history of Roman Catholicism

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major treatment
- In Roman Catholicism: History of Roman Catholicism
  At least in an inchoate form, all the elements of catholicity—doctrine, authority, universality—are evident in the New Testament. The Acts of the Apostles begins with a depiction of the demoralized band of the disciples
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effect on Shintō
- In Shintō: Fukko Shintō
  …who showed the influence of Roman Catholic teachings in some respects—derived from the writings of Jesuits in China—by advancing the idea of a creator god and retribution for ethical and religious failings in another world. These doctrines, however, were not accepted into the main current of Shintō. Hirata developed the…
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Ethiopia
- In Ethiopia: Challenge, revival, and decline (16th–19th century)
  …different kind of threat from Roman Catholicism.
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impact on Native American religions
- In Native American religions: South America
  For centuries Roman Catholicism was the dominant Christian influence on Native American peoples. In the 20th century various forms of Protestant Christianity took hold, especially Evangelical and Pentecostal.
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Korea
- In Korea: The introduction of Roman Catholicism
  …with the European merchants came Roman Catholic priests. Korea’s first significant contact with Christianity was through missionaries in China. Korean envoys to China in the 16th century brought back with them a world atlas and scientific instruments made by the priests, as well as literature on science and Christianity. Some…
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Latin America
- In history of Latin America: Institutional, legal, and intellectual developments
  Church organizations, which in the Spanish scheme of things were part of the overall governmental framework (the crown appointed bishops and many other high officials of the church), also came into the central areas in force on the heels of the conquest. Few clerics of…
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Uruguay
- In Uruguay: Religion
  …people are at least nominally Roman Catholic. About one-third of the population adhere to other Christian faiths or are nondenominational Christians. About one-sixth of Uruguayans are agnostics or atheists. Jews, mostly in Montevideo, make up a small minority, which is nevertheless one of the larger Jewish communities in South America.
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16th century

In Church of England: History and organization
The break with the Roman papacy and the establishment of an independent Church of England came during the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47). When Pope Clement VII refused to approve the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the English Parliament, at Henry’s insistence, passed a series of…
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In history of Europe: Aspects of early modern society
…established religions of Europe, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, zealously sought to assure uniformity of belief in the regions they dominated. The courts inspired by them actively pursued not only the heterodox but also witches, the insane, and anyone who maintained an unusual style of life. The special papal court…
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In history of Europe: Reformation and Counter-Reformation
…the fiscal machinery of the church provoked a movement that at first demanded reform from within and ultimately chose the path of separation. When the Augustinian monk Martin Luther protested against the sale of indulgences in 1517, he found himself obliged to extend his doctrinal arguments until his stand led…
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In Protestantism: Henry VIII and the separation from Rome
In the meantime the Reformation had taken hold in England. The beginning there was political rather than religious, a quarrel between the king and the pope of the sort that had occurred in the Middle Ages without resulting in a permanent schism and might…
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In Protestantism: The role of Luther
…attacked the life of the church while he confronted its doctrine. Whereas they denounced the sins of churchmen, he was disillusioned by the whole scholastic scheme of redemption. The church taught that humans could atone for their sins through confession and absolution in the sacrament of penance. Luther found that…
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Allen
- In William Allen
  …Jesuit missions to England, where Roman Catholic worship was prohibited. However, in subsequent years, he despaired of restoring Catholicism to his native country by peaceful means. He therefore called upon King Philip II of Spain to conquer England and assume the English throne. As a consequence, he was made a…
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Augsburg Interim
- In Augsburg Interim
  …Augsburg Interim primarily reflected a Catholic viewpoint. It did, however, allow clerical marriage and communion in both kinds (bread and wine) for the laity.
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Catherine de Médicis
- In Catherine de’ Medici: Political crises
  …the commingled interests of European Catholicism and personal aggrandizement. It is also necessary to understand this political struggle of the Catholic crown with its own ultramontane extremists and to perceive its fluctuations in changing circumstances, in order to realize the fundamental consistency of Catherine’s career. Her essentially moderate influence was…
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Council of Trent
- In biblical literature: The Christian canon
  …response to Protestant views, the Roman Catholic Church made its position clear at the Council of Trent (1546) when it dogmatically affirmed that the entire Latin Vulgate enjoyed equal canonical status. This doctrine was confirmed by the Vatican Council of 1870. In the Greek church the Synod of Jerusalem (1672)…
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Cranmer
- In Thomas Cranmer: Archbishop of Canterbury
  …he had abandoned the traditional Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation—that Christ is rendered substantially present by the Eucharist (although the properties of bread and wine remain the same)—but retained his belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. As early as 1536 he was recognized by the northern…
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Denmark
- In Denmark: Reformation and war
  …other members of the predominantly Catholic Rigsråd postponed the election of a new king; they feared that the obvious candidate, Frederick’s son Prince Christian (later King Christian III), if chosen, would immediately introduce Lutheranism. They tried unsuccessfully to sponsor his younger brother Hans.
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Dublin
- In Dublin: Ascendancy in the 18th century
  …less than that, however, for Roman Catholics, who constituted the majority of the population. In 1695 the Irish Parliament, dominated by the Ascendancy, passed the first of the Penal Laws—a series of harsh discriminatory measures against Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland. These laws disenfranchised Catholics, placed restrictions on their ownership…
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Edict of Nantes
- In Edict of Nantes
  …Pope Clement VIII, by the Roman Catholic clergy in France, and by the parlements. Catholics tended to interpret the edict in its most restrictive sense. The Cardinal de Richelieu, who regarded its political and military clauses as a danger to the state, annulled them by the Peace of Alès in…
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Elizabeth I
- In Elizabeth I: Position under Edward VI and Mary
  …force if necessary, to the Roman Catholic faith. This attempt, along with her unpopular marriage to the ardently Catholic king Philip II of Spain, aroused bitter Protestant opposition. In a charged atmosphere of treasonous rebellion and inquisitorial repression, Elizabeth’s life was in grave danger. For though, as her sister demanded,…
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England
- In United Kingdom: The administration of justice
  …past remained untouched, the semi-independent Roman Catholic Church, and it was left to the second Tudor to challenge its authority and plunder its wealth.
