Hierarchy reestablished in England after 300 years

Today marks the death of Nicholas Wiseman (1802-1865), first Archbishop of Westminster and the first resident Cardinal in England for almost three hundred years. In 1850 he oversaw the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales. Under Henry VIII, Roman Catholic dioceses (the most famous being Canterbury) became Anglican. Rather than using the original names, the new R.C. dioceses received different names. So the head diocese under Wiseman was set up at Westminster in London rather than Canterbury. (London made sense for another reason; the bulk of the Catholics in 19th century England were immigrants from Ireland who flocked to England’s urban centers looking for work.)

Born in Spain to an English merchant and a Spanish mother, Wiseman studied at the English College in Rome (one of the many national residences for seminarians attending Roman universities). He was ordained in 1825 and he served as Rector of the English College for twelve years (1828-1840). In 1840 he was made a bishop and sent to England, which was divided into ecclesiastical districts each under the jurisdiction of a Vicar Apostolic. He was named head of Oscott College, a seminary/college set up in 1794. In 1849, he was named Vicar Apostolic of the London District.

When dioceses were reestablished in 1850, Wiseman was named primate (head bishop) of England, with the rank of Cardinal Archbishop. For the next fifteen years he oversaw the expansion of English Catholicism. An impulsive, flamboyant character, his October 1850 pastoral “Out of the Flaminian Gate” started an anti-Catholic riot with its triumphalistic predictions for the future of the Church in England. And his grandiose plans for a pontifical Catholic University in Ireland, headed by John Henry Newman, didn’t get very far. But Wiseman deserves credit for putting English Catholicism back on its feet institutionally for the first time since before Henry VIII. He was also the author of a bestselling novel, Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs (1854), a story of the early Christian persecutions.