ABSTRACT
This chapter explains both aspects of Roman Catholic worship, and the buildings associated with it, between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of the last acts of the Council of Trent was to request a reform of the liturgical rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The Council had been summoned by Pope Paul III, partly to respond to the allegations made against the church by the reformers. The one change that the Council of Trent declined to make to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church was the language in which it was celebrated. Except in the case of some of the Uniate Eastern churches, the liturgy remained in Latin until the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Before the second half of the seventeenth century, Roman Catholicism was a largely proscribed religion in England and Wales. Roman Catholics were regarded as political traitors, houses of Roman Catholics likely to be raided and priests executed.
