st ...
, historian
Thomas William Allies
Thomas William Allies (12 February 181317 June 1903) was an English historical writer specializing in religious subjects. He was one of the Anglican churchmen who joined the Roman Catholic Church in the early period of the Oxford Movement.
Life
A ...
, and
Jesuit
, image = Ihs-logo.svg
, image_size = 175px
, caption = ChristogramOfficial seal of the Jesuits
, abbreviation = SJ
, nickname = Jesuits
, formation =
, founders ...
poet
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame placed him among leading Victorian poets. His prosody – notably his concept of sprung rhythm – established him as an innovato ...
.
G. E. M. Anscombe
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (; 18 March 1919 – 5 January 2001), usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe or Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, ...
was also a notable convert during the early 20th century.
Prominent cradle Catholics included the film director
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English filmmaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 featur ...
, writers such as
Hilaire Belloc
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (, ; 27 July 187016 July 1953) was a Franco-English writer and historian of the early twentieth century. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. H ...
,
Lord Acton
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, (10 January 1834 – 19 June 1902), better known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He is best remembered for the remark he wr ...
and
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, ; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philology, philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''.
From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was ...
and the composer
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestr ...
, whose oratorio ''
The Dream of Gerontius
''The Dream of Gerontius'', Op. 38, is a work for voices and orchestra in two parts composed by Edward Elgar in 1900, to text from the poem by John Henry Newman. It relates the journey of a pious man's soul from his deathbed to his judgment b ...
'' was based on a 19th-century poem by Newman.
Contemporary English Catholicism
English Catholicism continued to grow throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century, when it was associated primarily with elements in the English intellectual class and the ethnic Irish population. Numbers attending Mass remained very high in contrast with some Protestant churches (though not the Church of England). Clergy numbers, which began the 20th century at under 3,000, reached a high of 7,500 in 1971.
By the latter years of the twentieth century low numbers of vocations also affected the church with ordinations to the priesthood dropping from the hundreds in the late 20th century into the teens in 2006–2011 (16 in 2009 for example) and a recovery into the 20s thereafter, with a prediction for 2018 of 24.
As in other English-speaking countries such as the United States and Australia, the movement of Irish Catholics out of the working-class into the middle-class suburban mainstream often meant their assimilation with broader, secular English society and loss of a separate Catholic identity. The
Second Vatican Council
The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly known as the , or , was the 21st Catholic ecumenical councils, ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. The council met in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome for four periods (or sessions) ...
has been followed, as in other Western countries, by divisions between
Traditionalist Catholicism
Traditionalist Catholicism is the set of beliefs, practices, customs, traditions, Christian liturgy, liturgical forms, Catholic devotions, devotions, and presentations of Catholic Church, Catholic teaching that existed in the Catholic Church befo ...
and a more liberal form of Catholicism claiming inspiration from the council. This caused difficulties for not a few pre-conciliar converts, though others have still joined the Church in recent decades (for instance,
Malcolm Muggeridge
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990) was an English journalist and satirist. His father, H. T. Muggeridge, was a socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party (UK), Labour Party Members of Parliament (for Romfo ...
,
Alec Guinness
Sir Alec Guinness (born Alec Guinness de Cuffe; 2 April 1914 – 5 August 2000) was an English actor. After an early career on the stage, Guinness was featured in several of the Ealing comedies, including ''Kind Hearts and Coronets'' (194 ...
, and
Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce (born February 12, 1961), is an English-born American writer, and Director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, before which he held positions at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in ...
). And public figures (often descendants of the recusant families) include
Timothy Radcliffe
Timothy Peter Joseph Radcliffe, OP (born 22 August 1945) is an English Roman Catholic priest and Dominican friar who served as master of the Order of Preachers from 1992 to 2001. He is the only member of the English Province to hold that off ...
, former Master of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and writer. Radcliffe is related to three late cardinals –
Weld,
Vaughan
Vaughan () (2021 population 323,103) is a city in Ontario, Canada. It is located in the Regional Municipality of York, just north of Toronto. Vaughan was the fastest-growing municipality in Canada between 1996 and 2006 with its population increas ...
and
Hume (the last because his cousin Lord Hunt is married to Hume's sister) – and his family is connected to many of the great recusant English Catholic families, the Arundels, Tichbournes, Talbots, Stourtons, Stonors, Welds and Blundells. There were also the families whose male line has died out such as the Grimshaws, the de la Barre Bodenhams or the Lubienski-Bodenhams. Among others in this group are
Paul Johnson;
Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William ...
; Antonia Fraser;
Mark Thompson,
Director General of the BBC
The director-general of the British Broadcasting Corporation is chief executive and (from 1994) editor-in-chief of the BBC.
The position was formerly appointed by the Board of Governors of the BBC (for the period of 1927 to 2007) and then the ...
;
Michael Martin, first Catholic to hold the office of
Speaker
Speaker may refer to:
Society and politics
* Speaker (politics), the presiding officer in a legislative assembly
* Public speaker, one who gives a speech or lecture
* A person producing speech: the producer of a given utterance, especially:
** In ...
of the
House of Commons
The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...
since the Reformation;
Chris Patten
Christopher Francis Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes, (; born 12 May 1944) is a British politician who was the 28th and last Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997 and Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1992. He was made a life pe ...
, first Catholic to hold the post of
Chancellor
Chancellor ( la, cancellarius) is a title of various official positions in the governments of many nations. The original chancellors were the of Roman courts of justice—ushers, who sat at the or lattice work screens of a basilica or law cou ...
of Oxford since the Reformation;
Piers Paul Read
Piers Paul Read FRSL (born 7 March 1941) is a British novelist, historian and biographer. He was first noted in 1974 for a book of reportage, '' Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors'', later adapted as a feature film and a documentary. Read ...
; Helen Liddel, Britain's High Commissioner to Australia; and former Prime Minister's wife,
Cherie Blair
Cherie, Lady Blair, (; born 23 September 1954), also known professionally as Cherie Booth, is an English barrister and writer. She is married to the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Tony Blair.
Early life and education
Booth ...
, These have no difficulty making their Catholicism known in public life. The former Prime Minister,
Tony Blair
Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British former politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He previously served as Leader of th ...
, was received into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2007.
Catherine Pepinster
Catherine Pepinster (born 7 June 1959) is an English editor, historian, commentator and writer with a focus on theology, Catholic and Anglican ecumenism, church history, and religion and politics. She was the first female editor of ''The Tablet ...
, editor of ''Tablet'', notes: "The impact of Irish immigrants is one. There are numerous prominent campaigners, academics, entertainers (like
Danny Boyle
Daniel Francis Boyle (born 20 October 1956) is an English director and producer. He is known for his work on films including ''Shallow Grave'', '' Trainspotting'' and its sequel ''T2 Trainspotting'', '' The Beach'', '' 28 Days Later'', '' Su ...
the most successful Catholic in showbiz owing to his film, ''Slumdog Millionaire''), politicians and writers. But the descendants of the
recusant
Recusancy (from la, recusare, translation=to refuse) was the state of those who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and refused to attend Church of England services after the English Reformation.
