The Passing of the ‘Simple Faithful’

Extract

The Catholic Church is the only Church in England to have had in recent times any substantial following among working class people. Now, as the Church loses this following, it is worth asking what exactly the attraction was. Evidently at one time working class people found something in the Church, and now they do not.

For all practical purposes the Catholicism we have now dates from the later half of the nineteenth century. The situation at the time is well known. There were a few, mostly well off ‘old’ Catholics, some pockets of the country where Catholicism had never entirely disappeared, a trickle of converts and the vast number of Irish immigrants working in the new industrial centres. A kind of Catholicism prevailed that found its inspiration in the Counter-Reformation. In Ireland it had been imposed by the Irish hierarchy in the power vacuum which followed the loosing of the English hold on what had not been destroyed of Irish Catholicism. In England it had been adopted after the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850.

Certainly there were objections to this kind of Catholicism. The ‘old’ Catholics grumbled at the rococo devotions introduced by Italianate converts and joined their bishops in resisting the ultramontane extravagances of Manning and his friends. To the Irish immigrants, however, ‘Counter-Reformation’ Catholicism had from the beginning a great deal to offer.

It is not just that Catholicism was ‘their’ religion, something the English had tried, but failed, to crush. Counter-Reformation Catholicism had the added attraction of its essentially alien nature.