A Comparative Historical Categorisation of Anti‐Catholicism

Abstract

The history of anti-Catholicism is a subject that readily lends itself to elephantine metaphors. Like large animals browsing in the African bush, anti-Catholic attitudes were prominent in a wide variety of societies, but could seem placid and unthreatening until roused into sudden fury, as for example in the Gordon Riots in London in 1780, in the Philadelphia Riots of 1844, and in the defiance of the signatories of the Ulster Covenant of 1912. AntiCatholicism needs sometimes to be recognized as 'the elephant in the room' of other historical problems such as the motivations of revolutionaries in nineteenth-century Europe, the unfolding of British or American imperialism, responses to Nazi Germany, and changing attitudes to gender, sexual and family relations. Scholarly analysis of this 'elephant' moreover is prone sometimes to resemble the efforts of the proverbial Indian blind men to visualise a real elephant by each feeling differing parts of its anatomy. All perceive a part of the truth, but none can grasp the whole, and unrecognised and unexplored differences of approach and understanding lead to unresolved divergences of analysis and interpretation.This article seeks to contribute to clarification of the consequent confusions by outlining in a broad comparative framework four different varieties of anti-Catholicism, all of which have rich and complex and in some respects distinct, histories of their own. These categories are not abstract theoretical ones, but are grounded in empirical historical research, which is used both to exemplify them and to illustrate their changing dynamics across time.Boundaries between them were fluid and might indeed be conceptualized in a variety of alternative ways. Nevertheless it is argued that these four categories are representative of perceptible differences of emphasis, personnel and organization and hence constitute a useful tool for developing nuanced historical analysis. The article will in turn consider first, constitutional-national; second, theological; third, socio-cultural, and finally, popular anti-1 Catholicism and conclude with a consideration of cross-cutting issues and alternative formulations. Material for the article is drawn primarily from majority Protestant countries, especially Great Britain and the United States. Some of the attitudes discussed had affinities with the concerns of anti-clericals in predominantly Catholic states, although here antagonism was naturally specifically directed against the institutional church, rather than against Catholics as a whole.2 Indeed, as we shall see, in some strands of anti-Catholic discourse, a parallel distinction between Catholics as individuals and Roman Catholicism as an institution was also apparent. Constitutional-national anti-CatholicismCentral to this form of anti-Catholicism was a perception of the Catholic Church as an extraterritorial power aiming to achieve worldwide political supremacy, both as an end in itself, and as a means to the achievement of its ultimate religious ends. Such ambitions were som...

The Guild of Our Lady of Ransom and Pilgrimage in England and Wales, c. 1890–1914

“…In keeping with more widespread anti-Catholicism, this tended to be oral rather than printed. 132 At Hastings, there was hostility from a few anonymous Protestants in 1899 when they distributed a leaflet by the National Protestant Federation. The leaflet cited an obsolete proclamation, of 46 years previously, which banned Catholic processions.…”