The 1558 Recusancy Acts passed in the reign ...
families are still a force in the land."
Since the
Second Vatican Council
The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly known as the , or , was the 21st Catholic ecumenical councils, ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. The council met in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome for four periods (or sessions) ...
(Vatican II) the Church in England has tended to focus on ecumenical dialogue with the Anglican Church rather than winning converts from it as in the past. However, the 1990s have seen a number of conversions from Anglicanism to the Catholic Church, largely prompted by the Church of England's decision to ordain women as priests (among other moves away from traditional doctrines and structures). The resultant converts included members of the Royal Family (
Katharine, Duchess of Kent
Katharine, Duchess of Kent, (born Katharine Lucy Mary Worsley, 22 February 1933) is a member of the British royal family. She is married to Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, a grandson of King George V.
The Duchess of Kent converted to Roman Cath ...
, her son
Lord Nicholas Windsor
Lord Nicholas Charles Edward Jonathan Windsor (born 25 July 1970) is a relative of the British royal family, youngest child of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. As a Catholic convert, he has forfeited his right of succession to the throne. Lord Ni ...
and her grandson
Baron Downpatrick
Duke of Kent is a title that has been created several times in the peerages of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, most recently as a royal dukedom for the fourth son of King George V. Since 1942, the title has been held by Prince Edwa ...
),
Graham Leonard
Graham Douglas Leonard (8 May 1921 – 6 January 2010) was an English Roman Catholic priest and former Anglican bishop. His principal ministry was as a bishop of the Church of England but, after his retirement as the Bishop of London, he becam ...
(former Anglican Bishop of London),
Frances Shand Kydd
Frances Ruth Shand Kydd (previously Spencer, ''née'' Roche; 20 January 1936 – 3 June 2004) was the mother of Diana, Princess of Wales. She was the maternal grandmother of William, Prince of Wales and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, respectively ...
(maternal grandmother of
Prince William, Duke of Cambridge
William, Prince of Wales, (William Arthur Philip Louis; born 21 June 1982) is the heir apparent to the British throne. He is the elder son of King Charles III and his first wife Diana, Princess of Wales.
Born in London, William was educat ...
and
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, (Henry Charles Albert David; born 15 September 1984) is a member of the British royal family. He is the younger son of Charles III and his first wife Diana, Princess of Wales. He is fifth in the line of succe ...
), and a number of Anglican priests. Converts to Catholicism in Britain occur for any number of reasons, not least from "the mystical buoyant instinct" within each person to grow toward a profounder expression of what they believe. In 2019, Charles Moore, former editor of ''The Spectator,'' ''The Daily Telegraph,'' and authorized biographer of
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. S ...
, noted that his conversion in 1994 to Catholicism followed the Church of England's decision to ordain women, "unilaterally." The Church of England's "determination to do this," he said, "willy-nilly, come what may, meant that they weren't serious about Christian unity, because the Catholic and Orthodox had a different view." This view seems to match Graham Leonard's view and many other former Anglican clerics who, according to John Jay Hughes, have noted: "It is about authority, or lack of it, of the Church of England unilaterally to initiate a radical change in the priesthood, since it does not have its own, but only the priesthood of the whole Catholic church of which it had always claimed to be a part."
The spirit of ecumenism fostered by Vatican II resulted in 1990 with the Catholic Church in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland joining
Churches Together in Britain and Ireland
Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (CTBI) is an ecumenical organisation. The members include most of the major churches in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. CTBI is registered at Companies House with number 05661787. Its office is in Cen ...
as an expression of the churches' commitment to work ecumenically. In 2006, for example, a memorial was put up to St
John Houghton John Houghton may refer to:
Politicians
* John Houghton (fl.1393), MP for Leicester (UK Parliament constituency)
* John Houghton (died 1583) (before 1522–1583), MP for Stamford (UK Parliament constituency)
* John Houghton (Manx politician)
* J ...
and fellow
Carthusian
The Carthusians, also known as the Order of Carthusians ( la, Ordo Cartusiensis), are a Latin enclosed religious order of the Catholic Church. The order was founded by Bruno of Cologne in 1084 and includes both monks and nuns. The order has its ...
monks martyred at the
London Charterhouse
The London Charterhouse is a historic complex of buildings in Farringdon, London, dating back to the 14th century. It occupies land to the north of Charterhouse Square, and lies within the London Borough of Islington. It was originally built ( ...
, 1535. Anglican priest Geoffrey Curtis campaigned for it with the current archbishop of Canterbury's blessing. Also, in another ecumenical gesture, a plaque in Holywell Street, Oxford, now commemorates the Catholic martyrs of England. It reads: "Near this spot
George Nichols,
Richard Yaxley
Richard is a male given name. It originates, via Old French, from Old Frankish and is a compound of the words descending from Proto-Germanic ''*rīk-'' 'ruler, leader, king' and ''*hardu-'' 'strong, brave, hardy', and it therefore means 'strong ...
,
Thomas Belson
Thomas Belson (c. 1563 - 5 July 1589) was an English Roman Catholic layman and martyr, beatified in 1987.
Life
Belson was born at Brill in Buckinghamshire, although the date is uncertain. He was the son of Augustine Belson. He studied at St Ma ...
, and
Humphrey Pritchard
Humphrey is both a masculine given name and a surname. An earlier form, not attested since Medieval times, was Hunfrid.
Notable people with the name include:
People with the given name Medieval period
:''Ordered chronologically''
*Hunfrid of P ...
were executed for their Catholic faith, 5 July 1589." This action, however, did not please some Catholics, as the chair of the Latin Mass Society, Joseph Shaw, noted in a letter dated 2020: "As Mgr. Ronald Knox pointed out: 'Each of them
artyrsdied in the belief that he was bearing witness to the truth; and if you accept both testimonies undiscriminately, then you are making nonsense of them both.'" And at Lambeth Palace, in February 2009, the Archbishop of Canterbury hosted a reception to launch a book, ''Why Go To Church?'', by Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, one of Britain's best known religious and the former master of the Dominican Order. A large number of young Dominican
friars
A friar is a member of one of the mendicant orders founded in the twelfth or thirteenth century; the term distinguishes the mendicants' itinerant apostolic character, exercised broadly under the jurisdiction of a superior general, from the o ...
attended. Fr Radcliffe said, "I don't think there have been so many Dominicans in one place since the time of Robert Kilwardby, the Dominican Archbishop of Canterbury in the 13th century."
Currently, along with the 22
Latin Church
, native_name_lang = la
, image = San Giovanni in Laterano - Rome.jpg
, imagewidth = 250px
, alt = Façade of the Archbasilica of St. John in Lateran
, caption = Archbasilica of Saint Joh ...
dioceses, there are two dioceses of the
Eastern Catholic Churches
The Eastern Catholic Churches or Oriental Catholic Churches, also called the Eastern-Rite Catholic Churches, Eastern Rite Catholicism, or simply the Eastern Churches, are 23 Eastern Christian autonomous (''sui iuris'') particular churches of th ...
