ideology,Matthew 12:46-50, St John Boste, History of Catholic Church in England and Wales
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P.U.S.H. (Pray Until Something Happens). It has a remarkable way of producing solace, peace, patience and tranquility and of course resolution...God's always available 24/7..
We are all human. We all experience birth, life and death. We all have
flaws but we also all have the gift knowledge and free will as well,
make the most of it. Life on earth is a stepping to our eternal home in
Heaven. Its your choice whether to rise towards eternal light or lost to
eternal darkness. Material items, though needed for sustenance and
survival on earth are of earthly value only. The only thing that passes
from this earth to Heaven is our Soul, our Spirit...it's God's perpetual
gift to us...Embrace it, treasure it, nurture it, protect it...
"Raise not a hand to another unless it is to offer in peace and goodwill." ~ Zarya Parx 2012
Today's Word: ideology i·de·ol·o·gy [ahy-dee-ol-uh-jee, id-ee-]
Origin: 1790–1800; ideo- + -logy; compare French idéologie
noun, plural i·de·ol·o·gies.
1. the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.
2. such a body of doctrine, myth, etc., with reference to some political and social plan, as that of fascism, along with the devices for putting it into operation.
3. Philosophy .
a. the study of the nature and origin of ideas.
b. a system that derives ideas exclusively from sensation.
4. theorizing of a visionary or impractical nature.
Today's Gospel Reading - Matthew 12: 46-50
Gospel Matthew 12,46-50
While Jesus was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers appeared outside, wishing to speak with him. Someone told him, "Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, asking to speak with you." But he said in reply to the one who told him, "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?" And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother."
Reflection•
The family of Jesus. The relatives reached the house where Jesus was.
Probably they have come from Nazareth. From there up to Capernaum there
is a distance of forty kilometres. His mother also comes together with
them. They do not enter, but they send a messenger: "Your mother and
your brothers are standing outside, asking to speak with you." Jesus’
reaction is clear: "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?" And
stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, "Here are my
mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father
is my brother, and sister, and mother." To understand well the sense of
this response it is convenient to look at the situation of the family in
the time of Jesus.
• In the Old Israel, the clan, that is, the large family (the community), was the basis for social living together. It was the protection of the families and of the persons, the guarantee of the possession of the land, the principle vehicle of the tradition, the defence of identity. It was the concrete way on the part of the people of that time to incarnate the love of God and the love toward neighbour. To defend the clan was the same as to defend the Covenant.
• In the Galilee at the time of Jesus, because of the system established during the long periods of government of Herod the Great (37 BC to 4 BC) and of his son Herod Antipas (4 BC to 39 AD), the clan, (the community) was becoming weaker. The taxes to be paid, both to the Government and to the Temple, the debts which were increasing, the individualistic mentality of the Hellenistic ideology, the frequent threats of violent repression on the part of the Romans and the obligation to accept the soldiers and give them hospitality, the ever growing problem of survival , all this impelled the families to close themselves in self and to think only of their own needs. This closing up was strengthened by the religion of the time. For example: the one who gave his inheritance to the Temple, could leave his parents without any help. This weakened the fourth commandment which was the backbone of the clan (Mk 7, 8-13). Besides this, the observance of the Norms of purity was a factor of marginalization for many persons: women, children, Samaritans, foreigners, lepers, possessed persons, tax collectors or Publicans, the sick, mutilated persons and paraplegic persons.
• And thus, the concern with the problems of one’s own family prevented the persons to meet in community. Now, in order that the Kingdom of God could manifest itself in community living of the people, the persons had to overcome the narrow limits of the small family and open themselves again to the large family, to the Community. Jesus gave the example. When his own family tries to take possession of him, he reacted and extended the family: "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?" And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother." He crated a community.
• Jesus asked the same thing from all those who wanted to follow him. Families could not close themselves up in self . The excluded and the marginalized had to be accepted in the life with others, and in this way feel accepted by God (Lk 14, 12-14) This was the path to attain the objective of the Law which said “There must, then, be no poor among you” (Dt 15, 4). Like the great Prophets of the past, Jesus tries to consolidate community life in the villages of Galilee. He takes back the profound sense of the clan, of the family, of the community, as an expression of the incarnation of the love toward God and toward neighbour.
• In the Old Israel, the clan, that is, the large family (the community), was the basis for social living together. It was the protection of the families and of the persons, the guarantee of the possession of the land, the principle vehicle of the tradition, the defence of identity. It was the concrete way on the part of the people of that time to incarnate the love of God and the love toward neighbour. To defend the clan was the same as to defend the Covenant.
• In the Galilee at the time of Jesus, because of the system established during the long periods of government of Herod the Great (37 BC to 4 BC) and of his son Herod Antipas (4 BC to 39 AD), the clan, (the community) was becoming weaker. The taxes to be paid, both to the Government and to the Temple, the debts which were increasing, the individualistic mentality of the Hellenistic ideology, the frequent threats of violent repression on the part of the Romans and the obligation to accept the soldiers and give them hospitality, the ever growing problem of survival , all this impelled the families to close themselves in self and to think only of their own needs. This closing up was strengthened by the religion of the time. For example: the one who gave his inheritance to the Temple, could leave his parents without any help. This weakened the fourth commandment which was the backbone of the clan (Mk 7, 8-13). Besides this, the observance of the Norms of purity was a factor of marginalization for many persons: women, children, Samaritans, foreigners, lepers, possessed persons, tax collectors or Publicans, the sick, mutilated persons and paraplegic persons.
• And thus, the concern with the problems of one’s own family prevented the persons to meet in community. Now, in order that the Kingdom of God could manifest itself in community living of the people, the persons had to overcome the narrow limits of the small family and open themselves again to the large family, to the Community. Jesus gave the example. When his own family tries to take possession of him, he reacted and extended the family: "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?" And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother." He crated a community.
