The problems besetting Dr Rowan Williams put me in mind of the 1850s
The influx of Irish immigrants to England in the wake of the Famine placed enormous strains on the Catholic clergy, some of whom paid with their lives for their efforts in tending to the sick & destitute
They struggled on their own in the sense that, since the Reformation, there was no hierarchy of bishops to provide organisation & support
Cardinal Wiseman, the head of the Roman Catholic church in England went to Rome in 1850 to seek the permission of the Pope to establish such a hierarchy
The Cardinal’s (now Archbishop’s) choice of words to announce the agreed plan was unfortunate. It was widely interpreted to mean that the Pope was preparing to retake control in the Government of England as a whole & not just in the governance of his church & congregations
There was outrage & Parliament soon passed The Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851 which forbad any Roman Catholic see or bishop from bearing the same name as an existing Anglican bishopric
The mood of Anti-popery continued & contributed towards the outbreak of a riot in Stockport in June 1852 in which 1 man was killed & 100 injured. One man was eventually transported for manslaughter
The immediate cause was protest at the annual parade of Roman Catholic children (then in its twentieth year) which was deemed by some to be in breech of the Royal Proclamation against the wearing of religious vestments & the carrying of religious banners in public
In that decade there was also the continuing row over the admission of Jews as MPs (settled in 1858), & the refusal to award Oxbridge degrees to non-Anglicans. And, according at least to popular supposition at the time, the Indian Mutiny was sparked by the Army's success in offending the religious sensitivities of both Moslems & Hindus by introducing a rifle whose cartridges were greased with pig & cow fat
And yet the distinguished historian GM Young could write:
Of all decades in our history, a wise man would choose the 1850s to be young in
