Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXX

Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin
Welby with Pope Francis 

Pardon the most recent hiatus.  I have been down with a temperature, but now am ready to resume my blogging.  Though actually, I had written this posting before I became sick and just wasn’t up to posting it until this afternoon.

I was interested to see on the neo-traditionalist  blog New Liturgical Movement a posting about and a link to an article calling for a new examination of the English Reformation by historian and barrister, Dominick Selwood that appeared in England’s Daily Telegraph.  Though I strong disagree with New Liturgical Movements underlying agenda, and often with their conclusions from historical and liturgical-historical data, they represent thorough scholarship so I while I was interested to see a reference to Selwood and his article on re-thinking the Reformation, I was not surprised.  According to Doctor Selwood, the Reformation has always been taught in England with a bias in favor of the Reformers and there is a need to take a critical look at that.  I will be anxious to read more of Professor Selwood’s observations as he continues to publish, but as “the winners write the history books” I have no doubt to the basic validity of his premise that the Protestant writers wrote England’s history—not just its Reformation History or its Ecclesiastical History, but its national history.     

Selwood sums the establishment historiography as

For centuries, the English have been taught that the late medieval Church was superstitious, corrupt, exploitative, and alien. Above all, we were told that King Henry VIII and the people of England despised its popish flummery and primitive rites. England was fed up to the back teeth with the ignorant mumbo-jumbo magicians of the foreign Church, and up and down the country Tudor people preferred plain-speaking, rational men like Wycliffe, Luther, and Calvin. Henry VIII achieved what all sane English and Welsh people had long desired ­– an excuse to break away from an anachronistic subjugation to the ridiculous medieval strictures of the Church.

This is obviously a gross characterization of the historical data but not without foundation.  Remember Lord Grantham saying to the Archbishop of York in Season 3 of Downton Abbey: “ I don’t want thumbscrews or the rack, but there always seems to be something of Johnnt Foreigner about the Catholics”?  Yes, yes, I know Downton Abbey is fiction and we don’t mix history and fiction, even historical fiction.  But trust me, the writers well captured the traditional English bias against those whose religious allegiance lay outside the realm rather than beneath the crown.

Selwood, for his part, does a mixed task of redressing the misinformation.  Very much in the style of Eamon Duffy, Selwood paints a vibrant picture of parish life in the first years of the sixteenth century.  On the other hand, he makes the break with Rome appear to be much more immediate than it was. He also fails to distinguish between Henry’s schismatic Church and the Protestant Church of England of Edward VI, Elizabeth, and her successors.  We can look at this a bit down the line, but it brings us the problems of writing history.  We all have our biases—and our biases are formed—often unconsciously—by our politics, our economic interests, our social position, our ethnic background, and the web of personal experiences and relationships that has brought us to this point of life. 

For centuries Catholics were not particularly interest in history, but rather “tradition.”  (note the small “t.”)   Facts and faith are apples and oranges.  An so when the Church encountered “facts” they didn’t like (Think Copernicus, Galileo) they either ignored them (Copernicus) or tried to stamp them out before they could spread (Galileo).  However, in the nineteenth century some highly perceptive minds in the Church realized that our not being more pro-active about the History of the Church, was leaving the field to the Protestant thinkers, and even worse, the rising anti-Catholic wing of the intelligentsia.  Perhaps it was Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (published between 1776 and 1789) with its consistent theme of how Christianity weakened Rome and left it to fall into oblivion that made the difference.   (I know that Gibbon’s book was 18^th century and I am talking 19^th, but it takes some time for these turgid words to have some impact on a culture. It isn’t like today—one Sunday in the New York Times Book Review and you can buy that little villa in the Keys.)   In England people like Lord Acton and Cardinal Gasquet rose to the occasion and used history to present the Catholic side of the story.  While they may have been more nuanced than the Protestant colleagues, they were often no less biased. 

Fortunately in the last thirty years a variety of first-rate historians—some Catholic, some not) such as Owen Chadwick, Eamon Duffy, Geoffrey Elton, Christoper Haigh, Diarmud MacCullough, A.G. Dickens, and J.J. Scarisbrick have done much to approach the English Reformation from a far more objective perspective.   The question is however, when will these studies begin to make an impact on both the people in the pews and on the institutional churches involved.  For all the cordiality when the Archbishop of Canterbury visits the Vatican—or the Pope comes to Canterbury—where are the ties between the local Catholic and Episcopalian parishes?  Where are the joint prayer services?  Where is the cooperation in mission for the needs of the local poor?  I remember seeing the Episcopal Bishop of Virginia struggling into his robes in the parking lot of a Catholic Cathedral where he had come for the funeral of the bishops and had not been provided any sort of welcome, much less an invitation to vest and sit with the clergy. No, the time has come to rekindle our interest in ecumenis, study the history, reflect together on the scriptures, and embrace the common mission of proclaiming not our respective Churches, but the one Mission left to us all by Christ.  

