Anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom

The Recusancy Acts, legally coercing English, Welsh, and Irish citizens to conform to Anglicanism and attend weekly services on pain of prosecution for high treason, date from Elizabeth's reign.

Later, regicide and decapitation strike plots organized by persecuted Catholics were heavily exploited by the Crown for propaganda and further fuelled anti-Catholicism in England.

The Act was amended in 2013 as regards marriage to a Catholic and the ecumenical movement has contributed to reducing sectarian tensions between Christians in the country.

Anyone who took office in the English church or government was required to take the Oath of Supremacy; penalties for violating it included hanging and quartering.

English anti-Catholicism was grounded in the fear that the Pope sought to reimpose not just religio-spiritual authority but also secular power over England, a view which was vindicated by hostile actions of the Vatican.

In 1570, Pope Pius V sought to depose Elizabeth with the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, declaring her a heretic and dissolving Catholics' duty of allegiance to her.

This engendered a state of war between the Pope and England, escalating to extended hostilities and culminating in a failed 1588 invasion by Spanish forces.

The passionate intensity of its style and its vivid and picturesque dialogues made the book very popular among Puritan and Low Church families, Anglican and nonconformist Protestant, down to the nineteenth century.

Later several accusations fuelled strong anti-Catholicism in England including the Gunpowder Plot, in which Guy Fawkes and other Catholic conspirators were found guilty of planning to blow up the English Parliament on the day the King was to open it.

The beliefs that underlie the sort of strong anti-Catholicism once seen in the United Kingdom were summarized by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England: The gravamen of this charge, then, is that Catholics constitute an imperium in imperio, a sort of fifth column of persons who owe a greater allegiance to the Pope than they do to the civil government, a charge very similar to that repeatedly leveled against Jews.

Under this Act, an oath was imposed, which besides being a declaration of loyalty to the reigning sovereign, contained an abjuration of Charles Edward Stuart, the Pretender to the British throne, and of certain doctrines attributed to Roman Catholics (doctrines such as those stating that excommunicated princes may lawfully be murdered, that no faith should be kept with heretics, and that the Pope has temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction in the realm).

However, the passing of this act was the occasion of the anti-Catholic Gordon riots (1780) in which the violence of the mob was especially directed against Lord Mansfield who had balked at various prosecutions under the statutes now repealed.

Despite the Emancipation Act, however, anti-Catholic attitudes persisted throughout the 19th century, particularly following the sudden massive Irish Catholic migration to England during the Great Famine.

[5] The forces of anti-Catholicism were defeated by the unexpected mass mobilization of Catholic activists in Ireland, led by Daniel O'Connell.

The Catholics had long been passive but now there was a clear threat of insurrection that troubled Prime Minister Wellington and his aide Robert Peel.

Lord Shaftesbury (1801–1885), a prominent philanthropist, was a pre-millennial evangelical Anglican who believed in the imminent second coming of Christ, and became a leader in anti-Catholicism.

[6] The re-establishment of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy in England in 1850 by Pope Pius IX, was followed by a frenzy of anti-Catholic feeling, often stoked by newspapers.

Examples include an effigy of Cardinal Wiseman, the new head of the restored hierarchy, being paraded through the streets and burned on Bethnal Green, and graffiti proclaiming 'No popery!'

[9] At the end of the nineteenth century one contemporary wrote that "the prevailing opinion of the religious people I knew and loved was that Roman Catholic worship is idolatry, and that it was better to be an Atheist than a Papist".

More important, he was strongly opposed to the authoritarianism of its pope and bishops, its profound public opposition to liberalism, and its refusal to distinguish between secular allegiance on the one hand and spiritual obedience on the other.

[17] This celebration has, however, largely lost any sectarian connotation and the allied tradition of burning an effigy of the Pope on this day has been discontinued – except in the town of Lewes, Sussex.

Although some of the Penal Laws restricting Catholic access to landed property were repealed between 1778 and 1782, this did not end anti-Catholic agitation and violence.

In the same year, the Presbyterians reaffirmed at the Synod of Ulster that the Pope was the anti-Christ, and joined the Orange Order in large numbers when the latter organisation opened its doors to all non-Catholics in 1834.

Over the course of later medieval and early modern history violence against Catholics has broken out, often resulting in deaths, such as the torture and execution of Jesuit Saint John Ogilvie.

Devine has suggested that a number of factors are responsible for this change: radical structural changes in the Scottish economy, with the decline of manufacturing industries where sectarian prejudices were ingrained; the increase of foreign investment in high-tech industry in Silicon Glen and the post-war expansion of the public sector; the construction of the welfare state and growth of educational opportunities, which provided avenues for social mobility and increased interfaith marriages with Catholics.

The Vanguard, the official newspaper of the Scottish Protestant League, referred to the event in the following text: Sectarianism was a part of the 1994 Monklands East by-election.

[29] In 2003, the Scottish Parliament passed the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003 which included provisions to make an assault motivated by the perceived religion of the victim an aggravating factor.

The violence was partly in response to the IRA killing in Cork of a northern RIC police officer Gerald Smyth, and also because of competition for jobs due to the high unemployment rates.

In 1986, at the annual conference of the Democratic Unionist Party, MP for Mid Ulster William McCrea interrupted councillor Ethel Smyth when she said she regretted the death of Sean Downes, a 24-year-old Catholic civilian who had been killed by a plastic bullet fired by the RUC during an anti-internment march in Andersontown in 1984.

[36] Some of the most savage attacks were perpetrated by a Protestant gang dubbed the Shankill Butchers, led by Lenny Murphy who was described as a psychopath and a sadist.