Catholic Church in England and Wales

The Catholic Church in England and Wales is part of the worldwide Catholic Church in full communion with the Holy See. Its origins date from the 6th century, when Pope St Gregory the Great through the Benedictine missionary, Saint Augustine of Canterbury, intensified the evangelization of the Kingdom of Kent linking it to the Holy See in 597 AD. This unbroken communion with the Holy See lasted until the "murderously opinionated monarch Henry VIII" ended it in 1534.
For two hundred and fifty years surviving English Catholics known as recusants were forced to go underground and seek continuity in Catholic Europe, where exiled English clergy set up schools and seminaries for the sons of English recusant families. Legislative restrictions were placed on Catholics, some continuing into the 20th century, while the ban on Catholic worship lasted until the Catholic Relief Act 1791. The ban did not, however, affect foreign embassies in London, although serving priests could be hounded. During this time, the English Catholic community was "divided into the upper classes, the aristocracy and gentry, and what were literally the working classes." The "survival of Catholicism in the past was due largely to the dogged, but hopefully inconspicuous, protection provided by the former to the latter."
In North West England one in five are church adherents, a result of large-scale Irish migration in the nineteenth century as well as the high number of English recusants in Lancashire.
At the 2001 United Kingdom census, there were 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, some 8% of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they represented only 4.8% of the population. In 1981, 8.7% of the population of England and Wales were Catholic. In 2009, post the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, when thousands of overwhelmingly white Central Europeans (mainly Poles, Lithuanians, Rumanians and Romani people) came to England, an Ipsos Mori poll found that 9.6%, or 5.2 million persons, were Catholic in England and Wales.