HISTORICAL SIGNPOSTS

This book is about the Roman Catholic community in England in the decade from 1973 to 1983. It is concerned to explore the state of this community four decades after the Butler Education Act of 1944 and the subsequent expansion of both secondary and further educational opportunities had paved the way for socially and geographically mobile Catholics to escape from the working-class parishes in the inner cities. At the same time it will report the responses of Catholics to the liturgical and social changes resulting from the reforms of the Second Vatican Council which had been held in Rome from 1962 to 1965.

Five years after the end of the Second World War, in 1950, the Catholics of England and Wales had celebrated the centenary of the Apostolic Letter Universalis Ecclesiae by which Pope Pius IX restored a full Catholic hierarchy of bishops to England and Wales. The last survivor of the medieval Catholic hierarchy to refuse to take the Oath of Supremacy of Queen Elizabeth I had died in 1585 and until 1850 the small body of Catholics had a variety of religious leaders but no diocesan bishops. The restoration of the hierarchy in 1850 had infuriated the prime minister and public opinion although Cardinal Wiseman substantially defused the situation with his famous Appeal to the English People (Albion, 1950).

The celebrations of 1950, which included a massive open-air Mass at Wembley stadium, were triumphant and self-congratulatory.