• Jesus asked the same thing from all those who wanted to follow him. Families could not close themselves up in self . The excluded and the marginalized had to be accepted in the life with others, and in this way feel accepted by God (Lk 14, 12-14) This was the path to attain the objective of the Law which said “There must, then, be no poor among you” (Dt 15, 4). Like the great Prophets of the past, Jesus tries to consolidate community life in the villages of Galilee. He takes back the profound sense of the clan, of the family, of the community, as an expression of the incarnation of the love toward God and toward neighbour.
Personal questions • To live faith in the community. What place and what influence does the community have in my way of living faith ?
• Today, in the large city, overcrowding promotes individualism which is contrary to life in community. What am I doing to counteract this evil?
• Today, in the large city, overcrowding promotes individualism which is contrary to life in community. What am I doing to counteract this evil?
Reference: Courtesy of Order of Carmelites, www.ocarm.org.
Feast Day: July 24
Died: 1594
Patron Saint of : none
Saint John Boste (c. 1544 – 24 July 1594) is a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, and one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.
John Boste was born in Westmorland around 1544. He studied at Queen's College, Oxford where he became a Fellow. He converted to Catholicism in 1576. He left England and was ordained a priest at Reims in 1581.
He returned as an active missionary priest to Northern England, often being accompanied by John Speed. He was betrayed to the authorities near Durham in 1593. Following his arrest he was taken to the Tower of London for interrogation. Returned to Durham he was condemned by the Assizes and hanged, drawn and quartered at nearby Dryburn on 24 July 1594. Boste denied that he was a traitor saying "My function is to invade souls, not to meddle in temporal invasions".
John Boste was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929. He was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Their joint feast day is kept on 25 October. His memorial is kept on the day of his execution, 24 July.
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The Catholic Church in England and Wales is part of the worldwide Catholic Church in full communion with the Pope. Catholic Christianity was established in what are now England and Wales in the first century AD and in 597, the first authoritative papal mission, establishing a direct link from the Kingdom of Kent to Rome and to the Benedictine form of monasticism, was carried into effect by Augustine of Canterbury.
England adhered to the Catholic Church for almost a thousand years from the time of Augustine of Canterbury but, in 1534, during the reign of King Henry VIII, the greater part of the church, through a series of legislative acts between 1533 and 1536 aligned itself to Henry's new official ecclesial entity, the Church of England, with Henry declaring himself Supreme Head.
Under Henry's son, Edward VI, the Church of England became more influenced by the European Protestant movement but once again came under papal authority during the reign of Queen Mary I in 1555; however, this reunion was short-lived. Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, re-established the Church of England's independence from Rome in a 1559 settlement and reformulated its teaching and practice in the Act of Uniformity. The Catholic Church (along with other non-established churches)continued in England, although it was at times subject to various forms of persecution. For example, the act of being a Jesuit or seminarian was treasonable. "It was now treason to belong to a particular category of person, a remarkable extension of the law." Most recusant members (except those in diaspora on The Continent, in heavily Catholic areas in the north, or part of the aristocracy) practiced their faith in secret for all practical purposes until 1832 when the Catholic Emancipation Act came into force. Dioceses (replacing districts) were re-established by Pope Pius IX in 1850. Apart from the 22 Latin Rite dioceses, there is the Eastern Catholic diocese of the Apostolic Exarchate for Ukrainians.
In the last UK census, in 2001, there were 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, some 8 per cent of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they had represented only 4.8 per cent of the population. The percentage of Catholics was at its highest in the 1981 census, with 8.7 per cent. Sizeable Catholic populations include North West England where one in five are Catholic.This includes Liverpool which has the highest proportion of any city in Great Britain at 46 per cent; historically, this is due both to a large influx of Irish migrants after the 1800 Act of Union, in which Ireland became part of the United Kingdom, as well as a high concentration of English recusants living in Lancashire.
Christianity arrived in the British Isles in the 1st or 2nd centuries. Records note that Romano-British bishops, such as Restitutus, attended the Council of Arles in 314, which confirmed the theological findings of an earlier convocation held in Rome (the Council of Rome) in 313. The Roman departure from Britain in the following century and the subsequent Germanic invasions sharply decreased contact between Britain and Continental Europe. Christianity, however, continued to flourish in the Brittonic areas of Great Britain, and was strengthened by missions from Ireland, especially that of Columba, which firmly embedded Christianity in northern Britain and began evangelising the Picts. During this period certain practices and traditions took hold in Britain and in Ireland that are collectively known as Celtic Christianity. Distinct features of Celtic Christianity include a unique monastic tonsure and calculations for the date of Easter. Regardless of these differences, historians do not consider this Celtic or British Christianity a distinct church separate from general WesternEuropean Christianity.
In 597, Pope Gregory the Great sent Saint Augustine of Canterbury and 40 missionaries from Rome to evangelise the Anglo-Saxons, a process completed by the 7th century. The Gregorian mission, 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, Augustine established an archbishopric in Canterbury, the old capital of Kent, and, having received the pallium earlier (linking his new diocese to Rome), became the first in the series of Catholic archbishops of Canterbury, four of whom (St. Lawrence, St. Mellitus, St. Justus and St. Honorius) were part of the original band of Benedictine missionaries. (The last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury was Reginald Pole, who died in 1558.) During this time of mission, Rome pursued greater unity with the local church in Britain, particularly on the question of dating Easter. Saint Columbanus, Columba's fellow countryman and churchman, had asked for a papal judgement on the Easter question as did abbots and bishops of Ireland.Later, in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum,Bede explained the reasons for the discrepancy: "He [Columba] left 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 synods were held to resolve the matter, culminating with the Synod of Whitby in 644.
