The Return of the Roman Catholics to Oxford

In 1830, three centuries after the Reformation, which had turned followers of ‘the old religion’ into an oppressed minority, there were some 700,000 Roman Catholics (hereafter ‘Catholics’) in England and Wales. The Catholic Emancipation Act had just become law. By 1903 their number had risen to at least a million and a half. During that period the Catholic Church in Britain could be described as made up of three groups: those old families that had hung onto their Roman faith and their English property (the ‘recusant families’); the Irish, new families which had fled from famine and persecution and—devoid of property—had congregated in the larger towns; and the converts from the aftermath of the Oxford Movement. Intermarriage, industrialisation and the emergence of professional classes came to erode these distinctions, as did the power of an increasingly liberalised and fluid secular society to absorb sub-societies into the wholeness of the body. The First World War put the stamp of irrevocability on that process, though Catholics still retain a recognisable community identity. The story of the cautious renewal in modern times of relations between the CatKolic Church and another ancient institution, the University of Oxford, has something to say to quite a number of people interested in the Church, because it is the story of how the Church has tried to cope with an unusual issue in a situation of social and religious change. From the Reformation until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the University of Oxford—described by Catholics of the period as ‘one of the two national Protestant universities’—was an Anglican preserve from which professed Catholics were barred.