Key church anniversary sparks reparation calls from English Catholics

As English Catholics commemorate their church’s Victorian-era restitution, some are asking whether their country should also atone for past anti-Catholic cruelties.

“From the Reformation onwards, the state used the new Anglican Church as an organ of control, while Anglican bishops supported the persecution of Catholics,” explained Timothy Guile, chairman of England’s Catholic History Association.

“There’s never been any apology for this, nor any gesture of regret towards families who risked their lives helping fugitive priests.”

The historian spoke as a pastoral letter was read in Catholic churches to mark the 175th anniversary of “Universalis Ecclesiae,” an 1850 bull by Pope Pius IX restoring a Catholic hierarchy in England.

The letter, signed by Cardinal Vincent Nichols, chairman of the English and Welsh bishops’ conference, said the move had come as Catholic life was “slowly emerging from centuries of opposition and suppression,” and had helped Catholics “regain a recognized place in public and political life.”

Catholics should be proud of those who had passed on their church’s “great inheritance,” often “with courage and at great personal cost,” the letter added, and thankful that conditions facing Catholic life had since “changed beyond recognition.”

In an OSV News interview, however, Guile said “glaring economic and social disparities” still remained between Catholic and Anglican communities because of past discrimination.

Meanwhile, a senior Anglican administrator told OSV News his own church had recently agreed to provide reparations for its role in the 18th-century slave trade out of a 10 billion pound ($13.5 billion) investment fund, and said he also believed Catholics should expect some righting of historic injustices.

“Both the Crown and official church were complicit in coercion and judicial murder,” said the administrator, who asked not to be named.

“While claims for legal redress would be hard to prove, some kind of atonement is clearly a moral duty, given that these past iniquities are still having tangible effects.”

Restoration of the Catholic hierarchy under Archbishop Nicholas Wiseman of Westminster, England’s first cardinal since the 16th century, marked a key step in shaking off past repression — including Acts of Uniformity from the 1550s, which had required Catholics to attend Anglican services, and Penal Laws which had imposed the death penalty for priests caught saying Mass.

Among many such measures, a 1593 act had forbidden Catholics from traveling beyond 5 miles from home, while a 1698 Popery Act had rewarded informers and prohibited Catholics from purchasing or inheriting land. Harsh restrictions had been partially eased under Catholic Relief Acts in 1778 and 1791, and relaxed in 1829, when a Catholic Emancipation Act allowed Catholics to attend universities, enter professions, sit in Parliament and hold government offices.

Yet recusancy laws were only lifted in 1888, while some restrictions continued into the 20th century, including a 1701 act barring royal family members from marrying Catholics, which was lifted only in 2013.

To date, the British monarch remains “supreme governor” of the Church of England, guaranteeing the “rights and privileges” of the “Protestant religion,” while the brutality of past laws has been largely hushed up.

Guile thinks the human cost should be better remembered, along with complicity by the Church of England, whose bishops helped interrogate and convict Catholic priests, participated in raids and seizures, and whipped up anti-Catholic prejudice in sermons and speeches.

“The crushing fines imposed on Catholics for failing to attend Anglican services forced many to sell up their estates and were cynically used as a revenue source,” Guile told OSV News. “To claim this was all done to protect against subversion and foreign invasion is plainly unjust and wrong.”

Persecution of Catholics began after King Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1534.

It intensified again after a failed 1605 Gunpowder Plot by Catholic militants against King James I and is documented in Recusancy and Memoranda Rolls recording trials and sentences until 1835.

It’s also graphically illustrated in hidden “priest holes” where hunted clergy took refuge in Catholic houses and at a martyrs’ museum at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire.

A total of 23 Stonyhurst pupils were executed between 1610 and 1680, three of whom were among 40 English and Welsh Catholic martyrs canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 — while hundreds more await recognition as martyrs, and the material losses in lands and properties faced by Catholic families are still unaccounted for.

The Anglican administrator said he’s confident Britain’s modern human rights law would prevent any mistreatment of Catholics in future and regrets no such legal framework existed in the past.

Given their past sufferings, however, England’s Catholics deserve recompense — perhaps in a greater readiness by Anglicans to share their assets, and in a more generous openness to cooperation with Catholics in preserving the Christian faith, the person said.

“These enormous historic injustices have simply never been addressed and have left Catholics visibly poor and marginalized alongside their Anglican neighbors,” the administrator told OSV News.

“If it’s argued that the impact of slavery is still felt in parts of today’s world, the same can be said of anti-Catholic measures, which affected social attitudes and economic structures up to modern times.”

Guile, chairman of England’s Catholic History Association, for his part thinks a full acknowledgement of past sufferings could be impeded by lingering anti-Catholic feeling — but also by reticence among Catholics themselves.

“Sometimes you have to be assertive, and ready to expect a simple public expression of regret and sorrow for past misdeeds,” he told OSV News.

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