Preaching in Edinburgh on 8 October 1885 at the clothing ceremony of two Mercy nuns, Fr. William Humphrey SJ, the convert-chaplain of the episcopalian bishop of Brechin, used the following extract from Psalm XLIV as his theme:

In September 1831, the newly elected liberal Whig government under Earl Grey introduced an experiment of national education in Ireland aimed at uniting Catholics and Protestants in one general system. Schools were officially non-denominational but provision was made for separate religious instruction at designated times under the superintendence of the respective churches. It was a response to ten years of intensive lobbying by the Irish Catholic Church, and over twenty years of public and parliamentary debate, seeking a school system supported by State funds which would explicitly prohibit interference with the religious convictions of children.

The Haydock Bibles were a series of self-interpreting editions of the Douay Version with annotations compiled chiefly by Rev. George Leo Haydock. The first edition was published in serialized form over the years 1811 to 1814 by Father Haydock's brother, Thomas. It enjoyed great popularity and was frequently reprinted in a series of British and American editions. According to standard Bible bibliographies, the latest known editions were published in the 1880's. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief historical account of editions in this important series and to describe a 1910 reprint of the final edition recently located by the author. This copy establishes that the Haydock Bible series lasted longer than was generally known.

The letter given below is translated from the original in the archives of Propaganda and is presented here for the interesting light it casts upon the progress of the mission in the Isle of Man in the early eighteenth century. The original document is also reproduced. 18 July 1727

I am not one to follow in my own footnotes, but a number of correspondents have wondered how the shockingly poor relations between the Catholic gentry and their chaplains described in ‘Priests and Patrons in the Eighteenth Century’ (Recusant History Vol. 20, No. 2 pp. 207–22) could have arisen. One instance might be ascribed to the overbearing demeanour of a squire, or his wife, another to a clash of temperament, and yet another to a differing perception of the proper rôle of a chaplain, but the lack of cordiality between the clergy and the gentry was so widespread that a predisposition to incompatibility might reasonably be suspected. This paper traces the origins of their antipathy to the experience each gained of the other in early life, particularly during their schooldays.

Caroline Chisholm was a Victorian philanthropist designated by the Australian Encyclopaedia as ‘the greatest of women pioneers in the history of Australia’. She was born in Northampton in 1808, the daughter of William Jones, hog-jobber of some substance. She married Archibald Chisholm in 1830, a lieutenant in the East India Company Army, ten years her senior, on the understanding that she be allowed to undertake philanthropic works. It is assumed she converted to her husband's Roman Catholic faith either just before or after the marriage. It was in Madras, where her husband was based, that her philanthropic endeavours began and she founded a ‘school of industry for the daughters of European soldiers’. The school educated the sadly-neglected girls in general education and domestic duties.

Anna Kingsford, born Annie Bonus in September 1846, died at a young enough age to qualify for one of the most lovingly detailed of all nineteenth-century biographies. It appeared in January 1896, within eight years of her death. Its author, Edward Maitland, was in fact a prolific writer in several fields; but he never came closer than here to having an ideal subject to set before his Victorian readers. For not only had the culture of the nineteenth century already tended (with instruments as diverse as the national census and the personal diary) to reaffirm absolutely Samuel Johnson's famous axiom that ‘there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful' but Anna Kingsford had had one of those lives, peculiarly interesting to the Victorians, which the process of narration inevitably turns into histories of this or that set of religious opinions. She herself, in her final months of life, perceived as much; and it accordingly became ‘necessary’—or so she ventured to suggest—‘that I should not die without some sort of Apologia’.

A year after the First Vatican Council of 1870 a five-volume edition of George Hay's works was published, and the opening words of Bishop John Strain's introduction left no doubt as to Hay's significance: ‘Since the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, to no man has the Catholic Church in Scotland been so much indebted as to Bishop Hay. He is preeminently her bishop of the last three hundred years.’ In 1874 James Stothert's Life of Bishop Hay was brought before the public by the Rev. J. F. S. Gordon, who felt moved to comment: ‘It is most dishonourable, not only to the Memory of this great Bishop, but to the Catholic Religion in Scotland, which he may be said to have kept alive during a dismal period, that not so much as a simple Stone marks his grave.’

The negotiations between the Board of Education and the Roman Catholic authorities over what was to become the 1944 Education Act began in April 1941 when the Government's Green Book on educational reform was delivered to the Catholic hierarchy. They were to continue until the Government's proposals became law in 1944. There were three distinct phases in these negotiations, centred on the Green Book, the White Paper, and the Bill. The intention of this article is to examine the latter two phases.

