The Status of Catholic Education at Mid-Century

From the years prior to Catholic Emancipation to mid-century, the state of Catholic education, much like the Catholic community itself, existed in a decentralized, irregular and poverty-stricken condition. This was a time of rising Irish immigration into London and the western port cities but before the great wave of immigration induced by the Irish famine. Without an established Church hierarchy with an organizational centre, Catholic England and Wales remained in the decentralized mission status that had emerged from the penal era following the tumultuous sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Educational provision was haphazard at best. Yet one historian has shown that despite the disorganized and muddled state of schools prior to 1847, the Catholic community was slowly creating an embryonic system of Sunday and day schools from a variety of funding sources to provide education for some of the Catholic children crowding the Irish slums. More recently, Brian Carter has shed more light on the condition of Catholic charitable efforts and, specifically, education in the first half of the nineteenth century by highlighting the importance of the Catholic middle and working classes and the relative absence of the Catholic aristocracy in that benevolent work.

The year 1838 witnessed an upswing of bigotry towards Catholics from both the Protestant-influenced press and Protestant organizations such as the proselytizing Reformation Society.

Much has been written on Catholic political activity in the nineteenth century and two recent works in particular have examined this subject. One argues that English Catholics were of little importance in the political world of mid- to late nineteenth-century Britain, despite their protestations to the contrary. It argues that Catholics consistently exaggerated the value of the Catholic vote and their own ability to manage it as a way to gain patronage. Overall, it calls the political experience of English Catholics in the last fifty years of the century ‘one of misplaced hopes and disappointed enthusiasms’, an impotent force in an age of virile political operators.

More recently, another work argues that earlier portrayals of Catholic political impotence are based on a fundamental misreading of Catholic political intentions. This work asserts that English Catholic political participation was not solely to work for goals exclusive to the Catholic community but to work as individuals taking advantage of democracy to become politically engaged. This argument acknowledges greater Catholic political success than others; however, success was not always immediate, was built, in part, upon cooperation with other religious groups and achieved goals that were perhaps more broadly Christian in nature than specifically Catholic.

On the subject of education, Catholics were more vocal, organized and politically active than on other issues. But this politically active Catholic community did not begin to develop until the storm of the Education Act of 1870 arrived.

While the historiography of nineteenth-century English Catholicism has been a rather crowded field filled with general overviews, biographies and narrower monographs, as well as what a scholar once warned me were landmines both professional and personal, the field has lacked a systematic book-length study of the educational efforts of the Catholic community to provide elementary education to the Catholic poor in the important half century following the entry of the Catholics into the state grant system in 1847. While much of the earliest work done on this topic fell under the category of educational history, I like to think that this study is as much or more about religious history and the positioning (or repositioning) of Roman Catholic identity within that elaborate milieu we call Victorian religion. If the subject of English Catholics and elementary education has filled several pages of an overview or a chapter of an edited volume or biography, it has not been viewed, as it is here, as a facilitator of change in the identity of that English Catholic community. That said, I owe a tremendous debt to the scholars who have marked the historiographical trail before me and provided glimpses into the Victorian world of English Roman Catholicism with its historical richness and financial poverty, its Irishness and Englishness, its intellectuals and industrious working class, its eccentric personalities and sober leaders and finally its determination to make life better for its flock amidst the turmoil and progress of nineteenth-century Britain.

The visit of Her Majesty's inspector was the day for which the entire school year was spent in preparation. Even so, Catholic school logbooks, in which teachers recorded daily notes on events, visitations and other schoolroom incidents, reveal that the amount of secular instruction spiked in the months leading up to the inspection, often at the expense of religious education. As the examination neared, teacher entries in the school logbooks reflect the heightened repetition of secular lessons for all levels of students. The logbooks also reflect tangible classroom anxiety as teachers not only struggled to teach rudimentary skills in preparation for the examination but also battled daily attendance problems. Imagine the impact on the headmaster and manager from the following report – a report that affected a school's financial health – when it was published several weeks later:

The Roman Catholic elementary school system in England and Wales after the 1902 Balfour Act was markedly different from that which first accepted state financial assistance over a half a century before. The same can be said about the Catholic community. The pursuit of a fair resolution to the education difficulty grew into an obsession that dominated the Catholic agenda for half a century. Certainly, Catholic leaders recognized other problems that required attention and effort to improve the lives of the faithful in England and Wales. Clerical and lay leaders worked persistently to better housing and working conditions, combat public drunkenness, improve Catholic devotional life and fight leakage from the faith. But the struggle for the schools brought more Catholics together on the same subject and facilitated more action than any other effort. A subject that consistently dominated the Church's policy over so many decades and under the guidance of so many leaders during an era that often witnessed rancorous fights about its implementation and tested sectarian resolve was bound to become part of that community's lifeblood, something by which that community was immediately identified. Victorians knew that Catholics took education seriously; the proof, as this study has shown, existed in the multitude of petitions, speeches, sermons, editorials, meetings and reports generated by a motivated religious community committed to the educational well-being of its children.