The missionaries also introduced the Rule of Benedict, the continental rule, to Anglo-Saxon monasteries in England. St. Wilfrid, a Benedictine consecrated archbishop of York (in 664), was particularly skilled in promoting the Benedictine Rule. Over time, the Benedictine, continental rule engrafted 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 elevated Lichfield to an archdiocese and appointed Hygeberht its first archbishop. Later, in 808, Pope Leo III helped restore King Eardwulf of Northumbria to his throne; and in 859, Pope Leo IV confirmed and anointed Alfred the Great king, according to Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Individual Benedictines seemed to play an important role throughout this period. For example, before Benedictine monk St. Dunstan was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury in 960, Pope John XII had him appointed legate, commissioning him (along with Sts. Ethelwold and Oswald) to restore discipline in the existing monasteries of England, many of which were destroyed by Danish invaders. Two continental (Italian) Benedictines were also prominent during this time: Lanfranc and St. Anselm. Both became archbishops of Canterbury (1070 and 1093, respectively),
received their palliums, and made notable contributions to the church.
St. Anselm later became a Doctor of the Church. A century later, Pope Innocent III had to confirm the primacy of Canterbury over four Welsh churches for many reasons, but primarily to sustain the importance of the Gregorian foundation of St. Augustine's mission.
Pilgrimage was a prominent feature of medieval Catholicism, and England and Wales were amply provided with many popular sites of pilgrimage. The village of Walsingham, Norfolk became an important shrine after a noblewoman called Richeldis de Faverches experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1061, asking her to build a replica of the Holy House at Nazareth. In 1170, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral, by followers of King Henry II and was quickly canonised as a martyr for the faith. This resulted in Canterbury becoming a major place of pilgrimage and inspired the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. There were also shrines at Holywell in Wales which commemorated St Winefride and at Westminster Abbey to Edward the Confessor to name but a few. An Englishman, Nicholas Breakspear, became Pope Adrian IV from 1154 to 1159.
England remained a Catholic country until 1534, when it officially separated from Rome during the reign of King Henry VIII. In response to the Pope's refusal to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine of AragonParliament denied the Pope's authority over the English Church, made the king Head of the Church in England, and dissolved the monasteries and religious orders in England. Henry did not himself accept Protestant
innovations in doctrine or liturgy – but he 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 Saint Thomas More, former Lord Chancellor, and Saint John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, among others. The See of Rome Act 1536 enforced the separation from Rome, while the 'Pilgrimage of Grace' of 1536 and 'Bigod's Rebellion' of 1537, risings in the North against the religious changes, were bloodily repressed.
The 1547 to 1553 reign of the boy King Edward VI saw the Church of England become more influenced by Protestantism in its faith and worship, with the (Latin) Mass replaced by the (English) Book of Common Prayer, representational art and statues in church buildings destroyed, and Catholic practices which had survived during Henry's reign, for instance the public saying of prayers to the Virgin Mary such as the Salve Regina, ended.
The institutional Church in England briefly acquiesced to Catholic practice during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I from 1553 to 1558. Mary believed she had a mission to bring back 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 were "the key to Queen Mary's successful accession to the throne. Without them she would never have made it." However, Mary's executions of 300 Protestants by burning at the stake proved counterproductive, as they were extremely unpopular among the populace. For example, instead of executing Archbishop Cranmer for treason for supporting Queen Jane, she had him tried for heresy and burned at a stake. With the assistance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which glorified the Protestants killed at the time and vilified Catholics, this practice ensured her a place in popular memory as Bloody Mary – 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.
When Mary died and Elizabeth I became Queen in 1558, the religious situation in England was confused. Throughout the see-sawing religious landscape of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary, a significant proportion of the population(especially in the rural and outlying areas of the country), are likely to have continued to hold Catholic views, at least in private. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, England was clearly a Protestant country, and Catholics were a minority.
Elizabeth's first act was to reverse her sister's re-establishment of Catholicism, but during the first years of her reign 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's 1570 bull, Regnans in Excelsis, which also declared that Elizabeth was not a rightful queen and should be deposed, and formally excommunicated her.
In the setting of England's wars with Catholic powers such as France and Spain, culminating in the attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada in 1588, the Pope's bull unleashed a nationalistic feeling which equated Protestantism with loyalty to a highly popular monarch, rendering every Catholic a potential traitor, even in the eyes of those who were not themselves extreme Protestants. The Rising of the North, the Throckmorton plot and the Babington plot, together with other subversive activities of supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots, all reinforced the association of Catholicism and treachery in the popular mind. Elizabeth's government declared all Catholic priests, and all those who sheltered them, to be guilty of treason. Elizabeth did not believe that her anti-Catholic policies constituted religious persecution, finding it hard to distinguish between those Catholics engaged in conflict with her from those Catholics with no such designs. The number of English Catholics executed under Elizabeth was significant, including Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, and Margaret Clitherow. Elizabeth herself signed the death warrant that led to the beheading of her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.
Because of the persecution in England, Catholic priests in England were trained abroad at the English College in Rome, 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, 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 reign of Charles I (1625–49) and his Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria saw a small revival of Catholicism in England, especially among the upper classes. As part of the royal marriage settlement the Queen was permitted a Catholic 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 on the Continent of Europe had created a more vigorous and magnificent form of Catholicism (i.e., Baroque, notably found in the architecture and music of Austria, Italy and Germany) that attracted some converts, like the poet Richard Crashaw. 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 as Archbishop of Canterbury. How many Catholics and Puritans there were is still open to debate. Religious conflict between Charles and other "High" Anglicans and the more extreme Protestants - at this stage mostly still within the Church of England (the Puritans) formed a strand of the anti-monarchical leanings of the troubled politics of the period. The religious tensions between a court with 'Papist' elements and a Parliament where the Puritans were strong was one of the major factors behind the English Civil War, in which almost all Catholics supported the King. The victory of the Parliamentarians meant a strongly Protestant, anti-Catholic (and, incidentally, anti-Anglican) regime under Oliver Cromwell.