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- In United Kingdom: Internal discontent
  …of the last vestiges of Roman Catholicism. The controversy went to the root of society: Was the purpose of life spiritual or political? Was the role of the church to serve God or the crown? In 1576 two brothers, Paul and Peter Wentworth, led the Puritan attack in the Commons,…
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Forty Martyrs of England and Wales
- In Forty Martyrs of England and Wales
  …England and Wales, group of Roman Catholic martyrs executed by English authorities during the Reformation, most during the reign of Elizabeth I. An act of Parliament in 1571 made it high treason to question the queen’s title as head of the Church of England—thus making the practice of Roman Catholicism…
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Germany
- In Germany: The Reformation of Germany
  …(1) Everyone agreed that the Roman Catholic church was in need of correction. The lack of spirituality in high places, the blatant fiscalism, of which the unrestrained hawking of indulgences—the actual trigger of the Reformation—was a galling example, and the embroilment in political affairs all were symptoms of corruption long…
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Henry VIII’s divorce
- In Henry VIII: Loss of popularity of Henry VIII
  He appealed to Rome for a declaration of annulment. Popes had usually obliged kings in such matters, but Henry had picked both his time and his case badly. He was asking Pope Clement VII to help him discard the emperor’s aunt, but Clement, the emperor’s prisoner in 1527–28,…
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Holy League
- In Holy League
  Roman Catholics during the French Wars of Religion of the late 16th century; it was first organized in 1576 under the leadership of Henri I de Lorraine, 3^e duc de Guise, to oppose concessions granted to the Protestants (Huguenots) by King Henry III. Although the…
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Hooker’s views
- In Richard Hooker: His major work
  …defended the Elizabethan church against Roman Catholics and Puritans. He upheld the threefold authority of the Anglican tradition—Bible, church, and reason. Roman Catholics put Bible and tradition on a parity as the authorities for belief, while Puritans looked to Scripture as the sole authority. Hooker avoided both extremes, allowing to…
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Japan
- In Kirishitan
  …and when the prohibition against Roman Catholics began to ease again in the mid-19th century, arriving European priests were told there were no Japanese Christians left. A Roman Catholic church set up in Nagasaki in 1865 was dedicated to the 26 martyrs of 1597, and within the year 20,000 Kakure…
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Kyiv
- In Kyiv: Kyiv under Lithuania and Poland
  …to the expansion of Polish Roman Catholic influence, spearheaded by vigorous proselytization by the Jesuits. In the 17th century a religious Ukrainian brotherhood was established in Kyiv, as in other Ukrainian towns, to further this opposition and encourage Ukrainian nationalism. Peter Mogila (Petro Mohyla), a major theologian and metropolitan of…
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Low Countries
- In history of the Low Countries: Development of Dutch humanism
  …which were supported by the Roman Catholic church, and it took stern measures against Calvinism. Calvinists forcibly removed their coreligionists from prisons and occasionally even attacked monasteries. This group’s rejection of icons, paintings, statues, and valuables in churches sometimes led them to remove them and hand them over to the…
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Luther
- In Martin Luther
  …division of Western Christendom between Roman Catholicism and the new Protestant traditions, mainly Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, the Anabaptists, and the anti-Trinitarians. He is one of the most influential figures in the history of Christianity.
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Maximilian II
- In Maximilian II
  …for the reform of the Roman Catholic church. His efforts to gain the right of marriage for priests failed, largely because of the opposition of Spain.
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Milan
- In Italy: The duchy of Milan
  The Roman Catholic Church had unusual influence and autonomy in Milan. Charles Cardinal Borromeo, member of a rich noble family of Milan and nephew of Pope Pius IV (reigned 1559–65), resided in his diocese after 1565 as the model bishop of the Catholic Reformation. He instituted…
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Müntzer
- In Thomas Müntzer: Early life and career
  …against the Franciscan order, the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the veneration of the saints. He early showed himself to be an independent thinker. After occasional participation in debates between Luther and the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Eck in Leipzig, he pursued intensive literary studies at the monastery of Beuditz…
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Native American history
- In Native American: Spain
  The Roman Catholic missionaries that accompanied Coronado and de Soto worked assiduously to Christianize the native population. Many of the priests were hearty supporters of the Inquisition, and their pastoral forays were often violent; beatings, dismemberment, and execution were all common punishments for the supposed heresies…
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Peace of Augsburg
- In Peace of Augsburg
  of Lutheranism and Catholicism in Germany, promulgated on September 25, 1555, by the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire assembled earlier that year at Augsburg. The Peace allowed the state princes to select either Lutheranism or Catholicism as the religion of their domain and permitted the free emigration…
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Penal laws
- In Penal Laws
  Roman Catholics in Britain and Ireland after the Reformation that penalized the practice of the Roman Catholic religion and imposed civil disabilities on Catholics. Various acts passed in the 16th and 17th centuries prescribed fines and imprisonment for participation in Catholic worship and severe penalties,…
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Philip II of Spain
- In Philip II
  …I, 1580–98), champion of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. During his reign the Spanish empire attained its greatest power, extent, and influence, though he failed to suppress the revolt of the Netherlands (beginning in 1566) and lost the “Invincible Armada” in the attempted invasion of England (1588).
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Protestantism
- In Protestantism: Origins of Protestantism
  …Speyer in 1529, when the Roman Catholic emperor of Germany, Charles V, rescinded the provision of the Diet of Speyer in 1526 that had allowed each ruler to choose whether to administer the Edict of Worms (which banned Martin Luther’s writings and declared him a heretic and an enemy of…
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Richelieu
- In Cardinal Richelieu: Rise to power
  …in the religious controversy between Catholics and Protestants, and the dependence of the small states in France’s borderlands upon an equilibrium of power between France and Spain.
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Southwell’s martyrdom
- In Robert Southwell
  …letters of consolation to persecuted Roman Catholics and making pastoral journeys. His An Epistle of Comfort was printed secretly in 1587; other letters circulated in manuscript.
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Sri Lanka
- In Sri Lanka: The expansion of Portuguese control
  …influence was marked by intense Roman Catholic missionary activity. Franciscans established centres in the country from 1543 onward. Jesuits were active in the north. Toward the end of the century, Dominicans and Augustinians arrived. With the conversion of Dharmapala, many members of the Sinhalese nobility followed suit. Dharmapala endowed missionary…
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Sweden
- In Sweden: The early Vasa kings (1523–1611)
  …all the properties of the Roman Catholic Church. The church at that time held 21 percent of Sweden’s land, as opposed to only 6 percent held by the crown. The appropriation of the possessions of the church thus added enormously to the wealth of the state. To some degree the…
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Switzerland
- In Switzerland: The Reformation
  …he viewed as the decadent Roman Catholic hierarchy, Zwingli favoured the return to the teachings of the Bible. While Luther strictly separated the spiritual and political realms, Zwingli emphasized that both the church and the state were subject to the law of Christ. In 1525 Zürich’s great council adopted his…
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Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
- In Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
  …Church, largest of the Eastern Catholic (also known as Eastern rite or Greek Catholic) churches, in communion with Rome since the Union of Brest-Litovsk (1596). Byzantine Christianity was established among the Ukrainians in 988 by St. Vladimir (Volodimir) and followed Constantinople in the Great Schism of 1054. Temporary reunion with…
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views on Renaissance science
- In history of Europe: Renaissance science and technology
  The church might prefer that Christians seek their well-being through faith, the sacraments, and the intercession of Mary and the saints, but distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable belief in hidden powers were difficult to make or to maintain. Most clergy shared the common beliefs in occult…
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17th and 18th centuries

Baltimore
- In Baltimore: The contemporary city
  …1789 Baltimore became the first Roman Catholic diocese in the United States, and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1806–21) was the nation’s first Roman Catholic cathedral; St. Mary’s Seminary and University was founded in 1791. The Shot Tower (1828) is a…
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Bossuet
- In Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
  —died April 12, 1704, Paris) was a bishop who was the most eloquent and influential spokesman for the rights of the French church against papal authority. He is now chiefly remembered for his literary works, including funeral panegyrics for great personages.
