Catholic emancipation Reaction against this led to riots in Scotland in 1779 and then the Gordon Riots in London on June 2, 1780. Further relief was given by an Act of 1782 allowing the establishment of Roman Catholic schools and bishops. The British Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 was adopted by the Irish Parliament in 1792–93. Since the electoral franchise at the time was largely determined by property, this relief gave the votes to Roman Catholics holding land with a rental value of £2 a year. They also started to gain access to many middle-class professions from which they had been excluded,
Anti-Catholicism in the United States Anti-Catholicism in the United States Anti-Catholicism in the United States is historically deeply rooted in the anti-Catholic attitudes brought by British Protestants to the American colonies. Two types of anti-Catholic rhetoric existed in colonial society and continued into the following centuries. The first, derived from the theological heritage of the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars of the sixteenth century, consisted of the Biblical Anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon variety and dominated anti-Catholic thought until the late seventeenth century. The second type was a secular variety which derived in part from xenophobic and ethnocentric nativist sentiments and distrust towards