This volume considers how and why colonial Catholics embraced the individualistic, rights-oriented ideology of the American Revolution, in spite of the fact that the Revolution's rhetoric was riddled with anti-Catholicism, and even though Catholicism has had an uneasy relationship with Enlightenment liberalism until very recently.

The North East of England was regarded as a major Catholic stronghold in the nineteenth century. This was, in no small part, due to the large numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants who contributed greatly towards the region’s unprecedented expansion, with the Catholic population in Newcastle and County Durham increasing from 23,250 in 1847 to 86,397 in 1874. How far were the Catholic Church and its incoming Irish adherents accepted by the Protestant population of North East England? This book will provide a timely reassessment of the hitherto accepted view that local cultural factors reduced the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling in the North East that seemed deep-seated in other areas. This book demonstrates the way in which north-eastern anti-Catholicism was far from homogenous and monolithic, cutting across the political and religious divide. It highlights the proactive role of the Catholic communities in sectarian controversy, whose assertiveness contributed, ironically, towards the development of local anti-Catholic feeling. Finally, it will show how large-scale Irish immigration ensured that the North East experienced regular outbreaks of sectarian violence, whether English-Irish or intra-Irish, which were influenced by local conditions and circumstances. This book is the first comprehensive regional study of Victorian anti-Catholicism. By examining areas of enquiry not previously considered in broader studies, its findings have wider implications for understanding the prevalent and all-encompassing nature of anti-Catholicism generally. It also contributes towards the wider debate on North East regional identity by questioning the continued credibility of a paradigm which views the region as exceptionally tolerant.

A study of clerical reaction to the sizeable number of Catholics who outwardly conformed to Protestantism in late 16c England. An important and satisfying monograph... Many insights emerge from this rich and original study, whichwhets the appetite for more. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW [Diarmaid MacCulloch] `Church Papist' was a nickname, a term of abuse, for those English Catholics who outwardly conformed to the established Protestant Church and yet inwardly remained Roman Catholics. The more dramatic stance of recusancy has drawn historians' attention away from this sizeable, if statistically indefinable, proportion of Church of England congregations, but its existence and significance is here clearly revealed through contemporary records, challenging the sectarian model of post-Reformation Catholicism perpetuated by previous historians. Alexandra Walsham explores the aggressive reaction of counter-Reformation clergy to the compromising conduct of church papists and the threat theyposed to Catholicism's separatist image; alongside this she explains why parish priests simultaneously condoned qualified conformity. This scholarly and original study thus draws into focus contemporary clerical apprehensions andanxieties, as well as the tensions caused by the shifting theological temper ofthe late Elizabethan and early Stuart church.ALEXANDRA WALSHAM is Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter.

This is a brief highly readable history of the Catholic experience in British America, which shaped the development of the colonies and the nascent republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historian Robert Emmett Curran begins his account with the English reformation, which helps us to understand the Catholic exodus from England, Ireland, and Scotland that took place over the nearly two centuries that constitute the colonial period. The deeply rooted English understanding of Catholics as enemies of the political and religious values at the heart of British tradition, ironically acted as a catalyst for the emergence of a Catholic republican movement that was a critical factor in the decision of a strong majority of American Catholics in 1775 to support the cause for independence

This edited collection brings together varying angles and approaches to tackle the multi-dimensional issue of anti-Catholicism since the Protestant Reformation in Britain and Ireland. It is of course difficult to infer from such geographically and historically diverse studies one single contention, but what the book as a whole suggests is that there can be no teleological narration of anti-Catholicism – its manifestations were episodic, more or less rooted in common worldviews, and its history does not end today.

Farrelly uses America's early history of anti-Catholicism to reveal contemporary American understandings of freedom, government, God, the individual, and the community.