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Camisards
- In Camisard
  …1685, Louis sought to impose Roman Catholicism on all his subjects. Thousands of Protestants emigrated; those who remained were subjected to severe repression. In the first years of the 18th century, a wave of religious enthusiasm swept the strongly Protestant Cévennes. Prophets predicted the end of persecution, and many felt…
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Canada
- In Canada: The Company of New France
  …keeping New France in the Roman Catholic faith.
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- In Canada: The Quebec Act
  …the French language and the Roman Catholic faith, gave the church power to enforce the collection of tithes, and formalized the authority of the seigneurs to collect cens et rentes. In addition, Quebec’s territory was greatly expanded, its western border henceforth stretching to the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi…
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Charles II
- In Charles II: Restoration settlement
  …toleration to his Nonconformist and Roman Catholic subjects were sharply rebuffed in 1663, and throughout his reign the House of Commons was to thwart the more generous impulses of his religious policy. A more pervasive and damaging limitation was on his financial independence. Although the Parliament voted the king an…
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Civil Constitution of the Clergy
- In Civil Constitution of the Clergy
  …an attempt to reorganize the Roman Catholic Church in France on a national basis. It caused a schism within the French Church and made many devout Catholics turn against the Revolution.
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Cromwell
- In Thomas Cromwell: Cromwell and the Reformation
  He proposed to destroy Rome’s power in England and to replace it by the royal supremacy in the church. He was behind the first attacks on the papacy (1532) and the act against the payment by bishops of their first year’s revenue to Rome. He secured the submission of…
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Descartes and Cartesianism
- In René Descartes: Final years and heritage of René Descartes
  In 1667 the Roman Catholic Church made its own decision by putting Descartes’s works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) on the very day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called Descartes a…
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- In Cartesianism: Mechanism versus Aristotelianism
  …which was supported by both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. These thinkers held that, because all things are created by God with a given nature, there can be no evolutionary development of animals or of the universe as a whole. For Aristotle, all living things possess a spirit or “soul,”…
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Dominican Republic colonization
- In Dominican Republic: The colonial era
  …were rigidly drawn, and the Roman Catholic Church served as the strong right arm of temporal authority. A cruel, exploitative slave-based society and economy came into being.
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England
- In United Kingdom: Religious policy
  …that moderates of all persuasions, Roman Catholic and Protestant alike, might dwell together in his church. He offered to preside at a general council of all the Christian churches—Catholic and Protestant—to seek a general reconciliation. Liberals in all churches took his offer seriously. He sought to find a formula for…
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Enlightenment
- In Enlightenment: The age of reason: human understanding of the universe
  …the monolithic authority of the Roman Catholic Church. For Martin Luther, as for Bacon or Descartes, the way to truth lay in the application of human reason. Both the Renaissance and the Reformation were less movements for intellectual liberty than changes of authority, but, since they appealed to different authorities,…
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- In history of Europe: The language of the Enlightenment
  Among Roman Catholic countries France’s situation was in some ways unique. Even there orthodox doctrines remained entrenched in such institutions as the Sorbonne; some bishops might be worldly but others were conscientious; monasteries decayed but parish life was vital and curés (parish priests) well trained. Nor…
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Europe
- In history of Europe: Order from disorder
  …without destroying the idea of catholicism to which the Roman church gave institutional form. The word catholic survived in the creeds of Protestant churches, such as that of England. Calvin had thought in catholic, not sectarian, terms when he mourned for the Body of Christ, “bleeding, its members severed.” Deeper…
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Fénelon
- In François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon
  …to mitigate the harshness of Roman Catholic intolerance by open meetings with the Protestants (1686–87) to present Catholic doctrine in a reasonable light. While unsympathetic to Protestant belief, he equally repudiated forced conversions.
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France
- In France: Monarchy and church
  The king, moreover, was a Christian monarch and as such was endowed with quasi-priestly functions. He was anointed at his coronation with holy chrism said to have been brought from heaven by a dove. It was thought that, as evidence of his special status, he could cure scrofula by his…
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- In France: Religious tensions
  …that sweeping reform might return Roman Catholicism to its basic ideals, shorn of aristocratic trappings and superfluous privileges, but they assumed that the church itself would collaborate in the process. In the Assembly’s view, however, nationalization of church property gave the state responsibility for regulating the church’s temporal affairs, such…
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French Revolution
- In French Revolution: The new regime
  …nationalize the lands of the Roman Catholic Church in France to pay off the public debt led to a widespread redistribution of property. The bourgeoisie and the peasant landowners were undoubtedly the chief beneficiaries, but some farm workers also were able to buy land. The land transfer was made through…
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Galileo’s trials
- In Galileo: Galileo’s Copernicanism
  …and the beginning of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. But the tide in Rome was turning against the Copernican theory, and in 1615, when the cleric Paolo Antonio Foscarini (c. 1565–1616) published a book arguing that the Copernican theory did not conflict with scripture, Inquisition consultants examined the question and pronounced the…
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Gordon Riots
- In United Kingdom: Domestic responses to the American Revolution
  …made minor concessions to British Roman Catholics, who were excluded from civil rights. Anti-Catholic prejudice, however, had been a powerful emotion in Britain since the Reformation in the 16th century, and Roman Catholicism tended to be associated by many with political absolutism and persecution. A movement to repeal the Catholic…
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Instrument of Government
- In Instrument of Government
  Roman Catholics and those implicated in the Irish rebellion were permanently disenfranchised. Religious toleration was denied to Roman Catholics and upholders of episcopacy.
