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The Priest and the Elementary School in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
Extract
The Report of a Select Committee in 1835 gave the total of Catholic day schools in England as only 86, with the total for Scotland being 20. Catholic children had few opportunities for day school education. HMI Baptist Noel reported in 1840: ‘very few Protestant Dissenters and scarcely any Roman Catholics send their children to these [National] schools; which is little to be wondered at, since they conscientiously object to the repetition of the Church catechism, which is usually enforced upon all the scholars. Multitudes of Roman Catholic children, for whom some provision should be made, are consequently left in almost complete neglect, a prey to all the evils which follow profound ignorance and the want of early discipline.’ With the establishment of the lay dominated Catholic Institute of Great Britain in 1838 numbers rose to 236 in the following five years, although the number of children without Catholic schooling was still estimated to be 101,930. Lay control of Catholic schools diminished in the 1840s. In 1844, for example, Bishop George Brown of the Lancashire District in a Pastoral letter abolished all existing fund-raising for churches and schools and created his own district board which did not have a single lay member. The Catholic Poor School Committee was founded in 1847, with two laymen and eight clerics and the bishops requested that the Catholic Institute hand over all its educational monies to this new body and called for all future collections at parish level to be sent to it. Government grants were secured for Catholic schools for the first time in 1847. The great influx of Irish immigrants during the years of the potato famine (1845–8) increased the Catholic population and church leaders soon noted the great leakage among the poor. The only way to counteract this leakage was to educate the young under the care of the Church.
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References
Notes
1 Reports of the Committee of Council on Education, 1840–1 p. 176
2 Report of Catholic Poor School Committee, 1848 p. 32
3 By 1870 there were 666 Catholic schools under inspection throughout England and Wales and by 1882 there were 1,562, educating 190,540 children.
4 Letter of Vicars Apostolic, York, 15 Feb. 1848, in The Tablet, 26 Feb. 1848
5 Catholic School, 7, June 1849 p. 99
6 Ibidem p. 100
7 Ibidem p. 100
8 Catholic Directory and Ecclesiastical Register, 1850, London 1850, p. 41 Google Scholar
9 Ibidem, London 1870, p. 288 Some of this number were private chapels belonging to Religious houses or landed estates; some 660, were ‘parochial’ churches, registered for marriage.
10 N. Wiseman: Words of Peace and Justice, p. 16
11 Guy, R. E.: The Synods in English, St. Gregory’s Press, Stratford upon Avon, 1886 p. 268 Google Scholar
12 Ibidem p. 269
13 Ibidem p. 131
14 Ibidem p. 131
15 Ibidem p. 268
16 The Tablet, 28 Aug. 1869 p. 401
17 Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Wiseman Enjoining the Collection for the Building of Churches and Schools in the Archdiocese, London, 1864, pp. 19–20 Google Scholar, in Norman, E. R., The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford, Clarendon, 1984 p. 177 Google Scholar
18 The Tablet, 12 June 1869 pp. 60–61
19 Ibidem p. 62
20 Joint Pastoral Letter of the Archbishop and Bishops of the Province of Westminster, in Provincial Council Assembled, 12 Aug. 1873 in The Tablet, 20 Sept. 1873 p. 365
21 The Tablet 21 Aug. 1869 p. 369
22 Ibidem 27 Feb. 1869 p. 466
23 Ibidem 13 March p. 637
24 Ibidem 12 June 1869 p. 45
25 Ibidem 21 Aug. 1869 p. 368
26 Guy op.cit. p. 295
27 Ibidem p. 170
28 Ibidem p. 245
29 Joint Pastoral Letter of the Archbishop and Bishops of the Province of Westminster, in Provincial Council Assembled, 12 Aug. 1873 in The Tablet, 20 Sept. 1873 p. 365
30 Pastoral letter of Henry Edward, Archbishop of Westminster for the Feast of the Sacred Heart, 3rd Sunday after Pentecost, 1869 in The Tablet, 12 June 1869 p. 61
31 The Tablet 27 Feb. 1869 p. 580
32 Ibidem 5 June 1869 p. 26
33 Guy op.cit. p. 132
34 Ibidem p. 245
35 The Tablet, 2 April 1887
36 ACTA, Meeting of the Bishops in Low Week, 1888 (10 April), in Norman op.cit, p. 175
37 J. Fell and J. Whitford: St. Cuthbert and the First Martyrs’ School-Centenary 1887–1977, 1900
38 Synodus Diocesana Liverpolitana decima quinta, Liverpool, 1902 p. 14
39 Report of the Committee of Council on Education, 1851 p. 47
40 Ibidem 1851 p. 48
41 Ibidem 1850 p. 514
42 Ibidem 1855 p. 615
43 Ibidem 1854 p. 673
44 W. B. Ullathorne: Notes on the Education Question, p. 9
45 T. J. Brown The Distress in the Iron District of the Diocese of Newport and Menevia, Jan. 1873 qu.in Norman op.cit. p. 200
46 Committee of Council Report, 1860 op.cit. pp. 220–221
47 cf. Supple-Green, J. F.: The Catholic Revival in Yorkshire, 1850–1900, Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1990, p. 33 Google Scholar
48 Sneyd-Kinnersley, E. M.: H.M.I., London MacMillan, 1908 p. 185 Google Scholar
49 Ibidem p. 188
50 Ibidem p. 188
51 Committee of Council Report. 1880 p. 220
52 Sneyd-Kinnersley op.cit. p. 122
53 Ibidem p. 124
54 Guy op.cit. p. 281