Tomorrow the general synod of the Church of England will be asked to pass a resolution from the House of Bishops that hands a blank cheque to the archbishops in negotiations with the rest of the Anglican communion for a “covenant”.
The Church of England arose from the Elizabethan settlement of 1559, which settled half a century of vicious religious bigotry by virtue of a broad-based generous church with porous edges, shrewd intentional vagueness about doctrinal certainty and governance that included bishops, priests and people (laity). If the synod passes the motion unamended, the nature of the Church of England will change dramatically; first, because the way will be open for bishops to agree a document without recourse to the clergy and the laity. This looks curiously like a form of governance that the English Reformation abolished, a Curia, rule by the bishops. Secondly, the way will be paved for the “covenant” between provinces of the Anglican communion worldwide and, however widely drawn that is, some decision-making power will be ceded overseas, exporting some of its historic inheritance.
I see the “communion’ = “loose federation” myth prevails…
“The Church of England arose from the Elizabethan settlement of 1559, which settled half a century of vicious religious bigotry ”
That is, unless you were a Roman Catholic.
I find it interesting that those who speak of the glories of the Elizabethan Settlement and speak against the Covenant seem to forget that the Settlement included the 39 Articles and Book of Common Prayer as pretty definite statements of faith. Sure, there was latitude in what was acceptable within those boundries but the boundries were there. The Covenent wishes to reestablish boundries in acceptable Anglican faith and practice.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
I love editorials like this, with their historical montrosities:
“[The Church of England] has had bad patches: during Oliver Cromwell’s parliament it narrowed to a puritan sect, banning Christmas and threatening all joy and pleasure; the nation rejected that experiment.”
Wow, what a gloss on the Stuart Restoration and its motives! That of course makes Slee’s follow up a little suspect in its glibness:
“The national census of 2001 showed 72% of the nation claiming a Christian faith, 57% as Anglicans but only 5% in church regularly (15% occasionally), so why are 42% missing? They tell me they are fed up with self-righteous Christians who imagine they have a hotline to salvation.”
So who is the self righteous one here?
[blockquote]The Very Rev Colin Slee is Dean of Southwark[/blockquote]
Southwark, that rings a bell:
“I’m a bishop, its what I do”
ding dong!
Southwark Cathedral was Jeffrey Johns’s church. Dean Slee was his # 1 champion against the monstrous regiment of fundies. ‘Nuff said.
I agree with you #4 Tom Roberts. This quote from the article is very peculiar:
[blockquote] The national census of 2001 showed 72% of the nation claiming a Christian faith, 57% as Anglicans but only 5% in church regularly (15% occasionally), so why are 42% missing? They tell me they are fed up with self-righteous Christians who imagine they have a hotline to salvation.[/blockquote]
How amazing that 42% of the nation have contacted Colin Slee and shared their reasons for not attending church, which just happen to completely coincide with his own opinions.
And show the exact same misunderstanding of Anglican teaching:
[blockquote] The established church that they grew up to respect preached a gospel that shows God loves everybody. [/blockquote]
Anglican Christianity has always taught that God loves everybody, that is not in dispute now. What is in dispute now is whether, in loving everybody, God also gives approval of everything they do. This is a significant distinction.
The Church of England arose from the Elizabethan settlement of 1559, which settled half a century of vicious religious bigotry
Tell that to the Chideock Martyrs (after Chideock castle)
Also known as the Dorchester Martyrs: Blessed John Cornelius (known as John Mohun), Thomas Bosgrave, John Carey, and Patrick Salmon
Died: 1594, hanged and hacked to pieces at Dorchester, Oxfordshire,
England; buried by local Catholics
Beatified: 1929 by Pope Pius XI
Commemorated July 4
Details:
http://www.thedorsetpage.com/history/Chideock_Martyrs/chideock_martyrs.htm
#1 said “I see the “communion’ = “loose federation†myth prevails…”
There is no authority willing or able to dispute that this equality is a myth, so it is no wonder that it prevails. In fact, it now seems that (with regard to the Anglican Communion) it is not a myth at all.
Wm Blackstone in his Commentaries of the Laws of England Book 4 Chapter 8 wrote:
“5 Elizabeth c/ 1. To refuse the oath of supremacy will incur the pains of praemunire and to defend the pope’s jurisdiction in this realm, is a praemunire of the the first offense, and high reason for the second.”
Praemunire in its original meaning is the introduction of a foreign power into the land and creating an imperium in imperio (a government within a government).
The APO scheme for the US described by +Duncan in his November Memo requesting Alternative Primatial Oversight from the Steering Committee of the GS, and the pastoral vicar scheme created by Tanzania for TEC, did exactly that.
The draft covenant proposed by the +Gomez committee will create an offshore legislature and judicatory for the Church of England, a church that is headed by the Crown. Has the Crown been consulted? Has this Elizabeth R agreed to cede her Church to this offshore entity.
Thanks, Chris and Words Matter. We need to be reminded often that the “settlement” which ended half a century of “vicious religious bigotry” unleashed an equally long period of unrestrained and more than vicious religious bigotry against the “papists” – for a salutary lesson in just how vicious it got, read Alice Hogge’s recently-published God’s Secret Agents, a book which pretty much dispels any notion that Elizabeth brought religious peace and serenity. She was as equally nasty to the Puritans.
The “settlement” actually institutionalized the “vicious religious bigotry”. Mr. Slee’s ignorance of history is regretable – unfortunately when reappraisers appeal to history they often expose the same failing.
#10 Emily
Not sure what the Blackstone gloss’s relevance is to the US case, as you present it in your 4th paragraph. ecusa isn’t part of the US government, nor has it ever been so.
Uh Emily? The Episcopal church has nothing to do with Queen Elizabeth, her state government, or her state church.
RE: “The APO scheme for the US described by +Duncan in his November Memo requesting Alternative Primatial Oversight from the Steering Committee of the GS, and the pastoral vicar scheme created by Tanzania for TEC, did exactly that.”
No it does not.
Well, no, Sarah Hey, Queen Elizabeth has nothing to do with TEC. But the concept of praemunire as obedience to an offshore government (in this case church government) does. If that is not the case, then the primatial vicar would report to the TEC presiding bishop and be subject to TEC discipline. +Duncan specifically asked for GS their primatial oversight, to be freed from TEC discipline and TEC leadership. I could quote +Duncan’s letter again?
The British thing does interest me because, in England the church and the state are one. I don’t even know if the CofE can consent to the covenant as drafted. It clearly grants such power to the primates. Given British history re intervention by Rome with England’s clergy and governance, I would truly wonder. I would think authority now resides with Parliament?
What is interesting about this is not the sequence of errors which make it worthless as an account of Anglican history but that some Anglicans really believe this to be so. It functions as a kind of invented tradition or a myth of the origin of liberal Anglicanism. It happens to be almost completely untrue but it’s value is not it’s truth but it’s usefulness for the present.
