Papist - Definition - Law Dictionary Home Dictionary Definition papist

Definition :

Papist [fr. papa, Lat., a pope], one who, adhering to the communion of the Church of Rome, maintains the supreme ecclesiastical power of the Pope, as contradistinguished from English Protestants who in Statutes, Canons, and the 36th Article of Religion maintain the supreme ecclesiastical power of the sovereign. From the date of the Reformation Papists, either under that title or under the title of persons professing the Popish religion, or of Popish recusants convict, were subjected, by one statute after another, to various civil and religious disabilities, the removal of which began in 1788, and was to a great extent completed by the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act, 1829, which Act and other Acts, the earliest being an Act of 1791, speak of them as Roman Catholics. See ROMAN CATHO-LICS, and consult Lilly and Wallis's Manual of the Law specially affecting Catholics (1893).