"This irreligious art of liing" : strategies of disguise in post-reformation English catholicism

Mullett, M. A. A. (2007) "This irreligious art of liing" : strategies of disguise in post-reformation English catholicism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 20 (3). pp. 328-340. ISSN 1467-6443

Abstract

In the long Tridentine phase of Catholic history, the conduct of the Church, faith and praxis was nothing if not demonstrative in its execution, devising, for example, a triumphalist architectural and artistic form, the baroque, that shouted out its advertisements for an apparently ultra-confident creed. The great Council that created the tone of Catholicism over the four centuries that followed it defined the priest in particular as a public exemplar of the faith, a man of unambiguous integrity, stable residence and assured income. In England, as in the Netherlands, in contrast, the practice of the faith was covert, not overt, and priests were men on the run, sacerdotal vagrants, adopting a culture of deceit and disguise that aligned their lifestyles were those of any criminal underground: they used disguises, false papers, encoded language, aliases and fictive personae, employed chains of people-handlers and safe-houses, setting up patterns of behaviour that distanced them (a) from the clerical requirements of the Tridentine Church itself and (b) from assumptions about truth that were becoming firmly embedded in English Protestant culture: Catholicism itself could be presented as an "irreligious art of liing".