I am genuinely taken aback by how quickly anti Catholic rhetoric comes to the fore, from one side or another, in debates [i]within[/i] Anglicanism. Of course, ironically, for better or worse, that is a rather more truthful connection with Anglicanism’s Protestant heritage than anything else Dean Slee wrote.
RE: “But the concept of praemunire as obedience to an offshore government (in this case church government) does.”
LOL! No it does not. The “concept of praemunire” has nothing whatsoever to do with a non-state church. It has to do with state government.
What a trip. Grasping at straws gains new heights.
On the subject of the primatial vicar, I still think that is possible, IF, and that is a BIG IF, the vicar would be, ultimately, reporting to +KJS and, ultimately, all are subject to TEC discipline. This was +KJS’s original offer. If the primatial vicar would have little day-to-day contact with +KJS and the bishops seeking APO virtually none, could they not be comfortable? Maybe Bishop Howe? … Someone who might be acceptable to everyone?
I think, with only a small measure of irony, that the only person “acceptable to everyone” would have to [i]walk on water.[/i]
For all who are interested in Slee’s historical sources I’d recommend [url=http://www.amazon.com/1066-All-That-Memorable-Comprising/dp/0413775275/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-5494960-5240002?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183846233&sr=1-1]1066 & All That: A Memorable History Of England, Comprising All The Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings And 2 Genuine Dates [/url] ;->
Sarah, yes, I know that praemunire is a concept in British legal history. As a notion of how a people, or a church, might react to external control, I think the idea is pretty well implanted in the American experience, and TEC’s as well. We have inherited much from our English progenitors. Because church and state are tied in Britain, a citizen could justly scream as they did in the past “preamunire” We can just object, as a church, to being governed by abroad. At least the TEC Bishops and the Executive Council said no.
Speaking of invented myths (#15), how about the myth that the reason that people don’t go to church is the self righteousness of the fundies? I
t flies in the face of the observation that in religion generally it is the conservative movements that are growing and the liberal one’s that are declining.
And if we want to bandy about accusations of self righteousness there is at least a certain presumption in claiming to speak for 42% of the population.
“A broad-based generous church with porous edges [and] shrewd intentional vagueness about doctrinal certainty” —Slee
Slee equates Anglicanism with Latitudinarianism, the most worldly and sterile strain of Anglican Christianity.
Bp. Stephen Neill rightly summarized the Anglican Via Media as follows:
“Show us anything clearly set forth in Holy Scripture that we do not teach, and we will teach it; show us anything in our teaching and practice that is plainly contrary to Holy Scripture, and we will abandon it.†http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/3358
The proposed Covenant does not ask the Church of England or any other church to be “subject” to an extra-territorial power, e.g. the Primates. It asks, rather, that the Communion of churches called the Anglican Communion be so subject to its councils. The Church of England is free to do what it wants — Queen Elizabeth and all. But it is not free — under the proposed Covenant — to claim Communion status just on its own say-so. The Primates (in this case) are not claiming jurisdiction in England. They are, along with other councils and “instruments”, discerning the character of the Communion. That is quite different. As for the proposed “Pastoral Scheme” of Dar es Salaam: that too does not intend foreign jurisdiction, but rather an agreed upon cooperation with varied elements of the Communion. “Cooperation”, however, has become a dirty word in TEC-land, so it appears.
The “Acts of Praemunire” were four statutes passed in England, by the Parliament, between the 1350s and the 1390s whose purpose was to enable the king to threaten violators of the contemporaneous “Acts against Provisors”, which attempted to prevent the pope (or any other foreign ecclesiastic, e.g., the French abbot of a monastery that had a daughter-house in England) from making an ecclesiastical appointments within the realm of England without first consulting with the king, with penalties. It was not intended to be enforced but to enable the king to haggle with the papacy over such appointments. Henry VIII managed to browbeat the English clergy in 1530 into admitting that in accepting the late Cardinal Wolsey’s exercise of his jurisdiction as a papal legate they had corporately violated these acts, and to get them to pay a fine of 100,000 pounds (a fabulous sum, the equivalent of several years’ worth of ordinary government revenue). Since it was clear that Henry was willing to haggle about the actual amount that would be collected if the clergy agreed not to fight the charges in court (where they stood a good chance of winning). they conceded — only to find that two years later Thomas Cromwell would try to use the same argument to try to claim that the very acceptance of the immemorial papal jurisdiction over the English Church was also an act of praemunire. Even after the establishment of the Royal Supremacy over the Church, when one would suppose that the whole point of these acts had ceased to exist, common lawyers invoked “praemunire” to try to prise court cases out of ecclesiastical courts and into Common Law courts.
The invocation of “praemunire” in the context of the revisionist sof TEC to “have their cake and eat it” is little short of a desperately ludicrous fetch, and one that displays the historical ignorance of those that try to make it. Or worse: it demonstrates the fundamentally secular and “Erastian” reason, and obliviousness to theology and ecclesiology, that seems to dominate the imaginations (“where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”) of those who, by chasing the Holy Ghost out of doors and replacing him by the Zeitgeist, seem to have as their highest aspiration the notion that ECUSA’s destiny is to become Caesar’s chaplain, if not concubine; which is just a contemporary version of the worship of a Golden Calf.
Since there is so much “bad history” floating around, I’ll provide some “good history” in installments on this thread.
THE REFORMATION AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND:
NOT “A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE†BUT
“A ROYAL CONQUEST OF THE CHURCHâ€
For some time I have been alternately bemused, puzzled and annoyed by the arguments and assertions of those Anglican writers and bloggers who try to defend one or other modern Anglican innovations such as the “ordination” of women to the diaconate, priesthood, or episcopate or, latterly, the blessing of sodomitical “partnerships.” Some of the commentators are often generally “conservative” but somehow they seem compelled to dismiss the lack of any early church precedent for these innovations with remarks along the lines of, “the Church of England rejected papal jurisdiction in the Sixteenth Century, and so is free today to do what it will on its own authority.” They usually also contend that the English Church “broke away from Rome” or “freed itself from papal control” or “declared itself independent” at that time. The purpose of these claims seems to be to assert that this act of 450 years ago was indeed a declaration of independence on the part of the “Anglican Church” and one which gives some degree of “historical precedent” for these modern innovations, if only by establishing the “authority” of Anglican churches to depart on their own initiative from Catholic belief and precedent hitherto held to be binding as constitutive of “catholicity.”
There are interesting theological and ecclesiological questions underlying such an assertion, but my purpose here is not to discuss those, but, rather, what it was (if anything) that the Church of England “did” between the early 1530s and the mid 1560s to see if these assertions can be justified, or, indeed, whether they have any clear meaning at all.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, and for a long time previously, the Church of England consisted of two church provinces: Canterbury, with nineteen dioceses, and York, with three. To be precise, the English church also included the four Welsh dioceses, in addition to fifteen English ones. Although the English bishops had gathered together in “synods” beginning in the Seventh Century, such synods had ceased to meet by the Fourteenth Century, because of the development of two ecclesiastical assemblies, the Convocation of Canterbury and the Convocation of York.
