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. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church XLVIII

Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury 

Well, back to our story of the Church of England for a few episodes and then I want to look at all the fuss that the Holy Father’s interviews are creating.  Boy, are those crazy neo-trads angry with the Pope.  They feel betrayed for all their “loyalty” now we have a Pope that sees things from a very different perspective than their tired old locked-in Jansenism.    I, for one, am enjoying their frustration.  It is always good seeing a shoe go on the other foot.  And speaking of shoes going on the other foot, Judie Brown—the American Life League Maven—is getting more and more frustrated as her efforts to undermine Catholic Relief Services goes nowhere.  You might remember that Ms. Brown turned on Catholic Relief Services when CRS dropped its multi-million dollar contract with the Brown family printing business.  Judie started bad-mouthing CRS in retaliation, alleging that the agency isn’t following Catholic teaching in its distribution of medical services in developing countries, but her claims can’t be supported and despite a flurry of letters to the American Bishops she isn’t getting any traction.  CRS not only has the support of the Bishops, but of the Holy See—they are the American branch of Caritas Internationalis, the Holy See’s program of Aid to developing nations.  Ol’ Judie burned too many bridges over the years with various bishops and now nobody wants to answer her frantic calls.  Of course hitching her campaign to Michael Voris’ horse wasn’t helpful as the Church is backing off from him as well because of his outlandish claims about what is and isn’t authentic Catholicism.  So history is being made even as we look back centuries into schisms and heresies of the past.  And now on to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

We have looked at some of the key players in the separation of the English Church from the Roman Communion.  We have seen Henry VIII, of course, and his queen, Katherine of Aragon.  We have looked at wife and queen 2, Anne Boleyn.  And there has been Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More.  Now let’s look at Henry’s compliant Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.  Cranmer was born in Nottinghamshire in 1489 to a small farmer, not a member of the aristocracy, much less the nobility.  His older brother inherited the family farm and so Thomas had to make his way in the world.  After initial studies in a village school he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, at age 14.  By 22 he had his bachelor’s degree and by 25 his master’s.  He was elected a fellow of the College but abandoning the path towards priesthood he married and consequently lost his position in the College. (At that time it was expected that the residential fellows of a College would be clerics.)  When he was widowed after only a few years of marriage, he applied for ordination and was also named a University Preacher—a sign of the high regard in which he was held.  By age 37 he had attained the doctorate in theology. 

By the 1520’s Luther’s ideas had spread to various European Universities and Cambridge had become a hothouse of reformed ideals.  Cranmer was a habitué of the White Horse Tavern where Lutheranism was embraced with impunity.  The White Horse Tavern was often called “Little Germany” for its connection with Lutheranism and its clients were a virtual Who’s Who of the Anglican Reformation: Hugh Latimer, Miles Coverdale, Robert Barnes, John Bale, William Tyndale, Nicholas Shaxton and even Stephen Gardiner whose career would go in quite a different direction after several convoluted turns.   

Cranmer came to Wolsey’s attention and shortly before Wolsey’s fall entered the King’s diplomatic service in a minor role.  His friendship with Stephen Gardiner, formed at the White Horse tavern, let to Cranmer suggesting to Gardiner that Henry, rather than appealing for a Roman annulment, should canvas the theological faculties of Europe’s universities for their opinion on whether or not the marriage of Henry and Katherine was valid.  Henry, at this point having great difficulties with the proceedings in Rome, liked the idea—as did the King’s Chancellor, Thomas More.  Cranmer was put on the team to solicit the opinions.  The Universities, of course, overwhelmingly gave their opinions in the King’s favor.  It was in this work that Cranmer first started a correspondence with Simon Gyranaeus, a disciple of the Swiss reformer, Martin Bucer.  Later that summer, Henry sent Cranmer as ambassador to the court of Charles V, the nephew of Katherine of Aragon.  It was a delicate and difficult position, but being in Germany it afforded Cranmer with direct contact with the Lutheran reformers among whom was Andreas Osiander.  Despite his priestly commitment to celibacy, Cranmer secretly married Osiander’s niece.  There was a formal marriage but it had to be kept secret as Henry, though he was indifferent to any man’s chastity, insisted on celibacy for the clergy.