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 requiring any appointee to any public office or member of Parliament to deny Catholic beliefs such as transubstantiation. As far as possible, however, he maintained tacit tolerance. Like his father, he married a Catholic, Catherine of Braganza. (He would become Catholic himself on his deathbed).
James II is to date the last Catholic to reign as monarch of England.
Charles' brother and heir James, Duke of York (later James II) converted to Catholicism in 1668–1669. When Titus Oates in 1678 alleged a (totally imaginary) 'Popish Plot' to assassinate Charles and put James in his place, he unleashed a wave of Parliamentary and public hysteria which led to anti-Catholic purges, and another wave of sectarian persecution, 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, as James II 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 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' clear intent to work towards the restoration of the Church of
England to the Catholic fold encouraged converts like the poet John Dryden, who wrote "The Hind and Panther", celebrating 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.
The Glorious Revolution deposed James and established his Protestant daughter and son-in-law and nephew, Mary II and William III, on the throne (1689–1702). For some, however, the revolution was "fundamentally a coup spearheaded by a foreign army and navy."[] Nevertheless, the King fled into exile, and with him many Catholic nobility and gentry. The Act of Settlement 1701,which remains in operation today, excludes any Catholic or anyone who marries a Catholic from the throne. However, this Act was partially changed when the ban on the monarch's marrying a Catholic was eliminated(along with the rule of male succession).
Henry Benedict Stuart (Cardinal-Duke of York), 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 exists today at Vatican City. The current Duke of Bavaria, Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria von Bayern, head of the Wittelsbach family, is the most senior descendant of King Charles I and is considered by Jacobites to be the heir of the Stuarts.
The years from 1688 to the early 19th century were in some respects
the nadir 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 ebb. 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.
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, conformed to Anglicanism, meaning fewer such Catholic communities survived intact. A bishop at this time (roughly from 1688 to 1850) was called a Vicar apostolic. A Vicar Apostolic was a titular bishop (as opposed to a diocesan bishop) through whom the pope exercised jurisdiction over a particular church territory in England. (Interestingly, English-speaking colonial America came under the jurisdiction of the Vicar Apostolic of London. 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 also after the Seven Years War when the British Empire, in 1763, acquired the French-speaking [and predominately Catholic] territory of Canada. At the time, Richard Challoner, 1758–81, was titular bishop when Great Britain gained Canada. Only after the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and in 1789 with the consecration of John Carroll, a friend of Benjamin Franklin, did the U.S. have its own diocesan bishop, free of the titular bishop of London, James Robert Talbot.
Most Catholics retreated to complete isolation from a popular Protestant mainstream, and Catholicism in England in this period is politically, if not socially invisible to history, Alexander Pope being one memorable English Catholic of the 18th century and the other being a member of the Catholic gentry, the Duke of Norfolk, the Premier Duke in the peerage of England and as Earl of Arundel, the Premier Earl. In virtue of his status and as head of the Howard family (which included the Earl of Carlisle, the Earl of Suffolk, the Earl of Berkshire, and the Earl of Effingham),the Duke was always at court. 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. Samuel Johnson 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 and The Dunciad. Around this time, in 1720, Clement XI proclaimed Anselm of Canterbury a Doctor of the Church. In 1752, mid-century, Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. Later in the century there was some liberalisation of the anti-Catholic laws on the basis of Enlightenment ideals.
In 1778 a 'Catholic Relief Act' allowed Catholics to own property, inherit land and join the army. Hardline Protestant mobs reacted in the Gordon Riots in 1780, attacking any building in London which was associated with Catholicism or owned by Catholics. Other reforms allowed the clergy to operate more openly and thus allowed permanent missions to be set up in the larger towns. Stonyhurst College, for example, was re-established in 1791 for wealthier Catholics. In 1837, James Arundel, the tenth Baron Arundel of Wardour, 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 and a manuscript copy of Froissart's Chronicles, looted from the body of a dead Frenchman after the Battle of Agincourt. Yet Catholic recusants as a whole remained a small group, except where they stayed the majority religion in various pockets, notably in rural Lancashire and Cumbria, or were part of the Catholic aristocracy and squirearchy. One of the most interesting contemporary descendents of recusants is Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans)and writer. Radcliffe is related to three former cardinals—Weld, Vaughan 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, Tablots, Stonors, and Weld-Blundells. Finally, history cannot forget the famous recusant, Maria Fitzherbert, who during this period secretly married the Prince of Wales, Prince Regent, and future George IV in 1785. The British Constitution, 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 [Catholic] church 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 new 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, returned baroque forms to the London skyline and a Catholic composer, Thomas Arne, composed "Rule Britannia." According to reviewer, Aidan Bellenger, 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.'" Yale University historian, Steve Pincus, likewise argues in his book, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, that Catholics under William and Mary and their successors experienced considerable freedom.
After this moribund period, the first signs of a revival occurred as thousands of French Catholics fled France during the French Revolution.The leaders of the Revolution were virulently anti-Catholic, even singling out priests and nuns for summary execution or massacre, and England was seen as a safe haven from Jacobin violence. Also around this time (1801), a new political entity was formed, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which merged the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland,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. Despite the strong opposition of King George III, which delayed reform, 1829 brought the culmination of the liberalisation of the anti-Catholic laws. Parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation Act,giving Catholics almost equal civil rights, including the right to voteand 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 were often struck by the prominence of wealthy American-born Catholics,titled ladies among the nobility, like Louisa(Caton), granddaughter ofCharles Carroll of Carrollton, and her two sisters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth. After Louisa's first husband (Sir Felton Bathurst-Hervey) died, Louisa later married the son of the Duke of Leeds, and had the Duke of Wellington 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.Though 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,while the bulk of the large outflow of emigration 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, Manchester and Glasgow, but also in towns and villages up and down the country, thus giving English Catholicism a Gaelic flavour and a huge numerical boost. Also significant was the rise in the 1830s and 1840s of the Oxford Movement, which sought to revive some elements of Catholic theology and ritual within the Church of England (creating Anglo-Catholicism).
