Catholic Church in England and Wales

The Catholic Church in England and Wales is part of the worldwide Catholic Church in full communion with the Pope, who is currently Pope Benedict XVI. According to church tradition, it traces its origins to the original Christian community founded by Jesus, with its traditions first established by the Twelve Apostles and maintained through unbroken Apostolic Succession and its formal history dates from the early days of Christianity in the Western Roman Empire. Catholic Christianity was established in what are now England and Wales in the first centuries AD, and in 597, the first authoritative papal mission, establishing a direct link from the Kingdom of Kent to Rome and to the Benedictine form of monasticism, was carried into effect by Augustine of Canterbury.

Following this mission, known as the Gregorian mission, England adhered to the Western (Catholic) Church for almost a thousand years, from the time of Augustine of Canterbury; but in 1534, during the reign of King Henry VIII, the greater part of the Church in England, through a series of legislative acts between 1533 and 1536[1][2] was separated from the broader Catholic Church, and a new ecclesial entity, the Church of England, was created with Henry as its 'supreme governor'.[3][4][5] Under his son, Edward VI, the Church of England became more influenced by the European Protestant movement but it rejoined the Catholic Church during the reign of Queen Mary I in 1555. The two Statutes of Repeal to make the reunion with Catholicism were worded as definitive but the reunion was short-lived. Mary's sister, Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, re-established the Church of England's independence from Rome in a 1559 settlement and reformulated its teaching and practice in the Act of Uniformity. Elizabeth was finally excommunicated in 1570. The Catholic Church (along with other non-established churches) continued in England, although it was subject to various forms of persecution, with most recusant members (except those in diaspora on the continent or part of the aristocracy) going underground for all practical purposes until 1832 when the Catholic Emancipation Act came into force. Dioceses (replacing districts) were re-established by Pope Pius IX in 1850. Apart from the 22 Latin Rite dioceses, there is the Eastern Catholic diocese of the Apostolic Exarchate for Ukrainians.

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