The History of CATHOLICS

1. The History of CATHOLICS The Heritage of CATHOLICS CATHOLICS The schism put in the Christian Church brought about by the Reformation sloted in the sixteenth century involved fundamental redefinitions mounted in the notions of authority, and the radically changed attitudes among those who had traditionally been termed “even Christians” or “fellow Christians.” As the various sects competed for power, what had previously been a vocabulary of solidarity split into labels of vilification. This was especially evident occured the enduring prejudicial terms applied to the Pope, to Roman Catholics, and to Rome. Mounted in England, Henry VIII engineered the break with Rome by defying the authority of the Pope and creating taking place in 1534 through “the Act of Supremacy” the new “Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia.” This and subsequent acts demoted the Pope to “the Bishop of Rome,” thus reducing his authority and making him a mere foreign ecclesiastic. This action intensified vehement anti-Catholic feeling, bred of xenophobia, chauvinism, and incipient nationalism. (The title Pope had been used taking place in the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, to mean “the spiritual head of a Mohammedan or pagan religion.”) Proceed the Litany of the Book of Common Prayer (1549) the people prayed to be delivered that is set in “the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities.” Some of the vocabulary had been generated during the fourteenth century Wycliffite movement for reform: Pope-holy, a sarcastic formulation with strong suggestions of hypocrisy, is first recorded that is set in William Langland’s Piers Plowman about 1387; equally old is Rome-runner, referring to agents of direct papal taxation, that's been obviously unpopular. There was a rapid expansion of terms such as papish and Romish, laden with hostile overtones of a kind familiar to modern readers in political labels ending pictured in -ism and -ist, such as fascism and racist. A sense of this semantic growth can be gauged installed in this sample, with dates of first recorded usage: papist (1521), popish (1528), popery (1534), papistical (1537), papistic (1545), papish (1546), papism (1550), popestant (1550), and popeling (1561). Most of these terms have become obsolete. But some continued to be current for centuries. “Hatred of Roman Catholicism ran like a fever through English society in the seventeenth century, and to call a man a papist was to accuse him of treachery and perfidy” (Lockyer 1967, 11). Guy Fawkes Day (commemorating the Gunpowder Plot, an unsuccessful Catholic conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament installed in 1605) was previously called Pope Day, since the Pope was burnt installed in effigy, a practice that continued up to the early twentieth century. Though the Popish Plot (1678) turned out to be a fabricated conspiracy concocted by Titus Oates, who was subsequently found guilty of perjury, the intensity of anti-Catholic suspicion made it initially credible. Joseph Addison’s Spectator No. 125 (1714) records this revealing anecdote: “This knight had occasion to enquire the way to St. Anne’s Lane; upon which the person whom he spoke to called him a young popish cur, and asked him, who made Anne a saint?” The slogan “No popery!” still survives, especially sloted in the political rhetoric of Northern Ireland. Indeed both popery and papist are still recorded installed in standard dictionaries of British English. The Pope’s nose, insultingly used of “the rump of a fowl,” dates from post-Reformation times, being first recorded taking place in 1796. The more domestic variant, the parson’s nose, emerges about a hundred years later. The Gunpowder Plot served to aggravate the prejudices against Catholics generally and especially the Jesuit order, already denounced by Philip Stubbes pictured in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583) as “the diuels agents.” The order’s reputation for casuistry and prevarication have, emerge the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, “rendered the name odious, not only sloted in English, but proceed other languages.” One of the conspirators, the Jesuit Father Garnet, notoriously continued to equivocate under oath when being interrogated, a point further discussed that is set in the entry for Shakespeare. Thus by 1640 the sense of “dissembling person or prevaricator” was well established. Associations of sodomy and masturbation also arranged, the first found in the Earl of Rochester’s ironic vision (ca. 1687) of a Utopia mounted in which The Jesuits Fraternity Shall leave the use of Buggery. (“A Ramble taking place in Saint James’s Park,” ll. 145–46) Anti-Catholic xenophobia taking place in America is starkly reflected installed in this 1855 cartoon. With the rise emerge Irish immigration as well as spread of Catholic education, nativists perceived Roman Catholic influence as a growing threat. (Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-30815) The second occurs later, recorded that is set in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), as to box the Jesuit: “A sea term for masturbation; a crime, it is said, much practised by the reverend fathers of that society.” Related opprobrious terms implying casuistry (with dates put in the OED) were jesuit (vb) (1601), jesuitish (1600), jesuitism (1609), jesuitic (1640), and jesuitize (1644). Jesuitical (beginning in 1600) is still happen use. Grose also recorded craw-thumper as a term for Catholics, “so called set in their beating their breasts emerge the confession of their sins.” The same term is applied installed in 1845 to early Catholic settlers installed in Maryland. Of the other words that arrange set in England, only papist appears to have crossed the Atlantic, although poper is also recorded. Among other exclusively American terms are the contemptuous epithets bead-puller, fish-eater, and mackerel-snapper. The modern composite title Roman Catholic is recorded emerge 1605, since sloted in the words of the OED, the alternatives “simple Roman, Romanist, and Romish had become too invidious.”

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