Great Britain

Abstract

No account of the political and social impact of Catholicism in 20th-century Britain can ignore the fact that Catholics have formed a minority of the population. Catholics believed that the social and political principles derived from their faith were wholly relevant to a British society scarred by the effects of capitalism and liberalism, and now threatened by socialism. Accordingly, sections of the laity organized themselves, supported on occasion by a conservative hierarchy, to advance a distinctively Catholic critique of British society as they found it. Indeed, while the term ‘political Catholicism’ was alien to British Catholics, the term ‘social Catholicism’ was certainly not. This chapter contends that the many social Catholic movements of this period played an undeniably political role, both defensively (teaching the laity to resist socialism) and offensively (projecting a Catholic vision of a better society). It analyzes the attempts to articulate this Catholic social and political vision and to explain their ultimate failure.