The Upper House of each convocation consisted of prelates (bishops and abbots) while the Lower House consisted of archdeacons, deans of cathedrals and representatives of the parochial clergy. The convocations’ origins were connected with those of the English Parliament. As is well known, the English Parliament is a two-house body, consisting of the House of Lords, in which sat until only a decade ago the “Lords Spiritual” (the bishops of the original 26 dioceses of the Church of England and, until the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s some 31 abbots) and the “Lords Temporal” (the hereditary peers, to which were added the life peers in 1964). The membership of the House of Commons, by contrast, was elected each time the monarch summoned a Parliament. What is not so well known is that at the beginnings of Parliament in the late Thirteenth and early Fourteenth Centuries, “the Commons” included elected representatives of the lower clergy as well as of the laity, but in the 1330s these “proctors of the clergy” began to refuse to participate in parliamentary deliberations, considering them both time-consuming and unsuitably “secular” in nature. Consequently, they began to meet separately under the presidency of a Prolocutor (Speaker) of their own choosing, and at the summons of their respective province’s archbishop. This was the origin of the convocations, and the reason why meetings of the convocations took place in tandem with meetings of Parliament, and not otherwise. (1)
Footnote 1: In Ireland, by contrast, the “proctors of the clergy” never absented themselves from the Irish House of Commons, and continued to sit there until their blocking in 1536 the passage of legislation declaring Henry VIII to be “Supreme Head on Earth under Christ” of the Church of Ireland analogous to the legislation which had been passed by the English Parliament two years earlier. In order to get the legislation passed, they were forcibly ejected and permanently excluded from the Irish Parliament in that year.
The convocations were effectively the “church parliament” for the two provinces of the Church of England. They had two principal functions:
to make ecclesiastical laws (canons) which bound both clergy and laity and
to vote clerical tax grants to the Crown, analogous to those secular taxes voted by Parliament.
However, while Acts of Parliament required the monarch’s approval to become legally valid, those of the convocations did not: they came into force when approved by both houses and promulgated by the archbishop of their respective province. While both convocations were in theory of equal authority, in practice the Convocation of York was a small-scale affair as compared with the Convocation of Canterbury, and normally followed the lead of the latter body.
In 1216 King John signed Magna Carta. The first clause of Magna Carta granted “that the Church of England may be free” meant originally free from royal interference concerning episcopal elections and church finances. There had been a number of clashes between the Crown and the Church in the Middle Ages both before and after the grant of Magna Carta but after 1341 there were no major clashes. There continued to be jurisdictional quarrels between the king’s courts and the church courts. Some churchmen resented the various Fourteenth-Century parliamentary statutes that sought to limit papal interference with ecclesiastical appointments within the Church of England, but for the most part Church and Crown coexisted in relative harmony until the reign of Henry VIII. Frustrated by the failure of his attempt in 1529 to secure a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon or, otherwise, papal acquiescence in an annulment to be granted by a specially-arranged papal legatine court meeting in England in June/July of that year, Henry began to browbeat the English Church in order to secure its institutional support for his “divorce.” He wanted the support of the church to place pressure on the papacy to grant the annulment.
By June 1530 it was becoming clear that any Roman judgment on Henry’s marriage was likely to uphold its validity, and from that point onwards the goal of Henry’s diplomacy was to prevent or delay a resolution of the case in Rome, while casting about for some means of resolving the matter in England. At the time, most of the bishops had willingly or otherwise proclaimed their support for Henry’s annulment petition as had the convocations (academic assemblies of masters and doctors) of Cambridge and Oxford universities. Nonetheless, when Henry suggested in October 1530 to a group of bishops, clergy, judges and lawyers that perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury might proceed in the case in defiance of the pope, the meeting reacted with consternation, informing Henry that this was impossible. Likewise, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham (d. 1532), who was an unenthusiastic supporter of the king’s cause, refused to have anything to do with the suggestion.
Beginning in 1531 the king and his officials launched a number of legal attacks on the clergy of England, considered as a corporation, designed not only to mulct them of a large sum of money for a royal pardon — a pardon for their “offense” in infringing the king’s sovereignty by their use of Canon Law — but also to coerce them into recognizing (for the first time ever) that the king had a responsibility for his subjects’ spiritual welfare as well as their temporal weal. As such the king could claim to be “protector and supreme head” of the English Church and clergy. For the first time the suggestion was made that the very existence of church courts and their system of canon law constituted an infringement of the king’s prerogative and of English sovereignty.
In February of that year, the Upper House of the Canterbury Convocation recognized the king as “singular protector, supreme lord and even, so far as the law of Christ allows, supreme head of the English Church and clergy,” but the Lower House of the Canterbury Convocation accepted this only after reserving all of the traditional liberties of the Church and also the primacy and authority of the pope. It is not clear that the Convocation of York ever accepted the proposal at all. What did become apparent as a result of the controversy was that there were areas of spiritual authority immune from any form of royal and parliamentary control. These would have to be eliminated if the king were to obtain an annulment from Church authorities in England.
The next crisis began in January 1532, when an act was introduced in Parliament to cut off the payment of annates, a sum equivalent to a year’s revenue of a see payable to the papacy by newly-appointed bishops. This evoked furious opposition from the clergy, as well as massive resistance in Parliament itself. It was only overcome when the king came in person to the House of Commons and insisted that members vote on the bill in his presence. The aged Archbishop Warham suggested in the course of the debate that the king was attacking the Church in the same manner as Henry II had done some 350 years earlier, and declared that he was himself prepared to suffer the same fate as St. Thomas a Becket. In the middle of this stand-off, a great conflict erupted over the respective jurisdictions of Church courts and Common Law courts. On May 10 the king suddenly demanded that the Church surrender to him its legislative independence by granting him a veto power over all the legislation of the convocations, the right to revoke existing canons that conflicted with royal authority and the assurance that Canon Law itself owed its authority in England to the king alone. Some days of conflict and negotiation followed, until the prelates, for the most part, lost their nerve, and on May 15 (after most of the bishops and abbots had absented themselves) a small rump of the Upper House of the Canterbury Convocation consisting of six bishops and a few abbots submitted to the king with one dissenting vote – John Clerk, Bishop of Bath & Wells (who later submitted when faced with prosecution for treason). The firmest opponent of the king’s demands, the future martyr John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was absent recovering from having had his food poisoned by a disgruntled servant.
On the day after the Upper House of the Canterbury Convocation submitted to the king, Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor, tacitly but clearly indicating that he was unable to serve the king any longer in such circumstances. The Lower House, which had shown more mettle in opposing the king’s demands, was dispersed without even considering the proposal, and it was not until some years later, after Henry had broken with Rome and adhesion to the papacy had become treason, that the Convocation of York belatedly considered, and accepted, the king’s demands.
