Catholics

The schism in the Christian Church brought about by the Reformation in the sixteenth century involved fundamental redefinitions in the notions of authority, as well as radically changed attitudes among those who had traditionally been termed “even Christians” or “fellow Christians.” As the various sects competed for power, what had previously been a vocabulary of solidarity split into labels of vilification. This was especially evident in the enduring prejudicial terms applied to the Pope, to Roman Catholics, and to Rome.

In England, Henry VIII engineered the break with Rome by defying the authority of the Pope and creating in 1534 through “the Act of Supremacy” the new “Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia .” This and subsequent acts demoted the Pope to “the Bishop of Rome,” thus reducing his authority and making him a mere foreign ecclesiastic. This action intensified vehement anti-Catholic feeling, bred of xenophobia, chauvinism, and incipient nationalism. (The title Pope had been used from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, to mean “the spiritual head of a Mohammedan or pagan religion.”) In the Litany of the Book of Common Prayer (1549) the people prayed to be delivered from “the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities.” Some of the vocabulary had been generated during the fourteenth century Wycliffite movement for reform: Pope-holy , a sarcastic formulation with strong suggestions of hypocrisy, is first recorded in William Langland’s Piers Plowman about 1387; equally old is Rome-runner , referring to agents of direct papal taxation, which was obviously unpopular.

There was a rapid expansion of terms such as papish and Romish , laden with hostile overtones of a kind familiar to modern readers in political labels ending in – ism and – ist , such as fascism and racist . A sense of this semantic growth can be gauged from this sample, with dates of first recorded usage: papist (1521), popish (1528), popery (1534), papistical (1537), papistic (1545), papish (1546), papism (1550), popestant (1550), and popeling (1561).

Most of these terms have become obsolete. But some continued to be current for centuries. “Hatred of Roman Catholicism ran like a fever through English society in the seventeenth century, and to call a man a papist was to accuse him of treachery and perfidy” (Lockyer 1967, 11). Guy Fawkes Day (commemorating the Gunpowder Plot, an unsuccessful Catholic conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605) was previously called Pope Day, since the Pope was burnt in effigy, a practice that continued up to the early twentieth century. Though the Popish Plot (1678) turned out to be a fabricated conspiracy concocted by Titus Oates, who was subsequently found guilty of perjury, the intensity of anti-Catholic suspicion made it initially credible. Joseph Addison’s Spectator No. 125 (1714) records this revealing anecdote: “This knight had
occasion to enquire the way to St. Anne’s Lane; upon which the person whom he spoke to called him a young popish cur, and asked him, who made Anne a saint?” The slogan “No popery!” still survives, especially in the political rhetoric of Northern Ireland. Indeed both popery and papist are still recorded in standard dictionaries of British English. The Pope’s nose , insultingly used of “the rump of a fowl,” dates from post-Reformation times, being first recorded in 1796. The more domestic variant, the parson’s nose , emerges about a hundred years later.

The Gunpowder Plot served to aggravate the prejudices against Catholics generally and especially the Jesuit order, already denounced by Philip Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583) as “the diuels agents.” The order’s reputation for casuistry and prevarication have, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary , “rendered the name odious, not only in English, but in other languages.” One of the conspirators, the Jesuit Father Garnet, notoriously continued to equivocate under oath when being interrogated, a point further discussed in the entry for Shakespeare. Thus by 1640 the sense of “dissembling person or prevaricator” was well established. Associations of sodomy and masturbation also developed, the first found in the Earl of Rochester’s ironic vision (ca. 1687) of a Utopia in which

The Jesuits Fraternity
Shall leave the use of Buggery.
(“A Ramble in Saint James’s Park,” ll. 145-46)

The second occurs later, recorded in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), as to box the Jesuit: “A sea term for masturbation; a crime, it is said, much practised by the reverend fathers of that society.” Related opprobrious terms implying casuistry (with dates from the OED ) were jesuit (vb) (1601), jesuitish (1600), jesuitism (1609), jesuitic (1640), and jesuitize (1644). Jesuitical (from 1600) is still in use.

Grose also recorded craw-thumper as a term for Catholics, “so called from their beating their breasts in the confession of their sins.” The same term is applied from 1845 to early Catholic settlers in Maryland. Of the other words that developed in England, only papist appears to have crossed the Atlantic, although poper is also recorded. Among other exclusively American terms are the contemptuous epithets bead-puller, fish-eater , and mackerel-snapper . The modern composite title Roman Catholic is recorded from 1605, since in the words of the OED , the alternatives “simple Roman, Romanist , and Romish had become too invidious.”