Romism

English

Etymology

From Rome +‎ -ism.

Proper noun

Romism

2. (now rare, usually derogatory) Synonym of Roman Catholicism.
   • 2001, Roy Porter, The Penguin Social History of Britain: English Society in the Eighteenth Century‎, revised edition, Penguin UK, →ISBN:

     Many Georgians rarely went through a church porch between their christening and burial. Yet practically everyone, in his own fashion, had faith. Much of it was a fig leaf of Christianity covering a body of inherited magic and superstition, little more than Nature worship (the polite, doctrinally correct form of this was known as 'natural religion'). But everyone had his own vision of a Creator, of a 'place' in Heaven, and convictions of Good and Evil, reward and punishment. Though many were careless about performing their devotions, Dr Johnson was right to say 'there are in reality very few infidels'. Deism — belief in a non-personal Deity, lacking Christianity's historical Incarnation — made headway among intellectuals early in the century, sickened by sectarian fanatics, Popery and clericalism. But once Christians allowed their sword of persecution to sleep in their hands, the particular attractiveness of Deism and free-thought waned. The most prickly intellectual challenges to the foundations of belief were to come not from atheists but from heretics on the inside. The most notorious Georgian materialist was not some flash philosophe but the Bible fundamentalist and millennialist Joseph Priestley. Debate within theology remained heated, Anglican theology oscillating between rationalism and obscurantism, Dissenters divided over free-grace and Calvinist predestination. The reason for this was that it was difficult to adjust literalist dogma to the new material prosperity, science and freedom of inquiry. Religious divides went deep — this is evident from the reams of sermons and theological polemics published and avidly read — and only bashing the old bogey of Romism ('No Popery!') could unite Protestants.

   • 2006, “Chapter 2: When Did It Begin? Origins of the Tension Between Religion and Spirituality”, in Stephen R. Honeygosky, editor, Religion and Spirituality: Bridging the Gap‎, Twenty-Third Publications, →ISBN, page 26:

     Today we find an increasing tension and gap between formalized institutional religion and less formalized, less regularized (though practice-friendly) spirituality. It is worth remembering the heritage of today's dissent, beginning with early modern texts and culture. The tension, battle, and bloodshed between Catholicism and Protestantism was apparent and influential on the Continent and in Britain in the mid-sixteenth century. Catholics experienced persecution and exile during Henry VIII's and Elizabeth's reigns. During Mary's reign in between, it was the Protestants' turn. In exile, English Protestants learned from fellow persecuted protesters on the Continent. Their shared experience became part of their deep memory and a driving force for the next hundred years. Texts like John Foxe's Book of [Protestant] Martyrs kept the flame burning brightly with vivid stories, and John Bale's Image of Both Churches, while polemical and exaggerated, portrayed the Catholic, or Baptist, Roman Church as "false," a spouse of Antichrist, and the Protestant as "true," Christ's simple, plain spouse. As noted earlier, in the next century, William Dell's Uniformity Examined (1645), with its religious-political interest in the tension between Protestantism and Catholicism (then referred to as Papism or Romism), addressed the tension between the inner world of spirituality and the external world of religion. He distinguished unity—scripturally founded and endorsed through the practice of the true Churches of Christ—from uniformity, also tested scripturally, patristically, and historically.

   • 2007, Kim Woods, quoting Francis Close, Imported Images: Netherlandish Late Gothic Sculpture in England, C.1400-c.1550‎, Shaun Tyas, →ISBN, page 166:

     The vituperative dean of Carlisle Cathedral, Francis Close, was a die hard low church Protestant whose extreme views Pugin bitterly opposed.⁷¹ Close complained in 1844 of 'the dark and fatal errors which are being interwoven with the national faith by means of ecclesiastical statuary, paintings and architecture'.⁷² He saw in these 'errors' the threat of 'popery' and laid the blame firmly on two movements: 'as Romism is taught analytically at Oxford it is taught artistically at Cambridge, – that it is inculcated theoretically in tracts at one university, it is sculptured, painted, and graven at the other.'

4. (now rare, usually derogatory) Synonym of curialism: the supremacy of the Roman Curia.

Related terms

• Romanism
• Romanist
• Romer
• Romist