Turn of the tides – Catholic Emancipation

24 September 2025, The Tablet

Cardinal Wiseman

Alamy, Rye Hobie

Catholic features – Universalis Ecclesiae

One thing everyone agreed on: the country needed priests. The Catholic population in England was growing fast, not because of the middle-class converts of the Oxford Movement, but largely due to working-class immigration from Ireland: it had become a flood even before the potato famine. The answer, Wiseman believed, was to bring in the newer religious orders such as the Rosminians and the Passionists, regardless of the fact that their Italianate devotions were at odds with those to be found in Bishop Challoner’s ever-popular Garden of the Soul.

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