Church and State: Is all now forgiven?

Serenhedd James

In East Hendred in Oxfordshire a Catholic church and presbytery sit opposite each other across a pretty country lane. It is not necessarily a unique scene in England (the Throckmortons had a similar arrangement at Buckland), but it is relatively rare. The Eystons have held Hendred manor for six centuries; they retained their faith, heads and property, and against all the odds managed to keep Catholicism alive on their land. They supplemented their domestic chapel with a new church in 1865.

What is remarkable about the arrangement at East Hendred is that the two buildings are linked with an overhead passageway that connects the upper storey of the presbytery with the sacristy across the road. Its plain functionality verges on the ugly and a renovation of the original has not helped, yet it speaks volumes. As the parish priest explained, it was constructed to enable his predecessors to go from house to altar without causing scandal by appearing in a cassock in the street.

There, in a nutshell, is where the Catholic Church in England was in the popular mind nearly three centuries after Pius V’s excommunication of Elizabeth I and 35 years after Emancipation: still firmly on the back foot. In the wake of Regnans in Excelsis in 1570 William Cecil played his finest card: if the Queen were excommunicate, then all Catholics were absolved of their allegiance and by definition potential traitors, even those who wanted no more than to quietly count their beads and wish her well.

It must be admitted that the occasional plot did not much help, and nor did the Spanish Armada. The mud that Elizabeth’s Protestant ministers slung at her Catholic subjects in the 16th century stuck, and stuck fast. After the flight of James II and the coming of William & Mary the Toleration Act of 1688 only applied to non-Anglican Protestants; at the end of the 17th century the government passed “an Act for the further preventing the Growth of Popery”. The Jesuits had the distinction of legislation of their own.

Although the penal laws diminished slowly in their application, anti-Catholic suspicion lingered despite the Relief Bills of 1778 and 1793, the repeal of the Test Acts in 1828 and the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. The March to Derby was not forgotten when Pius IX restored the Catholic Hierarchy in 1850, by which time Rome had itself long abandoned the Jacobite cause. The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill that followed in 1851 was little more than a government sop to “no Popery” sentiment among the electorate.

And yet, with glacial speed, there has been glasnost, which can be measured in lifetimes – or perhaps in coronations. In 1902 Edward VII regretted the vituperative anti-Catholicism of the Coronation Oath, but felt he had to swear it anyway. In 1911 George V simply refused, and a bespoke Act of Parliament provided for a simpler and less offensive form. That year the coronation fell on a Friday, and Pius X duly dispensed all Catholics in the British Empire from their obligation of abstinence.

George VI and Elizabeth II also swore to uphold the good of the Church of England without necessarily acting to the detriment of other denominations; in 1953 Cardinal Griffin would probably have attended the service had not the rules on Catholics attending Protestant worship still been in place. Since 2013 heirs to the throne have been free to marry Catholics without forfeiting their place in the line of succession, although it would be interesting to see what would happen constitutionally if Prince George of Wales were to do so.

The Catholic Church in England and Wales is now numbered among the Privileged Bodies of the United Kingdom; Cardinal Nichols duly addressed the King at Buckingham Palace on 9 March. Furthermore, Pope Francis sent a relic of the Cross to precede the King’s Coronation procession into Westminster Abbey. Let that sink in for a moment: a relic of the Cross. Notwithstanding the challenges faced by the Catholic Church as it engages with various issues facing modern society, at the highest level in England things have undoubtedly and demonstrably changed.

This article first appeared in the May 2023 edition of the Catholic Herald. We are grateful for permission to reproduce it here. catholicherald.co.uk