: the
Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Holy Family of London
The Eparchy of the Holy Family of London ( uk, Єпархія Пресвятої Родини у Лондоні; la, Eparchia Sanctae Familiae Londiniensis) is the only Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church ecclesiastical territory or eparchy of the ...
and the
Syro-Malabar Catholic Eparchy of Great Britain
The Eparchy of Great Britain is the sole Syro-Malabar Catholic Church ecclesiastical territory or eparchy of the Catholic Church in Great Britain. Its cathedral is Syro-Malabar Cathedral of St Alphonsa in the episcopal see of Preston, Lancashi ...
. The
Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham
The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in England and Wales is a personal ordinariate in the Latin Church of the Catholic Church immediately exempt, being directly subject to the Holy See. It is within the territory of the Catholic B ...
, for Anglican-tradition converts to Catholicism, was erected by
Pope Benedict XVI
Pope Benedict XVI ( la, Benedictus XVI; it, Benedetto XVI; german: link=no, Benedikt XVI.; born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, , on 16 April 1927) is a retired prelate of the Catholic church who served as the head of the Church and the sovereign ...
in 2011.
Social action
The Church's principles of social justice influenced initiatives to tackle the challenges of poverty and social inclusion. In Southampton, Fr Pat Murphy O'Connor founded the St Dismas Society as an agency to meet the needs of ex-prisoners discharged from Winchester prison. Some of St Dismas Society's early members went on to help found the Simon Community in Sussex then in London. Their example gave new inspiration to other clergy, such as the Revd Kenneth Leech (CofE) of
St Anne's Church, Soho
Saint Anne's Church serves in the Church of England the Soho section of London. It was consecrated on 21 March 1686 by Bishop Henry Compton as the parish church of the new civil and ecclesiastical parish of St Anne, created from part of the par ...
, who helped found the homeless charity
Centrepoint, and the Revd Bruce Kenrick (Church of Scotland) who helped found the homeless charity
Shelter
Shelter is a small building giving temporary protection from bad weather or danger.
Shelter may also refer to:
Places
* Port Shelter, Hong Kong
* Shelter Bay (disambiguation), various locations
* Shelter Cove (disambiguation), various locatio ...
. In 1986 Cardinal
Basil Hume
George Basil Hume OSB OM (2 March 1923 – 17 June 1999) was an English Catholic bishop. He was a monk and priest of the English Benedictine monastery of Ampleforth Abbey and its abbot for 13 years until his appointment as Archbishop of Wes ...
established the Cardinal Hume Centre to work with homeless young people, badly housed families and local communities to access accommodation, support and advice, education, training and employment opportunities.
In 2006 Cardinal
Cormac Murphy-O'Connor
Cormac Murphy-O'Connor (24 August 1932 – 1 September 2017) was a British cardinal, the Archbishop of Westminster and president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. He was made cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2001. He sub ...
instituted an annual Mass in Support of Migrant Workers at Westminster Cathedral in partnership with the ethnic chaplains of Brentwood, Southwark and Westminster.
Adoption controversy
On 3 November 2016, John Bingham, Head of Media at the Church of England, reported in ''The Daily Telegraph'' that Cardinal
Vincent Nichols
Vincent Gerard Nichols (born 8 November 1945) is an English cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. He previously served as Archbishop of Birm ...
officially acknowledged that the Catholic Church in England and Wales had pressured young unmarried mothers in the country to put their children up for adoption in agencies linked to the Catholic Church throughout the decades following World War II and offered an apology.
Child abuse scandal
In November 2020 the
Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in England and Wales was an inquiry examining how the country's institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse. It was announced by the British Home Secretary ...
reported that between 1970 and 2015, the church in England and Wales had received more than 900 complaints involving more than 3,000 instances of child sexual abuse, made against almost 1,000 individuals, including priests, monks and church associates. In light of such serious and persistent allegations over decades, the Inquiry had hoped to gain the cooperation of the Vatican. In the event its repeated requests were thwarted. As a result, there have been calls for resignations of prelates in leadership roles both from victims, their families and supporters. The inquiry has not spared criticism of the church for prioritising its reputation over the suffering of victims. Cardinal Nichols was singled out in the inquiry report for lack of personal responsibility, or of compassion towards victims. However he has indicated he would not be resigning as he was "determined to put it right". In another article by Pepinster, she notes that the late Cardinal Basil Hume was "remembered for showing empathy to survivors but offered only pastoral care and kindness."
Organisation
![English and Welsh Catholic Dioceses Map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/English_and_Welsh_Catholic_Dioceses_Map.png)
The Catholic Church in England and Wales has five
provinces
A province is almost always an administrative division within a country or state. The term derives from the ancient Roman ''provincia'', which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire's territorial possessions outsi ...
: Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, Southwark and Westminster. There are 22
diocese
In Ecclesiastical polity, church governance, a diocese or bishopric is the ecclesiastical district under the jurisdiction of a bishop.
History
In the later organization of the Roman Empire, the increasingly subdivided Roman province, pro ...
s which are divided into
parish
A parish is a territorial entity in many Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a priest, often termed a parish priest, who might be assisted by one or m ...
es (for comparison, the Church of England and Church in Wales currently have a total of 50 dioceses). In addition to these, there are four dioceses covering England and Wales for specific groups which are the
Bishopric of the Forces
The Bishopric of the Forces (in Great Britain) is a Latin Church military ordinariate of the Catholic Church which provides chaplains to the British Armed Forces based in the United Kingdom and their overseas postings.
It is directly exempt ...
, the
Eparchy for Ukrainians, the
Syro-Malabar Catholic Eparchy of Great Britain
The Eparchy of Great Britain is the sole Syro-Malabar Catholic Church ecclesiastical territory or eparchy of the Catholic Church in Great Britain. Its cathedral is Syro-Malabar Cathedral of St Alphonsa in the episcopal see of Preston, Lancashi ...
and the
Personal Ordinariate for former Anglicans.
The Catholic bishops in England and Wales come together in a collaborative structure known as the
Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales
The Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) is the episcopal conference of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.
Overview
The Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales is the permanent assembly of Catholic Bishops ...
. Currently the
Archbishop of Westminster
The Archbishop of Westminster heads the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, in England. The incumbent is the metropolitan of the Province of Westminster, chief metropolitan of England and Wales and, as a matter of custom, is elected presid ...
,
Vincent Gerard Nichols
Vincent Gerard Nichols (born 8 November 1945) is an English cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. He previously served as Archbishop of Birmi ...
