Further relief was granted in the Act of 1832-2 and 3 Will. IV. c. 115—which in respect to schools, places of worship, education and charitable purposes, placed Catholics upon the same footing as Protestant dissenters—i.e., brought them within the Toleration Act, 1688, which had given Protestant dissenters liberty of public worship in their own registered buildings.
In 1844 a fresh advance was made, in the Act 7 and 8 Vic. C. 102, which repealed a whole series of penal Acts, some of which had already become obsolete or anachronistic, such as the 5 and 6 Ed. VI. c. I, which made it an offence to be present at any religious service except that prescribed by the Act ; the 1 Eliz. c. I, which forfeited all a man's possessions if he taught the spiritual authority of the Popes, and the 1 Eliz. c. 2, which made attend ance at the parish church on Sunday compulsory. Roman Cath olics were also exempted from the obligation to attend a service of thanksgiving on Guy Fawkes day, and they were permitted to send their children "to be popishly bred beyond the Seas," and, even though converts, they were permitted (what had been pro hibited to converts by 25 Car. 1 1, c. 2) to "breed up" their chil dren in the popish religion. There was also repealed the statute of 1688 which had made it an offence punishable by three months' imprisonment, forfeiture, and payment of treble value of the articles seized, for any papist or suspected papist who refused to subscribe the declaration against Transubstantiation and the invocation of saints, to possess arms or ammunition or a horse worth more than £5. But even this enabling Act retained the prohibition of I Jac. I., c. 4 against Catholics keeping schools. The purport of the Act nevertheless was to emphasize and round off the work of the Acts of 1829 and 1832, and restore the legality of the Roman Catholic religion.
The restoration was not however complete. The tangled mass of penal legislation was not cleared away even by the Act of 1844; there was indeed a set-back in the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 1851, which forbade Catholic bishops assuming territorial titles from places in the United Kingdom; but that Act was repealed in 1867.
In 186o some further relief was granted in the Roman Catholic Charities Act, which nrdained that charitable gifts for Catholic purposes should not be invalidated because they included a pur pose deemed to be superstitious or otherwise unlawful, but that the illegal part of the disposition might be separated by the Chancery Court and given to a lawful Catholic purpose.
The Promissory Oaths Acts 1867 and 1871 gave further relief by abolishing the oaths still imposed upon Catholics (the sov ereign's coronation declaration against Transubstantiation was changed to a mere declaration of Protestantism in 191o).
Disabilities still remained however, and in 1926 yet another repeal Act was passed, the Roman Catholic Relief Act, 1926 (which however does not apply to Northern Ireland). The enact ments repealed by this latest legislation are, in addition to the repeal of the law against religious orders already referred to, as follows :—The Act of forbidding the possession of Catholic liturgies and books of devotion and statues, is repealed. The Religious Houses Act, 1559, which declared religious orders to be superstitious, and gifts for their benefit therefore voidable, as being for a superstitious use is also revoked. So is the Act of 1715, above referred to, for appointing commissioners to raise money out of recusants' estates. Then the Relief Act of 1791
was made more fully relieving by removing from it the section which forbade steeples and bells in Catholic churches and pro hibited a priest from officiating at funerals in (presumably Prot estant) churches or church-yards, or from exercising any rights or ceremonies or wearing the habits of an order out of doors or in a private house where more than five persons in addition to the household were assembled, or from exercising his functions at all unless he had first taken the oath of allegiance and abjuration (a similar prohibition in the Act of 1829 being also removed). From the Act of 1791 was also eliminated the section which pro hibited the establishment or endowment of a religious order or school or college by Roman Catholics.
What must be regarded as further relief from the penal laws was made in a judicial decision, and so would more accurately be described as the removal of a misunderstanding of the law. It related to bequests for masses for the testator's soul, and the decision may be classed with the measures of legislative relief since, until 1919, when the decision was given, it had been assumed (after ineffectual attempts to obtain legal sanction for such be quests) that they were unlawful. The decision was given by the House of Lords in the case of Bourne v. Keane (Law Rep. [1919] App. Cas. 815). It overruled the leading case of West v. Shuttle worth (decided in 1835) and other cases following that decision, which had proceeded on the assumption that bequests for masses for the dead were now illegal because the Chantries Act of 1547 had confiscated gifts for such masses in existence at that time. It was held by the House of Lords in Bourne v. Keane that this was a wrong interpretation of the Chantries Act, that that Act did not govern subsequent bequests, and that with the repeal of the statutes which had made the Catholic religion illegal, the old common law legality of masses for the dead revived.
Subject to the Protestantism of the Crown and the lord chan cellorship and of the provisions of the law for preventing Roman Catholics interfering in the management of the Church of Eng land, as by nominating to benefices, it may now be said, with some confidence (but the maze of anti-Catholic legislation and the piecemeal nature and intricacies of the repeals make absolute con fidence appear rash) that full liberty is now restored to the Catholic religion, and equality also, except as regards the incidents attaching to the Protestant Establishment, which has inherited the old-time property and privileges of the Catholic Church. And whenever new legislation is passed in which the interests of re ligion are affected (as in education, guardianship of children, chap laincies or poor law) the Roman Catholic religion receives equal treatment with other denominations. (E. E. W.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-See also article "Church" by G. M. Joyce, and article "Catholic" by Herbert Thurston in the Catholic Encyclopedia; Murray, De Ecclesia (Dublin, 1866) ; Wiseman, Lectures on the Church; Newman, Development of Christian Doctrine; Difficulties of Anglicans, and Essays Historical and Critical (Essay IX.) ; Batiffol, Etudes d'histoire et de la theologie positive (Paris, 1906) ; Turmel, His toire de la theologie positive (1904) ; Wilhelm and Scannell, Manual of Catholic Theology; G. K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Con version (1926) ; H. Belloc, The Catholic Church and History (1926).