Ecclesia et Imperium

Charles A. Coulombe on how the British Empire helped spread the Faith

One of the innumerable superstitions infecting the modern mind is the idea that European expansion across the globe and the resulting colonial empires were unmitigated evils. Given that our global civilisation is based securely upon those colonial foundations, every beneficiary of modern technology alone owes those colonialists a debt of gratitude. Sans the racial reference, the United Nations Organisation have certainly attempted to take up the White Man’s burden, as outlined by Kipling: “…the savage wars of peace; fill full the mouth of famine, and bid the sickness cease.” Nowhere is this fact truer than in terms of religion. Without a doubt, the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonial empires were the building blocks of the Catholic Church across the globe. The French White Fathers did Yeoman work in Africa, and from the 1830s to 1914 the Emperor of Austria and the King of Bavaria poured millions of dollars into the Church in the United States through their foundations (to say nothing of artwork and missionaries). What is less well realised, however, was the role play in propagating the Faith by the British Empire.

At first glance, this seems an odd assertion. Even setting aside the Irish situation, from the time of Elizabeth I successive English and then British freebooters delighted in destroying Catholic foundations throughout the Spanish colonies – even as the Dutch did to the Portuguese in the East Indies. While this is certainly true, things were not quite so cut and dried in the 17th century. As is well known, the pro-Catholic Charles I gave Maryland to Lord Baltimore, who turned it into an abortive Catholic refuge (the last battle of the Ears of the Three Kingdoms would be fought there in 1652). Although London became resolutely anti-Catholic after 1688, two decades after the so-called “Glorious Revolution” Queen Anne intervened directly in Maryland’s affairs, vetoing the final anti-measure the provincial assembly had passed to end the Church in that Province. To this day a uniquely English-American Catholicism prevails in Southern Maryland and in its daughter region, the “Holy Land” of Kentucky.

But it was George III under whom the ice really broke. In 1763, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the French of Canada came under his sway, and by that treaty he became obligated to take them under his protection. The concrete result of this was the Quebec Act, whereby, among other things, the British Crown undertook the sponsorship of the Catholic Church there formerly exercised by the French King (it probably did not hurt that Clement XIII recognized George as de jure King of Great Britain on James III’s death in 1766). Catholic Emancipation’s high-water mark under George was undoubtedly the first Catholic Relief Bill in 1778; unhappily, the entrance of France that year and Spain the year following into the American rebellion and George’s feeling of betrayal at the hands of his Catholic fellow monarchs soured him on the idea. Nevertheless, as Britain acquired territories from Catholic powers over the remainder of his reign, the Quebec Act served as a template for establishing relations between the Crown and the Catholic Church in places such as Malta, Trinidad, Mauritius, Ceylon, and elsewhere.

Before and after the Napoleonic Wars, Scots Catholic emigration to the new settler colonies brought the Church to new areas. To this day there are more Catholics of Scots descent (and native-speakers of Scots Gaelic) in Canada than in Scotland, while Australia’s St Mary McKillop was born among Scots Catholic settlers in that country. The Faith first came permanently to South Africa with the arrival of Franco-Mauritian sugar planters in Natal. Not surprisingly, before waves of Irish emigrants fled conditions in their unhappy native Isle to swell the population of those colonies, various Irish regiments from India to Barbados were responsible for building Catholic churches. Speaking of India, there and in Ceylon and Malaya, friction occurred during the 19th century between parishes and dioceses founded by the Portuguese, and those created by missionaries responsible to the Propaganda Fide – breaking out in some place into open schism. Not surprisingly, in return for loyalty to the Crown, the British backed the Propaganda financially and in other ways. One byproduct of this development was the birth of uniquely Catholic Ethnic Groups – Malaysia and Singapore’s Eurasians, Ceylon’s Burghers, and – in addition to the pre-existing Goans – Mangaloreans, East Indians, and other groups in India. Most Anglo-Indians became Catholic, and the groups in turn helped spread the faith in East Africa.

The settler colonies each came with wide frontiers and native peoples to be evangelised: the American Indians of Canada’s great northwest, the Aborigines of the Australian Outback, the African peoples of the South African veldt, and the Maoris of New Zealand and other Pacific Islands. British colonial protection and patronage made it possible respectively for the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Benedictines of New Norcia, the Marianhill Missionaries, and the Marist Fathers to work among them. Such orders as the Mill Hill Fathers and Patrician Brothers were enabled through the peace brought by Imperial arms to evangelise vast stretches of British Africa and Asia.

The Mill Hill Fathers –the Missionary Society of St Joseph at London’s Mill Hill deserve special mention. At once inspired and challenged by the missionary efforts of other Catholic nationalities, Herbert Cardinal Vaughan (brother of Mgr Bernard Vaughan, who visited the dying Edward VII) founded them in 1866, asking Bl. Pope Pius IX for a missionary field; the Pontiff gave him English-speaking black people in Africa and America. The Order in the latter country became independent as the Josephites in 1893, and continue their work in American cities – they have two parishes here in Los Angeles. The British branch of the Order spread throughout British Africa, India, Borneo, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

It should also be pointed out that individual Catholics –often against great social and other odds – made good careers in the colonial service: among these were George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon, Viceroy of India; Sir John Pope-Hennessy, successively Governor of Labuan, Sierra Leone, the Windward Islands, Hong Kong, and Mauritius; Antony Patrick Baron MacDonell, successively chief officer in Burma, the Central Provinces of India, Bengal, and Agra and Oudh; and Sir Édouard Percy Girouard, French Canadian and High Commissioner in Nigeria and then Kenya (progenitor of the Girouard literary family). During campaigns up the Nile, Wolseley used French-Canadian boatmen in his Nile campaign, considering them the most skilled he ever encountered.

Cardinal Vaughan, founder of the Mill Hill Fathers

In light of the Ordinariates, one should also mention the Anglo-Catholic missionary effort across the Empire, probably strongest in Southern Africa and the West Indies – hence the veneration of King Charles there. It too featured religious orders – several of women and most notably the Cowley and Mirfield Fathers, heroic missionaries like Frank Weston, and colonial administrators such as Lord Halifax. Perhaps the bestknown survivor of this tradition is Mgr Robert Mercer, onetime Anglican Bishop of Matabeleland and Mirfield Father.

As the Anglican Communion is a religious reminder of the one-time spread of the British Empire, so too is the Catholic Church in those countries served across the planet by ICEL. Today, the seed sown thanks to British colonial protection has paid off – especially with the collapse in numbers of Irish, British, American, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealander vocations – with a bumper crop of African and South Asian priests and religious – and such prelates as Cardinals Arinze and Ranjith. Nor has this gift been restricted to the English-speaking world: these folks have been the salvation of many dying religious orders throughout Europe. Let us pray that the Western European nations and the settler countries – whose falling vocations have reflected not only a loss of Faith but an accompanying plummeting birth rate – may regain their sanity and become the beacons to the rest of the world that once they were.