Catholic Conspiracy Research Articles

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

«Знаете ли, я думал отдать мир папе…»: антикатолический пласт романа Ф.М. Достоевского «Бесы»

We analyzed the anti-Catholic discourse of the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky “Demons” (1872). The object of the study is the religious and confessional views of F.M. Dostoevsky in the aspect of the writer’s polemics with Catholicism and the papacy. The research methodology is based on the principles of comparative and contextual analysis. The interdisciplinary nature of the study is due to the appeal to theological, philosophical, religious-confessional and socio-political issues. The materials of the study were the text of the novel “Demons”, handwritten editions and draft notes to the novel, as well as external to F.M. Dostoevsky’s sources are historiosophical, polemical, historical literature, etc. In the course of an ideological content of “Demons” consistent review, the author identified three areas of anti-Catholic polemics implemented by the writer on the novel pages: anthropotheistic, Christological and socio-political. All three aspects are concentrated in the complex image of Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin – a demon, a man-god, an antichrist and novel world impostor. The motive of the worldwide Catholic conspiracy threatening Russia is displayed in the political constructions of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky. The practical significance of the results of the study lies in the possibility of their further use in a comprehensive study of F.M. Dostoevsky’s religious and historiosophical system of views, as well as by introducing the results obtained into the educational process for conducting seminars on the history of Russian literature.

Rethinking Film Adaptation Through Directors’ Discourse and Auteur Theory: Approaching Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code

This article examines the apropos of Dan Brown’s novel - adaptation, The Da Vinci Code, to the director’s discourses around the film adaptation of a literary work. Ron Howard’s stance as an auteur is assessed to gauge him as an illustrator of American filmmaking in terms of auteur discourses and formulate that his work disavows significant portions of the Catholic conspiracies, sidestepping the subject of authenticity, which is at the forefront of contemporary literature adaptation discourses. Despite appearing to be more ‘authentic,’ the film falls short of the fidelity to source material that was an avowedly auteurist vision and is shown to have issues with authorship. This paper proposes the contemporary auteur influence, examining how the concept of directors’ discourse functions in the Hollywood film industry and the director’s stature as an auteur and the works’ creative style in literary, screen adaptation and movie translation.

McTague, John. Things That Didn’t Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743.

McTague, John. <i>Things That Didn’t Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743</i>.

A dancer made a recusant: dance and evangelization in the Jacobean North East of England

In the summer of 1615, a newly discovered Catholic conspiracy prompted William James, bishop of Durham, to vigorously correspond with the archbishop of Canterbury. On 3 August, in the midst of the crisis, the bishop incarcerated a professional dancer, Robert Hindmers (b. 1585). Together with his wife Anne, Robert was associated with the Newcastle-based secular priest William Southerne and involved in Catholic evangelising in the diocese of Durham. This article discusses the biography and career of Robert Hindmers, and speculates about the role of dancing within the Durham Catholic community. It also analyses how the activities of the Hindmers were perceived by the ecclesiastical authorities. The case of Robert Hindmers traverses and links many related issues, such as Counter-Reformation culture, traditional festivity, religious politics, and the interconnectedness of elite and popular cultures. But above all, it expands our understanding of Catholic missionary strategies in post-Reformation England by suggesting that dance instruction might have been used by Catholics to access households and assist the mission.

An Irish Informer in Restoration England: David Fitzgerald and the "Irish Plot" in the Exclusion Crisis, 1679–81

