Conclusion: Taking the Long View of Anti-Catholicism

Abstract

This conclusion will explore issues of longue durée continuity and change in anti-Catholicism initially through a summary of some key insights from the earlier chapters. Taken together these point to a long-term shift in anti-Catholicism from a cultural consensus on the eighteenth century to relative marginality in the twentieth. This was not, however, a straightforward process of linear decline, as is demonstrated by closer attention to the nineteenth century, focused particularly on three pivotal events, the Union of the British and Irish Parliaments (1800), Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales (1850). The Union of 1800 brought Britain into direct political connection with predominantly Catholic Ireland, with its increasingly embattled staunchly Protestant minority, thus establishing new dynamics in anti-Catholicism across the United Kingdom as a whole. Catholic Emancipation was a paradoxical event, a seeming triumph for toleration but one that was followed by a substantial and prolonged anti-Catholic backlash. The restoration of the hierarchy gave Catholicism renewed institutional status, but at the expense of the widespread condemnation of “papal aggression” that was a perceived violation of national sovereignty. During the twentieth century, however, anti-Catholicism became more localised and secular in character.