I have described these actions in such detail because the action of the Upper House of the Canterbury Convocation on May 15, 1532 is the one and only possibility that can be adduced as the Church of England choosing to break with Rome and the papacy, to become an “independent church province.” Everything that followed subsequently — the “Act in Restraint of Appeals” of April 1533, which forbade all appeals from English church courts to Rome (2); the order to clergy to preach against the pope in December 1533; the Act of Supremacy a year later, that declared the king to be “the only Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England”; the Treason Bill in early 1535, which made it a capital crime to deny the king’s Supreme Headship; the dissolution of the monasteries some years later; the 1539 Act of Six Articles, by which Parliament enacted savage penalties for denials of certain points of Catholic doctrine and practice — were drawn up, debated and enacted without any formal consultation of, or ratification by, the Canterbury or York Convocations.
Footnote 2: Thus it was possible for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who had been appointed in December 1532 after Warham’s death in August, but not consecrated and installed as archbishop until March 1533, to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage to Queen Catherine in defiance of the pope. (The king had, in fact, already bigamously married Anne Boleyn in January 1533.) It should be noted that Cranmer, upon his appointment as archbishop, had to perjure himself by forswearing in the king’s presence, secretly, the oath of canonical allegiance to the Pope that he was to take the following day at his episcopal consecration.
The king, of course, consulted clergy, especially bishops, on theological matters, and on occasion the Convocations were asked to debate various points of doctrine and practice (as in the run-up to the Act of Six Articles), but their role in all of these was purely advisory: Henry could take advice on church matters from whomever he chose, clergy or lay alike, or act wholly on his own initiative; and such doctrinal statements, catechetical materials or revised occasional services (such as the “English Litany” of 1545) as were issued during these years were promulgated and implemented on the king’s authority as Supreme Head, not by the authority of the Church.
The same pattern continued under Edward VI after Henry’s death in 1547. In fact, once the Crown (used here as a collective term for the officials who governed England under the boy-king) decided to pursue a clearly Protestant policy, first by allowing clerical marriage and then by embracing liturgical and doctrinal reform, it sought advice and suggestions from “advanced” bishops and clergy (such as Archbishop Cranmer). However, it avoided consulting institutions such as the convocations, dominated as they were until the very end of the reign by “conservatives” who were likely to resist change rather than to promote it. The major religious developments of the reign — the requirement of communion in both kinds in 1547, the destruction of images in 1548, the allowance of clerical marriage in 1549, followed by the suppression of the Latin services and the promulgation of the first Prayer Book in that same year, the destruction of altars in 1550 and their replacement by wooden tables, the promulgation of the second Prayer Book in 1552 and the definition of England’s new Protestant faith by the Forty-Two Articles and its accompanying Catechism — were not submitted to, or ratified by, the Convocations. They were all the result of Crown action upon the Church. When consultation was sought, it was with clergy or bishops who were likely to favor the proposed changes. All of these changes, it should be noted, met with widespread resistance from clergy and laity alike.
When Mary Tudor came to the throne in July 1553, after defeating an attempt to replace her with the Protestant Lady Jane Grey, she came to the throne on a wave of enthusiasm that was at least as much religious as it was secular. In many parts of England, altars were erected and priests resumed the use of the old rites even before it became legal to do so. And once she was established on the throne and her first parliament began to meet, the queen requested the Canterbury Convocation to discuss the Mass, transubstantiation, the appropriate form of worship, and to advise her on these matters. In late October and early November the Canterbury Convocation began what proved to be an acrimonious debate on the Mass and the Eucharist.
The different theological views of Catholics and Protestants emerged starkly, and in the end the Convocation resolved that (1) the natural body of Christ really is in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine by virtue of the words of consecration spoken by the celebrant, (2) that no other substance remains in the Eucharist after the words of consecration but the Body and Blood of Christ and (3) that the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice which avails for the remission of the sins of both the quick and the dead, thus upholding the Real Presence, Transubstantiation and the Sacrifice of the Mass — all three of which had been repudiated and condemned during the reign of Edward VI.
Because the Protestant bishops who had been appointed during Edward VI’s reign had either been excluded and replaced by those Catholic bishops whom they had displaced in that reign, or else had (like Archbishop Cranmer) been charged with treason for supporting the attempt to divert the throne from Queen Mary to Lady Jane Grey, and so were imprisoned under indictment awaiting trial, the Upper House was unanimous in its support of the three articles, but in the Lower House a number of members argued against the propositions, and six members (out of slightly less than a hundred) dissented right to the end. This Convocation debate early in Mary’s reign can justly be seen as the first time since 1532 that the Church of England had been able to express its mind freely through its own institutions, and the mind that it expressed at that time was distinctly hostile towards all that had happened over the past two decades, but especially since the introduction of Protestantism in 1547.
When Parliament repealed all of the Henrician legislation against the papacy in the late summer of 1554, the Canterbury Convocation applauded the act, and its members joined with the members of the House of Lords and House of Commons alike when the papal legate, Reginald, Cardinal Pole (soon to become Archbishop of Canterbury in place of the deprived Cranmer) solemnly absolved them, and the whole “Church and Realm of England” from the sin of schism on November 30, 1554.
Mary died on November 17, 1558 and was succeeded by her half- sister Elizabeth. In retrospect, her decision to attempt to reassert the Royal Supremacy over the Church of England seems inevitable — she was Anne Boleyn’s daughter and, as such, of illegitimate birth in Catholic eyes (although even they recognized that she was nevertheless the lawful successor to the Crown). (3) But this was far from obvious at the time, despite the hopeful assurance of those Protestants who had fled from England during the Marian years and who would subsequently see the vindication of their cause. Elizabeth had played the role of a devout Bible-reading princess during the reign of her zealously Protestant brother Edward VI, but when Mary succeeded Edward and Catholicism returned as the religion of England, Elizabeth, although initially she resisted attending Mass, eventually asked Mary to send her Catholic books to read and theologians to confer with, and after some months she professed herself to have been converted. For the rest of Mary’s reign she lived in all respects as a Catholic, attending Mass in her household, receiving communion publicly from time to time and seeming well content with the established order of things. It appears that even her closest advisors were unaware of her religious sentiments: on the first day of her reign her newly-appointed Secretary, Sir William Cecil, dashed off a memo to remind himself of matters that needed attention over the next few days. Among them was sending notice of the new queen’s accession, together with assurances of friendship, to various foreign potentates. First on the list came the pope, but no ambassador was ever sent to Rome, and on this list of potentates the pope’s name (alone) has been crossed out, in Cecil’s hand but with a different color of ink — which implies that even he, at first, had little idea what choice his queen would make.
