Not all the troubles were between Protestants and Catholics

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.



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.