, is the
president
President most commonly refers to:
*President (corporate title)
*President (education), a leader of a college or university
*President (government title)
President may also refer to:
Automobiles
* Nissan President, a 1966–2010 Japanese ful ...
of the Bishops' Conference. For this reason in the global Catholic Church (outside England), he is ''de facto'' Primate of England though not in the eyes of English law and the established Church of England. Historically, the avoidance of the title of "Primate" was to eschew whipping up anti-Catholic tension, in the same way the bishops of the restored hierarchy avoided using current titles of Anglican sees (Archbishop of Westminster rather than "Canterbury" or "London"). However, the Archbishop of Westminster had certain privileges: he was the only metropolitan in the country until 1911 (when the archdioceses of Birmingham and Liverpool were created) and he has always acted as leader at meetings of the English bishops.
Although the bishops of the restored hierarchy were obliged to take new titles, such as that of Westminster, they saw themselves very much in continuity with the pre-Reformation Church. Westminster in particular saw itself as the continuation of Canterbury, hence the similarity of the
coat of arms
A coat of arms is a heraldry, heraldic communication design, visual design on an escutcheon (heraldry), escutcheon (i.e., shield), surcoat, or tabard (the latter two being outer garments). The coat of arms on an escutcheon forms the central ele ...
of the two sees (with Westminster believing it has more right to it since it features the
pallium
The pallium (derived from the Roman ''pallium'' or ''palla'', a woolen cloak; : ''pallia'') is an ecclesiastical vestment in the Catholic Church, originally peculiar to the pope, but for many centuries bestowed by the Holy See upon metropolit ...
, no longer given to Anglican archbishops). At the back of Westminster Cathedral is a
list of Popes
This chronological list of popes corresponds to that given in the ''Annuario Pontificio'' under the heading "I Sommi Pontefici Romani" (The Roman Supreme Pontiffs), excluding those that are explicitly indicated as antipopes. Published every ye ...
and, alongside this, a list of Catholic Archbishops of Canterbury beginning with Augustine of Canterbury and the year they received the pallium. After Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic incumbent of Canterbury, the names of the Catholic vicars apostolic or titular bishops (from 1685) are recorded and then the Archbishops of Westminster, in one unimpaired line, from 597 to the present, according to the Archdiocese of Westminster. To highlight this historical continuity, dating back to Pope Gregory I's appointment of Augustine and his sequent bestowal of the pallium on the appointee, the installation rites of pre-Reformation Catholic Archbishops of Canterbury and earlier Archbishops of Westminster were used at the installation of the current Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Gerard Nichols. He also became the forty-third of the
English cardinals
This is a list of cardinals of the Catholic Church from England. It does not include cardinals of non-English national origin appointed to English ecclesiastical offices such as the cardinal protectors of England.
Dates in parentheses are the da ...
since the 12th century.
Hierarchy
Chaplaincies
Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham
In October 2009, following closed-circuit talks between some Anglicans and the
Holy See
The Holy See ( lat, Sancta Sedes, ; it, Santa Sede ), also called the See of Rome, Petrine See or Apostolic See, is the jurisdiction of the Pope in his role as the bishop of Rome. It includes the apostolic episcopal see of the Diocese of Rome ...
, Pope Benedict made a relatively unconditional offer to accommodate disaffected Anglicans in the Church of England, enabling them, for the first time, to retain parts of their liturgy and heritage under ''
Anglicanorum coetibus
A personal ordinariate for former Anglicans, shortened as personal ordinariate or Anglican ordinariate,"...the liturgies approved for the Anglican ordinariates..." "Bishop Stephen Lopes of the Anglican Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter..." ...
'', while being in full communion with Rome. By April 2012 the UK ordinariate numbered about 1200, including five bishops and 60 priests. The ordinariate has recruited a group of aristocrats as honorary vice-presidents to help out. These include the Duke of Norfolk, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith and the Duchess of Somerset. Other vice-presidents include Lord Nicholas Windsor, Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth and the Squire de Lisle, whose ancestor
Ambrose de Lisle
Ambrose Lisle March Phillipps de Lisle (17 March 1809 – 5 March 1878) was a British Roman Catholic convert. He founded Mount St Bernard Abbey, a Trappist abbey in Leicestershire, and worked for the reconversion or reconciliation of Britain to ...
was a 19th-century Catholic convert who advocated the corporate reunion of the Anglican Church with Rome. According to the first Ordinary, Mgr Keith Newton, the ordinariate will "work on something with an Anglican flavour, but they are not bringing over any set of Anglican liturgy". The director of music at Westminster Abbey (Anglican), lay Catholic
James O'Donnell, likens the ordinariate to a Uniate church or one of the many non-Latin Catholic rites, saying: "This is a good opportunity for us to remember that there isn't a one size fits all, and that this could be a good moment to adopt the famous civil service philosophy – 'celebrating diversity'." In May 2013 a former Anglican priest, Alan Hopes, was appointed the new bishop of East Anglia, whose diocese includes the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. In 2021, the former Anglican bishop of Rochester,
Michael Nazir-Ali
Michael James Nazir-Ali ( ur, ; born 19 August 1949) is a Pakistani-born British Roman Catholic priest and former Anglican bishop who served as the 106th Bishop of Rochester from 1994 to 2009 and, before that, as Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan. ...
, joined the Ordinariate, noting: "I believe that the Anglican desire to adhere to apostolic, patristic and conciliar teaching can now best be maintained in the Ordinariate." Nazir-Ali also shared with Dr. Foley Beach, chairman of the Global Anglican Future Conference, "his willingness to continue to assist" that movement "in any way that might be suitable." In April 2022, Pope Francis granted Nazir-Ali the title "Prelate of Honour." He may now be addressed as "Monsignor."
Eastern Catholic Churches
![Wolverhampton Ukrainian Catholic Church](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Wolverhampton_Ukrainian_Catholic_Church.jpg)
There exists the
Apostolic Exarchate for Ukrainians which serves the 15,000 Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Great Britain, with a cathedral and various churches across the country.
The Maronite Church in the United Kingdom is under the jurisdiction of the Maronite Eparchy of Europe. The
Lebanese Maronite Order
The Baladites, formally known as the Lebanese Maronite Order (; abbreviated OLM), is a monastic order among the Levant-based, Catholic Maronite Church, which from the beginning has been specifically a monastic Church. The order was founded in 16 ...
(OLM) is in charge of serving the Maronite Catholics in the UK and it is a registered Charity in England and Wales. The OLM is an order of the
Maronite Catholic Church
The Maronite Church is an Eastern Catholic Churches, Eastern Catholic ''sui iuris'' particular church in full communion with the pope and the worldwide Catholic Church, with self-governance under the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. Th ...
. Father Fadi KMEID is the parish priest for Maronites. The OLM runs a few churches, for example Our Lady of Lebanon in Paddington serving the Lebanese Maronite community and the church of The Holy Family of Nazareth serving the Cypriot Maronite community.
There are also Catholic chaplains involved in the ministries of
Eastern Catholic Churches
The Eastern Catholic Churches or Oriental Catholic Churches, also called the Eastern-Rite Catholic Churches, Eastern Rite Catholicism, or simply the Eastern Churches, are 23 Eastern Christian autonomous (''sui iuris'') particular churches of th ...
(of Eritrean, Chaldean, Syriac, Syro-Malabar, Syro-Malankara, and Melkite communities). For information about the Syro-Malabar chaplaincy within the
Diocese of Westminster Diocese of Westminster may refer to:
* Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, since 1850, with seat at Westminster Cathedral
* Diocese of Westminster (Church of England)
The Diocese of Westminster was a short-lived diocese of the Church of Engl ...
in London, see
Syro-Malabar Catholic Church of London.
Demography
General statistics
At the 2001 United Kingdom census, there were 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, some eight per cent of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they represented only 4.8 per cent of the population. In 1981, 8.7 per cent of the population of England and Wales were Catholic.
In 2009, an Ipsos Mori poll found that 9.6 per cent, or 5.2 million persons of all ethnicities were Catholic in England and Wales. Sizeable populations include
North West England
North West England is one of nine official regions of England and consists of the ceremonial counties of England, administrative counties of Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside. The North West had a population of ...
where one in five is Catholic, a result of large-scale
Irish immigration
The Irish diaspora ( ga, Diaspóra na nGael) refers to ethnic Irish people and their descendants who live outside the island of Ireland.
The phenomenon of migration from Ireland is recorded since the Early Middle Ages,Flechner and Meeder, The ...
in the nineteenth century as well as the high number of English recusants in Lancashire.
Migration from Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries and more recent
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is a subregion of the Europe, European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic connotations. The vast majority of the region is covered by Russ ...
an migration have significantly increased the numbers of Catholics in England and Wales, although Pew Research data and stats of 2018 point to other factors at work. According to Pew researchers, 19% of UK adults identify as Catholic.
The Eastern European members are mainly from
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...
, with smaller numbers from
Lithuania
Lithuania (; lt, Lietuva ), officially the Republic of Lithuania ( lt, Lietuvos Respublika, links=no ), is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania ...
,
Latvia
Latvia ( or ; lv, Latvija ; ltg, Latveja; liv, Leţmō), officially the Republic of Latvia ( lv, Latvijas Republika, links=no, ltg, Latvejas Republika, links=no, liv, Leţmō Vabāmō, links=no), is a country in the Baltic region of ...
, and
Slovakia
Slovakia (; sk, Slovensko ), officially the Slovak Republic ( sk, Slovenská republika, links=no ), is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the s ...
. According to the
World Factbook
''The World Factbook'', also known as the ''CIA World Factbook'', is a reference resource produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with almanac-style information about the countries of the world. The official print version is available ...
, the ethnic/racial composition of UK was "white": 87.2%; "non-white": 12.8%. A 2022 report, however, noted the "white" population of England and Wales had dropped from 86% in 2011 to 81.7% in 2021.
Polish Catholic immigration
![Mother Frances Siedliska](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Mother_Frances_Siedliska.jpg)
The spiritual needs of migrating Catholic Poles in England and Wales over the past two centuries have been tied inexorably to the changing geo-political fate of their homeland. Most of the arrivals up to the 21st century were escaping political and other repressions. They were not all Catholics.
On the
accession of Poland to the European Union
The largest expansion of the European Union (EU), in terms of territory, number of states, and population took place on 1 May 2004.
The simultaneous accessions concerned the following countries (sometimes referred to as the "A10" countries): C ...
in 2004 there has been large-scale Polish immigration to the UK, up to 900 000 people as of 2017 have come.
The
Polish Catholic Mission
The Polish Catholic Mission, pl, Polska Misja Katolicka, (PMK) is a permanent Catholic chaplaincy for migrant Poles. It operates in a number of countries under the direction of the Polish Episcopal Conference.
England and Wales
History
The or ...
reports that only about 10% of the newly arrived Poles attend church regularly. For those it has around 219 branches and pastoral centres with 114 priests. The Vicars Delegate who manage the "chaplaincy" of the Polish Catholic Mission since then have been Mgr. Tadeusz Kukla up to 2010, succeeded by the Mgr. Stefan Wylężek.
In Poland, the Polish Bishops Conference has a bishop Delegate, with special responsibility for the spiritual needs of émigré Poles. The postholder since 2011 has been Bishop Wiesław Cichowski. ''The Tablet'' reported in December 2007 that the Polish Catholic Mission as stating that its branches follow a pastoral programme set by the Polish conference of bishops and are viewed as "an integral part of the Polish church".
History
Polish-speaking Catholics first arrived in the United Kingdom in some numbers after the 19th century national
insurgencies
An insurgency is a violent, armed rebellion against authority waged by small, lightly armed bands who practice guerrilla warfare from primarily rural base areas. The key descriptive feature of insurgency is its asymmetric nature: small irregu ...
in
1831 and 1863 which had arisen, especially in the Russian sector, in the wake of the
Partitions of the Lithuanian - Polish commonwealth during the late 18th century. In 1864 through the efforts of general
Zamoyski
The House of Zamoyski (plural: Zamoyscy) is the name of an important Polish noble (szlachta) family, which used the Jelita coat of arms. It is the Polish term for "de Zamość" (Polish "z Zamościa"), the name they originally held as lords of Z ...
and
Cardinal Wiseman
Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman (3 August 1802 – 15 February 1865) was a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who became the first Archbishop of Westminster upon the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850.
Born ...
, Rev. Chwaliszewski was invited to come to London and lead services in the Polish chapel at St. Peter's
Hatton Garden
Hatton Garden is a street and commercial zone in the Holborn district of the London Borough of Camden, abutting the narrow precinct of Saffron Hill which then abuts the City of London. It takes its name from Sir Christopher Hatton, a favourit ...
. Worthy of note in this period was the Polish figure of
The Venerable
The Venerable (''venerabilis'' in Latin) is a style, a title, or an epithet which is used in some Western Christian churches, or it is a translation of similar terms for clerics in Eastern Orthodoxy and monastics in Buddhism.
Christianity
Cathol ...
Bernard Łubieński
Bernard Alojzy Łubieński, ( translit. Bernard Aloysius Lubienski) CSsR, (9 December 1846 – 10 September 1933) was a Polish Redemptorist priest, missionary and writer, closely associated with Bishop Robert Coffin and with the Roman C ...
(1846-1933) closely associated with
Bishop Robert Coffin and who, after an education at
Ushaw College
Ushaw College (formally St Cuthbert's College, Ushaw), is a former Roman Catholic Church, Catholic seminary near the village of Ushaw Moor, County Durham, England, which is now a heritage and cultural tourist attraction. The college is known for ...
, in 1864 entered the
Redemptorists
The Redemptorists officially named the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer ( la, links=no, Congregatio Sanctissimi Redemptoris), abbreviated CSsR,is a Catholic clerical religious congregation of pontifical right for men (priests and brother ...
at
Clapham
Clapham () is a suburb in south west London, England, lying mostly within the London Borough of Lambeth, but with some areas (most notably Clapham Common) extending into the neighbouring London Borough of Wandsworth.
History
Early history
T ...
and spent some years as a missionary in the British Isles, before returning to his native land.