Footnote 3: By law, an illegitimate child had no right of succession to the Crown, or indeed to any other estate or title of inheritance. In 1543, however, Parliament had passed a statute allowing Henry VIII to determine the succession to the Crown by his own will. Acting on the strength of this grant, Henry had decreed that the Crown was to pass after his death to his son Edward and then, if Edward should lack offspring, to his daughter Mary and then, if she should lack offspring, to his daughter Elizabeth. At the time that he did this, both Mary and Elizabeth had been declared legally illegitimate, and his will did not alter their status. When Mary became queen in 1553, Parliament immediately passed an act voiding all of the acts and legal processes that had effected the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon in 1533, thus upholding her legitimacy. No such act was ever passed in Elizabeth’s reign, and so she remained even as queen as of illegitimate birth. Henry VIII’s will had gone on to decree that if Elizabeth were to die without children, the descendants of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary Tudor (d. 1532), Duchess of Suffolk, were to inherit the Crown, thus excluding the descendants of his older sister, Margaret (d. 1543), Queen of Scotland. However, when Elizabeth did die in 1603, the provisions of the will were ignored, and Margaret’s great-grandson, James VI of Scotland, became James I of England.
Within a month she had unambiguously signaled her intentions, first by walking out of the Christmas Mass at Court when the celebrant refused her request to omit the elevation of the Host and Chalice at the consecration, and then, at her coronation on January 15, 1559, after insulting the monks who welcomed her to Westminster Abbey, by withdrawing from her own Coronation Mass and refusing to receive communion at it (the only English monarch, other than the Catholic James II in 1685, not to receive communion at her own coronation).
Elizabeth’s first Parliament met on January 25, 1559 and by the time of its dissolution on May 8 of that year it had passed two acts — the Act of Supremacy, which effectively restored the royal supremacy over the Church of England, and the Act of Uniformity, which abolished the age- old Catholic services in favor of a version of the second Book of Common Prayer of 1552 which had been slightly modified to exclude a petition against the papacy from the Litany (“From the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, good Lord deliver us”) and to alter the words of administration of the Eucharist to render the meaning ambiguous, and as susceptible of a Catholic interpretation as of a Protestant (Zwinglian) “symbolic” one. But this had been achieved only after the Catholic bishops and their lay supporters in the House of Lords had, first, eviscerated the legislation and then nearly wrecked it. In turn, the Crown had to authorize a renewed plundering of the bishops’ lands in order to divide the bishops from some of their lay nobleman supporters and also had to modify the monarch’s title from “Supreme Head on Earth under Christ of the Church of England” to “Supreme Governor, as well in all spiritual causes, as in temporal.” In practice, this was a distinction without a difference, as her powers were identical with those of her father and brother, but it did salve the consciences of some of those, many of her Protestant clerical supporters among them, who did not think that a woman, queen or no, could be in any sense “head” of the church.
Finally, the Queen’s supporters were able to ensure the absence of a few bishops from the session and force that of two more (the most obdurate opponents of the bills) for the critical votes in the House of Lords, where the Act of Uniformity passed on a vote of 21 in favor to 18 against on April 26 (the Act of Supremacy passed by a wider margin three days earlier). It should be noted that all of the representatives of the “spiritual estate” — all churchmen, in other words — present in the House of Lords voted against both acts, which led to some suggestions (which were brushed aside) that they lacked legality, as it was a case of laymen (alone) authorizing an alteration in the doctrine and discipline of the Church against the will of the clergy. (4)
Footnote 4: In later times Puritan proponents of abolishing bishops and “presbyterianizing” the Church of England and abolishing the Prayer Book in favor of a Calvinist form of church services invoked the “precedent” of 1559 to justify the prospect of the “godly” laity and their clerical supporters so “reforming” the Church of England despite the opposition of its bishops to any such “reformation.”
Both bills came into force on June 24. Because of an influenza epidemic in the last months of 1558 and early in 1559, out of a total of 26 bishops, 9 had died by that time. A quarrel between Pope Paul IV and Queen Mary’s husband, Philip of Spain, from late 1557 onwards, ensured that papal approval was withheld from those nominated to replace them, and so the number of vacant sees continued to mount. In the course of the next five months after June 1559 all but one of the 17 surviving English bishops were removed from their offices upon their refusal to accept the royal supremacy. The one exception, Anthony Kitchen, Bishop of Llandaff, was old and decrepit, and while there is no evidence of his having sworn to the royal supremacy, he probably did so — but he played little part in church affairs down to his death in 1566 and participated in no episcopal consecrations after 1558.
So, beginning with the appointment of Matthew Parker to Canterbury in July 1559 (Cardinal Pole died on the same day as Queen Mary in November 1558), the Crown had to replace effectively the whole hierarchy of the Church of England.
What of the convocations? The Convocation of York never met during the whole course of these transactions, but the Convocation of Canterbury assembled when the Parliament opened in January 1559. In early February, when versions of the later Acts of Supremacy and of Uniformity were laid before parliament for consideration, the Lower House of the Canterbury Convocation took up the challenge, and in the course of that month drew up five articles concerning religion, which they unanimously approved and sent to the Upper House (consisting of the bishops and the abbot of the restored Westminster Abbey) on February 28 “for the disburdening of their consciences and a profession of their faith.” The first three articles were identical in wording with those that had been approved by the same Canterbury Convocation in 1553, upholding the Real Presence, Transubstantiation and the Sacrifice of the Mass.
The last two were new. The fourth upheld the papal supremacy and asserted it to be of divine institution and right, and without exceptions or exemptions for any church or realm. The fifth declared that “the authority of handling and defining concerning matters of doctrine, sacraments and ecclesiastical discipline hath hitherto ever belonged, and of right ought to belong, only to the pastors of the Church, whom the Holy Ghost for this purpose hath set in the Church, and not to laymen.” The university convocations of Cambridge and Oxford also declared themselves in favor of the first four of these, but ignored the fifth, possibly because it may have seemed to them so to stress the “episcopal magisterium” that it slighted their own “theologians magisterium.”
On February 28 the Lower House presented their resolutions to the Upper House, which likewise endorsed them. In the absence of an Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of London, presented them to Sir Nicholas Bacon, who, as the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, was the queen’s chief legal officer (and who was a strong, if covert, Protestant): he received them, but neither he nor any of the officials of the Crown, nor the queen herself, ever responded to them or (to all appearances) took any notice of them as the Parliament took its course and effected an enduring breach with the papacy.
Such is the story in brief, and the conclusion is easy to draw. Far from seeking “independence” from the papacy, far from approving its “reformation,” the Church of England throughout this period opposed such measures on every occasion that, through its own organs of government and self-expression, it was able to voice its sentiments. To effect the kind of “reformation” that a few desired for religious reasons and that many more desired for political reasons, the Church had to be bludgeoned into submission by forcible methods wielded by secular authorities, extending so far as making opponents (even those who spoke against Henry VIII’s “Supreme Headship”) guilty of treason. It has been estimated that some 400 individuals were executed under these law between 1535 and 1547. These laws were repealed by Mary and not reinstated by Elizabeth, although later in her reign draconian legislation was passed against Englishmen who went abroad to be ordained to the Catholic priesthood and returned to England to “seduce” her subjects from their allegiance.
