THE ELIZABETHAN ORIGINS

The form which English Catholicism was to take in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was largely determined by what happened in Elizabeth's reign. The English church had been ill-prepared, materially and psychologically, to face the challenge of the Reformation. The disposal of many of its richest benefices to clerics employed in the royal and ecclesiastical administrations tended to leave the church weakened and impoverished at the parochial level. Contemporary complaints of the pomp and venality of the higher clergy and the ignorance and incompetence of their inferiors had a firm basis in fact, but were both exaggerated and to some extent misdirected. However scandalous it might seem to humanist or Protestant intellectuals that many parish priests knew hardly a word of Latin, it mattered less to their illiterate parishioners who knew none at all. The old church may have been concerned mainly with outward observances, it may have taken over and endorsed pre-Christian practices and superstitions and it may have instilled no deep spiritual understanding into the people at large. It did however provide a series of ‘ingrained observances which defined and gave meaning to the cycle of the week and the seasons of the year, to birth, marriage and death’. It also provided and enforced a rudimentary moral code.