A Sidebar To the Foundations of the Anglican Church: Continuity (or lack thereof) in English Catholicism

Cardinal William Allen

OK, OK., enough on the Synod and its fall out—and the dizzying fall of Raymond Burke from the highest ecclesiastical heavens to the pit of Malta.  I need to take refuge in the sixteenth century and recover from the madcap pace of the 21^st.   Don’t worry, Avid Readers—humor me on this one.  We will get back to all the intrigue of Rome, the pressures of building the future on the foundations of the past, Synods and Cardinals and the current Pope(s).  But let’s take a short break and shake from our virtual sandals the dust of the fans who are interested only in current ecclesiastical gossip and my cheap shots at the krazies and their kardinal.  Today’s post: One final entry on the Church of England under Elizabeth I—or rather, in this case, the Catholic Church in England during the reign of Elizabeth; and then we will move on to Anglicanism under James I.  And, I promise, the occasional trip back to the present just for fun. 

It was not only the Church of England, taken out of the Roman Communion, that snapped its links with its own ancient heritage during the reigns of Kings Henry VIII and Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth I, but under Elizabeth, the Catholic Church in England represents not a continuity with the pre-Reformation Church but a new body—radically discontinuous with the Ancient Medieval Church on that sceptered isle—introduced into England from the continent. (Aren’t you glad that you’re not in fifth grade and Sister M. Humpty Dumpty isn’t making you diagram my sentences.)   

Argument for continuity: The Church of England, an entity now no longer part of the universal communion centered in the Bishop and Church of Rome, retained the ancient cathedral and parish churches, albeit stripped of most of their ornaments and even of much of their revenues.  Argument either way: There is persistent argument as to whether the links of the Apostolic Succession were broken as the new Elizabethan Bishops, consecrated to their office by Cranmer’s reformed Ordinal, replaced the Catholic hierarchy.  (Catholics say the link was broken; Anglicans and Lutherans affirm that it was not, the Orthodox are divided and in the end the arguments—either way—are more political and polemical than soundly theological.)  Argument against continuity: The ancient English rites were replaced by Cranmer’s radically altered Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 and then by Elizabeth’s 1559 Prayer Book, which was a slight modification of the 1552 Book.  The Church of England, in abandoning its ancient rites in favor of new rites with a distinct Protestant identity, is a new “Church.” 

Yes, those ancient English Rites.  England had never known the Roman Rite but had from ancient days its unique and distinct liturgical tradition.  While people often refer to the Pre-Reformation Liturgical Tradition of England as the Sarum Rite, and the Sarum Rite was the most commonly used Liturgy in the Kingdom, in fact York, Hereford, and Bangor each also had their own distinct rites.  Under Henry VIII, the Sarum Rite became the standard Rite for the entire Kingdom, and York, Hereford ad Bangor Rites were suppressed.  Then Edward VI replaced the Sarum Use with the 1549 Prayer Book.  The Sarum Rite was still used, however, where the old faith was practiced and it was the liturgy which Queen Mary reintroduced upon her accession in 1553.  Abolished again in 1559 by Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity in reintroducing the Protestant Prayer Book of that year, the Sarum Rite was secretly celebrated in those Catholic homes where the old believers gathered for their underground Masses and prayers.  But its days would prove to be numbered.

During the reign of Elizabeth, many devout Catholics fled to the continent even as during Mary’s reign the more ardent Protestants had fled the realm for Geneva, Strasbourg, and other Protestant centers.  Catholics established themselves, for the most part, in Northern France and in Flanders (today’s Belgium).  There they built monasteries, religious houses, and seminaries for English vocations.  The seminaries supplied priests to return secretly to England to minister to those English who clung to “the old faith.” 

Just as the Second Vatican Council called for the Church to “reform” the old rites of its day, so too the Council of Trent had called for the Mass of its time to be reformed.  Pope Saint Pius V established a commission to revise the older missals and create a standard rite for the Western Church.  We now call this revised liturgy the “Tridentine Rite,” and it was the Mass with which those of us “of a certain age” (as one grand old lady of my acquaintance likes to describe herself and her contemporaries) grew up.  In 1570 Pius V promulgated a new Missal introducing this revised Rite, and any Rite, whether of a place or of a religious Order, that could not show that it had been in continuous use for at least 200 years was suppressed.  The English seminaries on the Continent gave up the traditional English Rites in favor of the “new” Missal of Pius V.  When the priests trained in those seminaries returned to England they celebrated the Mass and Sacraments, not according to the ancient rites of the English Church, but to the new revised Rite of Pius V that they had learned during their training. 

