During the Enlightenment, an age of increasing secularization and the doubting of religious doctrine, many English men and women considered Catholicism as either completely unrelated and untouched by mainstream intellectual thought or antagonistic to the principles of the age. Outcries against Catholics included charges that they were unreasoning, intolerant, superstitious, and blindly obedient to authority. However, were these charges really a fair depiction of the state of Catholicism in the eighteenth century? Was Catholicism truly the antithesis of the spirit of the Enlightenment? Were Catholics completely outside the mainstream of Enlightenment thought? These important religious questions will be the fundamental underlying considerations of my dissertation, an examination of the relationship between the Enlightenment and English Catholicism. Through analysis of the works produced by constituents of the English College at Douai during the eighteenth century, the most important educational institution for English Catholics of the time, I will show that English Catholicism and the Enlightenment were not inherently at odds. Even more, many English Catholics actively embraced the major ideas of the period. In its broadest context, then, this will be a study of how an ostracized minority group comes to terms with the dominant patterns of thought of a society.