While my upper-division students sweat out their final papers, I too am slogging away at sermons. The frustrating thing about this article is that I have to prevent it from mutating into a summary overview of Victorian anti-Catholicism--of which we already have numerous and (given length restrictions) better examples. "Anti-Catholicism" per se is not the issue; anti-Catholicism as expressed in the sermon is. Moreover, I have to balance the broad overview with at least some close work with an author or authors, so that the reader has some sense of how anti-Catholic arguments emerge within the sermon's conventional structures. W. F. Hook and George Croly are probably the leading candidates here, since they're a) prolific and b) representative of opposing tendencies (Hook is very High Church, Croly is very...not).
I definitely want to stress that there isn't a unitary anti-Catholicism, but interlocking anti-Catholicisms, and that those anti-Catholicisms themselves reflect tensions within Protestant denominations. Certainly, there's a litany of shared complaints, but those complaints are turned to different ends. Dissenters, for example, frequently use anti-Catholic rhetoric to diagnose the failures of the Established Church itself (too many "Popish" remnants), and see the Catholic revival as an extension of the Establishment's predilections. Evangelical CofE clergymen argue that the Tractarians undermined the Church from within, while the Tractarians who don't follow Newman into the RCC turn that accusation back on the Evangelicals. (The Tractarians and traditional High Churchmen also have to distinguish the Thirty-Nine Articles from the more objectionable RCC "traditions.") Very few blame Irish immigration--at least, not in their sermons--but very many complain about the threat posed by religious toleration; some clergymen insist that the only solution to the crisis is to rescind the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829). The Dissenters are the outliers, because their disdain for Catholicism as a system of beliefs generally comes admixed with strong support for Catholic civil liberties. (Timothy Larsen is good on this point, although he doesn't spend much time on the "disdain" part.)
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