The Catholic Church in England and Wales (; ) is part of the worldwide Catholic Church in full communion with the Holy See. Its origins date from the 6th century, when Pope Gregory I through a Roman missionary and Benedictine monk, Augustine, intensified the evangelisation of the Kingdom of Kent,"St. Augustine of Canterbury", The Catholic Encyclopedia, New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved 3 April 2019 from New Advent. linking it to the Holy See in AD 597.
This unbroken communion with the Holy See lasted until King Henry VIII ended it in 1534.Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity, The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 625: "The early Reformation gained a curious sort of victory in England, where the murderously opinionated monarch Henry VIII found an alliance with Reformers useful during his eccentric marital adventures."Dairmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation, Viking, 2004, p. 194. Communion with Rome was restored by Queen Mary I in 1555 following the Second Statute of Repeal and eventually finally broken by Elizabeth I's 1559 Religious Settlement, which made "no significant concessions to Catholic opinion represented by the church hierarchy and much of the nobility".MacCulloch, The Reformation, 279-280.
For 250 years, the government forced members of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church known as recusants to go underground for academic training in Catholic Europe, where exiled English clergy set up schools and seminaries for the sons of English recusant families. The government also placed legislative restrictions on Catholics, some continuing into the 20th century, while the ban on Catholic worship lasted until the Catholic Relief Act 1791. The ban did not, however, affect foreign embassies in London, although serving priests could be hounded.'Lincoln's Inn Fields: The Church of SS. Anselm and Cecilia', in Survey of London: Volume 3, St Giles-in-The-Fields, Pt I: Lincoln's Inn Fields, ed. W Edward Riley and Laurence Gomme (London, 1912), pp. 81-84. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol3/pt1/pp81-84 [accessed 31 July 2020]. During this time, the English Catholic Church was divided between the upper classes, aristocracy and gentry, and the working class.Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics (New York: Doubleday, 2018), 25.Brian Magee, The English Recusants, A Study of Post-Reformation Catholic Survival and the Operation of the Recusancy Laws (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1997)John Martin Robinson, The Dukes of Norfolk: A Quincentennial History (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1982)James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London: Longman, 1995) 8-12. Brundage,
The Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales claims 6.2 million members. That makes it the second largest single church if Christianity is divided into separate denominations."Leader comment: Census reality," Church Times, 12/7/22. All denominations would include Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Non-Conformists, and unaffiliated Christians. www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/2-december/comment/leader-comment/leader-comment-census-reality. In the 2001 United Kingdom census, Catholics in England and Wales were roughly 8% of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they represented only 4.8% of the population. In 1981, 8.7% of the population of England and Wales were Catholic. In 2009, following the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, when thousands of Central Europeans (mainly heavily Catholic Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks and Slovenes) came to England, an Ipsos Morioka poll found that 9.6% were Catholics in England and Wales. The Tablet, 31 October 2009, 16. In the 2021 census, the total Christian population dropped to 46% (about 27.6 million people).Robert Booth, Pamala Duncan, and Carmen Aguilar Garcia, "England and Wales now minority Christian countries, census reveals," The Guardian, 28 Nov 2022.Tim Wyatt, "British Social Attitudes finds 'C of E' respondents halved in 15 years,' Church Times, 07 September 2018.David Voas, "Christian decline: How it is measured and what it means," www.brin.ac.uk/christian-decline-how-its-measured-and-what-it means/ January 25, 2023.
In North West England one in five are Catholic, a result of the high number of English recusants in LancashireDavid M. Cheney, "Great Britain, Statistics by Diocese, by Catholic Population [Catholic hierarchy]" (http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/).Kevin Phillips, The Cousins' Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 480–484. Phillips notes: "the subjection [of the Irish] of the seventeenth century was almost complete. ... During the first quarter of the eighteenth century [after the Treaty of Union], Catholic bishops were banned and priests required to register. Catholics lost their right to vote, hold office, own a gun or a horse worth more than £5, or live in towns without paying special fees....Once again the Irish were pushed west to poorer lands, an exodus that prefigured the disposition of the American Indians over the next two centuries." and large-scale Irish migration in the 19th century particularly centred in Liverpool.
