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Catholic History in Britain; how does it affect today?
Topic Started: Thursday, 29. January 2009, 02:05 (667 Views)
Rose of York
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JRJ
Thursday, 29. January 2009, 02:05
I have been wondering what it is like to be Catholic in Britain. The history of the Church has such crucial moments in your nations, and there are so many centuries of your history that have shaped today's Catholic experience. So many martyrs! I have become very interested in how differently religion is experienced in other nations and cultures. Here in America we have such a short history of the Church's presence.

Is it difficult to be Catholic in Britain? Not? How have your ancestors described earlier times as Catholics? How do you see the history of the Church in Britain affecting you today?
:topicbaack: :pl:
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JRJ

Rose, what a beautiful church! I did look at a map and locate Leeds and Bradford. Ah, "progress" changes all lands, doesn't it? I am grateful for your details - this is the sort of thing I am wondering about, because history is really about the families and their experiences over time. The histories we read in school are always the result of someone's agenda - you have to branch out to get a fuller view. Amazing how truly dirt poor immigrants in your country and mine accomplished so much - where is that spirit today? My husband was fascinated about the steel made in Middlesborough (spelling?).
Jennifer
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JRJ

Gerry and John,

So it sounds like in England there is only the modern secular prejudice against religion, but in Scotland there is still a trace of the old anti-Catholic feeling?
Jennifer
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JRJ

Mairtin and Patrick,

The Act of Settlement (don't they always name laws to cover up their intent??) must be a thorn in the side of many citizens in your nations. What have your families and lives taught you about Catholic history in Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales? Any or all of them...
Jennifer
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Rose of York
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JRJ
Thursday, 29. January 2009, 22:51
My husband was fascinated about the steel made in Middlesborough (spelling?).
Borough is the word used for a town that is big enough to have a mayor. It has two 'o's. Middlesbrough has one 'o'. Very odd!

Google for:

Phrase Margaret Clitherow
Word York

and

Phrase Nicholas Postgate
Word Egton

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JRJ

Like Gerry I don't live in Scotland any more but I do visit family there regularly. There is still Catholic-Protestant antagonism especially in the Western industrial belt but in my experience this is pretty much between what you might call "cultural" Catholics and Protestants ie those who identify themselves with these labels for family historical reasons but who have ceased to practise any religion. Their battleground is usually the soccer field through the 2 big Glasgow clubs and even that is toned down a great deal these days. In my home town, the annual dinners of the Catholic and Church of Scotland ( presbyterian) cparishes have been merged into a joint occasion because the 'real" Church members get on so well now.

Things are not all rosy but I would not want you to think that you could detect animosity in the streets. That would be rare and most people get on very well.

John
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Gerard

What John said

Gerry
"The institutional and charismatic aspects are quasi coessential to the Church's constitution" (Pope John Paul II, 1998).
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JRJ

Rose of York
Thursday, 29. January 2009, 23:03
JRJ
Thursday, 29. January 2009, 22:51
My husband was fascinated about the steel made in Middlesborough (spelling?).
Borough is the word used for a town that is big enough to have a mayor. It has two 'o's. Middlesbrough has one 'o'. Very odd!

Google for:

Phrase Margaret Clitherow
Word York

and

Phrase Nicholas Postgate
Word Egton

Now THAT was a history lesson, Rose. Some of what I found:

http://70.84.222.87/index.php?title=Margaret_Clitherow%2C_Venerable
http://www.lovingit.co.uk/2008/07/the-postgate-rally.html
Jennifer
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Rose of York
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JRJ
Friday, 30. January 2009, 01:03
Rose of York
Thursday, 29. January 2009, 23:03
Jennifer, if you click on this you will find a more accurate site about Nicholas Postgate. It will take quite some time to read all of it. Click on the blue circles to the left.

http://ca.geocities.com/patriciablackburn2004/HeartsOfOak/contents.html

The villages of Ugthorpe remained Catholic during recusant times (ie when Catholicism was illegal in this country). I last visited there in about 1992. There was an Anglican church but the village still revolved around St Hedda's, the Catholic Church, which has a shrine to Father Postgate, complete with his stole, breviary and tiny little chalice.

The website even gives the names of every priest who served that area, risking their lives, and the names of all persons baptised.

When iron ore was discovered at Egton, the bishop thought the Irishmen would settle there, so he had a magnificent church built there, with the hope that one day it would be a Cathedral. A larger lode of iron was found closer to Middlesbrough, so a new Cathedral was built there. The Cathedral type parish church still stands, is still in daily use. It is truly magnificent, stuck out on the remote Yorkshire Moors.

Posted Image
Posted Image

Opposite the church there is a public house, the only one in the country named after a Catholic priest.

Link to Postgate Inn
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Rose of York
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Here is a very good site about Margaret Clitherow

http://www.tanbooks.com/doct/margaret_martyr.htm

The City of York, where Margaret Clitherow lived and died.

http://www.vryork.com/
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Rose of York
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JRJ this will give you a really good insight into the development of Catholicism in England from the Reformation onwards. The article is very long, and well worth reading. I cannot post all of it, because it is copyright.

