‘The presence of the incarnation’: Roman Catholic social and political thought in England, 1830-1914

Ó Siochrú, C

Oxford Thesis Collection

Thesis

‘The presence of the incarnation’: Roman Catholic social and political thought in England, 1830-1914

Abstract:: This thesis offers a new intellectual history of Roman Catholicism in England between 1829 and 1914. Charting contributions to a range of national and international debates – theological, philosophical, scientific; socio- economic, ecclesiological, and political – it shows that the dominant mode of Catholic thought was Ultramontane, and argues for a new reading of Ultramontanism. What historians characterise as the ‘ecclesial ideology’ of a ‘fortress Church’ should instead be understood as an incarnational theology preoccupied with the world and its transformation.

Across the 1830s and 40s, a cosmopolitan Ultramontane party staked out a unique position in British public life. Drawing on continental Catholic discourses, they promised to Recusants, Tractarians, and Romantics a comprehensive critique of ‘liberalism’, and an ‘integrated’, incarnational alternative. Their synthesis was comprised of three elements: a eucharistic ecclesiology; a political theology, in which a sovereign Church consecrated society and guaranteed the ‘liberties of Christendom’; and a political economy that fused an incarnational anthropology with Thomist ethics to challenge Malthusian orthodoxy and develop a reformist science of social wealth. This paradigm disrupted national debates and reshaped the Catholic body.

Two mid-century revolutions, which Ultramontanes thought linked, forced them to revise this synthesis. Responding to positivism, they sought new ways to articulate Christ’s ‘real presence’ – historical and dogmatic- sacramental – in the world. Responding to the Risorgimento, they argued that the Church occupied a special place in a secularising modernity: a body politic seeking the world’s transformation into heaven’s antechamber. The dynamised incarnationalism that emerged from this moment positioned Catholics to develop a renewed critique of what they thought fin-de-siècle liberalism’s oppressive cultural politics and economic model. It gained traction in national discussion, but increasingly divided theocratic collectivists from corporatist pluralists and Liberal Catholics. All, however, remained committed to their common inheritance and goal: advancing ‘the Kingdom of the Incarnation’ in social engagement and public debate.

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APA Style

Ó Siochrú, C. (2025). ‘The presence of the incarnation’: Roman Catholic social and political thought in England, 1830-1914 [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.

MLA Style

Ó Siochrú, C. ‘The Presence of the Incarnation’: Roman Catholic Social and Political Thought in England, 1830-1914. 2025. University of Oxford, PhD thesis.

Chicago Style

Ó Siochrú, C. 2025. “‘The Presence of the Incarnation’: Roman Catholic Social and Political Thought in England, 1830-1914.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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