The Context

We have seen in chapter 2 that Father Nugent's early initiatives in the emigration of Catholic children from Liverpool sprang not only from a concern to save them from the ‘ravages of destitution’ but also from an anxiety about a ‘leakage from the faith’. One of the reasons why this was considered difficult to withstand was because of the Church's limited resources. On the one hand, there were heavy concentrations of poor Catholics in the densely populated urban areas and on the other, there was the class composition of Catholicism in Britain. At the lowest end of the social scale there was a huge army of unskilled poor and at the top a group of old aristocracy. What was missing were the middle and artisan classes, precisely the groups from which the Protestants recruited so many of their lay supporters and among whom much evangelical fervour was to be found.

However, when Henry Edward Manning (1808-92) became Archbishop of Westminster in 1865 various initiatives were launched to stem this loss of the faithful. These mostly originated from a programme set out in 1866 in which the creation of a special fund to increase the number of Catholic schools occupied a prominent position. It was felt that too many Catholic children were insufficiently educated or not educated at all, and yet it was to the allegiance of the children that the Church had to look if the future of the faith were to be secured. The widespread and excessive consumption of alcohol was also seen as a major cause of the poor abandoning their faith, which in turn led to their failure to pass on that faith to the next generation. In an attempt to combat this and to safeguard the children, Manning founded the Total Abstinence League of the Cross in 1872, but it had only limited success. The importance attached to securing the children’s faith was also to be seen in the attempts that were made to reduce the number of Catholics marrying non-Catholics, a practice that had become increasingly common. Steps were taken, in particular by the local priesthood, to discourage such unions or, if that were unsuccessful, to persuade the non-Catholic partner to convert or give assurances that their children would be raised as Catholics.