The Suppression of the Nineteenth-Century Catholics :: European History Essays

The inhibition of the Nineteenth-Century Catholics Missing Works Cited During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, vicars were low direct license from Rome, and controlled the Roman Catholic Church of England. It was not until the early nineteenth century, under Pope Pius IX, that the Church decided to split England into several sm eacher districts, severally headed by a bishop. London papers began following the growth and leadership change of the Roman Church in England. One article in The Times stated that Rome had mistaken the High Church renewal, the Oxford Movement, deep down the Church of England for a Romeward move (qtd. in Bowen 148). Several bishops tried to rationalize to The Times and its readers that the new hierarchy was simply a matter of church building government and had nothing to do with politics or national look in England. The Roman Catholic Church thought that it would be go bad for their congregations to have a local bishop they could rely on, rath er than having nearly all of the control in Rome. As the Roman Catholic Church began its restructuring, fantan passed a proviso that enabled them to control the public acts of Catholics. According to Bowen the proviso illegalise Roman Catholics from performing rites in public, no officer of the law was allowed to get in his robe in public, no monk was able to wear his habit, no processions were allowed in the streets and no funerals were allowed to be conducted at grave sites. Every anthropoid member of the Catholic religious order was forced to register with the shop clerk of the peace, and no new members were allowed once the proviso passed. (19)The only Catholics left cool by the new proviso were cloisters of nuns. Despite the new proviso, the number of Catholics began to grow. This change magnitude number is attributed to the immigrating Irish who were coming to England to escape over-population and the beginnings of a famine. The English were already anti-Irish, and they h eightened their prejudice by attaching the anti-Catholic prejudice onto the immigrating Irish. The majority of the immigrating Irish were tenant farmers, who were inefficient to support and feed their families. This was caused by the decreasing size of farms and an increase in agriculture inefficiency (McCaffrey 16). The British landowners who controlled the barren property did nothing to help the famishment Irish. The farmers felt dehumanized and demoralized, possessing neither the hope of progress nor the desire for profit (McCaffrey 15).