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 increasing waves of Catholic immigrants, particularly from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Mexico. It often focused on the alleged intrigues of Catholic states or Catholic peoples against the majority Protestant United States. Historians have studied the motivations for anti-Catholicism. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. characterized prejudice against the Catholics as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people." The conservative writer Peter Viereck once commented that (in 1960) "Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals." The historian John Higham described anti-Catholicism as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history". The historian Joseph G.