Yorkshire was not the only place with recusants. There were many in Lancashire, Dorset, and other counties. It just happens that I am familiar with the tales of the Yorkshire recusants, than the others.

http://middlesbrough-diocese.org.uk/1740/mary-ward/

Website of Middlesbrough Diocese
 

Mary Ward
A Special Feature to mark Jubilee 400

The Yorkshire Society, which honours the achievements of distinguished people born in Yorkshire by erecting Yorkshire Rose Plaques in their name, usually celebrates famous Yorkshire men. In March 2007 the Society came to the Bar Convent, York, to set up a plaque for Mary Ward, the first woman to be so honoured. January 2009 marks another celebration of her extraordinary life and achievements as the sisters of the Congregation of Jesus and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary mark the 400th jubilee of their foundation. Mary Ward’s is a unique story of courage, determination and a remarkable vision of women’s role in church and society centuries before its time.

Born in 1585 Mary lived during a period of severe persecution against recusants, Catholics who refused to attend the state church. She was one year old when her fellow Yorkshire woman, butcher’s wife St. Margaret Clitherow, was pressed to death in York for harbouring priests. Margaret belonged to a network of recusant women, under the supervision of doctor’s wife Dorothy Vavasour, who ran a maternity clinic under cover of which they could baptise babies and maintain their threatened faith. She and Mary Ward shared the same spiritual director, Father John Mush. The women in Mary’s family also belonged to underground networks. Her maternal great-grandfather, Sir William Mallory of Studley Royal, near Fountains Abbey, had stood for two days with drawn sword outside his parish church ‘to defend that none should come in to abolish religion’. Her grandmother, Ursula Wright of Ploughland Hall in Holderness, spent fifteen years in prison for her faith and her aunt, Grace Babthorpe of Osgodby, spent the first five years of her married life in prison. It was often safer for women to remain Catholic while men conformed in order to save the family fortune and home from the savage fines imposed on recusants. There were no bishops in England at this time and the whole system of church and sacramental worship had collapsed. It was kept going in secret, often in the households of landowners able to hide visiting priests within the home, disguised as servants or tutors. Many of these were Jesuits, like martyrs Edmund Campion or Robert Southwell, who would celebrate the sacraments and often teach members of the household, including girls, Latin, Greek and Scripture. It was easier, at times, for these priests to work collaboratively with women, whose movements were less spied upon than men’s. Many of these brave women would later become members of Mary Ward’s pioneering order.


Quote:
 
In 1609 she led a group of young women to St. Omer, near Calais, to begin a consecrated life without enclosure, despite the fact that the Council of Trent had expressly ruled that all women religious, even those like the Ursulines who were not founded to be enclosed, should live the cloistered life.

In 1611, she was told in a vision to ‘Take the same of the Society’, and understood that her companions were to live as the Jesuits did, taking their Constitutions, calling themselves the Society of Jesus and modelling themselves on the mobility and missionary focus of the sons of St. Ignatius Loyola. Neither church nor society was ready for this. Trent permitted no relaxation of enclosure for women, and St. Ignatius had insisted that there were never to be female Jesuits. Although Mary Ward’s sister Barbara and several early companions are buried in the English College in Rome, and held in honour there, some of the secular clergy of her day were hostile to the Jesuits. They referred to the new congregation as ‘Jesuitesses’ or ‘Galloping Girls’, hating and fearing what they represented. There were whispers of arrogance and immorality, of women aspiring to priestly roles. Society at this time considered women incapable of doing good to themselves, let alone to others, and was not prepared for someone who taught her sisters that ‘there is no such difference between men and women, that women may not do great things’. When a priest told her that ‘he would not for a thousand worlds be a woman, because a woman could not apprehend God’, she bit back the retort she could have made ‘by the experience I have of the contrary’; instead regretting the ‘lack of experience’ that lay behind his judgement. A Jesuit remarked that, while the ‘English Ladies’ were remarkable for their fervour, ‘when all is done, they are but women’, and their new venture was therefore bound to fail. Mary refused to believe that women were so weak and useless, insisting instead that “Women in time to come will do much”.
.

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The past is certainly not the focus of Mary Ward’s sisters today. The Bar Convent in York is the oldest convent in Britain and featured in Channel 4’s documentary Convent Girls. The convent’s superior Sister Mary Walmsley, who also works in the All Saints school chaplaincy, welcomes visitors from all over the world, including Nuns on the Run star Robbie Coltrane, who featured the Bar Convent in his popular TV series B Road Britain. Sister Agatha Leach cares for the order’s sick and elderly sisters in the St. Joseph’s community in York, but is far from retired herself, spending so much energy and enthusiasm in promoting the Bar Convent and York in general that she was named ambassador for York in the 2008 Tourism Awards. Cheerful and vivacious and a brilliant communicator, Sister Agatha secured vital funding for the Bar Convent from millionaire Paul Getty after a chance meeting on a train. ‘I met a murderer on a train once, too’, she remarks, ‘but we’d best not go into that’.