On October 1, 1532 Henry appointed Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury.  Cranmer was in Italy with the Imperial Court at the time and was summoned home.  The break with Rome was not yet formalized and Henry followed all the correct procedures.  The monks of Christchurch Cathedral at Canterbury duly “elected” Cranmer; the King petitioned Pope Clement for all the proper bulls authorizing the consecration.  On March 30^th 1533 Cranmer was consecrated Archbishop in St. Stephen’s Chapel in Westminster by the John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln; John Vesey, Bishop of Exeter; and Henry Standish OFM, Bishop of St Asaph in Wales.  Ironically all three bishops were conservatives and would die within the Roman Communion.

Cranmer’s first task was to find a solution to the royal mess in which Henry found himself.   At the time of Cranmer’s consecration, Henry had two wives—he had secretly married Anne (who was pregnant) about eight weeks before—but had not yet been annulled of Katherine. On April 7^th Henry had Parliament pass the Act in Restraint of Appeals which declared that all legal actions were to be decided in England without appeal to foreign power.  This meant that the annulment was to be heard in England and by an English court, not in Rome by a papal one.  Five days later Cranmer was authorized by Parliament to hear the case.  He convened a court at Dunstable for May 10.  Katherine refused to appear in court, either in person or by proxy as that would acknowledge its legitimacy.  On May 23^rd   the decision was announced in Henry’s favor and on May 28^th Cranmer declared the January wedding of Henry and Anne to have been a valid marriage.  Three days later, June 1, Archbishop Cranmer crowned Anne as Queen in Westminster Abbey.  The crowds massing outside the Abbey booed Anne and pelted the procession with garbage. 

Anne had used her position with Henry to nominate Thomas Cranmer to be Archbishop.  It is difficult to know precisely what connections existed between Cranmer and the Boleyn family but they were confident that he would take the necessary steps in favor of securing her position.  Anne Boleyn and her family were religious conservatives and while they were obviously not attached to the papacy were not known to be in favor of Lutheran ideas.  Anne’s connections in France with Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Louis XII, disposed her to religious reform but more in the line of Erasmus than of Luther; that is to say an institutional and scholarly reform more than doctrinal upheaval or the sort of religious revolution proposed by the more radical reformers.  In fact in the few years left to Anne little would change—the Mass would be in Latin, priests would be forbidden to marry (Henry either not knowing about or choosing to ignore Mrs. Cranmer), monks and nuns would continue to live and pray in their abbeys.  There would be statues in the churches and Holy Communion would be given in only one kind.  Masses would be offered for the dead, confessions would be heard, and those with Lutheran ideas—excepting the Archbishop of course—would be burned at the stake.  Cranmer himself however would continue to evolve theologically from Lutheran to Calvinist to Zwinglian in his ideas, ever more radical against the day when he could introduce true Protestantism into the ancient English Church.  More on that in the future.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church XLV

