| Summary: | During the latter decades of the nineteenth and opening decades of the twentieth century the Roman Catholic Church in England began, slowly and in small stages, not only to adapt its self image but also to make amendments to perceptions held by outsiders as to what it stood for as an institution, what motivated its leaders and membership and what issues it regarded as important, not only in respect of its own faithful, but also in civil society at large. Its days of being a quietist, self-effacing and unstructured remnant of past times, still cowed by memories of penal times, were over. Too often the historiography of English Catholicism during the second half of the nineteenth century has been dominated by discussion of the residue of anti-papal prejudice, high-profile conversions from the Established Church, criticism of Irish immigrants and the fear engendered amongst non-Catholics by the supposed civil disloyalty of Catholics occasioned by misconceived notions of what allegiance was owed to the pope. These approaches did not look at what the English Catholic Church itself thought was important, the matters to which it chose to devote its energy and topics to which it chose to add its voice. While Catholic writers still considered doctrine, the development of liturgical style and the logistics of building up a parochial structure sufficient to support the needs of rapidly inflated congregations, there was at the same time a growing awareness of the temporal concerns of secular society, the material wellbeing of the faithful as well as the economic problems and social injustices thrown up by post-industrial, urbanized, poverty stricken and, potentially, alienated dispossessed sections of society. The thesis charts the development of a Catholic social programme by the examination of four key subject areas of work, socialism, education and social action, through the methodology of an Weberian Ideal Type construct. It poses the hypothesis that the foundation of a new era of Catholic social thought was laid between c.1880 and c.1914.
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