The Return of the Catholic Hierarchy in Britain

In the mid-eighteen hundreds, English Catholicism finally emerged, staggering but alive, from the dark days of persecution. Some Catholics were sceptical, dubious of the newly established power structures and how they would influence the practice of a faith in a land which had been severed from ordinary episcopal jurisdiction for so long; but the anti-Catholic feeling in England seemed to have died down, and even high profile Anglicans such as John Henry Newman had converted to a faith that only a few decades before would have carried with it the stigma of a traitor.

So it was that in 1850 Pius IX announced the restoration of the English hierarchy. England was no longer a purely missionary land, where captured priests were sent to the scaffold and those who practiced their faith were fined or jailed. England would now be split into a separate diocese, each with their own bishop, and England would have a resident cardinal once more, Nicholas Wiseman, who would take the newly created diocese of Westminster as his seat. A Catholic cardinal would call the English capital city his home for the first time since the Reformation. Yet the announcement led to an outbreak of anti-Catholic violence the level of which had not been seen for seventy years. The formal hierarchy was back, but it appeared that the embers of English anti-Catholicism still glowed in the background.

The British government itself was content to allow Catholicism to establish itself more formally in society, after all, no religion could be forbidden in a country that prided itself on its liberality to all faiths. But the London Times growled, “The Pope and his advisors have mistaken our complete tolerance for indifference to their designs; they have mistaken the renovated zeal of the Church in this country for a return to Romish bondage.” Meanwhile, Catholic priests were “emissaries of darkness,” according to the Bishop of London.

As with most public scandals, real, inflamed, or imagined, the anger passed and the new way of doing business settled down. It may have been the triumphal language of Cardinal Wiseman’s Pastoral Letter out of the Flaminian Gate which lay at the eye of the storm, released to coincide with the official restoration. In it, he had said, “Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had long vanished.” This may seem innocuous enough to a Catholic, but to protestants in England, raised on anti-Catholic sermons, history, and tracts such as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the trajectory of English Catholicism towards a closer relationship with Rome, one less isolated from Papal whim, seemed to imply a direct threat to the British way of life, and even to the British state itself.

No doubt Wiseman’s declaration that the English Church would “begin anew its course of regularly adjusted action round the centre of unity, the source of jurisdiction, of light and of vigour,” added to the sense of anxiety amongst die-hard protestants, but it merely reflected the feeling amongst many in the English Catholic Church that they were finally returning to where they belonged in the life of the Church. Here lies the greatest irony of the whole affair. The British state and its protestant establishment were largely unaffected by the restoration of the hierarchy, as it merely recognised the new confidence of the English Catholics. It was, as should be expected, amongst Catholics themselves that the biggest changes took place. Yet most of those changes were a reflection of the general direction of English Catholicism as much as a result of new structures.

The Catholic gentry who had long protected and sheltered the priests who offered the sacraments, as well as providing the chapels for Mass to be celebrated, now lost the last of their old Reformation era authority. During the Reformation, priests had hidden in the big old houses, disappearing into priest holes when the priest hunters appeared, saying Mass secretly for those who had been informed of their arrival via the gentry-controlled networks that kept a close eye out for informers or traitors. Once the penal laws had been revoked, the need for secrecy had vanished.

Small churches had been built. At first, they had been forbidden from looking like churches, but they had been built. This had removed the gentry as the main power brokers, and begun to move authority to the priests who no longer had to hide in plain sight. Then there had been the urbanisation of England. Cities like Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham saw their populations explode. These urban areas were working and middle class, detached from the old country house culture of Catholicism.

Then, there was the influx of Irish immigrants into the big cities. Not only had the pressure from millions of new Irish subjects through the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800 helped to cause the repeal of the penal laws; the newly arrived workers in English cities were largely Catholic, transforming English Catholicism from a largely rural affair into an urban-based one. It also gave English Catholicism a distinctly Irish flavour in many places.

Another factor at this time was the growing number of Catholics, particularly clergy and converts from Anglicanism, with ultramontane sympathies. Everything that was perceived as ‘Roman’ became fashionable. The suggestion of returning to the old Sarum rite of England with the restitution of the hierarchy was squashed by the English themselves and vestments made in the Roman style were preferred, not to mention devotions and prayers with a distinctly Italian heritage.

Of course, there was also a contrasting push for the gothic in the Church and Victorian society at large, the greatest example being the rebuilt Palace of Westminster, the home of the British Parliament with the chambers of the House of Commons and the House of Lords on site. Gothic styles were seen as a return to the medieval English culture, and amongst Catholics, the gothic could be viewed as a homage to the glory days of the English Catholic Church. So it is that there is a wide range of styles for the Catholic churches built in England during the nineteenth century, often reflecting, like all buildings do, the constrictions, abilities, beliefs, and hopes of those who controlled the construction of those buildings.

The construction of Westminster Cathedral is an example of the changing story of the English Catholic Church. The building was not begun for nearly another forty years after the restoration of the hierarchy. The decision was made for the building to avoid looking like one of the Anglican cathedrals that dominate so many English towns and cities. But instead of opting for a Roman style, a Byzantine-looking cathedral was constructed. It’s still not quite finished. The original plan called for mosaics to cover every inch of the inside ceiling. Nearly a hundred and twenty years after it was built, most of the side chapels have been completed, but the vast vaulted ceiling over the nave is mostly dark brick, which in the shimmering light of the Easter Vigil or Forty Hours Devotion holds a mysterious beauty of its own.

The restoration of the hierarchy was the most visible sign of the free English Church. But it was not until 1918 that standard parish structures were introduced, and canon law came into force in its entirety. Propaganda Fide, set up to supervise the mission territories, remained the Vatican body in charge of England until 1908 when Pius X issued Sapienti Consilio, which normalised relations between Rome and the English Church.

So it was that English Catholics entered the 20th century. No longer persecuted, they had their own church structure and traditions, but there was a constant swirl of competing ideas and spiritual concepts that competed to form the newly reconstructed Church. Catholicism was still an outsider’s religion, with the whiff of the alien and foreign about it, as it had been since the middle years of the reign of Elizabeth I. But it was for outsiders who could live in the center of national life.

Catholics in England were no longer traitors to their nation and were able not only to practice their faith unmolested but to shape a culture and identity of their own. It was a Catholicism which bore very little external resemblance to the English Catholicism of the Middle Ages, or the recusant Catholicism of the penal years. It was not the Catholicism of the great cathedrals of England, as it had been before the Reformation, nor was it the Catholicism of the rural Old Catholics, holding onto their faith despite all that Crown and State could throw at them. It was an urban Catholicism, of factories and terraced houses, of social reform and schools and in that very English way, of the workers and the middle class. Also in a very English way, it would be the middle class who would shape English Catholicism in the mid 20th century. Though that is a story for another time.