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Italy
- In Italy: Political thought and early attempts at reform
  …and cultural roles of the church—in particular, the supranational character of the papacy, the immunity of clerics from the state’s legal and fiscal apparatus, the church’s intolerance and intransigence in theological and institutional matters, as well as its wealth and property—constituted the central problems in the reform schemes of Italy’s…
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James II
- In James II
  …he was admitted to the Roman Catholic Church, though on his brother’s insistence he continued to take the Anglican sacraments until 1672, and he attended Anglican services until 1676. Charles II also insisted that James’s daughters, Mary and Anne, be raised in the Protestant faith.
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Jansen and Jansenism
- In Cornelius Otto Jansen
  …a Flemish leader of the Roman Catholic reform movement known as Jansenism. He wrote biblical commentaries and pamphlets against the Protestants. His major work was Augustinus, published by his friends in 1640. Although condemned by Pope Urban VIII in 1642, it was of critical importance in the Jansenist movement.
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“L’Encyclopédie”
- In history of Europe: The Encyclopédie
  …as the officials of the church, the Encyclopédie would have been throttled. It was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, and a ban of excommunication was pronounced on any who should read it; but even Rome was equivocal. The knowledge that Pope Benedict XIV was privately sympathetic lessened the…
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Lucaris’ opposition
- In Cyril Lucaris
  …developed a strong distaste for Roman Catholicism. In 1596 the patriarch of Alexandria, Meletios Pegas, sent Lucaris to Poland to lead the Orthodox opposition to the Union of Brest-Litovsk, which had sealed a union of the Orthodox metropolitanate of Kiev with Rome. For six years Lucaris served as rector of…
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Netherlands
- In Netherlands: Religion
  …the Eighty Years’ War, when Roman Catholics still frequently bore the burden of their preference for the rule of the Catholic monarchs in the southern Netherlands. Sizable islands of Roman Catholicism remained in most of the United Provinces, while Gelderland and the northern parts of Brabant and Flanders conquered by…
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- In Netherlands: Economic and political stagnation
  Roman Catholics, still without political rights but facing milder restrictions, fell into a quarrel between adherents of Jansenism (see Roman Catholicism: Jansenism), which followed Augustinian theology, especially in the matter of predestination, and supporters of Rome, in particular the Jesuits; the former split off to…
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Philippines
- In Philippines: The Spanish period
  Manila was also the ecclesiastical capital of the Philippines. The governor-general was civil head of the church in the islands, but the archbishop vied with him for political supremacy. In the late 17th and 18th centuries the archbishop, who also had the legal status of lieutenant governor, frequently won.…
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Poland
- In Poland: Cultural changes
  Roman Catholicism was Sarmatized in its turn, assuming a more intolerant posture toward other denominations. The struggles against Lutheran Swedes and Prussians, Orthodox Russians, and Muslim Turks and Tatars strengthened the belief in Poland’s mission as a Catholic bastion. The expulsion in 1658 of Polish…
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Shimabara Rebellion
- In Shimabara Rebellion
  …Rebellion, (1637–38), uprising of Japanese Roman Catholics, the failure of which virtually ended the Christian movement in 17th-century Japan and furthered government determination to isolate Japan from foreign influences.
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Thirty Years’ War
- In Thirty Years’ War
  …1618, when the future Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand II, in his role as king of Bohemia, attempted to impose Roman Catholic absolutism on his domains, and the Protestant nobles of both Bohemia and Austria rose up in rebellion. Ferdinand won after a five-year struggle. In 1625 King Christian IV of…
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- In history of Europe: The crisis in Germany
  …half of the population were Catholic; the rest were Protestant. Neither bloc was prepared to let the other mobilize an army. Similar paralysis was to be found in most other regions: the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had separated Germany into hostile but evenly balanced confessional camps.
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19th century

Acton
- In John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton: Life
  …John Henry Newman, of the Roman Catholic monthly the Rambler, but he laid down his editorship in 1864 because of papal criticism of his rigorously scientific approach to history as evinced in that journal. After 1870, when the First Vatican Council formulated the doctrine of papal infallibility, Acton was all…
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Bismarck opposition
- In Otto von Bismarck: Domestic policy of Otto von Bismarck
  …one-third of Germans who professed Roman Catholicism. In Prussia the minister of public worship and education, Adalbert Falk, with Bismarck’s blessing, introduced a series of bills establishing civil marriage, limiting the movement of the clergy, and dissolving religious orders. All church appointments were to be approved by the state. Clerical…
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Catholic Emancipation in U.K.
- In Catholic Emancipation
  …civil disabilities granted to the Roman Catholics of Britain and Ireland in a series of laws during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the Reformation, Roman Catholics in Britain had been harassed by numerous restrictions. In Britain, Roman Catholics could not purchase land, hold civil or military offices…
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- In George III: George and the Younger Pitt, 1783–1806
  …had made the issue of Roman Catholic emancipation urgent. Rebellion in Ireland, in Pitt’s view, could not be cured simply by the union of the British and Irish Parliaments. Conciliation, by the political emancipation of the Roman Catholics, was a necessary concomitant of union. George III believed this proposal to…
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- In Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey: Foreign secretary
  While holding that Catholic Emancipation was a condition of any genuine Whig government, he accepted the fact that parliamentary reform must wait until there was solid support for it in the country. He thought the political stability of Britain was endangered both by the reactionary postwar policy of…
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Ecuador
- In Ecuador: The regime of García Moreno (1860–75)
  …adherence of the population to Roman Catholicism. He felt that in time nationalism could be created and more social cohesion would emerge as a result but that meanwhile Ecuador needed a period of peace and strong government. When he became president, therefore, he based his regime on two factors—strong authoritarian…
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Europe
- In history of Europe: Political patterns
  …made new arrangements with the Roman Catholic church to encourage religion against political attacks. Pope Pius IX, who had been chased from Rome during the final surge of agitation in 1848, turned adamantly against new political ideas. In the Syllabus of Errors accompanying the encyclical Quanta cura (“With What Great…
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- In history of Europe: Political patterns
  …new pope, Leo XIII, the Roman Catholic church moved more formally to accommodate to modern politics. The encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things,” 1891) urged Catholics to accept political institutions such as parliaments and universal suffrage; it proclaimed sympathy for working people against the excesses of capitalism, justifying moderate trade…
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France
- In France: Religious policy
  …papacy in 1802 reintegrated the Roman Catholic Church into French society and ended the cycle of bare toleration and persecution that had begun in 1792. Having immediately halted the campaign to enforce the republican calendar (which was quietly abolished on January 1, 1806), the Consulate then extended an olive branch…
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- In France: Charles X, 1824–30
  …reassert the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, which had been undermined by Enlightenment skepticism and by the Revolutionary upheaval. The Concordat of 1802 had allowed the beginning of a religious revival, which gained strength after 1814. The best-selling Le Génie du christianisme (1802; Genius of Christianity), by the Romantic…
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Institut Canadien conflict
- In Institut Canadien
  …came into conflict with the Roman Catholic church in 19th-century French Canada. Founded in Montreal on Dec. 17, 1844, it soon became a forum for discussing the problems of the day, maintaining the largest free library in Montreal. The membership of the parent organization in Montreal reached 700, and branches…
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Italy
- In Italy: Forces of opposition
  …in the country was the Roman Catholic Church. The Risorgimento had deprived the church of the Papal States, including Rome itself, and of much of its income. The church had lost its previous virtual monopoly of education and welfare, and compulsory state education was deliberately secular. Many religious orders had…
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- In Italy: Domestic policies
  Nor could the organized Roman Catholic movement easily make open arrangements with the Giolitti government. The Catholics too had founded trade unions and workers’ cooperatives, as well as mutual aid societies and rural banks, throughout northern Italy in the 1890s. This development followed Pope Leo XIII’s embrace of social…
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Juárez
- In Benito Juárez: Early career
  …economic monopoly held by the Roman Catholic Church and the landed aristocracy. He also believed that political stability could be achieved only through the adoption of a constitutional form of government based on a federal system.