Why history?

Every so often it is good to stand back and reflect on why I am writing this blog.  I am amazed how many regular viewers we have and which sites are so popular—everyone seems interested in that site on Catholics and the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln; in fact Civil War entries seem to be particularly popular while the European entries seem less so.  Be patient, however, I am going to have to go back to some of those European topics as we have left a number of strands unfinished.  If you have subjects you would like addressed just make a comment on a blog suggesting a topic and I will add it to my list.  I am going to finish up this series on “origins of radical Catholicism” and I think we will need about ten more entries to examine the situation at the end of the nineteenth century that is responsible for the formation of what one might call a “liberal” and a “conservative” camp in the American Church.  Actually the roots go much further back into colonial Catholicism where the American tradition first began and maybe in a month or two we will look at Catholicism in colonial America and see just how different it was from the Catholicism that the immigrants of the nineteenth century brought over.

All this is why I do this blog—not to supply readers with tons of useless information but to illustrate that our Catholic Church today is affected by its history and when we know its history we can understand better who we are and why we do the things we do.  History is not about the past.  In history we talk about the past as a means of understanding better the present and our options for the future.  When we know the history of the Catholic Church in the United States you can see that we were always different than the Church in Europe and that there have been episodes before as there are now when some in the Church are trying to make us follow a very foreign brand of Catholicism.  That is only one example.  We can see that the popes did not always have the power they have now.  At one times bishops were elected, not appointed by the Papal Curia.  We can see that some religious orders of sisters originally wore ordinary clothes and lived in rented apartments not convents.  We can see that there have been times when bishops and popes abused the authority of their office.  We can see that people who spoke up and against popes sometimes became saints and even doctors of the Church.  We can see when some of the heroes of the conservatives—like Cardinal Newman—were actually quite liberal and some of the heroes of the liberals—like Archbishop Ireland—were quite rigid and authoritarian.  We will see that there were saints who rejected the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception or purgatory.  We will be able to see ideas that once were considered heretical are now part of the teaching of the Church.  History is fascinating because it busts open many of the myths that we never question and it shows that beneath all the changes in the Church throughout its history are the real life needs, situations, ideas, prejudices, designs, hopes, fears and who knows what else of real people.  This is not to say that God isn’t involved only that he acts not by epiphany or direct revelation but through real people and in historical situations. Well, next blog will bring us back to the liberal-conservative struggles in the American Church at the end of the nineteenth century.   you may want to check out the blog-entry by the same title on February 6 2011  The image today is the reconstructed seventeenth century Catholic Church i Saint Mary's City, Maryland.   

          

Anti-Catholicism in Post-Civil War America

      I will eventually come back to the topic about Vatican II being under attack from within the Church, but I have noticed that questions of the history of the Church in the United States tend to draw considerably more interest than European Church history or “history in the making” issues.  And so today I want to go back to the subject of the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States.   In earlier blogs we looked at the Charlestown Convent burning, the Philadelphia Riots, the Know-Nothing movement and other episodes in nineteenth century America of prejudice against Catholics resulting in violence and discrimination.  At some point I want to take a deeper look at anti-Catholicism in the pre-Revolutionary colonies, especially Massachusetts, New York and Virginia.  Today however I want to pick up the thread where we had left off with the American Civil War and Catholic involvement in the Lincoln assassination. 

In a certain sense the Civil War was a bit of a draw for Catholics.  On the one hand the remarkable work of the nursing sisters on the battlefields, the diplomacy of Bishop John Hughes of New York, and the Irish immigrant troops that fought for the Union built up the esteem of Americans for the Catholic faith.  On the other hand, the Diplomatic Recognition of the Holy See for the Confederacy, the support for the Confederacy of Archbishop Oder of New Orleans and Bishop Lynch of Charleston, along with refusal of Bishop Elder of Natchez to have prayers said for the President of the United States, and the predominance of Catholics in the Lincoln conspiracy cast Catholicism in an unfavorable light, at least among the Northerners in general and Republicans in particular.

