ABSTRACT
PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS (1867) VIII. 17–18. A Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed in 1867 to examine the operation of both the Ecclesiastical Titles Act and the Catholic Emancipation Act. The Committee reported in favour of the repeal of the Act of 1851, and of section 24 of the Act of 1829 which dealt with the assumption of territorial titles by Catholic dignitaries. Most of the evidence heard by the Committee related to Ireland, where the Acts had produced most irritation, and, as Judge O’Hagan declared in his evidence, had tended ‘to separate the R.C. hierarchy from the civil government’. But in 1868 a House of Lords select Committee reported in favour of the retention of existing legal safeguards of the Establishment, and it was not until 1872 that Gladstone’s government repealed the Ecclesiastical Titles Act.
