There are subtler forms of anti-Catholicism, however, as anyone who objects to ‘political correctness’ knows -- a subject familiar to generations of English Catholics in the pervasive Protestant interpretation of the nation’s history. (This is also true in England’s former colonies.) For centuries, the English have been taught that the Crown’s unprovoked and brutal attack on the Church was justified by the supposed ‘superstition’ and ‘corruption’ of the ‘rich abbeys.’
Only in recent years have less-biased scholars begun to unearth the true story, about how the wealth and property of the abbeys passed into the hands of the petty nobles willing to do Henry’s dirty work, and how those same families generations later turned the peasantry off their lands in the hated “Enclosure Acts.”
The poor, with no place else to go, wound up on the streets of the industrial cities, whose appalling conditions Dickens recorded and the Methodist Wesley brothers decried. It was these same urban poor whom the Labour movements mobilized, spurred on by the theories of the German Karl Marx, writing in the British library.
But this was many years ago, and today the Catholic Church in England represents every class, and every conceivable background. On the surface, all is well. But Bogle points to a new, and perhaps more devastating threat than rack or rope ever was – indifferentism, and its cousin, secularism. Both essentially derive from 19th and 20th century materialistic philosophies, though the individual lapsed Catholic may not know or care about this.
Essentially, it boils down to unbelief. For university graduates, the story may read: ‘since there is no scientific proof that God exists, and history is replete with painful proof that religion breeds intolerance and sectarian violence, why bother?’ For those less ideologically-inclined, ‘if the Church is not helping me materially or spiritually, why bother?’
Attempts to address this by making the Church more ‘relevant’ since the 1960s have ended in abject failure, for the most part. Watered-down catechism has resulted in a situation where many English Catholics would be hard-pressed to explain what the difference actually is between Catholicism and Anglicanism – or any other religion, for that matter. This is especially true in the parishes, which have been dominated by an Irish hierarchy with strong modernist tendencies since Vatican II, says Bogle.
The English have been more strongly represented in the various Catholic orders since the Reformation. Brave Jesuits were hunted, drawn and quartered by a Crown wielded by a Monarch whom Protestant historians taught us all to regard as ‘Good Queen Bess.’ (One young priest’s ‘quarters’ were hung from the church steeples of the four towns he frequented, including his birthplace, Preston – a warning against others who might decide to ‘Pope.’)
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