In the 1760s the parlement of Paris undertook to destroy the Society of Jesus in the central one-third of France which it controlled, and to use its influence to gain the destruction of the order elsewhere. Its immediate victims were the 1,200 Jesuits resident in 42 colleges and other institutions in its own territory in 1761, but it also claimed authority over any of the other 2,200 French Jesuits who had been born in its territory or might enter it. By this time four French Jesuits in five were priests or future priests whose primary functions were preaching and teaching; the remaining one in five was a temporal coadjutor, often an administrator of property. This ratio prevailed in the groups with whom the parlement dealt. The parlement viewed all Jesuits as enemies and regarded as a Jesuit any man who had ever made vows in that order. Then, as now, members of the Society of Jesus not only made the usual three religious vows but also owed complete obedience to their superior-general in Rome and were bound by the special vow of obedience to the sovereign pontiff taken by the professed of the order. The unique nature of the Jesuit institute was widely understood in France in the 1760s and was a reason for the respect shown to Jesuits by the privileged classes from which many Jesuits came and which they served so well.

After the Rebellion (of 1745) a soldier, on return from Manchester, called at Stretford and tarried at a public house. A man who was a bitter enemy to my parents because they were Papists, dropt into the soldier’s company, and they drank till they were intoxicated. The man told the soldier that if he would go to my father’s house, and demand a sum of money he might have it because we were Papists and no law would be granted us. The soldier came and without apology entered the house. Providentially my father was from home, or it would have cost him his life. The soldier having loaded his fire-lock, clapped it to my mother’s breast and demanded money…. As the soldier was putting the money into his pocket my mother laid hold of the fire-lock, and giving it to me, I immediately ran away and hid it. She then seized the robber by the collar of his coat and shook him, tho’ he was a lusty man and thrusting him out of the door locked it. My father came home and procured a constable to apprehend the soldier and he was brought to our house; but upon acknowledging his fault and returning the money, he was dismissed.

The Devastation reached Palestine on 20 January 1842. She brought with her Michael Solomon Alexander, first Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. The bishop was originally to have been transported to Palestine in HMS Infernal. At this his Lordship demurred and the Admiralty obligingly thought again. So it was that HMS Devastation was the carrier of the bishop to the Holy Land. The Admiralty’s assistance was supplemented by Mr Arthur Guinness, who in the first of his firm’s timely benefactions to the Anglican church had provided without charge a supply of stout.

The liberal outcry occasioned by the publication of the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 concerned in large part the apparent condemnation by Pius IX of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. Lord John Russell quoted practice in Mexico to show that the Pope meant that Roman Catholicism should be maintained to the exclusion of every other form of worship, while the Saturday Review argued that Pius had defended the duty of the Church and the State to persecute those who worked against Roman Catholicism. The main problem for these and other critics was constituted by articles 24, 77 and 79 of the Syllabus: how could these be interpreted except as condemning religious toleration and liberty of speech? A few years later, Gladstone, in attacking the Vatican decrees on the Church, argued that the Syllabus had not only denied the principle of toleration but had also positively favoured persecution, and referred to article 78.

It is surely ironic that while the ‘spoiliation’ of the Irish Church in 1833 provided the initial rallying cry for the Oxford Movement, neither Tractarian spirituality, theology nor its later liturgical innovations ever really took any serious hold on that Church. It is perhaps even more paradoxical to note that though Alexander Knox, one of the forerunners of the movement was a lay member of the Church of Ireland, other sons of that Church, notably Robert Dolling, the notorious ritualist slum-priest; Dowden, the high-church bishop of Edinburgh; and Tyrell, the Catholic modernist, all made their careers outside Ireland. As Bishop Alexander was to comment, perhaps with the more colourful ritualists like Dolling in mind, the Church of Ireland had never to bear the cost of discovering that the liturgy had ‘lips of fire’; though perhaps that is not quite accurate, for, as I hope to show, fear of the heat from those ‘lips of fire’ was to be a major disruptive influence in the life of the Established, and disestablished Church in Ulster.

When Christian missionaries penetrated sub-Saharan Africa during the nineteenth century, three main persecutions of their converts caught the attention of Europe. The earliest took place in Madagascar between 1837 and 1857, when several hundred converts attached to the London Missionary Society were killed. The last of the three occurred in the Buganda kingdom of East Africa and culminated on 3 June 1886 when some 26 Baganda Christians were burned on a single pyre. Both these persecutions took place in autocratic and expanding kingdoms whose modernising rulers had initially welcomed missionaries for their skills. In both kingdoms the missionaries converted younger members of the ruling class. In both, the deaths of the modernising rulers precipitated traditionalist reactions in which converts were killed more to discourage and control Christianity than to extirpate it. Both persecutions were bounded in time. Both failed, leading only to further Christian expansion, the capture of power by Christian modernisers, and their use of the authoritarian political institutions to create overtly Christian kingdoms.