The Family of Sir Thomas More by Rowland Lockey

after a sketch by Hans Holbein the Younger,

Well, we should, I suppose, next look at Thomas More as he plays a crucial role in the development of the separation of the Church of England from the See of Rome.  Catholics have been steeped in the stories of this martyr for the faith—the Catholic Faith that is—but as in the case of most hagiography, the stories are somewhat selective and highly edited to the point of distortion.
More was a Londoner, born in 1478, to a prominent London jurist who was sufficiently well connected to place his son as a page in the household of Archbishop Morton, the Lord Chancellor of Henry VII.  Here More was exposed to the new humanism of the Renaissance and received an excellent education in Latin and Greek.  He went on to Oxford but remained only two years when, at his father’s insistence, he returned to London to study at the Inns of Chancery in preparation for a career in the civil service.  He went on to Linconl’s Inn in the Inns of Court and was called to the bar in 1502. 
More was prepared to cause his father grave disappointment by, like Luther, embracing the monastic life.  He lived near the Carthusian monastery, the London Charterhouse, and regularly joined the monks for the Divine Office and other spiritual exercises.  However he abandoned the idea of monastic life, finding celibacy a struggle which he did not think he could win.  He married Jane Colt in 1504 and they had three daughters and a son before Jane died in 1511.  In less than a month after his wife’s death, More remarried.  His second wife was Alice Middleton, a widow of considerable means.  She was, according to one source, a shrew of the first order and not a pretty woman either.  She certainly was a contrast to the gentle and docile Jane.  It was not a love match but a marriage of convenience as More needed a mother for his four young children.  More adopted Alice’s daughter in to his family as well and raised her as his own.  While romance may not have been the motive for the marriage, More deeply loved Alice and she certainly brought life into the household with her fiery temper and outspoken ways.  But beneath her attempts to dominate her husband and push his career, she loved him deeply too.
More had been in Parliament since 1504 and served as undersheriff of London, a position which brought him to the royal attention.  He was named Master of Requests—a position of handling requests to be brought to the King’s attention and a member of the Privy Council in 1514.  He was knighted and made under-treasurer of the Exchequer in 1521 and elected Speaker of the House of Commons in 1525.  This last advancement he owed to Cardinal Wolsey with whom he often worked closely in advancing the plans of the King.
Henry took a genuine liking to More.  Henry seems to have had a natural bonding with men somewhat older than himself, perhaps due to his strained relationship with his father, Henry VII.  In any event, as Wolsey began to fall, More began to rise in the royal favor.  This was not an auspicious time to find oneself in the public gaze however, as Henry’s desire of an annulment and his passion for Anne  Boleyn were both coming to the boiling point and unless the valve were released, the pot was about to blow.  In 1529, with
Wolsey being dismissed from the Lord Chancelorship, More was named to the post.  It was a fateful choice.
It was also an interesting choice however.  Henry obviously had confidence that More would go where Wolsey could not vis a vis the annulment.  Henry had no doubt in More’s absolute loyalty.  More, for his part, played the game very cagily.  More was opposed to the annulment and refused to sign the petition to Clement VII to annul the marriage.  But he was the King’s good servant and played both sides of the street in as that he signed the opinions of the Universities that the marriage to Katherine had been unlawful.  When Henry married Anne and had her crowned Queen in June 1533, More avoided going to the coronation, pleading ill health.  By that time, however, he had already resigned as Lord Chancellor and so the avoidance, while conspicuous, was not sufficiently grave a misstep to cause him trouble—at the moment.
In any case, it was not his refusal to subscribe to the marriage that was his undoing; it was his avoidance of the issues of the King’s supremacy over the Church, i.e. the rejection of papal authority.  More declared that he would subscribe to the 1534 Act of Succession both in recognizing Anne as Queen and in recognizing her offspring as next in succession to the Crown over Princess Mary, the daughter of Henry and Katherine.  This is an interesting detail because while we think of the Crown as inherited  by the male and then female children of the Sovereign in order of their age, More understood that the English Crown is indeed an elective Crown and that Parliament has a right to choose who will be Sovereign.  This principle would not be settled definitively until when in 1688 Parliament took the Crown from James II and gave it to his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, but it had already been established in principle from Anglo-Saxon times and More was affirming that Parliament had a right to choose the Sovereign over any right that an individual might claim as rightful heir of the previous Sovereign. 
But, as I said, the issue was not the marriage, it was the Royal Supremacy.  Henry’s separation from Rome was not a sudden move nor done in one act.  We will look at the process in a future posting, but beginning in 1531 there was a series of bills passed in Parliament weakening the ties with Rome and strengthening the King’s position over the Church in England.  The 1532 Act of Submission of the Clergy led More to resign as Lord Chancellor under the pretext of his health. More avoided a face-down with the King—he was no one to go out of his way to die for a principle, even an important one,  unless he had no choice. Indeed, in his service to the King he was not unlike some contemporary politicians who have to juggle conscience and public duty. In the end, for More, conscience would triumph, but only in the end.   More could see that a break was coming and he wanted no part of it.  It was in 1534 that the payment of Peter’s Pence was suspended and later that year that the Pope’s name was removed from the Liturgy.  However it was only in 1536 that the final act denying papal authority in England was passed.  By that time More was dead. 
In 1534 More was arrested for denying that part of the 1534 Act of Supremacy that granted the King headship of the Church.  The trial began on July 1, 1535.  Anne Boleyn’s father was one of the judges. More had never spoken, even in private, on this matter and claimed that no one knew his thoughts on the matter because he had never shared them, even with his wife or family members.   Yet his silence spoke volumes as everyone knew.  He was convicted by the perjury of one Sir Richard Rich. More argued
 Can it therefore seem likely to your Lordships, that I should in so weighty an Affair as this, act so unadvisedly, as to trust Mr. Rich, a Man I had always so mean an Opinion of, in reference to his Truth and Honesty, ...that I should only impart to Mr. Rich the Secrets of my Conscience in respect to the King's Supremacy, the particular Secrets, and only Point about which I have been so long pressed to explain my self? which I never did, nor never would reveal; when the Act was once made, either to the King himself, or any of his Privy Councillors, as is well known to your Honours, who have been sent upon no other account at several times by his Majesty to me in the Tower. I refer it to your Judgments, my Lords, whether this can seem credible to any of your Lordships.
Only after his conviction did More speak out and affirm his belief that neither King nor Parliament had the right to usurp the authority of the Pope over the Church which came from God’s gift.  Five days later, Thomas More was beheaded on the Tower Green in London and his head displayed on London Bridge as a traitor.  His request that his body be returned to his family for burial was denied and his headless body was buried in the chapel of St Peter in Chains in the Tower of London.   His daughter Margaret paid to have the head stolen from the bridge before it could be tossed into the Thames and it was eventually buried in her husband’s family vault in the Anglican Church of Saint Dunstan in Canterbury. 
In his time as Lord Chancellor More had been responsible for the execution of six “heretics” who had been spreading Protestant ideas in England and for the imprisonment of several more.  Some were actually imprisoned in his home.  John Foxe, the great Protestant Apologist and author of the Actes and Monuments, more commonly known as the Book of Martyrs, claimed that More had been responsible for cruel torture of these prisoners.  More, in his own lifetime, denied that he had ever tortured any prisoner and it is likely that they were confined in his home precisely to make sure they were not tortured by jailers.  Nonetheless, the facts are not known and it is today more a matter of polemics than of history as we cannot know from an objective source.  Of course, whether or not he tortured people before having them burned at the stake makes the torture somewhat of a moot point.  Execution of religious dissenters was common at the time and heretics continued to be burned in England even after Henry’s separation from Rome.  Henry’s daughter Mary burned several leading Anglicans and that has tarnished her reputation even today.  Elizabeth, on the other hand, never executed a person for religious dissent—but she had another way of dealing with those who denied her to be head of the Church.  But more on that later.  