Many of the Anglicans who were involved in the Oxford Movement 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. A steady stream of new Catholics would continue to enter the Church from the Anglican Church, often via high Anglicanism, for at least the next hundred years, and something of this continues. Among a large number from Anglicanism were some who brought British Catholicism a certain amount of public prestige.
Prominent intellectual and artistic figures who turned to Catholicism in the 19th and 20th centuries included the leading architect of the Gothic Revival, Augustus Pugin, the artist, Graham Sutherland, and literary figures such as Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, two sons of William Wilberforce, Samuel and Robert, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark. Prominent cradle Catholics included the film director, Alfred Hitchcock, writers like Hilaire Belloc, Lord Acton, and J.R.R. Tolkien and the composer, Edward Elgar, whose oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius, was based on a 19th century poem by Newman.
There is no doubt that at various points after the 16th century real hopes have been entertained by many English Catholics that the 'reconversion of England' was near at hand. To some the sign of this being imminent was the steady trickle of establishment converts from the second quarter of the 19th century on.
More important was the arrival of immigrant masses of Irish Catholics. Together these trends were seen by some as constituting a "second spring" of Catholicism across Britain. 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 Roman church in England and Wales had 22 dioceses immediately before the Reformation, but none of the current 22 bear close resemblance (geographically) to those 22 medieval dioceses.
The re-established diocesan episcopacy specifically avoided using places that were seats of Church of England dioceses as seats, in effect temporarily abandoning the titles of Catholic dioceses before Elizabeth I because of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851, which in England favoured a state church (i.e., Church of England) and denied arms 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 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. Of course, the Act was only carried out in England. For example, the official recognition afforded by the grant of arms to the archdiocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, brought into being by Lord Lyon in 1989, was made on the grounds that the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851 never applied to Scotland. In recent times, former Conservative Cabinent Minister, John Gummer, who is a prominent convert to Catholicism and columnist for the Catholic Herald in 2007, objected to the fact that no Catholic diocese can have the same name as an Anglican diocese (such as London, Canterbury, Durham, etc.) "even though those dioceses had, shall we say, been borrowed."
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 stark contrast with the Anglican church (although not to other Protestant churches), and conversions and vocations to the priesthood and religious life were also plentiful. 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 16 new priests for England and Wales in 2009 compared to 110 thirteen years earlier. Annual vocation numbers have been variable in recent years: from 24 in 2003 to the mid 40s in 2006 and 2007 and a drop back to 31 in 2008. Parishes have been closed or merged: Liverpool, for example, reducing from 60 to 27 parishes. Sexual abuse scandals have also damaged the Church.
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 has been followed, as in other Western countries, by divisions between traditional Catholicism 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 and Joseph Pearce), and public figures (often descendants of the recusant families) such as Paul Johnson; Peter Ackroyd; Antonia Fraser; Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC; Michael Martin (politician), first Catholic to hold the office of Speaker of the House of Commons since the Reformation; Chris Patten, first Catholic to hold the post of Chancellor of Oxford since the Reformation; Piers Paul Read; Helen Liddel, Britain's High Commissioner to Australia; and former Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Blair, have no difficulty making their Catholicism known in public life. The former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was recently received into full communion with the Catholic Church. Catherine Pepinster, Editor of Tablet, notes: "The impact of Irish immigrants is one. There are numerous prominent campaigners, academics, entertainers (like Danny Boyle the most successful Catholic in showbiz owing to his film, Slumdog Millionaire), politicians and writers. But the descendants of the recusant families are still a force in the land."
Since the Council 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, her son Lord Nicholas Windsor and her grandson Baron Downpatrick), a number of Anglican priests. Converts to Catholicism in Britain, for this reason, tend to be more conservative and even traditionalist than Catholics on the European mainland, often opposing trends within the Catholic Church similar to those which induced them to abandon Anglicanism in the first place.
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 as an expression of the churches' commitment to work ecumenically. Recently, for example, a memorial was put up to St. John Houghton and fellow Carthusian monks martyred at the London Charterhouse, 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, Thomas Belson, and Humphrey Pritchard were executed for their Catholic faith, 5 July 1589." And at Lambeth Palace, in February 2009, the Archbishop of Canterbury hosted a reception to launch the 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 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."
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 clergymen, such as Rev Kenneth Leech (CofE) of St Anne's Church, Soho who helped found the homeless charity Centrepoint, and Rev Bruce Kenrick (Church of Scotland) who helped found the homeless charity Shelter. In 1986 Cardinal Basil Hume 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 instituted an annual Mass in Support of Migrant Workers at Westminster Cathedral in partnership with the ethnic chaplains of Brentwood, Southwark, and Westminster.
References: Courtesy of Wikipedia, wikipedia.org
Featured Item of the Day from Litany Lane
Saint of the Day: St. John Boste, Marytr
Feast Day: July 24 Died: 1594
Patron Saint of : none
Saint John Boste (c. 1544 – 24 July 1594) is a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, and one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.
Life
John Boste was born in Westmorland around 1544. He studied at Queen's College, Oxford where he became a Fellow. He converted to Catholicism in 1576. He left England and was ordained a priest at Reims in 1581.He returned as an active missionary priest to Northern England, often being accompanied by John Speed. He was betrayed to the authorities near Durham in 1593. Following his arrest he was taken to the Tower of London for interrogation. Returned to Durham he was condemned by the Assizes and hanged, drawn and quartered at nearby Dryburn on 24 July 1594. Boste denied that he was a traitor saying "My function is to invade souls, not to meddle in temporal invasions".
John Boste was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929. He was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Their joint feast day is kept on 25 October. His memorial is kept on the day of his execution, 24 July.
