Definition
A term historically used in Anglo-American law to denote the religion, doctrines, and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. The word appears in legal texts not as a neutral descriptor but as the operative vocabulary of penal legislation — statutes that imposed disabilities, exclusions, and criminal penalties on Roman Catholics and those who practiced, promoted, or professed Roman Catholic religion. "Popery" in legal usage is therefore less a theological category than a jurisdictional trigger: the term defined the class of persons and conduct subject to a specific body of English and colonial law.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The teachings, practices and accoutrements of the Roman Catholic Church."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The religion of the Roman Catholic Church, comprehending doctrines and practices; — generally used in an opprobrious sense."
The legal and common meanings are nearly coextensive in substance, but the legal significance is not theological at all. Where ordinary usage describes a religion, legal usage identifies a status. Statutes deploying the term were not concerned with doctrine per se — they were concerned with which persons could hold office, inherit property, bear arms, or practice law. The opprobrious quality Webster's notes is not incidental: it reflects that this word entered law as a term of exclusion, not classification.
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Common Confusion
POPERY vs. ROMAN CATHOLICISM (as a legal category): In modern legal writing, "Roman Catholic" is a neutral religious identifier. "Popery" is not interchangeable — it carries the specific charge of penal-era legislation and signals a hostile legal context. Researchers encountering "popery" in a statute or court record are reading a term of art from anti-Catholic law, not a generic religious designation.
POPERY vs. RECUSANCY: Recusancy technically referred to refusal to attend Church of England services and was the formal legal trigger for many penal sanctions. "Popery" in statutes often functioned as the broader umbrella — the religious identity — while recusancy named the specific conduct. The two terms coexist in the same legislative tradition but are not synonyms.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely a creature of historical legal materials. Researchers will encounter it primarily in three contexts:
First, English penal statutes from roughly the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth century — the body of law sometimes called the Penal Laws or Anti-Popery Acts — used "popery" and related compounds ("papist," "popish") as operative terms. These statutes governed inheritance, land tenure, office-holding, education, and military service. Corpus materials from this period require familiarity with this vocabulary to parse correctly.
Second, colonial American law carried this tradition. Several colonial charters, frames of government, and early state constitutions restricted office-holding or civil rights using formulations drawn from English penal law, sometimes invoking popery explicitly. Researchers working on early American religious freedom, disestablishment, or civil rights history will encounter these provisions.
Third, legal reform and repeal materials — English Catholic Relief Acts beginning in 1778 and culminating in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, and parallel American developments — use "popery" and its compounds as the referent being dismantled. Understanding what the term meant in the original legislation is necessary to understand what the relief statutes were releasing.
A significant navigational trap: Black's entries for "Popery" are cursory to the point of being nearly useless for legal research. They provide the theological gloss but omit entirely the penal-law context that gives the word its legal charge. Relying on Black's alone will leave a researcher without the interpretive framework the term actually requires.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) offer identical, minimal entries: "The religion of the Roman Catholic Church, comprehending doctrines and practices." This is accurate as far as it goes, and both editions immediately follow this entry with an unrelated definition of "Populace" — suggesting the editors viewed "Popery" as requiring no more than a passing gloss.
What the historical dictionaries miss is the entire architecture of legal significance. The word's presence in a legal text is almost always a signal that anti-Catholic penal legislation is in play. Black's silence on this context reflects either the editors' assumption that the penal-law background was sufficiently well known to practicing lawyers of that era, or a simple undervaluation of the term's legal density. For modern researchers, neither explanation is satisfying.
Webster's 1913 is more candid than Black's in at least flagging the opprobrious character of the usage. That candor is useful: it signals to researchers that the word never functioned as neutral legal taxonomy.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term's legal force was most developed in English law and in jurisdictions that inherited the English penal tradition. American usage varies: some colonial and early state materials track English formulations closely; others use "popish," "papist," or "Roman Catholic" instead. Researchers should not assume consistency of terminology across jurisdictions even when the underlying legal disability is the same.
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