An Irish Informer in Restoration England:David Fitzgerald and the "Irish Plot" in the Exclusion Crisis, 1679-81 John Gibney (bio) Personal histories from the early modern era are often obscure, and David Fitzgerald's is no exception. But for a brief period his life comes to light, attracting attention as one of a number of dubious Irishmen to allege before the English parliament in November 1680 that the Catholic Irish, organized and funded by the Catholic Church, intended to massacre Irish Protestants and assist a French invasion of Ireland, after which a combined Franco-Irish force was to attack England and embark upon a similar massacre of English Protestants. The supposed existence of a conspiracy for an Irish rebellion had been part of the allegations made in August 1678 by Titus Oates, a highly dubious figure whose essentially criminal career "included lying, cheating, blasphemy, and sodomizing young boys."1 Oates had been an Anglican preacher, a naval chaplain, and a convert to [End Page 249] Catholicism; he was expelled from two continental seminaries before returning to England to concoct his fabulous if terrifying story. Oates's allegations precipitated and underpinned the Popish Plot in England, the outburst of anti-Catholic fervor prompted by his revelations about a Catholic conspiracy to wipe out Protestantism in the Stuart kingdoms. The most obvious Irish dimension to these events would be the execution in London of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic primate and archbishop of Armagh, in July 1681. Plunkett was convicted on spurious charges of attempting to facilitate a French invasion of Ireland, but even aside from this infamous case, allegations of Irish Catholic plots had been a recurring theme in the events that had unfolded.2 Over time the Popish Plot gave way to the so-called Exclusion Crisis, the intense political struggle that arose between 1679 and 1681 over the vexing question of who would succeed Charles II as king. In 1678 the heir to the throne was a Catholic: Charles's younger brother James, Duke of York, who had been tainted by Oates's allegations. In an atmosphere of intense anti-Catholicism, York's faith was inevitably contentious, and over the next two years a campaign to alter the succession would be conducted both inside and outside the English parliament. This eventually became a concerted effort specifically to exclude York from the succession, and one notable element in this campaign would be the promotion of ostensible Irish informers who could supposedly prove the existence of a plot involving an Irish Catholic rebellion. The reasoning behind this was straightforward: the Catholic Irish had rebelled before, and in 1641 it was believed that they had done so in an appallingly brutal and sectarian manner. Vastly exaggerated accounts of the torture and massacre of British Protestant settlers became the stock perceptions of the 1641 rebellion as it came to occupy a special place in the Protestant imaginations of both Britain and Ireland.3 If the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis rested upon the [End Page 250] assumption that a Catholic attack on Protestants in the Stuart kingdoms was imminent, these perceptions of 1641 as a wholesale sectarian massacre made it an obvious model for what this might entail. When in January 1679 an informer alleged that the French and the papacy had plans for an invasion of Ireland at the expense of the Protestant interest there, these claims carried a particular resonance, according to Gilbert Burnet, for "the memory of the Irish massacre was yet so fresh as [to] raise a particular horror at the very mention of this."4 What Burnet had in mind was 1641. The exclusion campaign ultimately rested upon fears of a Catholic monarch derived from a more general fear of an international Catholic threat across Europe, especially in the form of an expansionist Catholic France.5 This dovetailed with a rich vein of English anti-popery that drew upon the memory of critical events in Protestant history in order to illustrate the persistent danger that England faced from Catholicism.6 The Popish Plot could be (and was) incorporated into a pattern of Catholic threats and providential deliverance stretching from the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s, through...

The Barroso Drama: All Roads Lead to Rome

Italian governmental crisis at the origin of Rocco Buttiglione's nomination. Hearing before Civil Liberties committee and unprecedented rejection of Buttiglione. October events trigger changes in Italian governmental team. The EU: a Catholic conspiracy?

The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (review)

