Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis 14

Don't Look For This Any Time Soon

First of all, thanks Ann for your editing help.  I try to proof my entries, but sometimes I am in a hurry and things escape me.  I always welcome a chance to correct my mistakes.  

In my last post I wrote about Pius XII and I want to come back and write several more posts about him.  He was, in many ways and for many people, the defining pope of the modern age; certainly the arch-Pope of the Church as it was before  Vatican II, and many of those who want to restore that pre-Vatican II Church long for a Pius redivivus who will bring back the faded triumphalism of the papacy. Pius was Pope for nineteen years, seven months and seven days—the second longest reigning pope of the past one hundred years.  (John Paul II was Pope for 26 years, 5 months, and 18 days.)  He left an indelible mark on the Papacy and for some he was the last pope.  After Pius and his gloriously reigning style, they could just never adjust to the down-to-earth papacy of his successor, John XXIII or the subsequent papacies. 

As I mentioned in the posting, Pius was a genius, perhaps the pope with the highest I.Q. to sit on the papal throne in centuries.  I refrain from saying the most intelligent however as his extraordinary intellect got in the way of his practical aptitude on many occasions.   Pius’s  Achilles’ heel was that he was autocratic.    Confident in his intelligence and almost autistic in his personality, he was the sole decider and this led him into several disastrous decisions.  On the other hand, his remarkable theological breakthroughs accomplished in Encyclicals such as Divino Afflante Spiritu, Mediator Dei, Mystici Corporis, and even Humani Generis would never have passed the muster of a curial review and—ironically for those whose hero he is—without Pius’ contribution in these encyclicals, the theological developments of Vatican II would have lacked a foundation in the papal magisterium.  Vatican II is more the fruit of Pius’s mind than of that of his successor “Good Pope John.”  But Pius isn’t my topic today.  Francis is.  And in particular, Francis’s approach to authority and authoritarianism. 

In many ways, the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) is the epitome of the authoritarian Catholicism of Pius XII.  Saint Ignatius broke the mold of religious life—abandoning all the relics of monasticism such as singing the Divine Office, religious habits, communal penances, living within a cloister—and created a new form of religious life modeled on soldiering.  Ignatius had been a soldier and he wanted religious storm-troopers to meet the challenges of the Church in Reformation Europe and in what his contemporaries perceived to be the societal chaos of the newly “discovered” lands of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.  In abandoning monastic models, Ignatius also abandoned the monastic authority structure in favor of strict military obedience.  There was no discussion with one’s superiors, no arguing, no calling for a chapter to come to group consensus.  Orders came from top down, pure and simple.  And the commander-in-chief was the Pope.  Jesuits were there to carry our his orders  This system worked for centuries.  Francis, as a Jesuit was part of it.  But listen to what he learned from his experience while he was provincial.   This is what he said in the interview in La Civilta Cattolica which was republished in America.

“In my experience as superior in the Society, to be honest, I have not always behaved in that way—that is, I did not always do the necessary consultation. And this was not a good thing. My style of government as a Jesuit at the beginning had many faults. That was a difficult time for the Society: an entire generation of Jesuits had disappeared. Because of this I found myself provincial when I was still very young. I was only 36 years old. That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself. Yes, but I must add one thing: when I entrust something to someone, I totally trust that person. He or she must make a really big mistake before I rebuke that person. But despite this, eventually people get tired of authoritarianism.“My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Cordova. To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda [a goody-goody], but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

So for those who long for a day of Pius XII and a Pope who is, well, Pope, Francis ain’t your guy.  For the rest of us, we are glad he learned what he learned when he did.  This papacy is off to a great start, the morale is high, the energy is flowing down through the parishes as the window of Vatican II is open again and a fresh Breeze is blowing through the Church.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church LVIX

