From Country House Catholicism to City Church

This volume presents the contents of the sacramental records known to survive from the Oxford Catholic Mission, 1700-1875. These original registers are held in five volumes in the Archives of the Oxford Oratory. The Oratory's Oxfordshire archive consists of registers from Waterperry House, the chapel of St Clement's, Oxford, and the church of St Aloysius Gonzaga, Oxford. [1] The registers feature much common form and use of Latin and the contents are made accessible here in transcribed, translated and tabulated form.

The registers record the sacramental life and rites of passage of what began as a small, thinly spread community of Oxfordshire Catholics. The documents start in 1700 and go on to span the watershed of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. They record the transition from 'hidden' country-house Catholicism to a city church with influential priests and a varied, sometimes international, congregation.

[1] A further brief register, from the Catholic chapel of St Mary the Virgin, Bampton, 1856¬60 found its archival home in the collection but is not historically linked to the Oxford Mission. It is included here for completeness. See also Appendix D.