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Roman Catholicism in Great Britain
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The history of Roman Catholicism in the United Kingdom began with official discrimination as the Treaty of Union that led to the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, specified that there would be a protestant succession to the British throne. In addition, priests were liable to imprisonment and the civil rights of Catholics were severely curtailed with restrictions on property ownership, occupation, and voting. Catholic numbers, influence and visibility were therefore at a low ebb with only a very few Catholic communities surviving, often in almost complete isolation from the Protestant mainstream.
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The history of Roman Catholicism in the United Kingdom began with official discrimination as the Treaty of Union that led to the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, specified that there would be a protestant succession to the British throne. In addition, priests were liable to imprisonment and the civil rights of Catholics were severely curtailed with restrictions on property ownership, occupation, and voting. Catholic numbers, influence and visibility were therefore at a low ebb with only a very few Catholic communities surviving, often in almost complete isolation from the Protestant mainstream. except for pockets where Catholicism remained the majority religion such as rural Lancashire and Cumbria. Some adopted Cisalpinism to better help them accommodate their situation.
Things only began to change with the passing of the 'Catholic Relief Act' in 1778 that allowed Catholics to own property, inherit land and join the army, though even this measure resulted in the Gordon Riots in 1780, showing the depth of continuing anti-Catholic feeling. Signs of change occurred during the French Revolution with an influx of thousands of Catholics fleeing Jacobin violence in France. In addition, there was a thawing in relations with the Catholic world during the Napoleonic Wars when the UK was allied with the Catholic states of Portugal and Spain as well as with the Holy See itself, against France. In 1829, the political climate had changed sufficiently to allow Parliament to pass the Catholic Emancipation Act, giving Catholics almost equal civil rights, including the right to vote and to hold most public offices.
The Great Irish Famine led to a boost in the numbers of Irish Catholics in England, Wales and Scotland, in turn leading to Catholic hierarchies being re-established in England and Wales in 1850 and restored in Scotland in 1878. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, a number of prominent individuals converted to Roman Catholicism including John Henry Newman, the principal intellectual leader of the Oxford Movement which advocated Anglo-Catholicism, and intellectual and artistic figures such as Augustus Pugin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Catholicism retained its renewed strength in both England and Wales and Scotland through the first half of the twentieth century, though from the 1960s, the increased pressures of secularisation and the assimilation of Irish Catholics into the mainstream of broader, secular English and Scottish society led to some loss of their separate Catholic identity. Though the Second Vatican Council was followed, as elsewhere, by divisions between traditional and a more liberal form of Catholicism claiming inspiration from the Council, converts have still joined the Church (for instance, Malcolm Muggeridge and Joseph Pearce), and public figures such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie Blair, have no difficulty making their Catholicism known to the public, although Tony had waited with his "official" conversion and subsequent announcement until December, 2007, well after having left his Downing Street office. In recent years, catholic politicians have achieved high positions in government as well as the position of Speaker of the House of Commons.
With Catholicism organised by three separate national churches within the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, there is no single hierarchy for Roman Catholicism in the United Kingdom (though there is a single apostolic nuncio, presently Archbishop Faustino Sainz Muñoz). For details of these separate churches and the history of catholicism in the countries they serve, see:
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