WALES, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN

Located on the island of Great Britain, the principality of Wales is located west of England. Bounded on the north by the Irish Sea and Ireland, on the south by the Bristol Channel, and on the west by St. George's Channel, Wales comprises the upland region known as the Cambrian Mountains. Its northern and southern coasts are largely industrialized, but its mountainous interior is pastoral and sparsely settled.

Wales ("Cymru" in the Welsh language) has been politically integrated with England since 1536, and is now part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and

Northern Ireland. Despite its political links to England, the region retains many distinctive cultural characteristics. About 30 percent of the inhabitants speak Welsh, along with English. Welsh literature originated in the 5th century and is one of the important European Catholic literatures.

Early and Medieval Christianity. Wales was originally inhabited by a Celtic people, the Cymric. According to Tertullian and Origen, Christianity had entered the region by the 2d century, in conjunction with the Roman occupation. Another indication of the early introduction of Christianity is the rough coincidence between the territories of the ancient Dioceses of Saint Davids, saint asaph, bangor, and llandaff and those of the four pre-Roman tribes. Since three British bishops attended the Council of arles (314), an ecclesiastical organization must have existed then.

Celtic missionaries completely christianized Wales by the end of the 6th century. The end of Roman rule (406) exposed Britain to raids by pagan Saxons, particularly in eastern sections of the island. In western Britain (modern Wales), St. Elen, disciple of martin of tours before 400, inaugurated Celtic monasticism, which transcended the enervated, urbanized Catholicism of the Roman occupation. Welsh Christianity received its distinctive form during the age of the saints (sancti ). The saints were Christians, trained in the ascetical discipline of the Egyptian desert fathers, who lived in a fraternity (clas). Among the best-remembered figures are david (patron of Wales), illtud, Teilo, Dyfrig, Beuno, and Samson. Monastic colleges at Llantwit Major, Glamorgan, and elsewhere gathered students from other lands.

In 597 augustine of canterbury, personal emissary of Pope gregory i to the English, requested of Welsh and Celtic bishops personal submission to him and modification of certain customs that had evolved in Wales and other Celtic lands because of their isolation from the continental Church. Inferring that this would substitute submission of the Welsh Church to Canterbury for their direct allegiance to Rome, the bishops refused; they also rejected Augustine's requests for abolition of the Celtic tonsure, readjustment of the date of Easter to Continental usage (see easter controversy), and uniformity in the baptismal rite. This event, of traumatic importance in Welsh ecclesiastical history, was reflected in the hatred between Christian Welsh and pagan English that can be found in contemporary Welsh literature. The disputed points were conceded in 768 to Elfodd, a young Welsh bishop. (see celtic rite.)

The 6th century climaxed the age of the saints, and British coastal islands still bear evidence of their settlements. Records of the 8th to 11th centuries are meager. Despite the struggle against Norse raiders, Christian society progressed, and in 950 emerged the laws of Wales, codified by Prince Hywel the Good with monastic aid; they revealed a Christian stamp on the social order. By the time of the reign of Prince Owain in North Wales (1137–69), Norman infiltration had begun. In 1143 the Norman Gilbert became bishop of Saint Asaph. The Welsh hierarchy came increasingly under the control of Canterbury. Welsh arguments against this were so cogent that Bernard, first Norman bishop of Saint Davids, the primatial see, carried the Welsh case to Rome; but his attempt proved unsuccessful. The key interpreter of this struggle was giraldus cambrensis, of Welsh and Norman princely birth, archdeacon of Saint Davids (1176) who fought for and lost the case at Rome for an independent Welsh hierarchy. Until the death of Llywellyn (1282), last prince of Wales, the Welsh princes opposed foreign administration of Welsh dioceses, because it deflected their direct allegiance to Rome, and did so by royal violence, not by papal authority. Llywellyn's death also ended Welsh formal diplomatic contacts at Rome. Later popes, however, sought to strengthen the Welsh Church against increasing political erosion by England.