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Kulturkampf
- In Kulturkampf
  …von Bismarck to subject the Roman Catholic church to state controls. The term came into use in 1873, when the scientist and Prussian liberal statesman Rudolf Virchow declared that the battle with the Roman Catholics was assuming “the character of a great struggle in the interest of humanity.”
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- In Germany: Domestic concerns
  Liberals saw the Roman Catholic church as politically reactionary and feared the appeal of a clerical party to the more than one-third of Germans who professed Roman Catholicism. Both Bismarck and the liberals doubted the loyalty of the Catholic population to the Prussian-centred and, therefore, primarily Protestant nation.…
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Latin American anticlericalism
- In history of Latin America: Capitalism and social transitions
  The Roman Catholic Church also was the target of ever more aggressive liberal attacks after mid-century. In much of Latin America the church had been the preeminent source of capital and a major property owner. As in the case of indigenous communities, the justification for those…
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Mexico
- In Mexico: French intervention
  …laws of La Reforma, establish Roman Catholicism as the exclusive religion, restore the religious orders, remove the church from its dependence on civil authorities, turn education over to ecclesiastics, and return properties confiscated and sold by the republicans. Replying that he, not outsiders, would decide such matters, Maximilian issued decrees…
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Mun’s support
- In Albert, count de Mun
  …leader and orator who advocated Roman Catholicism as an instrument of social reform.
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New York City prejudice
- In New York City: Ethnic and religious diversity
  Jews, Roman Catholics, and numerous ethnic groups lived in Manhattan before the end of the 17th century, but political control remained in the hands of the established merchant elite. When the American Revolution began, more prominent Dutch families—the Van Cortlandts, De Peysters, and Schuylers—supported the cause…
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Newman’s theories
- In St. John Henry Newman
  …a cardinal deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. His eloquent books, notably Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834–42), Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), and University Sermons (1843), revived emphasis on the dogmatic authority of the church and urged reforms of the Church of England after the pattern…
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Pius IX
- In Pius IX
  …the Italian head of the Roman Catholic church whose pontificate (1846–78) was the longest in history and was marked by a transition from moderate political liberalism to conservatism. Notable events of his reign included the declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854), the Syllabus of Errors (1864), and…
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United Kingdom
- In United Kingdom: The political situation
  …on the civil liberties of Roman Catholics. Irish disorders centred, as they had since the Act of Union in 1801, on the issue of Catholic emancipation, a favourite cause of the Whigs, who had been out of power since 1807. During the 18th century, Catholics in England had achieved a…
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- In United Kingdom: Religion
  The Roman Catholic Church was growing in importance not only in the Irish sections of the industrial cities but also among university students and teachers. Dissent had a grip on the whole culture of large sections of the middle classes, dismissed abruptly by Matthew Arnold as…
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20th century

Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland: Ethnic groups and languages
…and often antagonistic groupings—the indigenous Roman Catholic Irish and the immigrant Protestant English and Scots—date from that period, and they have played a significant role in molding Northern Ireland’s development. The settlers dominated County Antrim and northern Down, controlled the Lagan corridor toward Armagh, and also formed powerful minorities elsewhere.
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In Northern Ireland: Religion and social structure
Despite its nominal proscription, the Roman Catholic Church claimed the allegiance of almost the entire population, except the newcomers from Britain. English-born settlers gravitated to the Church of Ireland, a Protestant church modeled on the Church of England. Scottish settlers brought with them the ardent Calvinism that had recently established…
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Bloody Sunday
- In Bloody Sunday
  …Sunday, January 30, 1972, by Roman Catholic civil rights supporters that turned violent when British paratroopers opened fire, killing 13 and injuring 14 others (one of the injured later died). Bloody Sunday precipitated an upsurge in support for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which advocated violence against the United Kingdom…
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Canada
- In Quebec: Population composition
  …population still claims to be Roman Catholic, while only a small proportion belongs to Protestant denominations. During the period of New France (1534–1763), Roman Catholicism was the official religion, and French Protestants were prevented from settling in the colony. After 1760 freedom of religious practice was authorized by the British…
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civil rights in Northern Ireland
- In civil rights: Civil rights movements across the globe
  In the 1960s the Roman Catholic-led civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was inspired by events in the United States. Its initial focus was fighting discriminatory gerrymandering that had been securing elections for Protestant unionists. Later, internment of Catholic activists by the British government sparked both a civil disobedience…
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Eastern Orthodox relations
- In Eastern Orthodoxy: Ecumenical involvement
  …attention to dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. In the 1960s Patriarch Athenagoras I and Pope Paul VI met in Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Rome, symbolically lifting the anathemas imposed in 1054 and making other gestures of rapprochement, though these moves were sometimes mistakenly interpreted as if they were ending the…
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England
- In England: Religion
  …among them, as with the Roman Catholic church. There is virtually complete religious tolerance in England and no longer any overt prejudice against Catholics. The decline in churchgoing has been thought to be an indicator of decline in religious belief, but opinion polls substantiate the view that belief in God…
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fascism
- In fascism: Totalitarian ambitions
  …of traditional elites, including the Catholic church.
