Catholic Church in England and Wales

The Catholic Church in England and Wales (Latin: Ecclesia Catholica in Anglia et Cambria; Welsh: Yr Eglwys Gatholig yng Nghymru a Lloegr) is part of the worldwide Catholic Church in full communion with the Holy See. Its origins date from the 6th century, when Pope Gregory I through a Roman missionary and Benedictine monk, Augustine, later Augustine of Canterbury, intensified the evangelization of the Kingdom of Kent, linking it to the Holy See in 597 AD.

This unbroken communion with the Holy See lasted until King Henry VIII ended it in 1534. Communion with Rome was restored by Queen Mary I in 1555 following the Second Statute of Repeal and eventually finally broken by Elizabeth I's 1559 Religious Settlement, which made "no significant concessions to Catholic opinion represented by the church hierarchy and much of the nobility."

For 250 years, the government forced members of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church known as recusants to go underground and seek academic training in Catholic Europe, where exiled English clergy set up schools and seminaries for the sons of English recusant families. The government also placed legislative restrictions on Catholics, some continuing into the 20th century, while the ban on Catholic worship lasted until the Catholic Relief Act 1791. The ban did not, however, affect foreign embassies in London, although serving priests could be hounded. During this time, the English Catholic Church was divided between the upper classes, aristocracy and gentry, and the working class.

The Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales claims 6.2 million members. That makes it the second largest single church if Christianity is divided into separate denominations. In the 2001 United Kingdom census, Catholics in England and Wales were roughly 8% of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they represented only 4.8% of the population. In 1981, 8.7% of the population of England and Wales were Catholic. In 2009, post the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, when thousands of Central Europeans (mainly heavily Catholic Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks, and Slovenes) came to England, an Ipsos Morioka poll found that 9.6% were Catholics in England and Wales. In the 2021 census, the total Christian population dropped to 46% (about 27.6 million people).

In North West England one in five are Catholic, a result of the high number of English recusants in Lancashire and large-scale Irish migration in the 19th century particularly centered in Liverpool.

Much of Great Britain was incorporated into the Roman Empire during the Roman conquest of Britain, starting in 43 AD, conquering lands inhabited by Celtic Britons. The indigenous religion of the Britons under their priests, the Druids, was suppressed; most notably, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus launched an attack on Anglesey (or Ynys Môn) in 60 AD and destroyed the shrine and sacred groves there. In the following years, Roman influence saw the importation of several religious cults into Britain, including Roman mythology, Mithraism and the imperial cult. One of these sects, then disapproved by the Roman authorities, was the Palestinian-originated religion of Christianity. While it is unclear exactly how it arrived, the earliest British figures considered saints by the Christians are St. Alban followed by SS Julius and Aaron, all in the 3rd century.

Eventually, the position of the Roman authorities on Christianity moved from hostility to toleration with the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, and then enforcement as state religion following the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, becoming a key component of Romano-British culture and society. Records note that Romano-British bishops, such as Restitutus, attended the Council of Arles in 314, which confirmed the theological findings of an earlier convocation held in Rome (the Council of Rome) in 313. The Roman departure from Britain in the following century and the subsequent Germanic invasions sharply decreased contact between Britain and Continental Europe. Christianity, however, continued to flourish in the Brittonic areas of Great Britain. During this period certain practices and traditions took hold in Britain and in Ireland that are collectively known as Celtic Christianity. Distinct features of Celtic Christianity include a unique monastic tonsure and calculations for the date of Easter. Regardless of these differences, historians do not consider this Celtic or British Christianity a distinct church separate from general Western European Christianity.

During the Heptarchy, the English people (referred to as the Anglo-Saxons) were converted to Christianity from Anglo-Saxon paganism, from two main directions: