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From Without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales 1850-2000. Edited by V. Alan McClelland and Michael Hodgetts. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. 1999. Pp. xvii, 406. L24.95.)
On September 29,1850, Pope Pius IX restored the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales. Soon afterwards, the new Archbishop of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman, issued a pastoral letter from Rome, "From Without the Flaminian Gate," which announced the pope's plans to the country's Roman Catholics. The Roman authorities had worked hard to soften the protests which would greet this papal action, but the exuberant rhetoric in Wiseman's message neutralized these plans. Protests in the press, hostile comments from Anglican bishops, an act of parliament, the burning of Wiseman and the other bishops in effigy, and the threat of hostile mobs demonstrated that anti-Catholicism flourished in Victorian England. But the climate has changed during this century. The tributes following the death of Cardinal Basil Hume in June, 1999, just short of the 150th anniversary of the restoration of the hierarchy and the new millennium, revealed that Roman Catholicism had become...