References: Courtesy of the Catholic Online, catholic.org and Courtesy of Wikipedia, wikipedia.org
- "St. John Boste." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. 24 Jul. 2012 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02702a.htm>
Today's Snippet: Catholic Church in England and Wales
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| St Augustine Abbey, Canterbury |
England adhered to the Catholic Church for almost a thousand years from the time of Augustine of Canterbury but, in 1534, during the reign of King Henry VIII, the greater part of the church, through a series of legislative acts between 1533 and 1536 aligned itself to Henry's new official ecclesial entity, the Church of England, with Henry declaring himself Supreme Head.
Under Henry's son, Edward VI, the Church of England became more influenced by the European Protestant movement but once again came under papal authority during the reign of Queen Mary I in 1555; however, this reunion was short-lived. Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, re-established the Church of England's independence from Rome in a 1559 settlement and reformulated its teaching and practice in the Act of Uniformity. The Catholic Church (along with other non-established churches)continued in England, although it was at times subject to various forms of persecution. For example, the act of being a Jesuit or seminarian was treasonable. "It was now treason to belong to a particular category of person, a remarkable extension of the law." Most recusant members (except those in diaspora on The Continent, in heavily Catholic areas in the north, or part of the aristocracy) practiced their faith in secret for all practical purposes until 1832 when the Catholic Emancipation Act came into force. Dioceses (replacing districts) were re-established by Pope Pius IX in 1850. Apart from the 22 Latin Rite dioceses, there is the Eastern Catholic diocese of the Apostolic Exarchate for Ukrainians.
In the last UK census, in 2001, there were 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, some 8 per cent of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they had represented only 4.8 per cent of the population. The percentage of Catholics was at its highest in the 1981 census, with 8.7 per cent. Sizeable Catholic populations include North West England where one in five are Catholic.This includes Liverpool which has the highest proportion of any city in Great Britain at 46 per cent; historically, this is due both to a large influx of Irish migrants after the 1800 Act of Union, in which Ireland became part of the United Kingdom, as well as a high concentration of English recusants living in Lancashire.
History
Early years
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| British Kingdoms circa 600AD |
In 597, Pope Gregory the Great sent Saint Augustine of Canterbury and 40 missionaries from Rome to evangelise the Anglo-Saxons, a process completed by the 7th century. The Gregorian mission, 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, Augustine established an archbishopric in Canterbury, the old capital of Kent, and, having received the pallium earlier (linking his new diocese to Rome), became the first in the series of Catholic archbishops of Canterbury, four of whom (St. Lawrence, St. Mellitus, St. Justus and St. Honorius) were part of the original band of Benedictine missionaries. (The last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury was Reginald Pole, who died in 1558.) During this time of mission, Rome pursued greater unity with the local church in Britain, particularly on the question of dating Easter. Saint Columbanus, Columba's fellow countryman and churchman, had asked for a papal judgement on the Easter question as did abbots and bishops of Ireland.Later, in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum,Bede explained the reasons for the discrepancy: "He [Columba] left 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 synods were held to resolve the matter, culminating with the Synod of Whitby in 644.
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| Benedictine Monk |
Medieval era
During medieval times, England and Wales were part of western Christendom. During this period, monasteries and convents, such as those at Shaftesbury and Shrewsbury, were prominent features of society providing lodging, hospitals and education. Likewise, schools like Oxford University and Cambridge University were important. Members of religious orders, notably the Dominicans and Franciscans, settled in both schools and maintained houses for students. Clerics like Archbishop Walter de Merton founded Merton College at Oxford and three different popes – Gregory IX, Nicholas IV, and John XXII – gave Cambridge the legal protection and status to compete with other European medieval universities.Pilgrimage was a prominent feature of medieval Catholicism, and England and Wales were amply provided with many popular sites of pilgrimage. The village of Walsingham, Norfolk became an important shrine after a noblewoman called Richeldis de Faverches experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1061, asking her to build a replica of the Holy House at Nazareth. In 1170, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral, by followers of King Henry II and was quickly canonised as a martyr for the faith. This resulted in Canterbury becoming a major place of pilgrimage and inspired the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. There were also shrines at Holywell in Wales which commemorated St Winefride and at Westminster Abbey to Edward the Confessor to name but a few. An Englishman, Nicholas Breakspear, became Pope Adrian IV from 1154 to 1159.
Tudor era
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| King Henry VIII |
The 1547 to 1553 reign of the boy King Edward VI saw the Church of England become more influenced by Protestantism in its faith and worship, with the (Latin) Mass replaced by the (English) Book of Common Prayer, representational art and statues in church buildings destroyed, and Catholic practices which had survived during Henry's reign, for instance the public saying of prayers to the Virgin Mary such as the Salve Regina, ended.
The institutional Church in England briefly acquiesced to Catholic practice during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I from 1553 to 1558. Mary believed she had a mission to bring back 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 were "the key to Queen Mary's successful accession to the throne. Without them she would never have made it." However, Mary's executions of 300 Protestants by burning at the stake proved counterproductive, as they were extremely unpopular among the populace. For example, instead of executing Archbishop Cranmer for treason for supporting Queen Jane, she had him tried for heresy and burned at a stake. With the assistance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which glorified the Protestants killed at the time and vilified Catholics, this practice ensured her a place in popular memory as Bloody Mary – 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.
When Mary died and Elizabeth I became Queen in 1558, the religious situation in England was confused. Throughout the see-sawing religious landscape of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary, a significant proportion of the population(especially in the rural and outlying areas of the country), are likely to have continued to hold Catholic views, at least in private. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, England was clearly a Protestant country, and Catholics were a minority.
Elizabeth's first act was to reverse her sister's re-establishment of Catholicism, but during the first years of her reign 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's 1570 bull, Regnans in Excelsis, which also declared that Elizabeth was not a rightful queen and should be deposed, and formally excommunicated her.