The liturgy was the most obvious change in the Catholic Church in post-Reformation England, but not the only one.  When Elizabeth had come to the Throne, a few English Sees, including the Primatial See at Canterbury, were empty, but there were still plenty of Catholic bishops from the reign of Queen Mary.  With the exception of Anthony Kitchin, Bishop of Llandalf in Wales, all Elizabeth’s bishops refused the Act of Supremacy and were deposed rather than accede to the break with Rome.  Rome, of course, still recognized these men as the legitimate bishops in their sees, but as they died (some in prison, some under house arrest, some in retirement, but all peacefully, no martyrs) Rome failed to name new bishops, loyal to Rome, to their sees.  This created a double problem.  By not naming successors, Rome gave tacit acknowledgement to the validity of the new appointments.  More critical than this rather abstract point, Rome’s failure to appoint new bishops left England without a hierarchy.  William Allen, an English priest and exile who had founded the English Colleges at Douai (later moved temporarily to Rheims), Valladolid, and Rome to train priests for “the English Mission,” exercised considerable authority over the priest on the English Mission because of his role in establishing the seminaries.  After Allen’s death in Rome in 1594, however, there was a real authority-vacuum.  In 1598 Enrico Caetani, scion of a prelate-ridden old and noble Roman family who had succeeded Allen as “Cardinal Protector” of England appointed George Blackwell as “Archpriest” to be the superior of the English mission.   This led to a conflict between the Jesuits and the secular clergy who had very different approaches to serving the Catholic faithful in England.  The conflict between the religious order clergy and the secular clergy meant that the Archpriest program never really worked out, and in 1623 Clement VIII appointed William Bishop as Vicar Apostolic of England, Scotland, and Wales, giving him authority over all priests in England, secular and religious.  Bishop was consecrated in Paris in June 1623 (thus becoming Bishop Bishop, neither the first nor the last to hold that particular distinction).   Bishop died the following year and was succeeded as Vicar Apostolic by Richard Smith.  When a warrant was sworn-out for Smith’s arrest (for being an agent of the Pope) in 1631, Smith fled the Kingdom to Paris and there was no Bishop in England again until 1688 when Innocent XI appointed four regional Vicars Apostolic.  However, Bishop Bishop, during his brief tenure, had appointed 20 secular priests to be a “chapter.”  As Bishop had no cathedral, and in fact not even a proper diocese, the legal status of this chapter was disputed but during the long vacancy from Smith’s fleeing England in 1631 until the appointment of the Vicars Apostolic in 1688, the chapter functioned as a diocesan chapter is meant to function during the sede vacante of the bishop with the Dean acting as Vicar General and granting all the necessary dispensations, faculties, etc.   Since the Holy See never challenged the arrangement “the old Chapter” is considered to have been irregular but valid. 

From 1688 until the creation of the English Hierarchy in 1850, the Catholic Church in England was administered by Vicars Apostolic.  When a Catholic hierarchy was appointed for England in 1850 Rome did not “restore” the pre-Reformation hierarchy with its various sees such as Canterbury and York and Winchester and Lincoln, but created new sees for them (though often taking the names of Sees of the English Church from pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon sees).  Again, the failure of Rome to revive the pre-Reformation sees concedes a legitimacy to the Bishops of the Church of England who currently hold them.  Granted, to have given the Catholic Bishops the titles of sees held by the State Church would have broken an Act of Parliament (passed specifically to stop the Pope from appointing Catholic Bishops to the medieval sees) and would have made the new bishops subject to fines and even arrest, but conceding the point is symbolic in the most profound sense of that word.  Creating new sees for the Catholic Bishops, Rome admited that it was not restoring the ancient hierarchy but installing a new one.  Gone were the medieval rites; gone were the medieval bishoprics—the Catholic Church in England was neither continuous with nor a restoration of the pre-Reformation Church but a new and somewhat non-English institution introduced onto that Island whose Church had once given us Hugh of Lincoln and Thomas à Becket and the Venerable Bede and Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and even Thomas More and John Fisher.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXVII

Elizabeth's Chapel

in the Palace of SaintJames

I have a backlog of things to post.  I have a few entries on the ever-popular Katholic Kraizies.  Whenever I do a posting on them, my readership doubles.  I want to bring up the dispute over the remains of the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen and the consequent suspension of his cause for beatification.  I also have been holding back on some comments about the neo-Traditionalist blog, The New Liturgical Movement.  But I want to go back to the Church of England for an entry to two.  I recently was at dinner with an Episcopalian clergyman who was going on and on about that series without realizing that I was the author of the blog.  I didn’t tell him but here is a shout-out: Hi Bill.  Now can you guess who it is that is writing this history?  Anyway, back to Elizabeth. 