This ought to be no surprise, as the same thing happened in countries like Denmark and Sweden where the pre-Reformation Catholic structure of the church was largely retained after the introduction of a Lutheran reformation by the civil authorities in both countries. (5) In other regions, the Catholic Church as an institution was either abolished, and replaced by a very differently-organized Lutheran or Reformed church, or else, as in France, Poland and parts of Germany where there was a degree of religious toleration, Lutheran and Reformed churches grew up alongside the Catholic Church. This is no surprise. Where the surprise occurs is the obliviousness to these facts by so many Anglicans or, if aware, how despite them they have continued to make claims that the Church of England and its offshoots have preserved a “Catholic essence” that has been lost in the other churches of the Reformation, and this despite the way that the Church of England, the Catholic Church in England, resisted the religious changes of the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s whenever it had an opportunity to do so.
Footnote 5: In Denmark, after a civil war from 1532 to 1536 in which the winning candidate was a Lutheran, one of the new king’s first acts was to remove and imprison all the country’s Catholic bishops and to replace them with Lutheran “superintendents.” In Sweden, by contrast with the swift and decisive nature of the changes in Denmark, it took thirty years of Machiavellian maneuvering by its king between 1527 and 1557, a king whose actual religious views, if he had any, remained obscure throughout the process, to push his country into Lutheranism while allowing the Catholic bishops to die off, and even then Sweden did not officially embrace Lutheranism until 1593. There are many interesting parallels between the English and Swedish “reformations.”
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Reading suggestions:
Birt, H. N. The Elizabethan Religious Settlement: A Study of Contemporary Documents. London, 1907: George Bell and Sons. Written from a strongly Catholic perspective by a monk of Downside Abbey, the book goes into meticulous detail concerning the promoters of the Elizabethan Settlement and the attitudes and reactions of the church hierarchy to the events of 1559.
Dickens, A. G. The English Reformation. London, 1964, 1989: Batsford. The best “traditional” work on the English Reformation, arguing that it succeeded because the English took rapidly (and sensibly) to Protestantism after some initial hesitations. The 1989 second edition attempts to rebut “revisionists” like Haigh (below) and Eamon Duffy.
Elton, G. R. Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell. Cambridge, 1972: Cambridge University Press. One of the many books of my late doctor-father (who was by no means inclined to favor anything Catholic), this deals with the period from 1532 to 1540. I mention it here, because it demonstrates how deeply unpopular Henry VIII’s discarding of Catherine of Aragon in favor of Anne Boleyn and the religious changes of the 1530s that ensued were at the popular level, giving rise to many “seditious speeches” from clergy and laity alike — which brought treason trials and executions upon many of these unfortunate folk.
Haigh, Christopher. English Reformations. Oxford, 1993: Oxford University Press. A sharply-written textbook by a self- described “Anglican agnostic” that debunks many of the myths (and especially Anglican myths) concerning the English Reformation.
Jones, Norman. Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion 1559. London, 1982: Royal Historical Society. An analysis of the legislative activity of the 1559 Parliament and of the politics of the settlement by an impartial agnostic historian. It demonstrates in detail how the change of religion would never have got through the House of Lords had not the government contrived to exclude some bishops, and then imprison two others for refusing to participate in a rigged “debate” arranged by Elizabeth’s officials.
Powicke, Sir Maurice. The Reformation in England. Oxford, 1941: Oxford University Press. After remaining in print for 30 years, this short book went out of fashion. It is time for a revival, as Powicke demonstrates that the dynamics of the English Reformation were very largely political, whatever may have been the case elsewhere in Europe.
If a cathedral chapter failed to elect the Crown’s choice of Bishop within the CofE they could be subject to the penalties of praemunire (forfeiture of all property included). (The penalities of praemunire have were finally repealed in the Criminal Law Act 1967).
William Tighe – thank you…..I really enjoyed the history lesson…again, thanks…..
[blockquote] Elton, G. R. Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell. Cambridge, 1972: Cambridge University Press. One of the many books of my late doctor-father (who was by no means inclined to favor anything Catholic)[/blockquote]
Was your father really G.R. Elton, Dr Tighe – I’m really impressed and I take it you are a convert to Roman Catholicism. Good article, save for the RC bias, Elizabeth was of course Legitimate under English law and the English view, the only one that matters and avoided us becoming a Spanish colony, despite the best efforts of her appaling sister, Bloody Mary. Otherwise Hablar Espagnol?
Many thanks and it is good to read something from you that does not mention ‘Erastianism’.
Sir Geoffrey Elton (1921-1994) was not my father in the flesh but my “Doktorvater” (the person under whom I did my doctorate), as the Germans say. It was one of the sadnesses of Elton’s like that he and his wife had no children (and I suppose being the uncle of Ben Elton wasn’t a compensation). “Elton,” btw, was a name that he and his brother Louis adopted at the behest of the Army Council during the War: they were the sons of the Classical historian Victor Ehrenberg.
BUT it’s not true to say that Elizabeth “was legitimate under English law:” she was not (except from her birth in September 1533 until May 1536). She was formally “bastardized” in May 1536 when the compliant Cranmer pronounced the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn null and void a day before her mother’s execution. Her title to the throne (like that of her elder half-sister Mary, who was likewise bastardized when Cranmer annulled her mother’s marriage to Henry in May 1533) rested solely on her being named as such in Henry VIII’s will. When Mary came to the throne, her first Parliament passed a statute condemning the annulment of the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon and repealing all legal acts, judgments and declarations connected with it, which fully legitimized her in the eyes of the law (and she had always been legitimate in Catholic and papal eyes). Elizabeth, by contrast, took no such action upon her accession to the throne, nor did Parliament — but the fact that when her greatuncle Sir James Boleyn (the last male Boleyn) died in 1561 a private Act of Parliament had to be passed to declare her his heir and allow her to inherit his small estate speaks volumes silently, for if she had been of undoubted legal legitimacy no such act would have been necessary for her to inherit. So she was at law a bastard to her dying day (and this was not unknown, as there are a few private letters exchanged between gentlemen courtiers during her reign which make strange punning comparisons between her and William the Conqueror, in which the comparison is justified by their “similaritie” but all of the particulars given are differences not similarities, and the unmentioned and unmentionable point of similarity seems to be their illegitimate status).
William Tighe – are you going for some kind of record?
As usual Dr. Tigue has done a superb job. Thanks.
I appreciate Dr. Tighe’s notation of events. As a decedent of recoussant English Catholics who sailed on the Dove for Maryland, I especially appreciate it. Last year I read John Krugler’s English and Catholic, and try as I might, particularly in examining what records I could find on Jesuits active under their various pseudonyms in both England and Maryland, I was not very successful in discovering much about the Calverts in England. Krugler seems to imply that that the “secret” houses and those loyal to the Catholic religion were well-known in England and, although the Crown took fast action against Jesuits coming over from France and Belgium, I just didn’t find in Krugler really vicious attempts of the Crown to take action against its own people who were Romish loyalists. But, I have no French and this was a decided handicap in my efforts. Does Dr. Tighe have a source specifically on the Romish laity in the late Henry 8th and Elizabethan period?
William Tighe’s histories always remind me of just how fortunate we are as Protestants. Things might have gone quite differently but in the providence of God, it did not and I am grateful for Elizabeth I and the English reformation.