In the setting of England's wars with Catholic powers such as France and Spain, culminating in the attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada in 1588, the Pope's bull unleashed a nationalistic feeling which equated Protestantism with loyalty to a highly popular monarch, rendering every Catholic a potential traitor, even in the eyes of those who were not themselves extreme Protestants. The Rising of the North, the Throckmorton plot and the Babington plot, together with other subversive activities of supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots, all reinforced the association of Catholicism and treachery in the popular mind. Elizabeth's government declared all Catholic priests, and all those who sheltered them, to be guilty of treason. Elizabeth did not believe that her anti-Catholic policies constituted religious persecution, finding it hard to distinguish between those Catholics engaged in conflict with her from those Catholics with no such designs. The number of English Catholics executed under Elizabeth was significant, including Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, and Margaret Clitherow. Elizabeth herself signed the death warrant that led to the beheading of her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.
Because of the persecution in England, Catholic priests in England were trained abroad at the English College in Rome, 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, 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.
Stuart era
The reign of James I (1603–1625) was marked by a measure of tolerance, though less so after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot 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 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, and the Duke of Norfolk, head of the Howard family.The reign of Charles I (1625–49) and his Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria saw a small revival of Catholicism in England, especially among the upper classes. As part of the royal marriage settlement the Queen was permitted a Catholic 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 on the Continent of Europe had created a more vigorous and magnificent form of Catholicism (i.e., Baroque, notably found in the architecture and music of Austria, Italy and Germany) that attracted some converts, like the poet Richard Crashaw. 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 as Archbishop of Canterbury. How many Catholics and Puritans there were is still open to debate. Religious conflict between Charles and other "High" Anglicans and the more extreme Protestants - at this stage mostly still within the Church of England (the Puritans) formed a strand of the anti-monarchical leanings of the troubled politics of the period. The religious tensions between a court with 'Papist' elements and a Parliament where the Puritans were strong was one of the major factors behind the English Civil War, in which almost all Catholics supported the King. The victory of the Parliamentarians meant a strongly Protestant, anti-Catholic (and, incidentally, anti-Anglican) regime under Oliver Cromwell.
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 requiring any appointee to any public office or member of Parliament to deny Catholic beliefs such as transubstantiation. As far as possible, however, he maintained tacit tolerance. Like his father, he married a Catholic, Catherine of Braganza. (He would become Catholic himself on his deathbed).
The Glorious Revolution deposed James and established his Protestant daughter and son-in-law and nephew, Mary II and William III, on the throne (1689–1702). For some, however, the revolution was "fundamentally a coup spearheaded by a foreign army and navy."[] Nevertheless, the King fled into exile, and with him many Catholic nobility and gentry. The Act of Settlement 1701,which remains in operation today, excludes any Catholic or anyone who marries a Catholic from the throne. However, this Act was partially changed when the ban on the monarch's marrying a Catholic was eliminated(along with the rule of male succession).
Henry Benedict Stuart (Cardinal-Duke of York), 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 exists today at Vatican City. The current Duke of Bavaria, Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria von Bayern, head of the Wittelsbach family, is the most senior descendant of King Charles I and is considered by Jacobites to be the heir of the Stuarts.
Eighteenth century
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| Christian Martyrs, Dore |
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, conformed to Anglicanism, meaning fewer such Catholic communities survived intact. A bishop at this time (roughly from 1688 to 1850) was called a Vicar apostolic. A Vicar Apostolic was a titular bishop (as opposed to a diocesan bishop) through whom the pope exercised jurisdiction over a particular church territory in England. (Interestingly, English-speaking colonial America came under the jurisdiction of the Vicar Apostolic of London. 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 also after the Seven Years War when the British Empire, in 1763, acquired the French-speaking [and predominately Catholic] territory of Canada. At the time, Richard Challoner, 1758–81, was titular bishop when Great Britain gained Canada. Only after the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and in 1789 with the consecration of John Carroll, a friend of Benjamin Franklin, did the U.S. have its own diocesan bishop, free of the titular bishop of London, James Robert Talbot.
Geographical distribution of English Catholic Recusancy, 1715—1720.
Most Catholics retreated to complete isolation from a popular Protestant mainstream, and Catholicism in England in this period is politically, if not socially invisible to history, Alexander Pope being one memorable English Catholic of the 18th century and the other being a member of the Catholic gentry, the Duke of Norfolk, the Premier Duke in the peerage of England and as Earl of Arundel, the Premier Earl. In virtue of his status and as head of the Howard family (which included the Earl of Carlisle, the Earl of Suffolk, the Earl of Berkshire, and the Earl of Effingham),the Duke was always at court. 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. Samuel Johnson 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 and The Dunciad. Around this time, in 1720, Clement XI proclaimed Anselm of Canterbury a Doctor of the Church. In 1752, mid-century, Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. Later in the century there was some liberalisation of the anti-Catholic laws on the basis of Enlightenment ideals.
In 1778 a 'Catholic Relief Act' allowed Catholics to own property, inherit land and join the army. Hardline Protestant mobs reacted in the Gordon Riots in 1780, attacking any building in London which was associated with Catholicism or owned by Catholics. Other reforms allowed the clergy to operate more openly and thus allowed permanent missions to be set up in the larger towns. Stonyhurst College, for example, was re-established in 1791 for wealthier Catholics. In 1837, James Arundel, the tenth Baron Arundel of Wardour, 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 and a manuscript copy of Froissart's Chronicles, looted from the body of a dead Frenchman after the Battle of Agincourt. Yet Catholic recusants as a whole remained a small group, except where they stayed the majority religion in various pockets, notably in rural Lancashire and Cumbria, or were part of the Catholic aristocracy and squirearchy. One of the most interesting contemporary descendents of recusants is Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans)and writer. Radcliffe is related to three former cardinals—Weld, Vaughan 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, Tablots, Stonors, and Weld-Blundells. Finally, history cannot forget the famous recusant, Maria Fitzherbert, who during this period secretly married the Prince of Wales, Prince Regent, and future George IV in 1785. The British Constitution, 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 [Catholic] church 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 new 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, returned baroque forms to the London skyline and a Catholic composer, Thomas Arne, composed "Rule Britannia." According to reviewer, Aidan Bellenger, 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.'" Yale University historian, Steve Pincus, likewise argues in his book, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, that Catholics under William and Mary and their successors experienced considerable freedom.
