The Church of Ireland is a Christian church in Ireland, and an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. It is organised on an all-Ireland basis and is the second-largest Christian church on the island after the Roman Catholic Church. Like other Anglican churches, it has retained elements of pre-Reformation practice, notably its episcopal polity, while rejecting the primacy of the pope.
In English history, the penal laws were a series of laws that sought to enforce the State-decreed religious monopoly of the Church of England and, following the 1688 revolution, of Presbyterianism in Scotland, against the continued existence of illegal and underground communities of Catholics, nonjuring Anglicans, and Protestant nonconformists. The Penal laws also imposed various forfeitures, civil penalties, and civil disabilities upon recusants from mandatory attendance at weekly Sunday services of the Established Church. The penal laws in general were repealed in the early 19th-century due to the successful activism of Daniel O'Connell for Catholic Emancipation. Penal actions are civil in nature and were not English common law.
The Test Acts were a series of penal laws originating in Restoration England, passed by the Parliament of England, that served as a religious test for public office and imposed various civil disabilities on Catholics and nonconformist Protestants.
An ecclesiastical court, also called court Christian or court spiritual, is any of certain courts having jurisdiction mainly in spiritual or religious matters. In the Middle Ages, these courts had much wider powers in many areas of Europe than before the development of nation states. They were experts in interpreting canon law, a basis of which was the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian, which is considered the source of the civil law legal tradition.
Sacrilege is the violation or injurious treatment of a sacred object, site or person. This can take the form of irreverence to sacred persons, places, and things. When the sacrilegious offence is verbal, it is called blasphemy, and when physical, it is often called desecration. In a more general sense, any transgression against what is seen as the virtue of religion would be a sacrilege, and so is coming near a sacred site without permission.
Catholic emancipation or Catholic relief was a process in the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, and later the combined United Kingdom in the late 18th century and early 19th century, that involved reducing and removing many of the restrictions on Roman Catholics introduced by the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts and the penal laws. Requirements to abjure (renounce) the temporal and spiritual authority of the pope and transubstantiation placed major burdens on Roman Catholics.
The Registration Act was an act of the Parliament of Ireland passed in 1704, which required all "Popish" priests to register at their local magistrates' court, to pay two 50-pound bonds to ensure good behavior, and to stay in the county where they registered.
An Act to prevent the further Growth of Popery was an Act of the Parliament of Ireland that was passed in 1704 designed to suppress Roman Catholicism in Ireland ("Popery"). William Edward Hartpole Lecky called it the most notorious of the Irish Penal Laws.
Hugh Boulter was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, the Primate of All Ireland, from 1724 until his death. He also served as the chaplain to George I from 1719.
In Ireland, the penal laws were a series of legal disabilities imposed in the seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries on the kingdom's Roman Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, on Protestant "Dissenters". Enacted by the Irish Parliament, they secured the Protestant Ascendancy by further concentrating property and public office in the hands of those who, as communicants of the established Church of Ireland, subscribed to the Oath of Supremacy. The Oath acknowledged the British monarch as the "supreme governor" of matters both spiritual and temporal, and abjured "all foreign jurisdictions [and] powers"—by implication both the Pope in Rome and the Stuart "Pretender" in the court of the King of France.
Irish Catholic Martyrs were 24 Irish men and women who have been beatified or canonized for both a life of heroic virtue and for dying for their Catholic faith between the reign of King Henry VIII and Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
Events from the year 1697 in Ireland.
Richard Woodward was an English Protestant cleric, active in Ireland during the 18th century. Educated at the University of Oxford, he moved to Ireland and would become the author of a vigorous defence of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Woodward was made an Anglican Bishop of Cloyne in the Church of Ireland.
The Roman Catholic Relief Bills were a series of measures introduced over time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before the Parliaments of Great Britain and the United Kingdom to remove the restrictions and prohibitions imposed on British and Irish Catholics during the English Reformation. These restrictions had been introduced to enforce the separation of the English church from the Catholic Church which began in 1529 under Henry VIII.
From the late 1980s, allegations of sexual abuse of children associated with Catholic institutions and clerics in several countries started to be the subject of sporadic, isolated reports. In Ireland, beginning in the 1990s, a series of criminal cases and Irish government enquiries established that hundreds of priests had abused thousands of children over decades. Six reports by the former National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church established that six Irish priests had been convicted between 1975 and 2011. This has contributed to the secularisation of Ireland and to the decline in influence of the Catholic Church. Ireland held referendums to legalise same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018.
The Reformation in Ireland was a movement for the reform of religious life and institutions that was introduced into Ireland by the English administration at the behest of King Henry VIII of England. His desire for an annulment of his marriage was known as the King's Great Matter. Ultimately Pope Clement VII refused the petition; consequently, in order to give legal effect to his wishes, it became necessary for the King to assert his lordship over the Catholic Church in his realm. In passing the Acts of Supremacy in 1534, the English Parliament confirmed the King's supremacy over the Church in the Kingdom of England. This challenge to Papal supremacy resulted in a breach with the Catholic Church. By 1541, the Irish Parliament had agreed to the change in status of the country from that of a Lordship to that of Kingdom of Ireland.
The Recusancy referred to those who refused to attend services of the state-established Anglican Church of Ireland. The individuals were known as "recusants". The term, which derives ultimately from the Latin recusare, was first used in England to refer to those who remained within the Roman Catholic Church and did not attend services of the Church of England, with a 1593 statute determining the penalties against "Popish recusants".
Events from the year 1704 in Ireland.
The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793 was an Act of the Parliament of Ireland, implicitly repealing some of the Irish Penal Laws and relieving Roman Catholics of certain political, educational, and economic disabilities.
John Baptist Sleyne was Roman Catholic Bishop of Cork and Cloyne and Apostolic Administrator of the diocese of Ross, who was an enthusiastic patron of the Gaelic language and culture, and an advocate of the severely repressed Roman Catholic population, in Ireland during the early period of the Penal Laws. He was one of only two bishops to minister in Ireland at the end of the 17th century. Sleyne was very learned in languages and moral theology, and had traveled widely. He was known to and had interactions with kings, queens, popes and wider cultural and religious establishment throughout Ireland and Europe. Because Sleyne "remain[ed] in the kingdom contrary to the [penal] law", of the time, he went into hiding. He was eventually brought before the courts in 1698 and spent five years in prison in Cork Gaol. During his time as Bishop, both as fugitive and prisoner, Sleyne ordained many priests and consecrated several bishops in Ireland. He was eventually exiled to Portugal, on 11 February 1703, where he was given shelter in the Irish Dominican Convento do Bom Sucesso, Lisbon. He died in Portugal on 16 February 1712, aged 74 years and is buried at the altar of the Sacred Heart in the Church of Nossa Senhora do Bom Sucesso.
