ABSTRACT
PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS (1871) VII. 183–88. In March, 1870, C. N. Newdegate, the member of Parliament for North Warwickshire, and a leading anti-Catholic propagandist, moved successfully for a Select Committee of the House of Commons to inquire into the state of the law relating to convents and monasteries. It was to be the prelude for legislation to secure permanent state inspections of those institutions. But Newdegate’s bills for that purpose, during the next few years, were all unsuccessful. The public reaction against the Vatican Council, which had prompted the appointment of the Convent Inquiry in 1870, was by then a spent force. Yet the Report of 1871 is especially useful, since it examines the whole state of the law relating to Catholic charities and bequests. It illustrates very clearly the extent to which Catholicism was still subject to exceptional statutory controls.