After protracted negotiations on the Green Book there was near deadlock between the Board and the Catholic Church. R. A. Butler's aim in the Green Book, which he adopted when he became President of the Board of Education in July 1941, was to provide a national system of education, primary, secondary and further. There would be secondary education for all, children being transferred at the age of eleven to grammar, modern or technical schools. This raised the issue of the role of denominational schools, the so called ‘Dual System’. Essentially the voluntary bodies, if they were to continue to be part of the State system were offered two possibilities. Under the first they would receive 100% grant towards the maintenance and repair of buildings (in addition to the payment of teachers’ salaries) for which they would concede the appointment of teachers to the Local Education Authority (LEA) and accept an ‘agreed syllabus’ for religious education. The second possibility would allow the voluntary bodies to retain the appointment of teachers and the teaching of their own religious syllabus, but the Government grant in this case would be only 50%. Catholics felt that, in conscience, they could not accept the first option and that they were being penalised for their religious beliefs in regard to the second. They pressed, therefore, for 100% grant.

No century previous to the nineteenth was so assiduous in its cultivation of the diary to record the minutiae of daily life. Partly because the average nineteeth century family knew that death was a frequent visitor, the diary assumed an importance that a century later was lost, along with the reverence for death. In Newman's Obituary List we have that full development of his thought concerning the dead, which began with the demise of those he had loved in his youth and ended with his remembrance of them at the altar in his room at Edgbaston, surrounded by their pictures and memorial cards. It will be helpful to trace the development of that process because it illuminates the Evangelical and Tractarian understanding of prayer for the dead and provides a useful basis for current concepts which have frequently been over-laid either with sentimentality or with a tendency to demythologise the reality of the next life altogether.

The political threat posed by the growth of Fenianism in Ireland in the late 1850s and early 1860s has generally been underplayed by much present-day historiography. Even contemporaries were not disposed to see American Fenianism as much of a danger to the constitutional stability of Ireland. The Dublin police authorities decided to recall sub-inspector Thomas Doyle from his surveillance work in America in July 1860. By that time Doyle had sent dozens of reports on Irish-American revolutionary activity. On the basis of his reports the authorities knew that John O'Mahony and Michael Dohney, both of 1848 notoriety, were prominently involved in Phoenix and Fenian conspiracy. They also knew the general points of the ‘phoenix theory’ that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity, that men were being recruited and drilled in large numbers in the U.S. for a possible invasion of Ireland, that ‘O'Mahony's theory [was] … to root out the Government, to cut down the landlords, and to confiscate the land of Ireland’, and that John Mitchel had gone to Paris as an agent for the ‘phoenix confederacy’ in the U.S.

Literary writings had a significant, if elusive and subtle, rôle to play in securing the position of the English Catholic community in the especially vulnerable period 1829–1850. It is questionable that the Catholic press and Catholic apologists and polemicists played so large a part in calming the anti-Catholic frenzy so evident in the 1820s as the subsequent more literary products of Catholics and those non-Catholics who were intrigued by Catholicism. Holmes remarks that in this period ‘most Catholic apologists attempted the fruitless and unending task of answering specific objections and those books or pamphlets which survive are merely gathering dust on the shelves of Catholic libraries’. It took greater art to get behind the defences of John Bull's anti-Catholic fortress mentality. The rôle of literature was to affect the perceptions and sympathies of the intelligentsia rather than political conditions: at the beginning of this period people felt with Dr. Arnold that ‘the [Anglican] Church, as it now stands, no human power can save'; while at its end, people could hold the expectation ‘that Popery will in a few years become the popular religion of these realms’. This sense of the seriousness of the Catholic presence was established mostly, of course, by Catholicism's actual presence; but that was amplified and consolidated in the mind of the educated public by literature, substantially in a positive direction.

Ever since the purchase of the Manor of Ingatestone in 1539, the Petre family has played a prominent part not only in the history of the Catholic community in Essex, but in the life of the Church further afield. Sir William Petre, the founder of the Essex line, and two of his descendants have merited the attention of a biographer, while there has also been a substantial periodical literature associated with the family. However, no such detailed study has yet been written on perhaps the most intriguing member of the family, the little-known thirteenth Baron of Writtle, Monsignor Lord William Joseph Petre. The present article seeks to shed light on the early part of the career of this pioneer of Catholic liberal education and the first Catholic priest to take his seat in the House of Lords since the Reformation. The focal point of Petre's earlier years was the monastery and school of St. Gregory's, Downside.

In his inaugural lecture on the study of history, delivered at Cambridge in 1895, Lord Acton exhorted his students to ‘try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong … If we lower our standard in history, we cannot uphold it in Church and State.’

This was Acton in his seventh decade, some seven years before his death. As a young man in his mid twenties, writing for The Rambler, which at that time Acton and his circle of liberal catholics hoped to use as the vehicle for educating their co-religionists into harmonizing their ancient faith with contemporary science and scholarship, he struck a very different note. This was the Acton who distinguished between Catholic and Protestant intolerance, excusing the former as the product of ‘external circumstances,’ while condemning the latter as an ‘imperative precept and a part of its doctrine.’ Acton was not, at any point in his life, a conventional thinker, and just as his later view of the historian as moral judge was, and remains, controversial, so his earlier reading of ecclesiastical history was disputed by friend and foe.