Carthusian Saint John Houghton

In the last posting we looked at the early phase of the dissolution of the Religious Houses in England during the reign of Henry VIII.  Just to recap in the broadest of all possible views, the Church held immense wealth—more than the Crown—and owned approximately a third of the land in England.  About half of this land was owned by the great Benedictine, Cistercian, Augustinian, and Bridgettine Abbeys and monasteries.  (Augustinians here refers to the canons and canonesses, not to the friars or nuns affiliated to the friars.  Also the Bridgettines had only one major house in England—Syon Abbey in Middlesex—but it was an extremely wealthy foundation, one of the richest in England.) 
In the fifteenth centuries a number of defunct religious houses were closed and their properties devoted to other charities—hospitals and schools primarily---and Cardinal Wolsey got the idea during his administration to shutter a number of smaller religious houses and transfer their members to more stable abbeys while using their endowments for two educational foundations he was making—a grammar school in his native Ipswich and a new College, Cardinal College, at Oxford.  Cardinal College later was renamed Christchurch and today is perhaps the icon-college of Oxford even as Kings is of Cambridge. 
With Wolsey’s fall, Henry was not quick to close down other monasteries but he did note how the monastic wealth could be diverted to other causes.  He filed that piece of information away in his mind for later use. 
The Religious of England—monks, nuns, canons, friars—almost universally acceded to the royal supremacy.  A notable exception was John Houghton, prior of the Carthusians in London.  Prior Houghton was persuaded to swear to the 1533 Act of Succession which named Henry Head of the Church “so far as the Law of Christ Allows.”  However, the following year the Act of Supremacy declared Henry to be “the only Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England” and Prior Houghton and two other Carthusian priors—Robert Lawrence of Beauvale and Augustine Webster of Axeholm—along with Richard Reynolds (a Bridgettine of Syon Abbey) and John Haile (the Vicar of Isleworth, the town where Syon Abbey stood) were hanged, drawn, and quartered for refusing the swear to the royal supremacy.  The process—usual for treason—was that the condemned person was hanged until near death, then cut down while still alive and cut open with his heart and entrails removed, and then the corpse cut into four pieces to be taken and displayed at four different points of the realm. Sir Thomas More and John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, would go to their deaths—simple beheadings—later that summer for refusing to swear to the same act.   Carthusians William Exmew, John Davy, William Greenwood, Thomas Green, William Holm, Thomas Johnson, Humphrey Middlemore, Sebastian Newdigate, Walter Pierson, Thomas Redying, John Rochester, and James Walworth, followed Houghton, Lawrence, and  Webster to their deaths rather than swear to the supremacy. 
Several Franciscans, especially among the Observant Franciscans at Greenwich—a house particularly important to Henry and the Tudors because of its proximity to the Royal Palace and the site of Henry’s Marriage to Katherine of Aragon as well as his own baptism and the baptism of his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth—resisted the Royal Supremacy.  Friars Anthony Brookby, Thomas Courtt and Thomas Belchiam refused to take the oath and paid with their lives.   Friars Richard Risby and Hugh Rich were Observant Franciscans from other convents who refused to swear to the supremacy and were martyred for their stalwart loyalty to the Holy See.  Henry, in exasperation declared that the Observant friars were “disciples of the Bishop of Rome and sowers of sedition.”  Some sources say that there were more martyrs among the Franciscans and Carthusians, but their names have been lost.  That is certainly possible but the comprehensive lists of English martyrs from this times make the historian conservative in estimating the numbers much beyond those actually known and recorded.   On the other hand, searching through various records—and the English were great keepers of records—to identify various other religious and their divergent fates is exactly the sort of work that doctoral students do.  Various charters, wills, ordination records, etc. make it possible to reconstruct with considerable accuracy the memberships of various abbeys, monasteries, and friaries at any point from the fourteenth century through their dissolution in the sixteenth.  These lists can be checked against not only court records but appointments to ecclesiastical benefices subsequent to Henry’s disbanding of the religious foundations and that would be of immense help in discovering the fate of many of the religious who either took or refused the oaths of royal supremacy.  As it is, given the number of religious in England in 1535—approximately fifteen thousand—the number of martyrdoms is remarkably small.  It should also be noted that there are approximately two dozen Benedictines or Cistercians executed in the period, as well as a Premonstratensian  presumably for refusing to swear to the supremacy, though some may have been connected more with the Pilgrimage of Grace.  By and large the religious or the other orders all subscribed to the royal supremacy without much hesitation.  Many, no doubt, considered a temporary sort of thing that would resolve itself and reconcile with the papacy in a period of time.  And indeed one would have thought that with Katherine’s death in 1536 that the reason for the break was over—especially as Ann was to go to the scaffold only five months after Katherine’s death and Henry was free to make a new beginning.   But by this time Henry had plans for his Church of England and those plans did not admit of any other person at its head than he himself.