Kenneth O. Morgan has argued that in 1945 it was ‘generally acknowledged that British society had undergone a massive transformation during the war years …’ The impact of World War Two on British society has been explored perceptively by Marwick and others. However, there has been little attempt to examine the impact of the war on the churches in Britain. This is especially the case with the Roman Catholic Church. The more general works have little to say of the Catholic church during this period. There have been some limited regional studies of Catholicism in the pre-war period but it is only for the post-war period, prior to and since the Second Vatican Council, that there has been any systematic attempt to examine structural changes in Catholicism. Hornsby-Smith in a series of enquiries has examined the social changes in the Catholic community in England since the Second Vatican Council. In a brief overview he described the Catholic church in England prior to the Council as having the characteristics of a ‘mechanistic’ organisation, namely a distinct hierarchical control structure, vertical relations between superiors and subordinates and an insistence on loyalty to the institution.

It is ironic that it should have been the leader of the church with the greatest proportion of working-class members who took up the most hostile stance to the General Strike of 1926. While Francis Bourne (1862–1935), Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, won the plaudits of the Establishment for his unambiguous denunciation of the strike, that cautious septuagenarian Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, found himself cast in the unlikely role of the workers’ friend after his illstarred attempt to conciliate the two sides. Sheridan Gilley has highlighted another contrast: while in 1926 Bourne found himself sharply opposed to labour, in a 1918 pastoral letter he had been insistent that the Church should reach an accommodation with the ‘modern labour unrest’. While Gilley implies that his General Strike condemnation was uncharacteristic, Buchanan suggests that this was closer to expressing his ‘real political views’ than his 1918 statement. This article aims to provide a closer examination of the shift in Bourne’s attitude, and to consider the broader episcopal response to social and political questions during these fraught years.

In November, 1850, in his first Pastoral Letter as Bishop of Newport and Menevia, Thomas Joseph Brown OSB described the unfavourable reactions to the recent restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy as ‘… wild passions that are agitating the land,’ but confidently prophesied that ‘a reaction will succeed, favourable to the progress of Catholic truth, as followed the healing of diseases from the stirring up of the pool of Bethsaida’. ‘Stirring up the pool’ was a well chosen image not only for the Restoration of the Hierarchy, but also for the ensuing controversy it unleashed between the new hierarchy and the regular clergy and specifically the English Benedictine Congregation, to which Brown belonged.

‘Whilst sailing on board a French ship on the Pacific Ocean in the year 1839, I drew up the first sketch of a plan for establishing the Catholic hierarchy in Australia. The sketch was afterwards completed by the guide of my monastic life and studies, the Archbishop of Sydney, then Vicar-Apostolic of Australia; and by authority of Pope Gregory XVI, in the following year the Australian hierarchy came into existence. The fertile results which quickly followed from the establishment of the normal state of the Church in that distant land inspired me with the earnest desire of seeing the same blessing conferred on the Catholics of England. And on the day of my episcopal consecration, being the very day of the coronation of the present reigning pontiff, as the three Bishops were placing the mitre on my head, there arose up in my mind a sense that was indescribably keen of the need in which we stood for recovering our Hierarchy; and with that sense came a desire as keen to labour for its recovery.’