Definition of "popery" [pop•er•y]

• Offensive The doctrines, practices, and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Above all, the system is destructive of faith, having a tendency to substitute passive acquiescence for real conviction; and therefore I should not say that the excess of it was popery, but that it had once and actually those characters of evil which we sometimes express by the term popery, but which may be better signified by the term idolatry; a reverence for that which ought not to be reverenced, leading to a want of faith in that which is really deserving of all adoration and love."
• "Whether this be the number of the errors and heresies that are contained in popery, or rather, as others, the number of the years from its rise to its fall, is not certain, much less what that period is which is described by these prophetic numbers."
• "It must be remembered that there was less of priestcraft -- less of what we now call popery -- in those earlier days than there came to be later on; and the springs of truth, though somewhat tainted, were not poisoned, as it were, at the very source, as they afterwards became."