The
Polish Catholic Mission
The Polish Catholic Mission, pl, Polska Misja Katolicka, (PMK) is a permanent Catholic chaplaincy for migrant Poles. It operates in a number of countries under the direction of the Polish Episcopal Conference.
England and Wales
History
The or ...
was placed on a permanent footing in 1894 by
Cardinal Vaughan
Herbert Alfred Henry Vaughan, MHM (15 April 1832 – 19 June 1903) was an English prelate of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Westminster from 1892 until his death in 1903, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1893. He was th ...
, the then
Archbishop of Westminster
The Archbishop of Westminster heads the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, in England. The incumbent is the metropolitan of the Province of Westminster, chief metropolitan of England and Wales and, as a matter of custom, is elected presid ...
. The nucleus of the mission and its chaplaincy was formed by
Blessed
Blessed may refer to:
* The state of having received a blessing
* Blessed, a title assigned by the Roman Catholic Church to someone who has been beatified
Film and television
* ''Blessed'' (2004 film), a 2004 motion picture about a supernatural ...
Franciszka Siedliska
Maria Franciszka Siedliska (12 November 1842 – 21 November 1902), also known by her religious name Maria of Jesus the Good Shepherd, was a Polish Roman Catholic professed religious and the founder of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth. ...
(1842-1902), founder of the
Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth
The Piamartini, officially known as the Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth of Blessed Father Piamarta ( it, Congregazione della Sacra Famiglia di Nazareth del Beato Padre Piamarta; abbreviated FN) is a Catholic clerical religious congrega ...
and its spiritual director, rev. Lechert
CR. Sr. Siedliska and two sisters started a Polish language primary school. From then on Polish services were regularly held in a chapel first in Globe Street, then in Cambridge Heath Road in
Bethnal Green
Bethnal Green is an area in the East End of London northeast of Charing Cross. The area emerged from the small settlement which developed around the common land, Green, much of which survives today as Bethnal Green Gardens, beside Cambridge Heat ...
in the
East End of London
The East End of London, often referred to within the London area simply as the East End, is the historic core of wider East London, east of the Roman and medieval walls of the City of London and north of the River Thames. It does not have uni ...
, where most exiled Poles were living at the time.
After
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, the Polish chaplaincy was in the rented Polish church in Mercer Street in North London. In 1928 the local authority condemned the building as unsafe. That same year the exiled community was visited by cardinal
Aleksander Kakowski
Aleksander Kakowski (; 5 February 1862 – 30 December 1938) was a Polish politician, diplomat, a member of the Regency Council and, as Cardinal and Archbishop of Warsaw, the last titular Primate of the Kingdom of Poland before Poland fully reg ...
with bishop Przeździeński from the diocese of
Siedlce
Siedlce [] ( yi, שעדליץ ) is a city in eastern Poland with 77,354 inhabitants (). Situated in the Masovian Voivodeship (since 1999), previously the city was the capital of a separate Siedlce Voivodeship (1975–1998). The city is situated b ...
and Polish ambassador,
Konstanty Skirmunt
Konstanty Skirmunt (russian: Константи́н Ге́нрихович Ски́рмунт) (30 August 1866 – 24 July 1949) was a Polish politician.
During 1907—1914 he was a member of the State Council of the Russian Empire. He was a memb ...
. After an extended search, a building was bought from the
Swedenborg Society
The Swedenborg Society was founded in 1810 to translate into English and publish the works of Emanuel Swedenborg. Its original name was the London Society for Printing and Publishing the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg.
The Society's headquarters, S ...
in Devonia Road, Islington.
Cardinal Bourne
Francis Alphonsus Bourne (1861–1935) was an English prelate of the Catholic Church. He served as the fourth Archbishop of Westminster from 1903 until his death, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1911.
Biography
Early life
Francis Bo ...
of Westminster, helped the mission with a £1000 loan for refurbishment. It became the first Polish-owned ecclesiastical building in the British Isles. It was consecrated on 30 October 1930 by cardinal
August Hlond
August Hlond (July 5, 1881 – October 22, 1948) was a Polish cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, who was Archbishop of Poznań and Gniezno in 1926 and Primate of Poland. He was then appointed as the Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw in 194 ...
, primate of Poland in the presence of cardinal Bourne. In 1938 rev. Władysław Staniszewski became chaplain to the mission.
After
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, the pastoral task had swelled to almost 200,000
displaced people
Forced displacement (also forced migration) is an involuntary or coerced movement of a person or people away from their home or home region. The UNHCR defines 'forced displacement' as follows: displaced "as a result of persecution, conflict, g ...
- mainly soldiers. Many Polish servicemen were unable to return to their homeland following the annexation of half of Poland's territory by the
USSR
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
and the imposition of a communist regime in the newly reconfigured Poland. The Polish Resettlement Corps was formed by the British government to ease their transition into British life. They were joined by several thousand Displaced Persons (DPs), many of whom were their family members. This influx of Poles gave rise to the Polish Resettlement Act 1947 which allowed approximately 250,000 Polish Servicemen and their dependents to settle in Britain. Polish British, Many assimilated into existing Catholic congregations. Among them were also 120 Military Chaplain, Military chaplains and priests, along with a minority of Eastern Orthodox Church, Orthodox, Lutheran and Armenians, Armenian Christians with their own chaplains. There was also a minority Jewish contingent and a handful of Muslims among the soldiers.
![Kościół sw](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Ko%C5%9Bci%C3%B3%C5%82_sw._Andrzeja_Boboli_1.JPG)
In 1948, following a visit to Poland the previous year for talks with cardinal Hlond, and after consulting with the Catholic episcopate of England and Wales, Cardinal Bernard Griffin nominated the rector of the Polish Catholic Mission, rev. Staniszewski as ''Vicar delegate for civilian Poles in England and Wales'', with the powers of an Military ordinariate, Ordinariate. Around this time Archbishop Hlond had nominated Bishop Józef Gawlina, also a Divisional general and based in Rome, Italy, Rome, to be responsible overall for the Polish diaspora. Between them, this enabled the then rector in England to engage priests and organize regular pastoral care across 18 dioceses in England and Wales. The Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales agreed to the appointment of a ''Vicar Delegate'', nominated by the Polish Episcopate, with ordinary power over the Polish clergy throughout England and Wales, with certain exceptions relating to Christian marriage, marriage.
On the pastoral front, the temporary Polish parish hosted in Central London by the fathers of Brompton Oratory was able to be moved westward in 1962 to the newly acquired St Andrew Bobola Church, Hammersmith, St Andrew Bobola church in Shepherd's Bush, the second Polish owned church in London since 1930. It is regarded as an unofficial garrison church with memorials to many historical Polish Army regiments.
The Mission was boosted by the integration of male religious orders, the Polish
Jesuit
, image = Ihs-logo.svg
, image_size = 175px
, caption = ChristogramOfficial seal of the Jesuits
, abbreviation = SJ
, nickname = Jesuits
, formation =
, founders ...
s in Willesden, north-west London, the Congregation of Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, Marian fathers in Ealing and formerly the college at Fawley Court. Latterly, these have been joined by the Society of Christ Fathers, dedicated to minister to the Polish diaspora, who run a parish in Putney in London.