Natal was the second acquisition of the British Empire in Southern Africa. While the Cape Colony was acquired permanently in 1814, and the Orange River Sovereignty temporarily in 1848 only to be abandoned in 1854, Natal was annexed reluctantly but permanently, for mixed strategic and philanthropic reasons, in 1844. The White population at this time was a few thousand, the Black about eighty thousand. The only missionary work that had taken place up to this time was that of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which had established two stations in Zululand in 1835, and the Church Missionary Society. In the period before the annexation they had had little success among the Zulus in Natal, and none at all in Zululand because of Dingane’s attitude to them. All left Zululand in 1838 and the missions were not reopened until the 1860s.

It is easy to vulgarize Max Weber. His assertion that ‘the Protestant Ethic’ was related to capitalism could be, and was, taken to mean that Protestantism was about money whereas Catholicism was about parasitism. Weber himself stoutly denied that any such vulgarization was legitimate. He himself could not see any sense in going through religious documents of early modern Europe with a view to finding out what the various divines had to say on economic subjects: on the contrary, he stressed that ‘Of course our concern is not with what was officially and theoretically laid down in moral compendia of the age … but rather with something quite different—the secular translation (Ermittlung) of the psychological forces, created by religious beliefs and practices, which gave directions for the conduct of one’s life and held the individual to them’. Did Protestantism and Catholicism vary on the ground, in daily life, and especially in economic affairs? It was a good question, and, for the literature and research it generated, one of the most important ones of this century.

The convocation of Bishop’s College, Lennoxville, was gathered in the chapel. In 1910 an honourary doctorate was being conferred on the bishop of Fredericton. In his convocation sermon, Bishop Richardson confided that the most disquieting thing he saw about the religious life of his day was its attitude of sheer indifference. The foe was seen in impatience with doctrinal sermons and in undenominational religion, but most of all it stood ‘naked and unashamed in countless arguements for Christian union.’ It was not the indifference of the masses outside the Church but of the faithful within it that disturbed him. The Christian world was ‘coming to mistake looseness of belief for liberality of thought.’ He conceded a grudging acceptance of the modern view of’the duty of toleration as the characteristic temper of the religious life’, while warning against the ‘danger of being so wide awake to the value of every other man’s opinion as to fail to form any strong intellectual convictions for oneself.’ Although the Inquisition and the fires of Smithfield were hideous, ‘behind all the cruel intolerance of persecution there was something that is lamentably lacking in the Church to-day,—a magnificently stern sense of responsibility for the safekeeping of a sacred trust.’ The Canadian bishops would soon exhibit their stern sense of stewardship.

The debate surrounding the appointment of George Jackson to a chair at Didsbury College in 1913 has been the chief theological controversy of the twentieth century in British Methodism. It forms an instance of an effort to extinguish alleged theological error, an attempt at persecution within rather than outside the church. It was, as contemporaries complained, a heresy hunt, comparable in some respects to the suppression of Modernism in the Roman Catholic Church in the previous decade and in other respects to the outcry over the appointment of Hensley Henson to the Anglican episcopate four years later. The issue was, in fact, most similar to controversies over the legitimacy of biblical criticism that took place in Scotland in the later nineteenth century and in America over a much longer period. Fundamentalists argued that Jackson was unsuitable for the appointment because he was prepared to doubt the historical accuracy of the Bible. The debate and its aftermath raised questions about the limits of toleration, revealed the balance of forces on the propriety of doctrinal discipline and contributed to shaping the destiny of evangelical Protestantism.

This paper runs from the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 to the Pope’s Christmas message of 1942. The final solution of the Jewish problem was planned at the Wannsee Conference under the chairmanship of Heydrich. On 24 December 1942 the Pope believed that he protested publicly against it. On 20 January no one outside the secret inner Nazi ring knew that such a plan was even contemplated. By Christmas 1942 all the world new in outline what was going on. So this paper is partly a study in information: how much did they know in the Vatican, how soon, and by what means did they know it? And partly it is a study in pressure. As the knowledge grew, so grew the pressure on Pope Pius XII to do something, say something, tell the world, condemn. Naturally the effectiveness of all such pressure depended on the extent of the knowledge, and the belief that the knowledge was reliable.

Why have churches in the U.S.S.R. been harassed in recent years? It has been supposed by many that if Stalin stopped most persecution during the Second World War, then things under Khrushchev could only improve. Instead they deteriorated, and all liberties of Soviet citizens received more respect except the religious.

A common answer has been that the Soviet authorities were horrified by the continued hold of religion which they considered to be a threat to Marxism. Such a view is quite popular in the west where a clash of ideologies, with Christianity triumphing over Marxism, consoles churchmen who cannot find such a triumph in their own society. But this assumes that the Soviet rulers consider Christianity to be a religion based on certain tenets, and as Marxists they cannot be expected to do so. For them religion is primarily an instrument of social control.