History
Roman Britons and early Christianity
Much of Great Britain was incorporated into the Roman Empire during the Roman conquest of Britain, starting in AD 43, conquering lands inhabited by Celtic Britons. The indigenous religion of the Britons under their priests, the Druids, was suppressed; most notably, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus launched an attack on Anglesey (or Ynys Môn) in AD 60 and destroyed the shrine and sacred groves there. In the following years, Roman influence saw the importation of several religious cults into Britain, including Roman mythology, Mithraism and the imperial cult. One of these sects, then disapproved of by the Roman authorities, was the Judea-originated religion of Christianity. While it is unclear exactly how it arrived, the earliest British figures considered saints by Christians are St. Alban followed by SS Julius and Aaron, all in the 3rd century.
Eventually, the position of the Roman authorities on Christianity moved from hostility to toleration with the Edict of Milan in AD 313 and then enforcement as state religion following the Edict of Thessalonica in AD 380, becoming a key component of Romano-British culture and society. Records note that Romano-British bishops, such as Restitutus, attended the Council of Arles in 314, which confirmed the theological findings of an earlier convocation held in Rome (the Council of Rome) in 313. The Roman departure from Britain in the following century and the subsequent Germanic invasions sharply decreased contact between Britain and Continental Europe. Christianity, however, continued to flourish in the Brittonic areas of Great Britain. During this period, certain practices and traditions took hold in Britain and in Ireland that are collectively known as Celtic Christianity. Distinct features of Celtic Christianity include a unique monastic tonsure and calculations for the date of Easter.Charles Plummer, "Excursus on the Paschal Controversy and Tonsure", in his edition Venerablilis Baedae, Historiam Ecclesiasticam Gentis Anglorum, 1892 (Oxford: University Press, 1975), pp. 348–354. Regardless of these differences, historians do not consider this Celtic or British Christianity a distinct church separate from general Western European Christianity.Kathleen Hughes, "The Celtic Church: Is This a Valid Concept?", O'Donnell lectures in Celtic Studies, University of Oxford 1975 (published in Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 1 , pp. 1–20).Wendy Davies, "The Myth of the Celtic Church", in The Early Church in Wales and the West, Oxbow Monograph, no. 16, edited by Nancy Edwards and Alan Lane, 12–21. Oxford: Oxbow, 1992.
Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons
During the Heptarchy, the English people (referred to as the Anglo-Saxons) were converted to Christianity from Anglo-Saxon paganism, from two main directions: Iona, through its subordinate house Lindisfarne (founded by Aidan of Lindisfarne), linking the Northumbrian element of the Church (and subsequently Mercia through Chad of Mercia) to the culture of the Church in Ireland; and in the south, first through Kent and then spreading out to Wessex, the Gregorian mission of the late 6th century, when Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine of Canterbury (at the time, Prior of the Abbey of St. Andrew or San Gregorio Magno al Celio) and 40 missionaries directly from Rome. This element, linked to the Continent through marriage alliances, had more of a Romano-Frankish orientation. Although the Celtic Britons (known mainly from the Middle Ages onwards as the Welsh) de facto retained their Christian religion even after the Romans pulled out, unlike the Gaels and the Romans the Welsh did not make any significant effort to evangelise the pagan Anglo-Saxons and indeed greatly resented them, as is related by Bede in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum.
The Gregorian mission, as it is known, is of particular interest in the Catholic Church, as it was the first official Papal mission to found a church. With the help of Christians already residing in Kent, particularly Bertha, the Merovingian Frankish consort of the then pagan King Æthelberht, Augustine established an archbishopric in Canterbury, the old capital of Kent. Having received the pallium earlier (linking his new diocese to Rome), Augustine became the first in the series of Catholic archbishops of Canterbury, four of whom, (Laurence, Mellitus, Justus and Honorius), were part of the original band of Benedictine missionaries. (The last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury was Reginald Pole, who died in 1558.)