History, in itself, is silent on how God’s Providence was active in the period of the Reformation. Nevertheless the great utility of Professor Tighe’s essays is that they show the falsity of so many Anglicans myths about our own past. The Protestant myth of the ‘popular revolution’; the Anglo Catholic myth of the church that was ‘catholic in all the essentials’; the liberal myth of the church that was ‘generously inclusive’.
[blockquote]In 1543, however, Parliament had passed a statute allowing Henry VIII to determine the succession to the Crown by his own will. [/blockquote]
Actually no, the Succession to the Crown Act 1543 (citation 35 Hen. VIII c. (confirmed by Henry’s will) had declared that if Edward died without heirs of his body, the Crown should pass first to Mary and then to Elizabeth, provided that neither of them had married without the council’s consent.
[blockquote]be enacted by His Highness with the assent of the lords spiritual and temporal and the commons in this present parliament assembled and by authority of the same, and therefore be it enacted by the authority aforesaid, that in case it shall happen the king’s majesty and the said excellent prince his yet only son Prince Edward and heir apparent, to decease without heir of either of their bodies lawfully begotten (as God defend) so that there be no such heir male or female of any of their two bodies, to have and inherit the said imperial crown and other his dominions, according and in such manner and form as in the aforesaid act and now in this is declared, that then the said imperial crown and all other the premises shall be to the Lady Mary, the king’s Highness’ daughter, and to the heirs of the body of the same Lady Mary lawfully begotten, with such conditions as by His Highness shall be limited by his letters patents under his great seal, or by His Majesty’s last will in writing signed with his gracious hand; and for default of such issue the said imperial crown and other the premises shall be to the Lady Elizabeth, the king’s second daughter, and to the heirs of the body of the said Lady Elizabeth lawfully begotten, with such conditions as by His Highness shall be limited by his letters patents under his great seal, or by His Majesty’s last will in writing signed with his gracious hand; anything in the said act made in the said twenty-eighth year of our said sovereign lord to the contrary of this act notwithstanding.[/blockquote]
Thus Elizabeth’s legitimate succession to the Crown was the result of the act of the King in Parliament and thus entirely lawful. The law was merely confirmed by the Will of the King.
Actually Driver8 I have to disagree with you about “great utility of Professor Tighe’s essays” and my objection is this. While they are scholarly and he has diligently researched many obscure byways of history they appear to be motivated mainly by a desire to contribute to the downfall of the reformed but catholic Anglican church.
Unless a historian of comparable diligence comes into the argument it is unlikely that any of his conclusions will be challenged and from what I have seen, this should not be allowed to pass without proper scrutiny.
It is a great shame because he writes with such scholarship and clear enthusiasm for his subject and it is with reluctance that I turn from the view of him as the helpful scholar who is to be valued to a vision of the Child Catcher of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang dangling tempting sweets and toys in front of gullible Anglicans with the aim of carting them off to Rome.
Professor Tighe is a committed Catholic and is very critical of much that has occured in the Anglican Communion. He is a professional, published historian whose speciality is the period under question. Anglicans regularly trot out a variety of myths about their past. Dean Slee’s (and numerous TEC Bishops) vision of the ‘inclusive’ church being just one. (It might be one possible vision of Anglicanism since Lux Mundi but is a ridiculous claim about the Elizabethan Church of England). These myths have been discredited not by the little essays of Professor Tighe but in work after work by Reformation scholars of all denominations and none. His essays pretty much accurately summarise the current state of play in Reformation scholarship.
As a Catholic he takes a particular view of that history. He also has trenchant views on the current condition of Anglicanism. Others are quite at liberty to take different views. For example, that a godly minority led the church and state towards Reformed truth and used the power of the law to secure and establish the Reformed heritage.
RE: “History, in itself, is silent on how God’s Providence was active in the period of the Reformation.”
So true. As is science, art, and more. ; > )
Which is why it is *people* that express opinions about God’s providence, which is precisely what I did.
Of course . . . those who oppose the Reformation would be opposed to my opinion about God’s providence, as is their right.
I know well of Dr Tighe’s Roman Catholicism and as far as I am aware he is still Associate Professor of History, holder of a Ph.D. and a church history specialist at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania.
I have to say though that for Anglicans on an Anglican blog, the constent spin placed on the history posted here makes it difficult to discern the difference between history and propaganda. I would rather a scholar set out the historical events and then stated what his opinion on them is, to which I would readily listen. The fact that fact and propaganda are intermixed leads a cautious person to discount giving the article any credence.
As an Anglican who values the Anglo-Catholic tradition within my church, and particularly the contribution in liturgy and spirituality which it has and will hopefully still continue to offer us, I just find this irritating…really really irritating.
What I do not know is whether he is a zealous convert or a real catholic born and raised.
Moderate that I am, I am somewhere in between Driver8 and Pageantmaster. ; > )
I greatly value William Tighe’s scholarship, while always understanding that he [like every historian] is never fully objective in his description of history. I don’t read all of his comments — since I usually know the ultimate point of it all [“and so we see the consequences of the dissenters not submitting to Mother Church”] but when I do read them I enjoy greatly his mind and his use of language, which is often at its best quite playful.
On the other hand, his essays have in no way countered the “popular myth” of the revolution — [although it’s not a particularly important ” myth” since almost NOTHING accomplished in history has been accomplished with anything more than an interested and committed minority and a disinterested and passive majority-middle] — since his essays largely point accusatory fingers at the role that politics and violence played in religious changes, which is somewhat of a given on all sides in history.
Sarah, I posted not seeing your contribution and agree that I enjoy greatly his mind, his use of language and his scholarship and this is the very positive side. Would that I did not see the other side.
Surely, William Tighe must have had this tour de force up his sleeve already. It doesn’t look like something written with Colin Slee in mind (it seems to be addressing rather different issues from those raised by the Dean of Southwark).
And if one of his main points is that the English Reformation was politically-motivated and messy, well, yes of course it was. But given the intimate connections of politics and faith in the sixteenth century, how could it be otherwise? And opting for Rome on that basis doesn’t get you out of the same bind. Did the Counter-Reformation have nothing to do with Hapsburg ambitions? Was the crushing of the French Reformed churches achieved without polticial skullduggery and massive persecution? I don’t think so.
We all have to read history with certain paradigms which help us make sense of it. When these become myths which totally distort the picture, let’s have them busted. But I still read the sixteenth century as the story of the recovery of some truths neglected by the medieval church and – yes – then denied by the Roman church (as it became after its Counter-reformation).
The CofE synod has apparently voted handily to give initial approval to the covenant process, rejecting attempts by both left and right to derail it. Details at:
http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/?p=1861
and
http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/002499.html
One may attribute the English Reformation to the Providence of God, or one may attribute the rebellion of the English against the Catholic Church to the willingness of God to let sinful man have his way. I say this not as a partisan (though I certainly am that!), but to note that Providence, or human rebellion have pushed things in the Catholic direction in other times and places. I rather doubt that Providence makes some of us Catholic and some Anglican.
a zealous convert or a real catholic born and raised
One wonders from what know-nothing rock that bit of bigotry crawled. Perhaps answering Dr. Tighe’s arguments, and not his motivations or religion might be more useful and… well, Anglican, since reason is such a thing with you folk.
