Despite what I have written in the past about the Catholic
Relief Act, there were a handful of influential and established Catholic
families who remained in England at this time. They used their influence and their money,
accompanied by a very deep faith, to keep the Church alive, almost literally at
times. These families included the Howards and Fitzalans (Earls of Arundel), and
the Talbots (Dukes of Shrewsbury).
It took a few decades
for lay and religious Catholics to trust the realities of the freedoms
gradually won in the various Catholic Relief Acts. It also took time to
establish and build new churches, schools and even congregations. And convents!
They really weren’t any convents since the Reformation. I did find the Church
of St. Aloysius in Somers Town, London, though and the Convent of St. Aloysius
was founded in 1830 by the French noblewoman and widow, Sister Marie Madeliene
de Bonault d’Houet. She, with a devoted band of French and English women,
established schools for both well off and poor English Catholic children.
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| Sister Marie Madeliene |
To return to the valuable and valued supporters of the Catholic
Church, they had a rather vehement rupture with their clergy when Catholicism
was legalised.
Those families who had loyally supported the Catholic Church
during the dark years of persecutions felt, perhaps justifiably, that they were
owed. They were also concerned, as good Englishmen and women, that their
loyalty to the king would be compromised by Rome now that Catholicism in
England was legal. Of course, added to this was the fact that, after the
Reformation, it was their unwavering adherence to their faith and their support
of the clergy, often at grave risks to themselves and certainly at great
expense, was the added notion that
without the support of these noblemen there would have been barely a skeleton
of a Catholic Church left to free.
Obviously this dispute caused the clergy a lot of distress.
However, they couldn’t budge. Now they could come out into the open and take
charge of the Church as well as make {clerical} appointments as they saw fit. They
wouldn’t defer to those who had supported them for so long, despite their
threats to withdraw their support now.
As I have said, there were very few convents or nuns before
the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 and it took a while for this to change. Until
then the Catholic church in England was called a Mission, the priests were
chaplains or rectors. They were not allowed to wear vestments and in fact were
very wary of ever wearing any garments that distinguished them as Catholic
chaplains or rectors. They certainly didn’t wear the ‘Roman collar’. They were
also not allowed to preach their sermons in English – in England! I would
imagine that this would be to prohibit anything seen as instructive, even
subversive, to the uneducated
parishioners.
Of course, many chaplains/rectors did preach their sermons
in English. At this time the practise of Catholicism was easier if one attended
a chapel attached to an Embassy, of which there were quite a few in London at
this time. Otherwise, in fact Catholics were not supposed to worship in London
at all so Masses were held secretly in houses and meeting rooms. If there were
Catholic churches they were very plain and very unobtrusive. And there really
wasn’t anything inside them that could be considered idolatrous.
I will return to the subject again when I discuss some of my thoughts on what contributed to the relaxing of the laws against the practice of Catholicism in England, especially before the first Catholic Relief Act of 1778.
