Catholic return

The persecution of and discrimination against English Catholics came to an end gradually in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This process of ‘Catholic Emancipation’ made its mark on the City of Oxford, as new communities arrived and new Churches were built. The Oxford University Act of 1854 and the Universities Tests Act of 1871 allowed Catholics to receive a degree from and be employed by the University and colleges for the first time since the Reformation. Catholics had come to Oxford to study informally over the previous centuries – particularly at Gloucester Hall which would later become Worcester College – but they could neither matriculate (formally enrol) nor graduate. Although the Pope attempted to ban Catholics from studying here until 1896, many English Catholic men began taking up the new opportunity. In the following decades, halls and colleges, chapels and societies were set up to cater for this new community in the predominantly Protestant University. There were the occasional tensions and conflicts between Protestant and Catholic undergraduates. Many contemporary Catholics saw this not as a moment of arrival but of return. New buildings and artworks harked back to the pre-Reformation past, asserting historical continuity and presenting this new influx as a long-awaited homecoming.