Well into Elizabeth’s reign, let’s say as late as the Armada in 1588, the majority of her subjects remained discretely, if not secretly, Catholics.  This was not true for the capital however—the mercantile cities and especially London, had been quick to embrace the Reformation and were strongly committed to Protestantism.  Max Weber, the 20^th century German sociologist, well noted the link between Protestant—and especially Reformed (or Calvinist)—thought and capitalism.  The merchants wanted their money to invest in business, not to squander on supporting monasteries or purchasing vestments or commissioning religious art.  This is not to say that the Protestant merchants were stingy when it comes to God.  Far from it.  But with God, as with business, they wanted to put their money where it would reap a return on their investment.  They endowed schools and scholarships to the universities.  They opened schools for poor children and orphans.  They built hospitals for the indigent sick.  They provided dowries for respectable young ladies from families that had fallen on hard times.  They just didn’t want to sink their money into buildings and the accessories of ritual. 

This led to a significant cultural change.  Art and architecture had, to this point, been primarily at the service of religion, but with the Protestant preference for the stark in matters religious, the arts shift to the secular.  We get far more portraits of solid prosperous English men and women and much fewer saints.  We get still-lifes and some landscapes.  Secular building projects take off as well.  No more abbeys, but we start getting the great manor houses built from the ruins of those monasteries.  Theatres and public buildings go up in London and other large cities.   Society itself secularizes. 

Secularization was not among the goals of the Protestant leadership, of course.  They wanted a “godly realm of England.”  But this is the trouble when you have a break in religious tradition, even a good break.  Once the hold of religion over the culture, or indeed individuals, is broken and the ancient “givens” are called into question, the whole religious establishment collapses like a house of cards.  When you see everything you once held sacred being discarded, nothing remains sacred in your eyes.  But again, this is where Protestantism failed its own ideals—it devolved into religion with an emphasis on doctrine and discipline.  Had Protestantism been able to reach its Evangelical goals and emphasized the conversion of life to which the Gospel shows us the way, secularism would never have gained the foothold in the culture that it did.  But the forest of the Christian life was lost sight of as the Church got tangled in the innumerable trees of cold and abstract doctrine.  Without the ways that medieval Christianity had been able to reach into the daily lives of the ordinary person with the stories of the saints and the feast days and the processions, there was nothing  but secularism to fill the gap in people’s lives. 

One area of art which remained at the service of the Church was music and the two great composers of the time, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, ironically were Roman Catholics.   Tallis was Catholic from the old days before the split with Rome and even though he was a musician in the Chapel Royal of King Henry and later King Edward, he never gave up the old faith.  Byrd was a convert to Catholicism during the reign of Elizabeth.  Being Catholic did not stop them from writing music for the Anglican liturgy, though both wrote for the Catholic liturgy as well.  Byrd was the music director of Elizabeth’s chapel, an indication of how Elizabeth did not go looking for religious conflict as well as an indication of her preference of a more formal approach to liturgy. 

The fact that the Church of England developed a fine musical tradition should not confuse us into thinking that the average English subject attending Sunday worship in his or her parish church was being exposed to good music.  What happened in the chapel royal or in the occasional cathedral was one thing, but in the average parish the service was pretty drab, mostly read and not sung, and what little singing there might be was only the psalms, the Puritans considering hymns and anthems “too Catholic.”  Indeed church wasn’t a lot of fun due to the strong puritan influence that was suspect of anything ritualistic.  More about that in the next posting.

Back to where I started.  London was Protestant.  So was Norwich and the other larger towns of the south east, but there were Catholics aplenty in the countryside, and especially in the North where many of the great landowning families were still Catholic and with sufficient political clout, at least on the local level, to get away with it.  But priests are funny people and the seminary priests returning from their education and ordination abroad were supposed to pass through London and head into the Catholic regions to support the remaining Catholic population.  They didn’t.  They stayed in London, or at least the majority of them did.   They loved the big city and didn’t want to spend their years toiling away in the rural north.  Historians think that had the clergy dispersed into the Catholic areas, not only would far fewer of them had to pay for their faith with their lives, but that the Catholic faith would have continued to hold on in the North and West of England.  But you know, priests have always been known for liking a good restaurant and let’s face it, even in the sixteenth century you can’t beat London for the nightlife.   How can you keep them down on the farm…?