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France
- In France: The prewar years
  Many Roman Catholics were outraged by the triumph of the anticlericals, and they responded to the Vatican’s urging to sabotage the new system. They resisted (sometimes violently) the transfer of church property to state ownership and refused to establish lay associations to govern the church. By…
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Hungary
- In Hungary: Political developments
  The head of the Roman Catholic Church, József Cardinal Mindszenty, who refused to follow their example, was arrested on transparent charges in December 1948 and condemned to life imprisonment. The monastic orders were dissolved. Thereafter, the Roman Catholic Church accepted financial terms similar to those offered to other churches,…
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Italy
- In Italy: Anti-Fascist movements
  …in the country was the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican implicitly supported Mussolini in the early years and was rewarded in February 1929 by the Lateran Treaty, which settled the “Roman Question” at last. Vatican City became an independent state, Italy paid a large financial indemnity to the pope for…
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- In Italy: Demographic and social change
  Regular church attendance fell sharply, from about 70 percent in the mid-1950s to about 30 percent in the 1980s. The membership of Catholic Action fell to about 650,000 by 1978, about one-fourth of its figure in 1966, and in the late 1960s Catholic trade unions allied…
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John XXIII
- In Saint John XXIII
  …in the history of the Roman Catholic Church by his openness to change (aggiornamento), shown especially in his convoking of the Second Vatican Council. He wrote several socially important encyclicals, most notably Pacem in Terris.
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Lateran Treaty
- In Lateran Treaty
  …as the “centre of the Catholic world and place of pilgrimage.” Article 20 stated that all bishops were to take an oath of loyalty to the state and had to be Italian subjects speaking the Italian language.
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Latin America
- In history of Latin America: Religious trends
  Roman Catholicism continued to be a powerful force in the second half of the 20th century. Its influence could be seen in the continuing prohibition, almost everywhere, of abortion and in the tendency to play down official support (which nevertheless existed) for birth control campaigns.…
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Liturgical Movement
- In Liturgical Movement
  In the Roman Catholic Church, the movement can be traced back to the mid-19th century, when it was initially connected with monastic worship, especially in the Benedictine communities in France, Belgium, and Germany. After about 1910, it spread to Holland, Italy, and England and subsequently to the…
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Marcel’s conversion
- In Gabriel Marcel: Religious belief of Gabriel Marcel
  …led to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1929, and he is now often referred to as a theistic or Christian existentialist. Marcel’s approach to religious belief was notably existentialist, and it is no surprise that he distanced himself from traditional philosophy of religion. Indeed, he remained suspicious of attempts…
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Pius X
- In St. Pius X
  …conservatism dominated the early 20th-century Roman Catholic Church.
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Pius XI
Pius XII
- In Pius XII
  …Rome and head of the Roman Catholic Church, who had a long, tumultuous, and controversial pontificate (1939–58). During his reign as pope, the papacy confronted the ravages of World War II (1939–45), the abuses of the Nazi, fascist, and Soviet regimes, the horror of the Holocaust, the challenge
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Polish National Catholic Church
- In Polish National Catholic Church
  …United States who left the Roman Catholic Church. From 1907 until 2003 it was a member of the Union of Utrecht and in full communion of the Old Catholic churches; in 2006 it entered a limited communion agreement with Rome. Headquarters and a seminary are in Scranton, Pa., U.S.
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Romania
- In Romania: Religion
  Roman Catholicism is the primary religion of ethnic Hungarians and Swabian Germans. The Eastern rite (Uniate) church is prominent in Transylvania. In 1948 it was forcibly united with the Romanian Orthodox Church by the communist regime, but its independence was restored after 1989. Protestantism, both…
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- In Romania: Romanians in Transylvania
  …countryside by the Calvinist and Roman Catholic Hungarian nobility and in the cities by the Lutheran German-speaking Saxon upper class. A large Romanian population lived there also, but Romanians were excluded from public affairs and privileges because they were overwhelmingly peasant and Orthodox. Their fortunes improved when Transylvania was brought…
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800–1500

Albigensian revolt
- In Albigenses
  …in permanent opposition to the Roman church and raised a continued protest against the corruption of the clergy of their time. The Albigensian theologians and ascetics, known in the south of France as bons hommes or bons chrétiens, were always few in number.
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Austria
- In Austria: Early Babenberg period
  …King Henry IV (later Holy Roman emperor) fought for control of the church in Germany. In 1075 Margrave Ernest, who had regained the Neumark and the Bohemian March for his family, was killed in the Battle of the Unstrut, fighting on the side of Henry IV against the rebellious Saxons.…
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Bohemia
- In Bohemia
  …fell victim to disputes between Roman Catholics and the followers of the Bohemian religious reformer Jan Hus, who was burned as a heretic in 1415. Wars between Bohemian Hussites and the Roman Catholics of Bohemia and Germany engulfed the kingdom until compacts were negotiated in 1436 that granted the more-moderate…
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- In Czechoslovak history: The Luxembourg dynasty
  …the enormous wealth accumulated by the church in a comparatively short time. Moral corruption had infected a large percentage of the clergy and spread also among the laity. Prague, with its large number of clerics, suffered more corruption than the countryside. Both the king and the archbishop showed favour to…
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- In Czechoslovak history: Re-Catholicization and absolutist rule
  Both the victorious Catholic Church and the wealthy laymen regarded the Baroque style as the most faithful expression of their religious convictions and their worldly ambitions. For about 100 years, the Baroque dominated in architecture, sculpture, and painting and influenced literature, drama, and music. The external appearance of Prague…
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Boris I
- In Boris I
  Boris originally intended to accept Roman Christianity, but an unsuccessful war with the Byzantines forced him to adopt the Orthodox faith of Constantinople (864). Boris (at his baptism he took the Christian name Michael), his family, and the nobles who supported his policy were baptized one night in secret by…
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Bosnia and Herzegovina
- In Bosnia and Herzegovina: Ancient and medieval periods
  …essentially nonheretical branch of the Roman Catholic Church, based in monastic houses in which some Eastern Orthodox practices also were observed.