190 Reviews are so numerous that perhaps a more apt title would have been 'The Time of Thomas More'. David Tulloch Department of History Victoria University of Wellington Alf ord, Stephen, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and Succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (Cambridge Studies in Early M o d e m British History), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998; cloth; pp. 286; R.R.P. £35.00. Sir William Cecil is perhaps the best-known — and certainly the mos often quoted — politician of the Elizabethan era. Created Baron of Burghley in 1571, he is almost universally treated in modern historiography as being Queen Elizabeth's political soul mate, even her alter ego. As Patrick Collinson once put it, Elizabeth and Cecil (or Burghley) have become welded together by historians 'as if they were the front and rear legs of a pantomime horse'. Stephen Alford seeks to pull this unnatural creature apart and to show Cecil, as it were, in his true spots: a politician whose views were often distinctly different from those of his queen and w h o was both willing and able to propose solutions which diverged radically from her conservative stance. In many ways, this book is a pre-history of the curious 'monarchical republicanism' which Collinson detected among England's social arid political elite in the 1570s and early '80s. Exploring the books and ideas which shaped Cecil's education at Cambridge and Gray's Inn during the 1530s and '40s, Dr Alford explains w h y a whole generation of Protestant English gentlemen believed that they had a positive duty to counsel the queen through court, council or parliament, and how Elizabeth's frequent unwillingness to heed their advice created a severe tension between their innate loyalty to their monarch and their passionate concern to preserve the integrity of the state. Although Alford perhaps underplays the impact of political events of the mid-Tudor period on this process, he succeeds very well in demonstrating how repeated crises in the 1560s forced Cecil (and many of his colleagues on the privy council) to contemplate measures which would have had Reviews 191 radical implications for the English polity. In 1559, for example, Cecil was so concerned about affairs in Scotland that he proposed the formal deposition of Mary Stuart and the transfer of her crown to the earl of Arran. Such ideas remained utterly unacceptable to Elizabeth, but they prefigured Cecil's o w n later thoughts in the 1560s, and again in the mid-1580s, about h o w England might cope with the profound uncertainties over the succession which Elizabeth herself consistently refused to resolve. This book also places great emphasis upon the role of language in politics and policy-making, reflecting both the 'linguistic turn' which has influenced m u c h recent historiography and the unique richness of Cecil's surviving papers. Other key themes include the indivisibility of domestic, 'British' and Continental issues in the politics of the 1560s (despite the best efforts of nineteenth-century cataloguers and twentieth-century historians to inscribe artificial distinctions upon them) and the pervasive influence of a mind-set which analysed the contemporary international scene in providential and, indeed, conspiratorial terms. The latter point — 'the strength of what can be too easily dismissed as paranoia' (p. 187) — is important not only because it helps to explain Cecil's ideas and actions. According to Alford, a shared belief in an international Catholic conspiracy against England also united the privy council during the 1560s and therefore undermines any factional analysis of politics of the sort advanced by Conyers Read and m a n y other scholars. For Alford, cooperation is the hallmark of the privy council in the 1560s, not faction. In his view, debates among the councillors — 'when they disagreed at all' — occurred essentially over 'the application of practical policy': the basic premises of each debate were essentially accepted by all councillors, but debate might ensue over the risks and ramifications of taking specific actions. This wholesale dismissal of faction from the politics of the 1560s m a y be going too far. It is noteworthy that this book focuses almost exclusively on the privy council and says...

Godly charity or political aid? Irish protestants and international Calvinism, 1641–1645

The rebellion of Irish catholics in October I64I and the accompanying atrocities committed against protestant settlers in Ulster are generally acknowledged to have exercised considerable influence over the political events leading up to the Civil War in England. Fears of invasion by marauding Irish catholics, and the suspicion that Charles I would use the rebellion as a pretext for raising an army against parliament, were widespread in England. Some contemporary observers, such as Clarendon and Richard Baxter, considered the Irish massacre and rebellion crucial in precipitating the armed confrontation between king and parliament which followed. News of the events in Ireland reached London in November and lurid and sensationalized descriptions were immediately published in a stream of broadsheets and pamphlets, often with dramatic titles such as, 'Bloody newes from Ireland, or the barbarous crueltie by the papists used in that kingdome'. The significance of the Irish rebellion for the subsequent political and religious developments in England has long been accepted. It has, however, been largely forgotten that Calvinists perceived the rebellion as yet another incident in the host of persecutions they were confronted with in the early seventeenth century. Similarly, it has gone unnoticed that the rebellion gave rise to a charitable collection in the United Provinces for suffering, Irish 'brethren in Christ'. In what follows I shall argue that this collection among the Reformed communities in the Netherlands was initiated by godly Englishmen for political, as well as religious reasons, and furthermore that it was never exactly what it pretended to be. The number and the character of the tracts pouring out from the printing presses in London in the I 64os brings to mind the wealth of pamphlets published 20 years earlier during the first years of the Thirty Years' War which had threatened the very existence of European protestantism. Then, the tracts had been primarily concerned with the dangers to the Reformed communities in Bohemia and the German Palatinate. In I 64I the same fear of a catholic conspiracy to eradicate European Calvinism is in evidence in the tracts dealing with the Irish rebellion. To Calvinists, the disturbances in Ireland only represented yet another instance where the godly had to face the forces of AntiChrist. That, at least, was the way most English puritans interpreted events in Ireland. The puritan artisan, Nehemiah Wallington, saw the rebellion as being part of a great catholic plan stretching back to the Spanish Armada in I588. It demonstrated 'how Antichrist, even those bloody-hearted Papists, doth plot against the poor Church of God'.' John Dillingham, Lord Montague's chief informant in London, had no doubt that the Irish rebellion was part of a great catholic scheme, 'we are diverted from

