A Catholic Community: Shrewsbury. Part II: 1850–1920

Extract

The Papal Brief restoring the English hierarchy was promulgated on September 29th 1850. On October 25th the Shrewsbury Chronicle reprinted without comment a straight summary taken from the French Catholic paper, L’Univers. Soon enough anti-Catholic feeling, fanned to fury by Cardinal Wiseman’s provocative and flamboyant Letter from the Flaminian Gate, was unleashed across the length and breadth of the nation. In the next few weeks the Chronicle reprinted a whole series of letters on the controversy, an open letter from the Bishop of London to his clergy, John Russell’s open letter to the Bishop of Durham, endorsing the bishop’s remark that this example of ‘papal aggression’ was both ‘insolent and insidious’. Replies were also published: Bishop Ullathorne’s letter to The Times and an article in The Spectator both insisting on the spiritual nature of the issue, rather than presenting it as a threat to the constitution of the English Church and nation. These seemed to go unnoticed. An advertisement appeared from the clergy of Shrewsbury signed amongst others by the Archdeacon of Salop, and Kennedy (of Shorter Latin Primer fame), then Headmaster of the Schools. A petition was to be left for signing in Mr. Lake’s, in Market Square, protesting about the ‘illegal usurpation of power, insulting to our most gracious sovereign… openly intimating a design eventually to subjugate England to papal control’. The local papers seemed happy enough to encourage the debate.