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Byzantine Empire
- In Byzantine Empire: The Iconoclastic controversy
  …dignity of emperor of the Romans. For all those reasons, Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Lombards by right of conquest, assented to his coronation as emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, 800, by Pope Leo III. No longer a barbarian king, Charlemagne became, by virtue of the symbolism…
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- In Byzantine Empire: Final Turkish assault
  …of stirring the conscience of Western Christendom. His father had been skeptical about the benefits of such a policy, knowing that it would antagonize most of his own people and arouse the suspicion of the Turks. The proposal was made, however, at the Council of Florence in 1439, attended by…
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Chinese missions
- In China: Yuan China and the West
  …therefore, only natural that the Roman Catholic Church looked for potential converts among non-Muslim people of Asia. After Franciscan envoys brought back information on what was known as Cathay (northern China) in the mid-13th century, Pope Nicholas IV, a former Franciscan, dispatched a Franciscan mission to the court of the…
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Crusades
- In Crusades: The military orders
  …into the conquered lands a Latin ecclesiastical organization and hierarchy. The Greek patriarch of Antioch was removed, and all subsequent incumbents were Latin except in one brief period before 1170, when imperial pressure brought about the installation of a Greek. The Eastern Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem left before the conquest…
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England
- In United Kingdom: Church–state relations
  …discipline and order into the English church. The see of York was subordinated to Canterbury, and efforts were made to bring the ecclesiastical affairs of Ireland and Scotland under Lanfranc’s control. Several church councils were held in England to legislate for the English church, as similar councils did in Normandy.…
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Ferdinand II
- In Ferdinand II: Legacy
  A very pious Catholic, he especially favoured the Jesuits. Yet, basing his policies chiefly on religious principles, he suffered from discrepancies between his religious goals and the maxims of a modern raison d’état. An indecisive man, he depended much on the influence of his counselors and his Jesuit…
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France
- In French literature: The context and nature of French medieval literature
  The Roman Catholic church grew in wealth and power, and by the 12th century its schools were flourishing, training generations of clerks in the liberal arts. Society itself became less embattled, and the nobility became more leisured and sophisticated. The machismo of the epics was tempered…
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Germany
- In Germany: The promotion of the German church
  …in the Reich: the German church. By ancient Germanic custom, moreover, the founder of a church did not lose his estate in the endowment that he had made; he remained its proprietor and protecting lord. Still, the bishoprics and certain ancient abbeys, such as Sankt Gallen, Reichenau, Fulda, and Hersfeld,…
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Henry IV
- In Henry IV: Role in the Investiture Controversy of Henry IV
  …put the defense of the Roman Church into the king’s hands. But after defeating the Saxons, Henry considered himself strong enough to cancel his agreements with the pope and to nominate his court chaplain as archbishop of Milan. The violation of the agreement on investiture called into question the king’s…
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Henry V
- In Henry V
  As a promoter of church reform willing to compromise with the papacy, he had the support of the church. He took his father prisoner and forced him to abdicate (Dec. 31, 1105) but was not certain of his throne until his father’s death on Aug. 7, 1106. He had…
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Hus and Hussite movement
- In Jan Hus
  …the most important 15th-century Czech religious reformer, whose work was transitional between the medieval and the Reformation periods and anticipated the Lutheran Reformation by a full century. He was embroiled in the bitter controversy of the Western Schism (1378–1417) for his entire career, and he was convicted of heresy at…
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- In Hussite
  The Hussites broke with Rome in using a Czech liturgy and in administering Holy Communion to the laity under the forms of both bread and wine. (The doctrine supporting this was called Utraquism and the more moderate Hussites were called Utraquists.)
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Irish church reform
- In Ireland: The Norse invasions and their aftermath
  …11th and 12th centuries the ecclesiastical reform movement of western Europe was extended into Ireland. As the kings of Munster and Connaught, along with those of Leinster and Ulster, each struggled to secure the dominant position that had once been held by Brian Boru, they came to realize the value…
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Jerusalem
- In Jerusalem: Christians
  The Roman Catholic Church in Jerusalem, established in 1099 during the First Crusade, was dissolved when the Muslims won the city in 1244. The Franciscan order, which since 1334 has been the “Custodian of the Holy Land,” is charged with the safekeeping of Roman Catholic rights…
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John of England
- In John: Quarrel with the church of John
  John’s attention was diverted and his prestige disastrously affected by relations with the papacy. In the disputed election to the see of Canterbury following the death of Hubert Walter, Pope Innocent III quashed the election of John’s nominee in procuring the election of…
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Joseph II
- In Joseph II: Domestic reforms
  Joseph’s conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, however, posed more difficult problems. He established national training colleges for priests and deprived the bishops of their authority and limited their communications with the Pope. The power of the church was even more affected by the dissolution of more than 700…
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Louis XI
- In Louis XI: Domestic achievements. of Louis XI
  A new concordat with the Pope, concluded in 1472, allowed him to control the appointment of bishops. He augmented the royal revenues by raising taxes on his own authority. The meetings of notables and the assemblies of the estates had only a consultative role. Nevertheless, Louis XI sought the support…
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Middle Ages
- In history of Europe: Ecclesiastical organization
  …affairs, the organization of the universal church and local churches acquired a symmetry and consistency hardly possible before 1100. An 11th-century anonymous text that was accepted by canon law identified two orders of Christians, the clergy and the laity. It considered the clergy largely in a monastic context, indicating that…
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Philip IV
- In Philip IV
  His long struggle with the Roman papacy ended with the transfer of the Curia to Avignon, France (beginning the so-called Babylonian Captivity, 1309–77). He also secured French royal power by wars on barons and neighbours and by restriction of feudal usages. His three sons were successively kings of France: Louis…
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Savonarola’s reforms and martyrdom
Schism of 1054
- In East-West Schism
  Michael Cerularius) and the Western church (led by Pope Leo IX). The mutual excommunications by the pope and the patriarch in 1054 became a watershed in church history. The excommunications were not lifted until 1965, when Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, following
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- In Christianity: The Schism of 1054
  …Constantinople and the church of Rome. While 1054 is the symbolic date of the separation, the agonizing division was six centuries in the making and the result of several different issues. The Eastern church sharply disagreed when the Western church introduced into the Nicene Creed the doctrine that the Holy…
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Sweden
- In Sweden: Civil wars
  The church received the right to administer justice according to canon law and a separate system of taxation, protected by royal privileges, and the pretenders sought the church’s sanction for their candidacies. The first known coronation by the archbishop was that of Erik Knutsson in 1210.…
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Ukraine
- In Ukraine: Lithuanian and Polish rule
  …Lithuanians into the Latin (Roman Catholic) church. The spread of Catholicism among the Lithuanians and the attendant diffusion of the Polish language, culture, and notions of political and social order among the Lithuanian nobility eroded the position of the Orthodox Ruthenians, as had happened earlier in Galicia. In 1569,…
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- In Ukraine: Religious developments
  The Roman Catholic Church, steadily expanding eastward into Ukraine, enjoyed the support of the state and legal superiority over the Orthodox. External pressures and restrictions were accompanied by a serious internal decline in the Ruthenian church. From the mid-16th century, both Catholicism, newly reinvigorated by the…
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Wycliffe and the Lollards
- In Lollard
  …their views and conform to Roman Catholic doctrine. The sect continued to multiply, however, among townspeople, merchants, gentry, and even the lower clergy. Several knights of the royal household gave their support, as well as a few members of the House of Commons.