Nineteenth century
In the 1840s and 1850s, especially during the Great Irish Famine,while the bulk of the large outflow of emigration 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, Manchester and Glasgow, but also in towns and villages up and down the country, thus giving English Catholicism a Gaelic flavour and a huge numerical boost. Also significant was the rise in the 1830s and 1840s of the Oxford Movement, which sought to revive some elements of Catholic theology and ritual within the Church of England (creating Anglo-Catholicism).
Many of the Anglicans who were involved in the Oxford Movement 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. A steady stream of new Catholics would continue to enter the Church from the Anglican Church, often via high Anglicanism, for at least the next hundred years, and something of this continues. Among a large number from Anglicanism were some who brought British Catholicism a certain amount of public prestige.
Prominent intellectual and artistic figures who turned to Catholicism in the 19th and 20th centuries included the leading architect of the Gothic Revival, Augustus Pugin, the artist, Graham Sutherland, and literary figures such as Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, two sons of William Wilberforce, Samuel and Robert, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark. Prominent cradle Catholics included the film director, Alfred Hitchcock, writers like Hilaire Belloc, Lord Acton, and J.R.R. Tolkien and the composer, Edward Elgar, whose oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius, was based on a 19th century poem by Newman.
There is no doubt that at various points after the 16th century real hopes have been entertained by many English Catholics that the 'reconversion of England' was near at hand. To some the sign of this being imminent was the steady trickle of establishment converts from the second quarter of the 19th century on.
More important was the arrival of immigrant masses of Irish Catholics. Together these trends were seen by some as constituting a "second spring" of Catholicism across Britain. 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 Roman church in England and Wales had 22 dioceses immediately before the Reformation, but none of the current 22 bear close resemblance (geographically) to those 22 medieval dioceses.
The re-established diocesan episcopacy specifically avoided using places that were seats of Church of England dioceses as seats, in effect temporarily abandoning the titles of Catholic dioceses before Elizabeth I because of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851, which in England favoured a state church (i.e., Church of England) and denied arms 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 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. Of course, the Act was only carried out in England. For example, the official recognition afforded by the grant of arms to the archdiocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, brought into being by Lord Lyon in 1989, was made on the grounds that the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851 never applied to Scotland. In recent times, former Conservative Cabinent Minister, John Gummer, who is a prominent convert to Catholicism and columnist for the Catholic Herald in 2007, objected to the fact that no Catholic diocese can have the same name as an Anglican diocese (such as London, Canterbury, Durham, etc.) "even though those dioceses had, shall we say, been borrowed."
Twentieth century and the present
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| Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson |
By the latter years of the twentieth century low numbers of vocations also affected the church with 16 new priests for England and Wales in 2009 compared to 110 thirteen years earlier. Annual vocation numbers have been variable in recent years: from 24 in 2003 to the mid 40s in 2006 and 2007 and a drop back to 31 in 2008. Parishes have been closed or merged: Liverpool, for example, reducing from 60 to 27 parishes. Sexual abuse scandals have also damaged the Church.
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 has been followed, as in other Western countries, by divisions between traditional Catholicism 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 and Joseph Pearce), and public figures (often descendants of the recusant families) such as Paul Johnson; Peter Ackroyd; Antonia Fraser; Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC; Michael Martin (politician), first Catholic to hold the office of Speaker of the House of Commons since the Reformation; Chris Patten, first Catholic to hold the post of Chancellor of Oxford since the Reformation; Piers Paul Read; Helen Liddel, Britain's High Commissioner to Australia; and former Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Blair, have no difficulty making their Catholicism known in public life. The former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was recently received into full communion with the Catholic Church. Catherine Pepinster, Editor of Tablet, notes: "The impact of Irish immigrants is one. There are numerous prominent campaigners, academics, entertainers (like Danny Boyle the most successful Catholic in showbiz owing to his film, Slumdog Millionaire), politicians and writers. But the descendants of the recusant families are still a force in the land."
Since the Council 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, her son Lord Nicholas Windsor and her grandson Baron Downpatrick), a number of Anglican priests. Converts to Catholicism in Britain, for this reason, tend to be more conservative and even traditionalist than Catholics on the European mainland, often opposing trends within the Catholic Church similar to those which induced them to abandon Anglicanism in the first place.
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 as an expression of the churches' commitment to work ecumenically. Recently, for example, a memorial was put up to St. John Houghton and fellow Carthusian monks martyred at the London Charterhouse, 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, Thomas Belson, and Humphrey Pritchard were executed for their Catholic faith, 5 July 1589." And at Lambeth Palace, in February 2009, the Archbishop of Canterbury hosted a reception to launch the 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 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."
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 clergymen, such as Rev Kenneth Leech (CofE) of St Anne's Church, Soho who helped found the homeless charity Centrepoint, and Rev Bruce Kenrick (Church of Scotland) who helped found the homeless charity Shelter. In 1986 Cardinal Basil Hume 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 instituted an annual Mass in Support of Migrant Workers at Westminster Cathedral in partnership with the ethnic chaplains of Brentwood, Southwark, and Westminster.
References: Courtesy of Wikipedia, wikipedia.org
References
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- 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. ISBN 0-521-06880-0
- 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).
- 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) ISBN 1-84383-284-3
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