I assume i can't search rc records ?
Locating Catholic registers is not easy.
LANOPC began adding a few in recent years. There are new additions to LANOPC every few weeks. I check "What's new" regularly. Familiarise yourself with LANOPC if you haven't already.
Manchester & Lancashire FHS website has a list of R.C. churches in Manchester with dates & whereabouts of registers. Some churches had cemeteries. There's one index for all the registers, searchable by surname.
Catholic Family History Society has some Manchester registers on cd.
Catholic registers are the property of the church and diocese. A Catholic baptism register is a working document for the parish priest because marriages are added to a person's baptism entry wherever the marriage takes place. When a register was no longer needed at the church it was deposited at Diocesan Archives. Salford Diocesan Archives was without an archivist for a considerable time. I don't know present situation.
Not all Catholic registers survived from this era. England was a mission country for the Catholic Church when Catherine McDonnell was born, with a shortage of priests especially in cities and industrial towns. There were no dioceses with bishops to oversee things. There weren't even parishes for a long time.
If you don't get a result with M&LHFS or LANOPC I would again advise putting the baptism search aside for the time-being and revisit it at intervals in the hope that records may become available. Seasoned researchers bang their heads in frustration when following Catholic ancestors. That's one of the reasons a specialist society was set up.
I suggest that you get to know Victorian Manchester. Locate the place(s) your ancestors lived on old maps (can be viewed online). Consult M&LFHS, LANOPC and Manchester pages of GENUKI and compile a shortlist of Catholic churches in existence at the time that they may have used. Searches for churches by distance can be done on GENUKI. This also has a map for each church. N.B. A Catholic Mission was often in operation for several years before an actual church building. Research the history of each church. Some have their own websites. Find out what local history societies exist. They may have websites or Facebook. A good family historian is a local historian. Hope this helps.