In the years immediately after the Civil War, veterans of the Confederate army organized the original Ku Klux Klan to resist the Northern “Carpetbagger” politicians who were enforcing “Reconstruction” in the South in order to disenfranchise those who had been loyal to the Confederacy and to keep the African American population, almost all former slaves, from exercising their political and civil rights. This “First Klan” (as opposed to the revived Klan, or “Second Klan” of the 1920’s and 30’s did not have a specifically anti-Catholic agenda but that is not to say that there wasn’t strong anti-Catholicism in the Southern United States.  Catholicism was virtually unknown in the South whose population—with the exception of Maryland and Louisiana— was almost entirely Baptist and Methodist Protestant.  Catholicism’s being unknown was both a blessing and a curse.  Catholicism was not a strong threat and thus did not provoke as strong a reaction as it did in places such as Ohio and Indiana where the Catholic-Protestant balance was more delicate with the rural population being Protestant and Catholics often holding the political edge in the cities and larger towns.  But also being unknown, it became the subject of negative myths and stories.

The greater problem, however, was in the North where a rapidly growing Catholic population was a threat to the economic and political establishments.  The fierce Catholic attachment to the Democratic Party with its ties to labor and its openness to immigrants along with the stories of Catholic involvement in the murder of President Lincoln generated a strong anti-Catholicism in Republican circles.  This often worked against the Republican interest such as in the 1884 Presidential campaign when a Presbyterian Minister, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Burchard in a speech at which Blaine was present, declared: “We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." Blaine failed to repudiate the statement (he probably had not even noticed it) and it ended up costing him the election and returning the White House to the Democrats for the first time since 1856, before the Civil War. 

Even more acrimonious was the Republican cartoonist Thomas Nast.  Nast, a German Protestant immigrant, is best known for his visual creation of “Santa Claus” drawn for an 1863 illustration of the Rev. Clement Clark Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas”  in Harper’s Bazaar, but he had a pathological hatred for the Catholic Church, accompanied by a particular hatred for the Irish.  Nast depicted the Irish as violent drunks and Catholics as dangerous to American liberty.  His cartoons were carried in scores of newspapers and journals across the country. 

Much of the anti-Catholicism of the period had to do with the huge flood of immigrants sweeping in the United States from the end of the Civil War right up until World War I.  Irish (almost entirely Catholic) and Germans (more than half Catholic) composed the largest number of immigrants, but considerable numbers came also from such Catholic populations as Italy and the Austo-Hungarian Empire, including parts of Poland.  While these immigrants were almost invariably relegated to menial work and the poorest of living conditions, it was clear to the old Anglo-Saxon establishment that America was changing and would soon be nation in which they—the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—would be a political and economic minority.  This put them in a conflict between their traditional intellectual liberalism and their self-interest.  Social evolution would in time create a more homogenous society where the descendents of the immigrants would “Americanize” but in interim fear and anxiety fed stereotypes and  prejudices. 

The image today is one of Thomas Nast's (1840-1902)  anti-Catholic and anti-Irish cartoons

Why history?

Let’s take a time out from the march of history and talk about "why do a history blog?". There are many voices around claiming to have a monopoly on what it means to be a Catholic. There are web presences like “Trinity Communications” that “rate” sites for their Catholic “orthodoxy.” There are sites like “Restore DC Catholicism,” “The Defender,” “The Saint Catherine Review,” “The Cardinal Newman Society,” “The Catholic Media Coalition,” “Catholic Citizens of Illinois” Michael Voris and “Real Catholic T.V.” and dozens of others who claim to be authentic Catholic voices yet are no more than the opinionated voices of individuals or groups who very often use a “Catholic” identity to mask other agendas—political, economic, or social. Their particular views on Catholicism and misrepresentations of our Catholic Tradition is best countered by a knowledge of the history of the Church which shows just how rich and varied our Catholic heritage and Tradition is. Very often Catholics think that the Church into which many of us were born and in which we grew up—the American Catholicism of the 1950’s—represents historic Catholicism. Well it does, sort of. It was one flower on the abundant vine of the Catholic Church, a flower of a very different color or scent than the Catholicism of medieval France or that of seventh-century Ireland or that of second century Rome. Things that we thought always and everywhere were: Mass in Latin, celibacy for the clergy, papal infallibility, seven sacraments, confession, kneeling at mass, communion on the tongue, nuns in habits, calling priest “Father” never were either “always” nor “everywhere.” History can shed a very different light on things. One might be surprised to know that “Mr. Carroll,” as our first bishop was known to his contemporaries, normally wore ordinary clothes in public—granted, of a dark color and with out ornamentation; pews in church were a Protestant innovation, Kneeling at Sunday Mass was banned by the same Council that gave us the Creed we recite on Sundays, and communion rails were an Anglican custom that we borrowed. It surprises people to know that even before Vatican II, the papal altars in the four Roman basilicas always “faced the people,” that Vincent de Paul wanted his Daughters of Charity to live in rented apartments not convents, and that Thomas Aquinas did not believe in the Immaculate Conception. Our history can be very enlightening, very freeing, and also show us that many of the “changes” of the last forty years are not “innovations” but restorations of more ancient practices of the Church. So that is one reason to do a blog like this. Some of us believe in real “Tradition” and know there was a Catholic Church long before there was a Baltimore Catechism and even before there was a Roman Missal. Our image today is a medieval sculpture from the facade of Lucca Catheral showing mass facing the people 500 years before the Second Vatican Council.

