Ritualism in the Church of England
argued that it was almost inevitable that some of the leaders of Anglo-Catholicism would turn their attention to questions of liturgy and ritual and started to champion the use of practices and forms of worship more commonly associated with Roman Catholicism.
The ecclesiological questions gave rise to an interest in giving liturgical expression to the theological conviction that the Church of England had sustained a fundamentally Catholic character after the English Reformation.
The ritualist movement (see Cambridge Camden Society) also played a substantial role in promoting: The prosecution and conviction of Arthur Tooth in 1876, Sidney Faithorn Green in 1879, and Richard William Enraght in 1880, illustrate the controversies caused by these liturgical practices.
For an ideological defense of this position, it was argued that English identity was closely linked with England's history as a Protestant country that, after the Reformation, had played a key role in opposing Catholic powers in Continental Europe, especially Spain and then France.
In the minds of such people, Protestantism was inextricably identified with anti-despotic values and Catholicism with autocracy that, in the religious arena, hid behind the "disguise" of complicated rituals whose meaning deliberately lacked transparency.
Although ritualism had an aesthetic and ideological appeal for many in the cultural elite, as well as a cognate relationship with the Gothic Revival, the idea that it was inextricably linked with an inclination towards political despotism was a misapprehension.
One of the key ideological justifications used by many of the early ritualists, apart from the fact that it was a symbolic way of affirming their belief in the essentially Catholic nature of Anglicanism, was the argument that it provided a particularly effective medium for bringing Christianity to the poorest "slum parishes" of the Church of England.
This argument may have had some merits, but, very often, the respect that the most successful ritualists often gained in the highly impoverished communities they went to serve was based on the fact that they had expressed a genuine pastoral concern for the poor amongst whom they lived.
Instead, its success was probably largely due to a special cultural identity that many Irish migrants felt with the Roman Catholic Church as one of the few institutions that they encountered in diaspora that was also a feature of life in their homeland.
Although many members of the Church of England today still feel uncomfortable or skeptical about certain 'Catholic' or 'Romish' liturgical practices,[citation needed] they would be astonished[citation needed] to be told that, in the late 19th century, using incense, wearing vestments, putting candles on the altar, having the mixed cup, making the sign of the Cross over the congregation, and using unleavened (wafer) bread in the Eucharist could spark riots and lead to the prosecution and imprisonment priests, such as the prosecution of Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, between 1888 and 1890.