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- In John Wycliffe: Wycliffe’s attack on the church
  …beliefs and practices of the church. Theologically, this was facilitated by a strong predestinarianism that enabled him to believe in the “invisible” church of the elect, constituted of those predestined to be saved, rather than in the “visible” church of Rome—that is, in the organized, institutional church of his day.…
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China

Kangxi
- In Kangxi: Administration of the empire
  …contributions by the Jesuits endeared Roman Catholicism to Kangxi, who gave official permission for its propagation in 1692 and later gave French missionaries a residence within the imperial city and built a church for them in Beijing in gratitude for curing him of malaria. His sympathy attracted to China more…
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Qianlong
- In Qianlong: Relations with the West
  …modify the imperial reserve regarding Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholic preaching remained officially forbidden after the “Rites Controversy”—a quarrel over the compatibility of ancestor worship with Roman Catholicism—that pitted the pope’s legate against the Kangxi emperor at the beginning of the 18th century. Although the work of the missionaries continued to…
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contribution by

Allouez
- In Claude-Jean Allouez
  …been called the founder of Catholicism in the West.
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Loyola
- In St. Ignatius of Loyola
  …most influential figures in the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 16th century, and founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in Paris in 1534.
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Ricci
- In Matteo Ricci: Early life and education
  Approved by the pope in 1540, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was already well known for its spirit of apostolic initiative. Its members were distinguishing themselves in scientific research as well as in their voyages to new worlds. Stimulated by the examples of his seniors, Ricci dedicated himself…
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Xavier
- In St. Francis Xavier
  …December 3) was the greatest Roman Catholic missionary of modern times who was instrumental in the establishment of Christianity in India, the Malay Archipelago, and Japan. In Paris in 1534 he pronounced vows as one of the first seven members of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits
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missions and missionaries

In mission
The Roman Catholic Church, reformed and revitalized after the Council of Trent (1545–63), sent missionaries into the newly discovered and conquered territories of three Catholic empires: Spain, Portugal, and France. As a result, Christianity was established in Central and South America, in the Caribbean, and in…
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In Christianity: Roman Catholic mission, 1500–1950
In the 15th century European nations began a process of exploration and colonization that brought them more fully into contact with the rest of the world and facilitated the spread of Christianity. Motivated in part by Christian zeal, Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) launched exploratory voyages along the…
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Central Africa
- In Central Africa: Economic organization
  In the Belgian sphere the Roman Catholic church took a high profile and eventually established a Catholic university through which to train not only colonial whites but also a small elite of Black Africans. The rival to the state church was an independent Black church, built in honour of the…
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to 800 AD

Albania
- In Albania: From Illyria to Albania
  …under the jurisdiction of the Roman pope until 732. In that year the iconoclast Byzantine emperor Leo III, angered by Albanian archbishops because they had supported Rome in the Iconoclastic Controversy, detached the Albanian church from the Roman pope and placed it under the patriarch of Constantinople. When the Christian…
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Britain
- In United Kingdom: The decline of Roman rule
  …there was also a powerful Roman Catholic party anxious to reforge the links with Rome, in support of whom St. Germanus of Auxerre visited Britain in 429. It may have been partly to thwart the plans of this party that Vortigern made the mistake (c. 430; the date given by…
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Byzantine Empire
- In Byzantine Empire: The Iconoclastic controversy
  …relations between the empire and Roman Catholic Europe. The Lombard advance, it may be remembered, had restricted Byzantine authority in Italy to the exarchate of Ravenna, and to that quarter the popes of the 7th century, themselves ordinarily of Greek or Syrian origin, turned for protection against the common enemy.…
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Clovis’s conversion
- In Clovis I
  …made of Clovis’s conversion to Catholicism. One of the first Germanic kings to do so, he did, in fact, convert to Catholicism, but recent analysis of the contemporary sources that describe his reign—especially of a letter written by Avitus of Vienne congratulating him on his baptism—suggests that Clovis did not…
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- In France: The conversion of Clovis
  …a leader of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, Clovis converted to Catholic Christianity with some 3,000 of his army in 498. This traditional account of the conversion, however, has been questioned by scholars, especially because of the echoes of the conversion of Constantine that Gregory so clearly incorporated in his history.…
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Donatist controversy
- In Donatist
  …Africa that broke with the Roman Catholics in 312 over the election of Caecilian as bishop of Carthage; the name derived from their leader, Donatus (d. c. 355). Historically, the Donatists belong to the tradition of early Christianity that produced the Montanist and Novatianist movements in Asia Minor and the…
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- In North Africa: Christianity and the Donatist controversy
  Christians were still a minority at the end of the 3rd century in all levels of society, but they were in a good position to benefit from Constantine’s adoption of the religion and his grants of various privileges to the clergy. At that time (313)…
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Eastern Orthodox estrangement
- In Eastern Orthodoxy: The cultural context
  …the apostolic origin of the church of Rome, was incompatible with the Eastern idea that the importance of certain local churches—Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and, later, Constantinople—could be determined only by their numerical and political significance. For the East, the highest authority in settling doctrinal disputes was the ecumenical council.
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Italy
- In Italy: The Lombard kingdom, 584–774
  …son were, however, Catholic, and Catholics were common among the Lombards as a whole from at least the 590s as well. Germanic peoples had often been Arians in the 5th and 6th centuries (the Ostrogoths were, for example), but the Lombards seem to have been less committed to Arianism than…
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Middle Ages
- In history of Europe: The organization of late imperial Christianity
  …Latin Christians adopted the term Catholic (from catholicus, “universal”). The term catholic Christianity was originally used to authenticate a normative, orthodox Christian cult (system of religious belief and ritual) on the grounds of its universality and to characterize different beliefs and practices as heterodox on the grounds that they were…
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patristic literature
- In patristic literature: The Apostolic Fathers
  …instructive in showing that the Roman church, even in the late 1st century, was asserting its right to intervene in the affairs of other churches. The letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch at the beginning of the 2nd century, depict the position of the monarchical bishop, flanked by subordinate presbyters…
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Portugal
- In Portugal: Pre-Roman, Roman, Germanic, and Muslim periods
  …restored and was reconverted to Catholicism by St. Martin of Braga. When Muslim forces invaded in 711, the only serious Gothic resistance was made at Mérida; upon its fall the northwest submitted. Berber troops were placed in central Portugal and Galicia. When ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I set up the Umayyad monarchy
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Theodosius I the Great
- In Theodosius I: Early years as emperor
  …were henceforth to be considered Catholic Christians, a designation that here appears for the first time in a document.
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United States

Michigan
- In Michigan: Population composition
  … in its early predominance of Roman Catholicism. Because the first European settlers in Detroit were French Roman Catholics, many immigrants of that faith were attracted to the city even before the large Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrations of the 19th century. Detroit was made a diocese in 1833 and an…
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