The Pornocracy--shady ladies and promiscuous popes

When it is mentioned—ever so rarely—in a “Church History” class, it is referred to as the “saeculum obscuram” –the dark century, but I have always preferred the title “the pornacracy”—the “rule of whores.” I have heard that this term is attributed to Luitprand of Cremona, a bishop and court historian to the emperor Otto I, and indeed it might be. Luitprand had a vicious tongue and a streak of self—righteousness that makes his being the alleged coiner of this term plausible, but I have also heard that the term originated with sixteenth century Lutheran historians, anxious to discredit the papacy. That theory actually makes less sense, for while in the heat of the Reformation polemics were the menu du jour, Lutheran scholars were meticulous in the exactness of their work, Admiuttedly Martin Luther himself reportedly had a flair for vulgar language but it was pretty much limited to the table banter with his friends. The great Reformer, while he might have been able to “swear like a sailor,” could also write stirring prose (his sermos and German translation of the Bible) and powerful hymns. The Greek roots of the word pornacracy being porne (whore, harlot) and kratein (to rule) might indicate its sixteenth-century roots where the Renaissance had revived a knowledge of Greek but, while Greek was all but unknown in the 10th century, Luitprand had served as Imperial ambassador on at least one occasion at the Court of Constantinople and would certainly had some knowledge of the language. After all “prostitute,” “harlot, “whore” is one of the first words men try to remember when learning a language, if only so one can tell jokes. In any event, I suppose I could plow through his works and see if indeed he used the term, but frankly I am too lazy.
Well, enough of those trivialities. Who cares who coined the term; it’s a great attention grabber. Where to begin? This is always the problem because history is this great interlocking puzzle where part of the story is always part of a previous story and there is rarely a clear place where one can nicely cut into the cake. Behind the pornacracy is the fascinating (if ghoulish) story of the “Cadaver Synod” but we will go there some other time. Let’s begin with a young lady by the name of Marozia and who had been born in 890. By the time she was fifteen she was the mistress of Pope Sergius III (reigned 904-911). Today that would be called “child abuse” but in the ninth century it was not uncommon for people to be married at fourteen or fifteen. Nevertheless, given the probable age difference (we don’t know the year of Sergius’ birth but he would most likely have been at least in his thirties as pope and given his death in 911 may have been even in his fifties or sixties) it is a bit creepy. But then Sergius was a particularly creepy man with three distinctive marks
1. The only pope known to have murdered his predecessor (plus a rival claimant to the throne of Peter)
2. The only pope whose bastard son himself became pope (John XI)
3. And the first pope to wear—or at least the first to be depicted wearing—the papal tiara.

We will talk more about Marozia in a future posting. As I said this was the “rule of harlots” not the rule of “a harlot.” So let’s meet whore #2. Presenting, Theodora, wife of Theophylact, count of Tusculum and mother of …guess who? None other than whore# 1, yes, Marozia. Theodora is the mistress of Pope John X (reigns 914-928), successor but two to her daughter Marozia’s old flame, Sergius III. So what we have here is a Mother-Daughter prostitution ring in the Lateran Palace. (The popes didn’t live in the Vatican at the time, but in the palace adjoining the Lateran Basilica.)
Well, you might think, what is the poor count of Tusculum to do? How can one resist the power of the pope if he want your wife or your daughter. Poor Theophylact, how can a count resist the Ruler of Rome? Well, that’s the irony. These popes—indeed all the popes in this particular period—were zero’s when it came to power. If anything, they owed their power to Theophylact who was the de facto ruler of Rome. in fact, ol’ John X was only a deacon in Bologna when Theodora “noticed” him—i.e. took a fancy to him—and persuaded her husband to make her boy-toy first bishop of Bologna and then Archbishop of Ravenna from which it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to the papacy.
There obviously is something going on here besides sex. What is it? Well, I will come back to the saga of Theophylact clan, our sort of "Desperate Housewives of the Dark Ages" and we will find out more. Meanwhile, just as a teaser—Marozia holds the rare distinction of being the mistress of one pope, mother of a second, and grandmother of a third. I am sure she made Theodora and Theophylact proud.

Today's image is Theodora by Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant. The only problem is that this is the wrong Theodora--this is Justinian's wife and we will do some posting on her too--she is a fascinating character. But in the meantime, this picture works both Theodoras had their shady-lady pasts.