Anomalous Polish "parishes"
![Fawley Court-1342938830](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Fawley_Court-1342938830.jpg)
Since the original agreement between the English and Polish church hierarchies in 1948, whenever a Polish Catholic community emerges within England and Wales, the vicar delegate appoints a Polish priest to organise a local branch of the Polish Catholic Mission. A priest thus appointed is the Catholic version of a "priest in charge", but he is not actually a parish priest. There are strictly no Polish parishes or ''quasiparishes'' in England and Wales (in accordance with Canon law of the Catholic Church, Canons 515 §1 and 516 §1) with the exception of the original church on Devonia Road in Islington. A Polish community is sometimes referred to as a "parish", but is not a parish in the canonical sense. Hence the Polish community attending a "Polish church" is not a "judicial person". The canonical judicial person which represents the interests of all Polish communities of worship is vested in the Polish Catholic Mission.
In December 2007, Cardinal
Cormac Murphy-O'Connor
Cormac Murphy-O'Connor (24 August 1932 – 1 September 2017) was a British cardinal, the Archbishop of Westminster and president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. He was made cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2001. He sub ...
said: "I'm quite concerned that Poles are creating a separate Church in Britain – I would want them to be part of the Catholic life of this country. I would hope those responsible for the Polish Church here, and the Poles themselves, will be aware that they should become a part of local parishes as soon as possible when they learn enough of the language." Mgr Kukla stressed that the Polish Catholic Mission continues to have a "good relationship" with the hierarchy in England and Wales and said "Integration is a long process".
The Polish Catholic Mission co-operated with the English hierarchy's 2008 research inquiry into the needs of migrants in London's Catholic community. The inquiry had been commissioned by the Archdiocese of Westminster, Archbishop Kevin McDonald (bishop), Kevin McDonald of Diocese of Southwark, Southwark and Bishop Thomas McMahon (bishop), Thomas McMahon of Diocese of Brentwood, Brentwood. Around 1000 people attending Mass in three London dioceses were surveyed using anonymous questionnaires available in Polish, Lithuanian, Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English. The congregations were drawn from mainstream diocesan parishes, ethnic chaplaincies and churches of the Polish vicariate. The report findings described how 86% of eastern Europeans said the availability of Mass in their mother-tongue was a reason for their choosing to worship in a particular church. One of the report's recommendations emphasised cooperation with key overseas bishops conferences, dioceses and religious institutes on the recruitment and appointment of ethnic chaplains.
Miracles
A number of events which Catholics hold to be miracles are associated with England.
Marian apparitions
A number of Marian apparitions are associated with England, the best known are the following;
* Our Lady of Mount Carmel, associated with Simon Stock at Aylesford
* Our Lady of Walsingham, associated with
Richeldis de Faverches
Richeldis de Faverches, also known as Rychold, was a devout Catholic Church in England and Wales, English Catholic noblewoman who is credited with establishing the original shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. The story of the vision of "Rychold" wa ...
at
Walsingham
Walsingham () is a civil parish in North Norfolk, England, famous for its religious shrines in honour of Mary, mother of Jesus. It also contains the ruins of two medieval Christian monasticism, monastic houses.Ordnance Survey (2002). ''OS Exp ...
* Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, associated with Helsim the Abbot in the North Sea
* Our Lady of Evesham, associated with Egwin of Evesham at Evesham
* Our Lady of Canterbury, associated with Dunstan and
Anselm at
Canterbury
Canterbury (, ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and UNESCO World Heritage Site, situated in the heart of the City of Canterbury local government district of Kent, England. It lies on the River Stour, Kent, River Stour.
...
* Our Lady of London, associated with
Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket (), also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas of London and later Thomas à Becket (21 December 1119 or 1120 – 29 December 1170), was an English nobleman who served as Lord Chancellor from 1155 to 1162, and then ...
and Hildegard von Bingen at
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
* Our Lady of Jervaulx, associated with Abbot John Kingston of Byland at Jervaulx Abbey, Jervaulx
* Our Lady of Durham, associated with Godric of Finchale at Durham, England, Durham
* Our Lady of Ipswich, associated with Anne Wentworth at Ipswich
Pilgrimages
Augustine Camino, ending at Pugin's Church and Shrine of St. Augustine, Ramsgate
Incorruptibility
A number of cases of alleged incorruptibility of some Catholic saints are associated with England;
* Æthelthryth of Ely, hand discovered in 1811
* Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, relics destroyed under Henry VIII
* Werburgh of Chester, relics destroyed under Henry VIII
Now believed to be buried beneath her shrine in Chester cathedral.
* Wihtburh of East Anglia, relics destroyed under Henry VIII
* Winibald of Wessex, tomb found empty in 1968
* Guthlac of Crowland, relics destroyed by Vikings
* Ælfheah of Canterbury, buried at Canterbury Cathedral
*
Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor ; la, Eduardus Confessor , ; ( 1003 – 5 January 1066) was one of the last Anglo-Saxon English kings. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 to 1066.
Edward was the son of Æth ...
, bodily allegedly intact in 1269, skeleton by 1685
* Hugh of Lincoln, tomb pillaged in 1364, shrine destroyed under Henry VIII
* Edmund of Abingdon, taken to Pontigny Abbey in France
* John Southworth (martyr), John Southworth, returned to Westminster Cathedral in 1927
Stigmata
Two cases of alleged stigmata are associated with England, neither have been approved by the Vatican;
*1880: Teresa Helena Higginson, Servant of God, at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire
*1986: Patricia de Menezes, at Surrey
Catholic saints associated with England
See Catholic Church in the United Kingdom for English Saints, English Catholics declared
Blessed
Blessed may refer to:
* The state of having received a blessing
* Blessed, a title assigned by the Roman Catholic Church to someone who has been beatified
Film and television
* ''Blessed'' (2004 film), a 2004 motion picture about a supernatural ...
, Venerable, and Servants of God, past and present. The list includes Welsh, Scot, Irish, and English saints.
[Regarding miracle processes for saints and blesseds: "The rule until recently was two miracles for beatification and two more after beatification for canonization, if the cause was based on virtue. In the case of a martyr, recent popes have routinely dispensed the cause from having to prove any miracles for beatification on the grounds that the ultimate sacrifice is sufficient for the title of blessed. Two miracles, however, are still required for canonization of non-martyrs. The process, of course, must be repeated for each miracle." Kenneth L. Woodward, ''Making Saints'' (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) 85.]
See also
* Agatha Christie indult
* Carthusian Martyrs
* Catholic Church by country
* Catholic Church in Ireland
* Catholic Church in Scotland
* Catholic Church in the United Kingdom
* Catholic National Library
* Catholic schools in the United Kingdom
*
Colleges of St Omer, Bruges and Liège
The Colleges of St Omer, Bruges and Liège were successive expatriate institutions for Roman Catholic higher education run by the Jesuits for English students.
