Excerpt from Observations on the Laws and Ordinances Which Exist in Foreign States: Relative to the Religious Concerns of Their Roman Catholic Subjects

It is the peculiar characteristic of the warfare which is directed against the Catholic Church, that its combatants remember nothing which they should know, and forget nothing which it would be more wise, if not more honourable, to banish from their recollection. They move for ever in the same circle: they return again and again to the same manoeuvres; and, however they may have been previously discomfited or defeated, they advance, at intervals, by the same approaches, to make the same attacks in which they have so constantly been repulsed.

We have an instance of this, at the present moment, in the reproduction, by order of the House of Commons, of the Report of a Committee originally drawn up in 1816, on "the Laws and Ordinances of Foreign States, regulating the intercourse between their Roman Catholic Subjects and the See of Rome." So far back as the year 1812, it had become evident, from the growing liberality of the age, and the increased importance of the Catholic body, that the time was approaching when the removal of all civil disabilities, on the score of religion, must be effected; and, with a view, therefore, to prepare itself to legislate on the subject, the government, through Lord Castlereagh, and at the instigation, if not at the suggestion, of Sir John Cox Hippisley, instructed the English ministers, accredited to foreign courts, to ascertain the precise regulations by which the Catholics, in the several states of Europe, were governed in ecclesiastical matters, and to transmit the information, when obtained, to the authorities at home. On the conclusion of the general peace, in 1815, further instructions to the same persons, and to the same effect, were issued by Lord Bathurst, in the absence of Lord Castlereagh; and, in the following year, the returns made by the several ambassadors and ministers having been successively presented to the House of Commons, they were finally, on the motion of Sir John Cox Hippisley, referred to a select committee for its report. That report was brought up on the 25th of June, and ordered to be printed.

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