Ancient history and modern England

johnnypapa said:

Ancient history and modern England

www.catholicworldreport.com

Click to expand...

I thought this was amusing:

- But I have found—and it is beginning to be a bit irritating—a sort of disappointment among visitors from America, that Catholics in Britain are not actively persecuted under 17th-century laws. They’ve seen the movie (yes, I’m referring to “A Man for All Seasons”, which is excellent) and they sort of know the subsequent history. But they somehow do not want to follow the rest of the story: the complicated history with Stuarts and Hanoverians and industry and railways and the Catholic revival and two World Wars and The Beatles and Margaret Thatcher and so on to today.

To clarify that quotation: Catholics are a minority, but are certainly not persecuted. The “17th-century laws” are not even law any more, for they were repealed. AFAIK the only piece of anti-Catholic legislation from that period still in force is the Act of Succession of 1701 (amended in 2013), that makes it illegal for anyone but a communicant member of the Church of England to be Monarch (and thus, excludes Catholics from the succession). But that is a very minor irritant, of practical importance to almost nobody; if to anybody. Since there is a shortage of foreign Protestant royalty (which was by no means the case in 1701), heirs to the throne in the UK are largely limited to marrying home-grown Protestants. One cannot assume that there will always be a steady supply of Scandinavian royalty available for marriage.

A considerable number of US Catholic video-makers seem to be under the impression that there is some kind of Catholic revival in England or in the UK. I am puzzled to know what this impression is based on.