Rethinking Britishness: Religion and Debates about the “Nation” among Britons in Company India, 1813–1857

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 822-843 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Sramek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Roman Catholic Priests ◽  
A Site

AbstractThis article examines the intersections of religion and national identity among Britons in nineteenth-century colonial India. It argues, contrary to Linda Colley and other scholars who have asserted a pan-Protestant nature of Britishness, that religion frequently was a site of division among Britons in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. Anglicans such as Claudius Buchanan wished to cement an Anglican hegemony within the empire. Presbyterian chaplain Dr. James Bryce, by contrast, advocated for the Churches of Scotland and England to be coestablished. Roman Catholic priests, less successfully, argued for similar rights to be extended to Roman Catholicism, the religion of close to a majority of British troops serving in India. Lastly, Baptist missionaries questioned the East India Company's continued support of Hinduism through its collection of pilgrim taxes, which they labeled as “anti-Christian.” These competing visions of “Greater Britain” in religious terms point to the fragility and divisiveness of national identity in the nineteenth-century British Empire, an institution scholars have generally claimed fostered a sense of Britishness.

John Gee, Archbishop Abbot, and the Use of Converts from Rome in Jacobean Anti-Catholicism

1993 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Questier
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Politics And Literature ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Roman Catholic Priests ◽  
The Church ◽  
Point Of Reference

This article is concerned with one aspect of movement between religions in England at the end of the Jacobean period, namely the polemical use which could be made of the convert to Protestantism. The increasing likelihood of a successful conclusion of the Spanish Match negotiations had for some time been threatening the Protestant Establishment. In this climate, prominent changes of religion were of great interest to polemicists of both sides. As in Elizabeth’s reign, Protestants could attack the Church of Rome by focusing on the apostates from it. The point of reference from which this polemical use of conversion will be analysed is the best-selling vitriolic anti-Catholic tract written by the wavering Protestant minister John Gee, entitled The Foot out of the Snare. Gee is familiar to modern historians as a source on Roman Catholic priests in the 1620s but he is important also for the way in which he was employed as an anti-Catholic writer. His tract originated with the clerical group which gathered around Archbishop Abbot, clerics distinguished by their violent opposition to encroaching Roman Catholicism, evident in the likely success of the Spanish Marriage project and the conversions which had started to occur as the political climate changed. Gee’s tract may be used as a starting point to explore some of the politics and literature of conversion at this time.

scholarly journals The ‘persona’ lives of Roman Catholic priests

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James O. Juma ◽  
Danie Du Toit ◽  
Karen Van der Merwe
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Roman Catholic Priests ◽  
Cultural Openness

This study aimed to provide an in-depth description and interpretation of African Roman Catholic Church priests’ experiences integrating African and Western worldviews into their lives and works as Roman Catholic Church priests through the lens of Jungian constructs. Fifteen African priests were purposely selected and interviewed in depth. Additional sources of data were reflexive notes and observation notes. Data were subjected to various iterative cycles of analysis. Most participants (80%) indicated that, in one way or another, they were experiencing conflict in terms of the cultural values of manhood and Roman Catholic Church prescription. Findings suggest that a more concerted and serious effort should be undertaken by the Roman Catholic Church to support and guide its priests on a path of healing, which includes the priests risking cultural openness and being true to themselves and God.

Americanism Redux

2020 ◽  
pp. 184-208
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Constitutional Republic ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Teaching

This chapter investigates the use of Americanism to appropriate Roman Catholicism for the good of a nation. It recounts older Roman Catholic heresy claimed that the American political system was not at odds with church teaching, even though the United States seemed to stand for most of the social and political realities that nineteenth-century popes had condemned. It also talks about the Americanists in the nineteenth-century who argued that Vatican officials misread the United States, stating that the nation was far friendlier to Roman Catholicism than Europeans imagined. The chapter details how Americanists urged the church to update its polity to the nation's political sensibilities, a strategy that would make Roman Catholicism look less odd in the United States. It also highlights ways Americanists adapt Roman Catholicism to life in a secular, constitutional republic.

