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- The Catholic Church in England and Wales is part of the worldwide Catholic Church in full communion with the Pope, who is currently Pope Benedict XVI. It traces its origins to the original Christian community founded by Jesus, with its traditions first established by the Twelve Apostles and maintained through unbroken Apostolic Succession and its formal history dates from the early days of Christianity in the Western Roman Empire. In 597, the first authoritative papal mission, establishing a direct link from the Kingdom of Kent to Rome and to the Benedictine form of monasticism, was carried into effect by Augustine of Canterbury. England officially adhered to the Western (Catholic) Church for over a thousand years; but in 1534, during the reign of Henry VIII, the Catholic Church in England was separated from the broader Catholic Church, and a new ecclesial entity, the Church of England, was created with Henry as its head. Under his son, Edward VI, the Church of England became more influenced by the European Protestant movement but it rejoined the Roman Catholic Church during the reign of Queen Mary I in 1555. The two Statutes of Repeal to make the reunion with Roman Catholicism were worded as definitive but the reunion was short-lived. Mary's sister, Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, re-established independence from Rome in a 1559 settlement and was finally excommunicated in 1570. Roman Catholicism continued in England, although it was subject to various forms of persecution, with most recusant members (except those in diaspora on the continent or part of the aristocracy) going underground for all practical purposes until 1832 when the Catholic Emancipation Act came into force. Dioceses (replacing districts) were re-established by Pope Pius IX in 1850. Apart from the 22 Latin Rite dioceses, there is the Eastern Catholic diocese of the Apostolic Exarchate for Ukrainians. In the last UK census in 2001, there were 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, 8% of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they represented only 4.8% of the population. The percentage of Catholics was at its highest in the 1981 census, with 8.7%. An estimate in 2009 put the number of Roman Catholics in England and Wales at 4.5 million. Liverpool has the highest proportion of Catholics of any city in Great Britain at 46%; historically, this is primarily due to the large influx of British Irish after the 1800 Act of Union, in which Ireland became part of the newly-created United Kingdom.
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