Reconstruction Revisited: The Republican Public Education Crusade of the 1870s

Reconstruction Revisited: The Republican Public Education Crusade of the 1870s Ward M. McAfee The character of the second half of Reconstruction can best be seen by focusing on a public school movement that became prominent during the 1 870s. Some may disagree and argue that the enforcement acts of 1 870 and 1 871 better reveal both the strengths and weaknesses ofthe latter half of the Reconstruction program. Indeed, greater scholarly attention has been given to the enforcement legislation and its aftermath than to the education crusade of that decade. Nevertheless, without the underlying Reconstructionistjustification of reforming the nation through education, the enforcement acts would have appeared far more arbitrary in spirit than they did at the time. Indeed, the enforcement legislation was directly inspired by the Ku Klux Klan's burning of public schools. The very term "waving the bloody shirt," which became the Republicans ' chief symbolic argument in the seventies, came from Ben Butler's showmanship in congressional debates over the enforcement bills as he waved a bloodied nightshirt of a Mississippi school administrator assaulted by the Klan. For many, the enforcement acts were publicly validated as a necessary foundation for the Republicans' public education reform.1 In 1 870, the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment (which sanctioned African American male voting) encouraged a movement to bring public education to the South. Efforts involving the Freedmen's Bureau had preceded this date, but the public school movement did not move into the center of the political arena until after the Fifteenth Amendment went into operation. The anticipated reform of uplifting the nation through public education certainly had a strong racial component, but it had a broader agenda than only this.2 It also aimed to ' Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper and Row, 197 1), 294. 2 For histories of the racial component ofthe public education issue in the 1870s, see James Mcpherson , "White Liberals and Black Power in Negro Education, 1865-1915," American Historical Civil War History, Vol. xlii. No. 2 © 1996 by The Kent State University Press 134CIVIL WAR HISTORY federalize guarantees that public education in the North would never be undermined by the Roman Catholic Church, which was then growing in influence and power. Republicans hoped to funnel the children of Catholic immigrants living in the North through the public schools, then characterized by many Protestant religious practices. In this way, they sought to break both the self-imposed cultural separatism encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church as well as the potential political power of the Irish Catholics, who were the Republicans' ethnic opponents as much as African Americans were then their ethnic allies.3 Many of the emotions that had characterized the Know-Nothing movement of the 1 850s resurfaced in the Republicans' Reconstruction policy of the 1870s. Throughout that decade, Republicans trumpeted the virtues of a homogeneous Union, harmonious with traditional American Protestant mores. Similarly, they cast the Roman Catholic Church as an antinational force, as dangerous to the Union as the "slave-power" conspiracy had once been. It behooved Republicans to emphasize this theme throughout the seventies, for it helped mask the unpopular racial implications of their program to reconstruct the nation. Republicans and Democrats had different advantages in fighting over publicschool issues in the national political arena. As the Catholic Church erected its own sectarian school systems, many Protestants became concerned that immigrant children going through these parochial schools might not become fully Americanized. Protestants were also disturbed by the Catholic complaint that America's public schools were little more than tax-supported Protestant schools. As Catholics increasingly demanded that Protestant Bible-reading ceremonies cease in public education, Republicans fought back and exploited the anti-Catholic biases of the Protestant majority, especially in the North. Republicans also warned of a Catholic conspiracy to get their own parochial schools funded at taxpayer expense. The Democratic strategy regarding public education in the political arena was different. In all sections, Democrats relied on deep-seated white racism and fears that the Republican nationalizing agenda included racial integration of all American children in national public schools of the future. Of the two, the Democrats ultimately...