Aliases Of Roman Catholic Priests

1936 ◽  
Vol CLXXI (sep26) ◽  
pp. 227-227
Author(s):  
H. Askew
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Roman Catholic Priests

Roman Catholic priests buried in London

1906 ◽  
Vol s10-VI (142) ◽  
pp. 219-219
Author(s):  
J. Basil Birch
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Roman Catholic Priests

Roman Catholic priests buried in London

1906 ◽  
Vol s10-VI (139) ◽  
pp. 149-150
Author(s):  
Frederick T. Hibgame
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Roman Catholic Priests

Shiny Black and Layers of White: Japanned Papier Mâché, Race and the British Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavi Levy Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
British Industry ◽  
Black Surface ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
Great Exhibition

Abstract Race, class and empire in nineteenth-century England inflected understandings of japanned papier mâché, influencing both its brief popularity and its abrupt demise in the 1860s. Although the material was rarely used as an explicit signifier in nineteenth-century literature or theory, or indeed mentioned at all, its inclusion in the Great Exhibition suggests its cultural and industrial centrality. This article proposes that this disparity results not from an absence of meaning, but from too great a complexity and too clear a set of implications. As an imitation of an East Asian form, japanned papier mâché represented an Orientalizing fantasy; as a shiny black surface, japanned papier mâché tapped into both desires and anxieties surrounding racial Blackness; as a backdrop for depictions of recognizably British landscapes and architecture; and as a distinctively British industry, japanned papier mâché offered a kind of national identity-fashioning. Tying a ubiquitous but understudied material of the English mid-nineteenth century to broader histories of the British empire, this article demonstrates the tidy encapsulation of the fraught and complex 1850s and 1860s into the materiality, forms and failure of japanned papier mâché.

The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Irish Diaspora

1984 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Irish Catholics

Quite the most remarkable achievement of nineteenth-century Ireland was the creation of an international Catholic Church throughout the Celtic diaspora in the British Empire and North America. A true Irish empire beyond the seas, it was often compared in Hibernian self-congratulation to the monastic missions of the Dark Ages and was served by an Irish clergy and a host of religious orders who fostered a distinctively ‘ethnic’ or Irish Catholic expatriate culture, while often showing the higher values of the Catholic spiritual life. It is remarkable that there is no scholarly modern study of this international community now in process of dissolution, for it has given an incalculable strength to twentieth-century Roman Catholicism. Something of its dimensions and importance can, however, be glimpsed from a growing body of historical writing about Irish Catholicism in England and Scotland, the United States and Australia, as well as in Ireland itself. The American Republic and the white settler areas of the British Empire were to Irish Catholics what the Roman Empire had been to Jews and Christians, the alien organisms by which a faith was carried to the far corners of the earth. As a matter of institutional and ecclesiastical history, the subject is one in which the new nations were divided into dioceses and parishes, and provided with churches, convents, colleges, seminaries and schools. This was, moreover, achieved by no easy process, but in spite of endemic conflict within Irish Catholic communities, who were also opposed by Roman Catholics of other national traditions, by the expanding Protestant Churches and by a hostile Protestant or secular state.

Delinquency among Irish catholic children in Victorian London

1983 ◽  
Vol 23 (92) ◽  
pp. 319-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.M. Feheney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Control Problem ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Irish Immigrants ◽  
Irish Immigration ◽  
Juvenile Deliquency ◽  
The Subject

The growth of interest in urban studies in recent years had induced scholars to take a new interest in Irish immigrants to Britain during the nineteenth century. The Irish encountered most of the problems of immigrants and were the subject of much comment from contemporary English writers. Moreover, since they constituted a small but homogeneous minority, easily discernible in the larger community, they can be conveniently studied in depth. The purpose of this article is not, however, to do this so much as to enter a few caveats for anyone thinking of specialising in one facet of Irish immigration to Britain, namely, juvenile deliquency. The subject of delinquency among Irish children in Britain, which has intrigued Englishmen for at least 150 years, has taken on new importance in recent times, partly as a result of the revival of an old allegation that there is a connexion between Catholicism and crime. Formerly, the assertion was made by ultra-protestants, especially Recordite evangelicals. Now it is being made by some English Roman Catholic priests. While this article will not deal conclusively with the overall question of a connexion between Catholicism and crime, it is intended to argue that, at least as far as Irish immigrant catholics in nineteenth-century London were concerned, such a connexion could not reasonably be said to exist. In the course of doing so, it will contend that, even granting that the Irish were a police problem as distinct from a crime control problem, there is, nevertheless, evidence of police prejudice against them. It also aims to show that destitution and vagrancy were common among London’s juvenile poor, especially the Irish, and that destitute juveniles were frequently classified as delinquent juveniles and treated accordingly. Finally it will put forward evidence to suggest that some English protestant philanthropists, including some evangelicals, have through over-generalisation, and perhaps unwittingly, caricatured the London Irish.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document