The imposition of Norman ecclesiastical organization increased the difficulties. The Celtic structure, derived from monastic origins, consisted of mother churches served by daughter churches over wide areas. The Norman pattern of territorially defined dioceses required a century to establish. Archdeacons, assisted by rural deans, became pivotal men. Roman canons of discipline and ecclesiastical courts were introduced. Three issues proved insoluble: hereditary succession to ecclesiastical office, clerical celibacy, and marriage within prohibited degrees. Of the religious orders, the canons regular of st. augustine were established earliest; but the cistercians, whose arrival was independent of all political association, were the most loved. They cultivated desolate lands and were learned in native tradition; and therefore they recalled the age of the sancti. During the 13th century, the newly established mendicant orders of

franciscans, dominicans, and carmelites came to Wales. They were superior in contemporary learning to monks and secular clergy, but the latter continued to maintain traditions of scholarship. Following the decrees of the Fourth lateran council in 1215 the type of theology popularized by the Dominicans began to appear. Augustinian theology, mediating through the Victorine school (see saint-victor, monastery of), and varied trends in scholastic theology coming from Oxford and Paris were reflected in contemporary literature.

In 1284, two years after the death of Welsh King Llewellan, Edward I of England completed the conquest of Wales, and the region became an English principality. Cultural differences remained between Wales and England, however, and by 1400 these differences had sparked a national rebellion, which lasted ten years. It was led by Owain Glyndwr, who supported the Avignon claimant to the papacy (see western schism) and destroyed all church property held by incumbent agents of English expansion. Seculars, Cistercians, and Franciscans supported Glyndwr's unsuccessful uprising. In addition to causing enormous material loss to the Church, Glyndwr's rebellion did little to aid in the Church's transition to a diocesan, rather than monastic structure.

Introduction of Protestantism. From the mid-14th to the mid-15th century the Church's structure became increasingly unstable. The practice of farming out Church land led to a preponderance of lay control, while abbots became privileged landowners. Welsh sees were staffed by politically appointed Englishmen en route to preferment in England. Yet social recovery in the years after the rebellions was rapid and beneficial to the Church, since the faithful remained loyal. As Welsh literature testifies, Pope Nicholas V's jubilee in 1450 revived pilgrimages to Rome, santiago de compostela, and elsewhere, while Cistercian monastic discipline tightened under the reform of John de Cireyo of Cîteaux (1467–1503).

While Church ritual and hierarchical organization became increasingly stable, lay control continued to be a source of grave abuses. Clerical celibacy was enforced briefly by Queen mary tudor. In 1536, when Henry VIII suppressed all monasteries in England following his break with Rome and his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, the loss of the 47 Welsh religious houses was a grievous blow in a land of so few institutions. Formal grammar and bardic schooling ended, while the persecution of Catholics began. The persecution would last for the next 150 years, causing many ordinary folk to suffer heroically. Between 1557 and 1680, 91 Welsh Catholics sacrificed their lives publicly for the faith, and hundreds more testified in obscurity (see reformation, protes tant in the british isles; england, scotland, and wales, martyrs of).

Meanwhile, illustrious Welsh Catholic exiles abroad contributed to the Counter Reformation with translations and original works for circulation in Wales. Perceiving the need for literacy, Gruffydd Robert, confessor to St. Charles Borromeo in Milan, produced his famous Grammadeg (Welsh Grammar). Later his Y Drych Cristionogawl (Mirror of Christianity) was printed in a cliffside cave near Llandudno. Throughout the period of the penal laws, numerous Welsh aspirants to the priesthood left for continental seminaries. Up to the Civil War (1642) more than 25 percent of British clerical students in continental seminaries were from North Wales. It was not persecution that caused Catholicism to yield, but the puritans, whose preachers came in the wake of the Civil War and supplied the spiritually starved Welsh with religious nourishment.

