English Catholic Attitudes to Irish Catholics1

Abstract

This essay explores the various paradoxes of the Roman Catholic Church in England, and to a degree in Scotland, beginning with the consideration that in the modern period, a large majority of the members of the English and Scottish Catholic Churches have been of Irish birth or descent. After the years of the great mid nineteenth-century immigration from Ireland, these Catholics in Britain found in their faith, rather than in any abiding sense of Irish nationality or consciousness of their place of origin, the central element of a distinct identity which was neither wholly native nor Irish, but lay in a strange middle ground between the two. Catholicism was a mark of separation in spite of the fact that the Church in Britain was served by a predominantly English priesthood and an overwhelmingly English episcopate, so that it never became a province of the spiritual empire of Irish Catholicism across its international diaspora, and was also an instrument of assimilation. The differences were masked by the fact that the romanisation and ultramontanisation of Catholicism in both islands made their Churches look very similar, with a common Latin liturgy, priesthood and devotional culture. English Catholicism had its own separate agenda, of converting England rather than serving the immigrant Irish, yet there is the further paradox that while the native English Roman Catholics could be as hostile to Irish Catholics as any English Protestant, especially over Irish nationalism and republicanism, there were also English converts to the faith who were positively attracted to the Church by the political and economic radicalism of Irish Catholicism, like Frederick Lucas and G.K. Chesterton.