Founded in 1593 by Father Robert Parsons SJ as the College of Saint-Omer in Artoi ...
* Council of London in 1102
* English College, Rome
* Forty Martyrs of England and Wales
* Latin Mass Society of England and Wales
* List of Catholic churches in the United Kingdom
* List of Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation
* List of English cardinals
* Priest hole
* The Stripping of the Altars
Sources
Footnotes
References
*
Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William ...
''Albion: The origins of the English Imagination'' (New York: Anchor Random, 2002)
* Virginia Blanton ''Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. AEthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–1615'' (University Park: Penn State University, 2007)
* John Bossy ''The English Catholic Community 1570-1850'' (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Company, 1975)
* Michael Burleigh ''Sacred Causes'' (New York: HarperCollins, 2007)
* Thomas Clancy, S.J., ''English Catholic Books, 1641–1700'' (Cambridge: Scolar Press, 1996)
* Thomas Clancy, S.J., ''English Catholic Books, 1701–1800'' (Cambridge: Scolar Press, 1996)
* Eamon Duffy ''The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580'' 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) .
* Eamon Duffy ''The Voices of Morebath'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
* Eamon Duffy ''Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240–1570'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
* Eamon Duffy ''Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) Excellent for background and policies of Cardinal Pole.
* Eamon Duffy ''A People's Tragedy: Studies in Reformation'' (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020)
* Mark Elvins, Mark Turnham Elvins, ''Old Catholic England'' (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1978)
*
Antonia Fraser
Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, (' Pakenham; born 27 August 1932) is a British author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction. She is the widow of the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Harold Pinter (1930–2008), and pr ...
''Mary Queen of Scots'' (New York: Delta Random, 1993)
* Antonia Fraser ''Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot'' (New York: Anchor Books, 1996)
* Howard Esksine-Hill ''Alexander Pope: World and Word'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1998)
* Gabriel Glickman ''The English Catholic Community 1688-1745: Politics, Culture, and Ideology'' (Baydell Press, 2009)
* Gordon-Gorman, William James. ''Converts to Rome: a biographical list of the more notable converts to the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom'' (1910
online
* Greenblatt, Stephen. ''Will in the World'' (New York: W.W.Norton, 2004)
* John Guy ''A Daughter's Love: Thomas and Margaret More'' (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) 0618499156
* Alana Harris ''Faith in the Family: a lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945–82'' (Manchester: University of Manchester:2014)
* Roy Hattersley ''The Catholics'' (Chatto and Windus, 2017) NSBN-10: 178474152
* Clare Haynes ''Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660–1760'' (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006)
* Robert Hutchinson ''House of Treason: the Rise and Fall of the Tudor Dynasty'' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009)
* Emilia Jamroziak and Janet Burton, eds. ''Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000–1400'' (Europa Scra 2.Turnhout: Brepols, 2006)
* Julie Kerr ''Monastic Hospitality: Benedictines in England, c.1070-c.1250'', Studies in the history of Medieval Religion 32. (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2007)
* K.J. Kesselring ''The Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith, Politics, and Protest in Elizabethan England'' (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007)
* Peter Lake and Michael Questier ''The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England'' (Bloomsbury, 2011)
* Peter Marshall ''Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England'' (London: Ashgate, 2006)
* Peter Marshall and Alex Ryrie, Eds ''The Beginnings of English Protestantism'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
* Thomas McCoog ''And Touching Our Society: Jesuit Identity in Elizabethan England''
* Geoffrey Moorhouse ''The Pilgrimage of Grace: the Rebellion that Shook Henry VIII's Throne'' (London: Weidenfeld and Moorhouse, 2003)
* Edward Norman ''The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)
* Hazel Pierce ''Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury 1473–1541: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership'' (University of Wales Press, 2009)
* Linda Porter ''The First Queen of England: The Myth of "Bloody Mary"'' (New York: St. Martin Press, 2008)
* Michael C. Questier ''Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640'' Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). This re-evaluates post-Reformation Catholicism through windows of the wider Catholic community in England and through aristocratic patronage.
* John Saward, John Morrill, and Michael Tomko (eds), ''Firmly I Believe and Truly: The spiritual tradition of Catholic England 1483–1999'' (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011).
* Nicholas Schofield and Gerard Skinner ''The English Vicars Apostolic 1688-1850'' (Family Publications, 2009)
* Karen Stober ''Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c.1300–1540'' Studies in the History of Medieval Religion. (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2007)
* Charles E. Ward ''The Life of John Dryden'' (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1961)
* James Anderson Winn ''John Dryden and His World'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)
* Barbara Yorke ''The Conversion of Britain 600-800'' (New York: Routledge, 2014)
Further reading
* Altholz, Josef L. "The Political Behavior of the English Catholics, 1850-1867." ''Journal of British Studies'', vol. 4, no. 1, 1964, pp. 89–103
online
* Beck, George Andrew, ed. ''The English Catholics, 1850–1950'' (1950), scholarly essays
* ''British Catholic History'' biennial journal of the Catholic Record Society published by Cambridge University Press
* Corrin, Jay P. ''Catholic Progressives in England After Vatican II'' (University of Notre Dame Press; 2013) 536 pages;
* Dures, Alan. ''English Catholicism, 1558–1642: Continuity and Change'' (1983)
* Glickman, Gabriel. ''The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: politics, culture and ideology'' (2009)
* Harris, Alana. ''Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism, 1945–1982'' (2013); the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the ordinary believer
* Heimann, Mary. ''Catholic Devotion in Victorian England'' (1995
online* Hughes, Philip. ''The Catholic Question, 1688–1829: A Study in Political History'' (1929)
* McClain, Lisa. "On a Mission: Priests, Jesuits," Jesuitresses," and Catholic Missionary Efforts in Tudor-Stuart England." ''Catholic Historical Review'' 101.3 (2015): 437–462.
* McClelland, Vincent Alan. ''Cardinal Manning: the Public Life and Influences, 1865–1892'' (1962)
* Mathew, David. ''Catholicism in England: the portrait of a minority: its culture and tradition'' (1955)
* Mourret, Fernand. ''History of the Catholic Church'' (8 vol, 1931) comprehensive history to 1878. country by country
online free by French Catholic priest.
* Mullet, Michael. ''Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829'' (1998) 236pp
* Watkin, E. I ''Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950'' (1957)
Primary sources
* Mullet, Michael. ''English Catholicism, 1680–1830'' (2006) 2714 pages
* Newman, John Henry. ''Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England'' (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000) 585pp; based on 6th edition of 1889
External links
The Catholic Church in England and WalesEnglish Catholic History AssociationThe Catholic Record SocietyDirectory of Catholic Churches, Schools, Dioceses, Religious Houses, Chaplaincies and Organisations in England and WalesTaking Stock: Catholic ChurchesWho Were the Nuns?Society of St. Augustine of Canterbury
{{Catholicism in Europe
Catholic Church in England and Wales,