Catholic Conspiracy in Early Elizabethan Foreign Policy

In the tension-ridden environment of early Elizabethan England diplomacy was increasingly hampered by the intrusion of religious dogmas into foreign affairs. As Garrett Mattingly has so cogently stated, Opposed ideologies would distort the lines of policy, cut across old allegiances, and multiply the hostilities between states by the implacable hatreds of conflict over absolute, transcendental ideas.' In spite of Mattingly's assertion, however, recent studies of English diplomacy have moved away from ideological considerations and have focused attention on the impact of events to the extent that religion has been demoted to a position of only peripheral importance to the shaping of policy.2 It might be said that perhaps a more balanced interpretation of Elizabethan diplomacy would recognize the interrelationships between events, personalities, and ideologies than is currently the case. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how one important element of religious ideology-belief in a Catholic conspiracy to exterminate Protestantism-affected diplomatic thinking. It will be shown that belief in such a conspiracy was instrumental to the creation of an aggressive attitude, an elan vital, that gave Englishmen confidence in the future, in spite of impending or imaginary threats from abroad. Unfortunately, however, such thinking projected Philip II of Spain as the perpetrator of such plots and was thus instrumental to the deterioration of Anglo-Spanish relations in the 1560s. The frequency with which allusions to conspiracy are found in English diplomatic correspondence suggests widespread acceptance of such rumors. As might be expected, belief in the Catholic bogey was a common assumption among Protestant hot gospellers, such as Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, Christopher Mundt, Sir Henry Norris, and Sir Francis Walsingham. But even among diplomats considered to be religious and political moderates, such as Sir Thomas Gresham, Sir Thomas Challoner,

Anti-popery on the Welsh Marches in the Seventeenth Century

South Wales and the border counties played a crucial part in the events known as the ‘Popish plot’. The alleged catholic conspiracy laid particular emphasis on the roles allotted to Welsh magnates like Worcester and Powis, with their neighbours and dependants, and invasion plans were said to hinge on strategic centres like Chepstow castle and Milford Haven. Men from this area were active in the’plot’, whether as informers - notably Bedloe - or as parliamentary opponents of the duke of York; Welsh Jesuits were supposedly involved in the main conspiracies and murders, and Border protestants like Bishop Croft were among their main targets. John Arnold of Monmouthshire even aspired to the position in the whig leadership held by Shaftesbury, and the tory Ailesbury regarded the worst villains of the whole ‘plot’ as Arnold himself and his Herefordshire kinsman John Dutton Colt. It was also in this area that the ‘plot’ was at its most violent, and Professor Kenyon's study of the Popish plot rightly refers to ‘this battle area on the frontier of Wale’. ‘The main damage suffered outside London’ by the Jesuits was the loss of the south Wales district headquarters at the Cwm, when this was raided in 1678 by Croft, Arnold, and another ultra-protestant named Charles Price: ‘ the south Wales mission was the only one completely eliminated’. In 1679 a Jesuit wrote from north Wales that’ the college of South Wales was totally rooted up. We of the north have fared a little better, thus far; but God knows how long it is to last, for we live in constant fears and perils, only three of us now remaining’.

The Economic Consequences of Recusancy in Elizabethan Worcestershire

How far were recusants affected financially by the Elizabethan penal statutes? Given that only a small proportion of fines was collected or reached the Exchequer, it may be that the question is scarcely worth discussing. It is nearly always assumed that Elizabethan Catholics suffered economic hardships; it has been suggested that their chief disability was not the fines but continuous exclusion from public office (1), and also that their plight was so desperate that they had no alternative save rebellion (2). Such conjectures can only be tested by examining the fortunes of recusant gentry at the local level; and Worcestershire, with its record of Catholic conspiracies culminating in the Gunpowder Plot, provides the right circumstances for such an examination.

Contributors

x• Ting v.A•mY 1890's a secret, oath-bound, anti-Catholic society called the Protestant Protective Association made its way into Canada from the United States. For six years the P.P.A. worked secretly to protect the institutions of Canada against what it alleged to be a Roman Catholic conspiracy to take control of the state. Its battle against his menace consisted of a bitter campaign on both social and political levels; the P.P.A. discriminated against Catholics personally by boycotting their businesses, and also attempted to drive Catholics out of political ife. During its meteoric rise the P.P.A. ran candidates in municipal and provincial elections in Ontario and in the federal election of 1896 with such success that Wilfrid Laurier, Oliver Mowat, and Lord Aberdeen, the Governor General of Canada, all denounced its activities in public speeches. The P.P.A. seemed so powerful at first that one Ontario journal predicted that further growth would mean either civil war or the breakup of Confederation. x The importance of this anti-Catholic organization, however, stems not so much from its political impact as from the insight it provides into the spirit of the 1890's. The P.P.A. was more than just a secret, anti-Catholic society; for the first three years of its existence in Canada it was a movement which rather than creating anti-Catholicism was a product of it and only reflected, and in some ways intensified, the dominant social and psychological spirit of the time. In the 1890's a strident anti-Catholic nativism blossomed in Canadian life and the ideals of Confederation became