Things that should not be surprises

I'm still thinking about the recently-dispatched paper on the Marian persecutions, which at some point will resurface (in completely different fashion) as a book chapter.  As I noted during the Q&A afterwards, I had originally planned to put "Catholic" and "Protestant" arguments/representations--obviously, those are convenient but oversimplified categories--into some sort of roughly equal dialogue.  But I couldn't do that, because the dialogue was completely one-sided.  The Catholic minority, whether of Ultramontanist or Cisalpine tendency, kept reasonably well-abreast of what their Protestant counterparts were saying; the Protestant majority, whether High Church, evangelical, or Dissenting, kept reasonably well-abreast of what John Lingard was saying, along with a few other very high-profile figures.  In retrospect, this imbalance shouldn't have startled me at all, and not just because of the respective demographics involved.  While I don't know how accurate J. H. Newman was when he claimed that Catholics were far better informed about Protestant theology than Protestants were about Catholic theology (although it would have been hard for Victorian Protestants to be less well-informed about Catholic theology...), it's true that Victorian Catholics were, for obvious reasons, heavily invested in seeking out and disproving anti-Catholic discourse.  (The late-Victorian Catholic Truth Society pamphlets are a case in point--they're a great way of finding obscure anti-Catholic polemicists.)  The actively anti-Catholic Protestant contingent, meanwhile, apparently felt no need to go hunting for lesser-known Catholic writers--and in their minds, there was probably no reason that they should.