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Without priests, these social classes drifted into the Church of England and Catholicism was forgotten. By Elizabeth's death in 1603, Catholicism had become "the faith of a small sect", largely confined to gentry households. [273] Gradually, England was transformed into a Protestant country as the Prayer Book shaped Elizabethan religious life.
At the 2001 United Kingdom census, there were 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, some 8.3 per cent of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they represented only 4.8 per cent of the population (approximately 1.8 million people). [180] In 1981, 8.7 per cent of the population of England and Wales were Catholic. [13]
Catholics were forced to choose between attending Protestant services to comply with the law or refusing to attend. Those who refused to attend Church of England services were called recusants. Most Catholics, however, were "church papists"—Catholics who outwardly conformed to the established church while maintaining their Catholic faith in ...
Recusants were Roman Catholics who refused to attend Church of England services as required by law. [55] Recusancy was punishable by fines of £20 a month (fifty times an artisan's wage). "Church papists" were Roman Catholics who outwardly conformed to the established church while maintaining their Catholic faith in secret. [56]
The main disabilities, as referenced above, were lifted by the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. In 1850 the pope restored the Catholic hierarchy, giving England its own Catholic bishops again. In 1869 a new seminary opened. [2] Another, larger group comprised very poor Irish immigrants escaping the Great Irish Famine. Their numbers rose from ...
When Catholics in England were deprived of the normal episcopal hierarchy, their general pastoral care was entrusted at first to a priest with the title of archpriest (in effect an apostolic prefect), and then, from 1623 to 1688, to one or more apostolic vicars, bishops of titular sees governing not in their own names, as diocesan bishops do, but provisionally in the name of the Pope.
The Catholic tradition, strengthened and reshaped from the 1830s by the Oxford movement, has stressed the importance of the visible Church and its sacraments and the belief that the ministry of bishops, priests and deacons is a sign and instrument of the Church of England's Catholic and apostolic identity. [72]
Mary persuades Parliament to request that the Papal Legate, Cardinal Reginald Pole, obtain Papal absolution for England's separation from the Catholic Church. This effectively returned the Church of England to Catholicism. 1554, November Revival of the Heresy Acts restored the death penalty for those that denied the principles of Catholicism.