‘The Catholic Church is springing up again’, boasted the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, before a captive audience of European Catholic leaders in Malines, Belgium, on 21 August 1863. ‘It had left its tap root’, he continued, ‘under the religious soil of England, from which new suckers are now shooting upwards; the sap which was believed to be drained out is rising in them once more. The old plant scents again the waters, and revives, endowed with a marvellous fertility.’ As Wiseman regaled his audience with the triumphs of the Catholic faith in England since the restoration of the hierarchy had placed him at the titular head of English Catholicism thirteen years before, he realized he had to step gently around the one matter that he uncharacteristically described in rather blunt, truthful terms which betrayed a certain lack of success. That issue was education. ‘Our weak side is the education of our children’, he declared, ‘whom our poverty prevents us from bringing up as we would desire’.

These statements comprise two of the central messages of this study. The first is the enthusiasm and confidence reflected in Wiseman's portrait of his Church in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The second is the sober realization that, despite recent advances for Catholics in England and Wales, education, namely education of the Catholic poor, was an issue in need of tireless effort and one that had to be a priority for Catholics.

Although much of the political analysis of Catholics in the late nineteenth century has focused on Cardinal Manning, this chapter contends that Bishop, and later Archbishop and Cardinal, Vaughan was, at the very least, equal to the efforts of his predecessor in the political arena, especially after he moved to Westminster in 1892. Prolific in authoring pamphlets, petitions, articles and letters to the editors of several newspapers, Vaughan also travelled the country industriously to speak on behalf of denominational education. Along with the new archbishop's increased lobbying efforts was the heightened political effort of Catholics in Parliament. Whereas not one Catholic spoke in the Commons during the initial debate on the 1870 Education Act, the education debates of the 1890s featured much greater Catholic input. Part of the explanation for this change can be found in the fall of Irish leader Charles Parnell and the subsequent split in the Home Rule party that weakened the Irish cause. After Gladstone's second Irish Home Rule bill fell to defeat in the Lords in 1893, the issue faded from the political stage for nearly a decade, allowing Catholic MPs to refocus their efforts on an acceptable education settlement.

A few months before the 1892 general election returned a minority Liberal government to power under Prime Minister's Gladstone's fourth ministry, English Catholicism experienced the death of the long-time Gladstone confidant, Oxford convert and socially-radical-leaning Manning and his subsequent replacement by the old Catholic, conservative-leaning Vaughan.

In the minds of Catholic leaders, the state overreached itself with the Education Act of 1870. It was that fateful year, as Manning later told a crowd of Catholics in 1885, that the ‘children in English schools [became] children of the State’. Prior to 1870, all education was provided by voluntary schools of various denominations supported by internal subscriptions and state education grants. The Act, however, established nondenominational board schools, supported by rates paid by all property owners, in direct competition with the denominational schools. This event forced Manning and the rest of the hierarchy to re-evaluate their political stance; they realized that an aloof position outside the political arena rendered them ineffective. With the 1870 Act we see Catholic political action for education, both inside and outside of Parliament, expand far beyond what it had been previously. In Manning's eyes, when the state discarded the system that provided all elementary education and forcibly thrust itself wholly on education instead, then ‘the clergy had a right to enter into practical politics’. A culmination of increasing Catholic political activity in 1870 combined with a debate over a significantly altered education system that, in Catholic minds, led to an injustice against which they would aggressively fight for years to come.

Education Enters the Catholic Political Landscape

The issue of elementary education permanently entered the political agenda of Catholics in 1870 and shared prominence with Irish aff airs until the end of the century.

Only three years after the Education Act of 1870, Archbishop Manning decided to make education the most important issue of the remainder of his archepiscopate. Determined not to do it alone, Manning knew that his singular voice could not bring about an equitable solution for Catholics. The effort would require agitation from other members of the hierarchy, as well as the laity. It would require an energized Catholic Poor School Committee, as well as new organizations to provide the corporate leadership necessary to make Catholic opinions heard in the press and in Parliament. In a letter to Cardinal Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin, Manning chose to employ a military analogy as the appropriate description of the battle they faced on education: ‘It is the field on which I should most wish to fight a general action’. Education was the issue that built the most consensus among the Catholic community. It was also an issue that gave them common ground with their Anglican neighbours, with whom they would ally in the battle over the schools. First, however, they needed to recruit their soldiers and marshal their munitions.

In the Wake of Education Act

Festering within the Catholic community in the 1870s and 1880s was a growing distrust of the school board system and disgust with the increasing financial inequality that accompanied its growth. The Catholic press reflected these beliefs frequently. A survey of articles on education provides some indication of the Catholic political drift in the post-1870 Education Act era.