Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745-1810
­­­Alexander Lock  

Catholicism has always been characterised by doubt and diversity as much as certainty and uniformity. During the Enlightenment, before the French Revolution brought its critical temper and rational methodology, religious faith was often worn lightly in European society. Worldly and bien pensant prelates, half-believers paying lip ­service to the institutional Church, were the tip of a contemporary iceberg. The Enlightenment entered the bloodstream of the European elite, not least through the teaching of Newtonian science in Catholic colleges.

The English Catholic community was not immune to this context and the second half of the eighteenth century saw a marked decline in Catholic observance. The heroic period of the community, the age of martyrdom, had passed and even Jacobitism, which had provided the English Catholics with a political identity, had given way to acquiescence to the Hanoverians. Individual conscience was being put ahead of corporate identity. Greater government toleration combined with increasing accommodation among Catholics was leading to assimilation and blurred identities Lay leaders of the community were not, however, fully integrated into what remained in many ways a confessional state.