As Mark McCall has posted from Anglican Mainstream, the CofE Synod has passed the resolution on the Anglican Covenant after first as speech by Drexel Gomez – official news here:
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/gsjul0807pm1.html
no audio files yet or full report on this or on Drexel Gomez’ speech but these should in due course be here:
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/agendas/july2007.html
Church Society has a report on the Gomez speech and events here:
http://www.churchsociety.org/issues_new/synod/iss_synod_latest.asp
Thinking Anglicans also has a report:
http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/
Anglican Mainstream has the result posted and Bishop Nazir Ali’s speech to Synod
http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/
Looks like the Bishops won the day against either end.
46 Words
I am what you would call a cradle Anglican. My mother’s family are an ancient west-country roman catholic family until recently, well 160 years ago, and some branches still are. I deal closely with them and with other roman catholics who I serve and pray with. I never encounter from them the antagonism that Dr Tighe displays to my church; on the contrary we show to each other and our churches respect and a common interest as Christians.
RE: “One may attribute the English Reformation to the Providence of God, or one may attribute the rebellion of the English against the Catholic Church to the willingness of God to let sinful man have his way.”
Very true. Like I said: “Which is why it is *people* that express opinions about God’s providence, which is precisely what I did.”
I’ve expressed my opinion that it was God’s providence. Certainly others will think differently! ; > )
I am deeply grateful for the English Reformation.
I enjoy Dr Tighe’s pieces (& what he has to say elsewhere about the Church of Sweden). I can’t judege the historical scholarship. But nothing will convince me that the Bible teaches transubstantiation, invocation of the saints, or purgatory!
Pageantmaster –
Well, of course, in real life we get along with our neighbors, emphasizing the positive. That’s quite unlike what often passes for discourse on blogs. So would you refer to a convert you actually knew as something other than a “real Catholic”. Actually, cradle Catholics sometimes marvel at the knowledge and enthusium of converts (while I marvel that what I have in my head they have in their bones), though some dismiss us.
William Tighe certainly makes his case with historical data, taking no prisoners along the way, I’ll grant you. I simply argue that historical arguments are objectively true or untrue and response to that data should avoid personal attack.
FWIW, there’s a good bit of Catholic-bashing at this site from time-to-time, generally from reappraisers, but sometimes from reasserters. There are also reasoned disagreement with Catholic matters. It is the latter we should seek and engage, pulling the beam of prejudice our of our own eyes before concerning ourselves with the mote of bigotry in our brothers.
And above all… FACTS… FACTS…FACTS.
#51 I guess feelings and thoughts will often be more sharply defined when one has made a choice to be a Catholic or Anglican or at least, seriously explored the possibility of making such a choice. I am an Anglican by choice and thought at the time I made that choice that the Church of England simply was the catholic church in England though separated by the vagaries of history. (Such a view seems naive in the extreme now but was relatively common well in the 1980s). I continue to reflect on my choice.
#52 Words – on reflection the comments on how long Dr Tighe has been a roman catholic were unnecessary and I withdraw them with apologies.
I am used to working with rather than against roman catholics.
Re: #34,
Emily, the two best books that come to my mind are Arnold Pritchard’s *Catholic Loyalists in Elizabethan England* and Hugh Aveling’s *The Handle and the Axe* (I have the authors’ names right, but I’m not so sure of the titles), both of which were published about 30 years ago. Christopher Haigh’s engaging book *English Reformations* contains chapters specifically discussing English Protestants under Catholic rule (Mary) and English Catholics under Protestant rule (Elizabeth). For a long time it was thought that there was no coherent of organized “Catholic opposition” to the regime from the failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537 to 1553 (which was, in a way, the most profound and successful stroke of Catholic opposition to the regime), apart from the Western Rising of 1549. Elton’s *Policy and Police* began to undermine this notion, and a recent collection (published by Ashgate) of essays by Peter Marshall of the University of Warwick (whose name I forget) has carried the good work further.
“But nothing will convince me that the Bible teaches transubstantiation, invocation of the saints, or purgatory!”
True enough — just a sit doesn’t teach homoousios, the Trinity, the hypostatic union or the words “without confusion,” “without change”, “without separation” or “without distinction” of the Chalcedonian Definition; or just as it does not teach sola scriptura.
And the relevance of the point is?
I am both “a Catholic born and raised” and “a zealous convert” (or, rather, “revert”); so I have the good fortune to inhabit the best of both worlds.
Re: #37,
But the act also allowed Henry to alter its provisions as he saw fit, and in his will he did so, by providing further for the succession should Elizabeth die without heirs, and in so doing to exclude the offspring of his elder sister in favor of those of his younger — a stipulation that was ignored in 1603, of course, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England — and his accession was welcomed by an Act of Parliament declaring, among other things, that Parliament lacked the competence to alter the succession of the Crown from its “rightful heirs.”
Well of course the competance of Parliament was the issue with James I’s son, Charles I and led to the Civil War, the awful Commonwealth and the Restoration under Charles II, part of the terms of which were the acceptance of constitutional monarchy and the competence of Parliament. That settled the question, with as ever in England a few constitutional quirks like the prerogative.
There was of course the issue of Edward VI whose Will purported to disregard the 1543 Act and to disinherit both Mary and Elizabeth in favour of Lady Jane Grey (heir through Henry VIII’s sister) who was deposed after 9 days. The Act continued to operate – as Acts of Parliament still do today.
# 55: “True enough—just a sit doesn’t teach homoousios, the Trinity, the hypostatic union or the words “without confusion,†“without changeâ€, “without separation†or “without distinction†of the Chalcedonian Definition; or just as it does not teach sola scriptura.”
True enough, [i]expressis verbis[/i] . But I understand these to be necessary implications of the Bible’s teaching, otherwise we’d have unitarianism, tritheism, Arianism or some such other.
Woops, can’t handle the italics thingy. Anyway, the Reformation affirmed the teaching of those councils on Christology as consonant with the meaning of the Bible. But it couldn’t likewise affirm Catholic doctrine of the eucharist or purgatory. That was my point. More broadly, I remember T S Eliot’s aphorism: ‘History may be servitude, history may be freedom.’
#59 Yes – of course that’s right but you accept the church’s authority on at least some occasions, through God’s grace, to define the necessary implications of the Bible’s teaching.
#62 – Ah but which part of the Church? – and how?
Aye there’s the rub.
#62 absolutely. How doctrine is defined and inauthentic development distinguished from authentic is at the heart of the current Anglican crisis.
Every so often, T19 brings together strange bed-fellows. I’ve read through this thread and I find myself mostly in agreement with Gordian and Sarah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But I expect they will feel the same way.
just a quick note to thank Dr. Tighe for the references at #54.