Despite the resulting popular legend, Protestant reform in Great Britain did not consign Catholicism to historical oblivion; for too long, by general consent, the study of Catholicism in Britain operated in a silo. The dominant version of history held that Catholics disappeared at the Reformation – apart from the odd execution for treason – before reappearing in the 19th century thanks to immigration, to become, by the mid-20th century, a distinct but weird branch on the fringes of national life.
On the other side, at the start of the 20th century, confessionally-motivated Catholics began working on their own history, contentedly separate from the mainstream in their ghettoised “recusant” approach. In contrast, the opposite was true for Ireland, where Catholicism is so mainstream to history-writing that its own specifics were often buried.
It is this tendency to fence off in Britain, or swallow up in Ireland, that the new Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism seeks to end. Though popular perceptions of Catholicism’s premature demise may still endure, the last decades have seen major upheavals in the study of Catholicism.
A growing number of scholars have recognised the importance of the subject to both national and global history. The result is these five volumes, featuring more than 80 contributors, which, for the first time, tell the story of Catholicism in the British Isles from the break with Rome to the present day.
Acting as joint general editor of the project has given me the opportunity to identify four main themes that run across the five centuries. The first of these is the relevance of Catholicism within different spheres of national and international life, particularly its political significance.
Catholics and their faith did not exist in a void, but interacted with dominant trends, such as the growth of the nation state, or international movements, whether that be the Catholic Reformation in the earlier period, or Empire and mission in the later, not to mention major global happenings such as both world wars.
The second factor is very much tied to the first: the importance of Catholicism within the wider historical narratives of Britain and Ireland. For example, populist suspicions of Catholics acted as serious engines of identity and State formation in England during the time of the Faith’s official proscription, from the reign of Elizabeth I to Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
That it was mainstream is evidenced by its prevalence in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. Equally, Catholicism’s role within the wider narrative of Irish history in the 19th and 20th centuries is so obvious that any distinction has been lost.
Put simply, the history of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland does not belong in its own hermetically-sealed zone.
The third factor is the internationality of British and Irish Catholicism. There is an understandable tendency to look inwards when thinking about British and Irish Catholicism, and to neglect the importance of the various nations’ Catholic diasporas.
Until the French Revolution it was elsewhere, at institutions in continental Europe, that Catholic children were educated, where women religious lived their lives and where the clergy were formed.
That international element is no less prevalent in the modern period; from debates about Ultramontanism in the 19th century to the impact of Vatican II in the 20th century, British and Irish Catholicism fitted into, and was influenced by, global trends.
This even included Newman’s fabled “Second Spring” of the 19th century, which itself was part of a wider movement of Christian revivalism throughout Europe.
It is an irony that the seminary closures of recent years, and in particular the collapse of clerical training in Scotland, has brought things full circle. Scottish Catholic priests are once more trained abroad, as in penal times.
As well as the exile movement, another constant feature is migration between and into the islands, not only in terms of Irish movement, but, more recently, Polish immigration and even the creation of a Syro-Malabar cathedral.
The fourth major thread may seem an obvious element to highlight, but the importance of the theological and spiritual underpinnings of Catholicism are vital. Picking up on the examples given above, those individuals – both male and female – at the exiled foundations in Europe were fully exposed to Catholic Reformation ideas and, by the 18th century, the growing Catholic Enlightenment.
In other words, these people were not only English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh exiles, but were members of the global Church, exposed to the ideas circulating in those arenas. This is no less true in the modern period, whether that be the impact of Vatican II or the 19th century’s Ultramontane movement, which placed emphasis on strong papal authority.
Meanwhile, British and Irish Catholics were caught up on both sides of the global Church’s modernism crisis. Indeed, it was an Englishman, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, who was key in defining the Church’s stance against modernism.
This last point touches on one of the other patterns across the period: the cyclical relationship between the global Church and Britain and Ireland. British and Irish Catholics did not simply receive dictation from a distant, centralised body in Rome.
Whether it be Reginald Pole co-chairing the first session of the Council of Trent in the 16th century, or 19th-century Marian devotions spreading from places like Knock in Ireland, Catholics in the British Isles helped shape the global Church as much as they were moulded by it.
Such agency often counters popular narratives that have sprung up. Despite modern consensus, the Irish bishops in the 19th century were serial ignorers of advice or rulings from Rome. This put them in complete opposition to, for example, Cardinal Manning in his support for universal education. Apart from underlining how, post-Emancipation, British Catholics sought to impact wider society while, if anything, the Irish bishops looked inwards, it also laid the foundations for the serious repercussions within the Irish Church in the 20th century.
Having noted that hierarchical role, the frequently limited influence of bishops is also apparent. For all that bishops often get blamed for everything, it is clear that they were just as regularly not listened to, whether that be Richard Smith failing to stamp his authority on England’s Catholics in the 17th century, or religious orders ignoring the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Ireland.
It is thus clear that the strong clericalism of the 19th century was in fact an aberration. Just as the influence of what is frequently referred to as the Victorian period still impacts traditions today, the same is true in assumptions about the Catholic Church. It is clear in these volumes that before – and increasingly after – that period, the laity had a far more significant role than is usually assumed.
Another very notable feature is the prominent role of women throughout. In the 16th and 17th centuries, women played a vital part in the survival of Catholicism, running safe houses for missionary clergy; the historian John Bossy called it a matriarchy. Similarly, into the 19th and then the 20th century, women led popular devotional trends and, frequently, played an increasingly important role in the running of parishes.
Nevertheless, whatever time may now be reminisced about as the golden era for Catholics in Britain and Ireland, those living through it never saw it as such. If there is one constant, it is that, even at the heights of 19th-century Second-Spring rhetoric and 20th-century outward signs of growth, Catholics still complained and worried about non- or low Mass attendance and knowledge of the faith.
Some things never change.
Photo: Members of Christian suffragist groups at Victoria Embankment during the Equal Political Rights Demonstration, London, 3 July 1926. Forty different organisations took part in the march from Embankment to Hyde Park, calling for women’s suffrage. From the front, members of the League of Church Militant (Anglican), the Church League for Women’s Suffrage (Anglican) and Saint Joan’s Social and Political Alliance (Catholic). (Photo by MacGregor/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)
Dr James Kelly is Sweeting Associate Professor in the history of Catholicism at the University of Durham.
This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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