Throughout the 300 years that followed the Act of Supremacy—which, by making Henry VIII head of the Church, confirmed in law the breach with Rome—English Catholics were prosecuted, persecuted and penalized for the public expression of their faith.
It is a characteristic that excites admiration in even a hardened atheist..
Catholicism survives because it does not compromise.
It is the victory of moral and spiritual unbending certainty.
The survival of Catholicism in Britain is the triumph of more than simple faith.
It tells the story of the men and women who faced the dangers and difficulties of being what their enemies still call "Papists." It describes the laws which circumscribed their lives, the political tensions which influenced their position within an essentially Anglican nation and the changes in dogma and liturgy by which Rome increasingly alienated their Protestant neighbors—and sometime even tested the loyalty of faithful Catholics.
It focuses on the lives, and sometimes deaths, of individual Catholics—martyrs and apostates, priests and laymen, converts and recusants.
The first book to tell the story of the Catholics in Britain in a single volume, The Catholics includes much previously unpublished information.
Even after the passing of the emancipation acts Catholics were still the victims of institutionalized discrimination.
Throughout the 300 years that followed the Act of Supremacy—which, by making Henry VIII head of the Church, confirmed in law the breach with Rome—English Catholics were prosecuted, persecuted and penalized for the public expression of their faith
