An Urban Church

The scale of problems brought about by urbanisation and large-scale Irish immigration to England, which increased the indigenous Catholic population was, in many ways just beginning to be realised by the new Hierarchy in their previous existence as Vicars Apostolic. They were amongst the most urgent matters that faced the English Catholic Church in the mid nineteenth century and illustrate why the restoration of the Hierarchy was a necessary adjunct in helping its leaders develop new ways of dealing with them. The missionary status of the English Church had meant that all its initiatives, activities and deliberations were tightly regulated by Rome through Propaganda Fide acting for the Pope in his role as bishop of the English Catholic Church. This was under the provisions of the Bull Apostolicum Ministerium issued in 1753, which linked English clergy to the direct authority of the Pope and presupposed the existence of a church under penal conditions hidden in the homes of country gentry. Demographic shifts of population into the new industrial towns had rendered the system inadequate and, though remaining under the supervision of Propaganda until 1908, the restoration of the Hierarchy implied new freedom of action to minister to the spiritual needs of Catholics in England. It enabled the new bishops to develop a united ecclesiastical agenda for the Church, in particular for those problems brought about by the rise of a new industrial and urbanised England. As a result it needed to be concerned with those social realities and also pastoral.

The act of restoring the English Catholic Hierarchy at the end of 1850 should not have attracted the furore of interest and anti-Catholic aggression that it did, as it was merely the internal reorganisation of the affairs of a Christian denomination in England and Wales. The public debate that ensued does show the growing confidence of the Catholic community in publicly stating their faith. This is illustrated by the reports of a public meeting called by the High Sheriff of Yorkshire, held in York castle and attended by an estimated ten thousand people on 22nd November 1850. The Earl Fitzwilliam, the opening speaker, after denying that there was an English Catholic population other than a few gentry, attacked them for being ‘monuments, respectable monuments of by-gone times … of the taste, of the piety … of by-gone times.’