The oates plot (1678–81) definitively ended the old Catholicism in Wales as in England. Movements dissenting from the formalism of Anglicanism kept multiplying. By 1750 Methodism, Calvinistic or Wesleyan, prevailed in Wales. There developed a different religious culture, based on literacy and the ability to read the Welsh Bible, translated in 1588 by Bp. William Morgan at the command of Elizabeth I. Welsh religion was henceforth presented entirely in the Welsh vernacular.

The Catholic Church after 1800. Modern Catholicism came to Wales early in the 19th century, brought by immigrants from Ireland who were attracted by the industrial revolution. From 1688 to 1840 the few Catholics living in Wales were under the jurisdiction of the vicars apostolic of the Western District, resident in Bath, England. In 1801 the population of the counties of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, which combined totaled 126,000, included only two Catholics, in Cardiff. Within the entire region, there were only 1,000 Catholics and a few private Catholic chapels. But within 40 years industrialism would increase the population to 305,000. About 1847 famine in Ireland forced thousands of destitute Irish to this Nonconformist milieu where numerous Catholic missions took root. Msgr. Peter Bernardine Collingridge, OSF, became vicar apostolic. Priests worked among impoverished exiles; frequently they had to contend also with strong opposition from Nonconformists. Catholic emancipation came in 1829. In that year Peter baines succeeded Collingridge as vicar apostolic.

In 1840, when the Western District was divided into two vicariates, Wales (including the county of Monmouthshire, which is sometimes considered part of England) and the English county of Herefordshire formed one of them. When the hierarchy was restored in 1850, the six counties of South Wales plus Monmouthshire and Herefordshire became the Diocese of Newport and Menevia; and the six counties of North Wales, part of the English Diocese of Shrewsbury. In 1895 the Vicariate of Wales was created by uniting all Welsh counties except Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire, and from 1898 to 1916 this area formed the Diocese of Menevia, suffragan to Westminster. Glamorganshire, Monmouthshire, and Herefordshire constituted the Diocese of Newport from 1896 to 1916, when the name was changed to Cardiff. Since 1916 Wales has been a separate ecclesiastical province with the Archdiocese of cardiff as metropolitan and Menevia and Wrexham as its suffragans. The county system was redrawn in 1974, and by 2000 Wales was politically divided into eight counties.

Oblates of Mary Immaculate came from Brittany in 1900, and maintained a mission in the Conway Valley in North Wales until World War I. A Welsh seminary, founded at Holywell in 1904, lasted until 1933. After the Anglican monastic community on Caldey Island, South Pembrokeshire, was converted to Catholicism in 1913, it functioned as a Benedictine community until 1928, when French Cistercians obtained Caldey, and the previous occupants moved to prinknash abbey.

Into the Twenty-First Century. In 2000 Wales boasted 153,286 Catholics, 89 churches and chapels, 2 bishops, and 258 priests. There were 187 parish churches in the principality. Because of their relatively small numbers, Welsh Catholics have organized few religiousbased organizations. Wales traditionally joined England in its Conference of Bishops.

Bibliography: c. gross, Sources and Literature of English History … to 1485 (2d ed. New York 1915; repr. 1952). c. read, ed., Bibliography of British History: Tudor Period, 1485–1603 (2d ed. New York 1959). g. davies, ed., Bibliography of British History, Stuart Period, 1603–1714 (Oxford 1928). s. macc. pargellis and d. j. medley, eds., Bibliography of British History, 1714–89 (Oxford 1951). a. w. w. evans, Welsh Christian Origins (Oxford 1934). g. williams, The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation (Cardiff 1962). d. attwater, The Catholic Church in Modern Wales (London 1935). k. s. latourette, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age: A History of Christianity in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York 1958–62). v.2, 4. Bilan du Monde 2:752–766. CathDir (London 1838—). Annuarai Pontifico.

[c. m. daniel/eds.]