Quote:
 
The days of persecution in England are thankfully over, and it is a particular joy to all Mary Ward’s sisters and their friends that the 400th Jubilee celebrations begin with a Mass in York Minster by the gracious invitation of Archbishop John Sentamu and their many friends in the Church of England. Sister Jane Livesey, provincial superior of the Congregation of Jesus says, ‘It speaks of a new spirit of reconciliation and collaboration. We are delighted to begin this celebration of one of Yorkshire’s great heroines together in the beautiful surroundings of York Minster’. Jubilee celebrations will take place all over the world throughout the next two years, but wherever they are, no one will forget that it all began in Yorkshire.


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JRJ

Rose,

I am reading the links you have provided. St. Margaret Clitherow's story is so humbling. I'm working through Patricia Blackburn's and J.L. O'Connor's work. Then I will start on the Mary Ward article from the Diocese. The link to the Postgate Inn stops me at a warning about malware. Hmph. I will do a search. The link to York has great photos with 360-degree views. Fascinating to see The Shambles and wonder, well, was it #3 or #36??
Jennifer
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JRJ

John Sweeney
Thursday, 29. January 2009, 23:24
JRJ

Like Gerry I don't live in Scotland any more but I do visit family there regularly. There is still Catholic-Protestant antagonism especially in the Western industrial belt but in my experience this is pretty much between what you might call "cultural" Catholics and Protestants ie those who identify themselves with these labels for family historical reasons but who have ceased to practise any religion. Their battleground is usually the soccer field through the 2 big Glasgow clubs and even that is toned down a great deal these days. In my home town, the annual dinners of the Catholic and Church of Scotland ( presbyterian) cparishes have been merged into a joint occasion because the 'real" Church members get on so well now.

Things are not all rosy but I would not want you to think that you could detect animosity in the streets. That would be rare and most people get on very well.

John
Funny how human beings can channel their animosities into sport. Eventually.
Jennifer
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Rose of York
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JRJ
Saturday, 31. January 2009, 16:08
Rose,

I am reading the links you have provided. St. Margaret Clitherow's story is so humbling. I'm working through Patricia Blackburn's and J.L. O'Connor's work. Then I will start on the Mary Ward article from the Diocese. The link to the Postgate Inn stops me at a warning about malware. Hmph. I will do a search. The link to York has great photos with 360-degree views. Fascinating to see The Shambles and wonder, well, was it #3 or #36??
Jennifer I don't understand what you mean by #3 or #36. Margaret Clitherow lived above the butcher's shop in the shambles. The former shop is now a shrine.

A few more for you:

Chideock martyrs:
http://myancestors.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/the-chideock-martyrs/

their shrine
http://www.chideockmartyrschurch.org.uk/

Cuthbert Mayne:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuthbert_Mayne

Tyburn Convent, built on the site of the gallows where martyrs were hung, in London
http://www.tyburnconvent.org.uk/home/index.html

A twentieth century Scotish woman, Venerable Margaret Sinclair, biscuit factory worker, trade unionist, and nun:
http://www.rosslyntemplars.org.uk/margaret_sinclair.htm


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Mercatornet have published an interesting article by Joanna Bogle "Henry VIII: petulant, lustful greedy - but never protestant"
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It is ironic – and a tragedy – that among those who would die as martyrs for the Catholic cause in Britain were leading supporters of authentic reform within the Church. Thomas More, the Chancellor of England, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, both saw an urgent need for change. Long before he clashed with the king over the latter’s demands for support in abandoning his wife and marrying his mistress, Fisher was pioneering reforms in the education of clergy – he effectively established the Library at the University of Cambridge in a modern form – and in their pastoral training. There are touching accounts of him visiting the sick and dying, showing his priests by practical example how they should minister. Thomas More, as a leading layman, denounced clerical greed and ignorance. Both men died on the scaffold at the Tower of London for opposing the King’s break with Rome.
Henry VIII’s lust and greed ensured that the crucial events of the Reformation in England centred on his own personal needs. Other issues did not emerge until later. He never intended to create a Church of England as it later came to be seen and understood. He always thought of himself as a Catholic, never knew the Book of Common Prayer, would have been baffled by the Protestantism of later generations with teetotalism and Baptist chapels and the Salvation Army.
Henry’s divorces produced tragic children: the mistakes and tragedies of Mary’s reign when she sought to reunite England to the worldwide church and people were cruelly executed for heresy, the tortures and executions of Elizabeth’s reign, the use of the rack and the rope and the dungeon.
Later centuries saw good come out of tragedy: the Protestant denominations born out of confusion and division nevertheless produced men and women who came to know and love Christ and contribute hugely to English history: William Wilberforce, General William Booth, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry. The Catholic Church survived persecution to soar again in the nation’s life, and today no town is without its Catholic church and its (usually much sought after) Catholic schools.

Complete article at mercatornet
I couldn't help noting a remark at the beginning of the article "taking off his shoes in order that he might walk the two miles to Walsingham in bare feet." I knew the Walsingham mile was a country mile - my feet told me.

KatyA
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