Foundations of The Anglican Church XLIV--The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey II

Cardinal Wolsey's Coat of Arms

can still be seen above gateways

at Hampton Court

By the time that Henry had decided on seeking an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, Wolsey was running the English government single-handedly.  Henry had entrusted everything to him.  This is not to say that Wolsey was setting policy—he was always very careful to follow royal policy though he could often persuade the King to follow a particular course of action as in the instance of when the King’s sister, Mary, the Dowager Queen of France,  in 1515 married Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk, without Henry’s permission.  (Keep this marriage in mind as it will have complications a little later in our story when a Protestant grand-daughter of Mary and Brandon claims the throne against the Catholic heir.)  Henry wanted to imprison the couple, and even considered executing Brandon (to marry an heir to the throne without permission of the monarch was an act of treason), but Wolsey talked Henry into forgiving the couple.  Mary was always Henry’s favorite sister and Wolsey’s healing the breach worked greatly to his advantage and Mary always remembered him as an ally.  When Henry would try to annul his marriage to Katherine, however, in favor of Anne Boleyn, Mary was strongly opposed.  She was a friend of Katherine’s and an enemy of Anne’s.
Wolsey too was an enemy of Anne.  Wolsey had been responsible for ending her romance with Henry Percy.  Some claim that Wolsey was only pimping for the King in breaking up the romance.  Others think he was working with the Boleyn family who had—before they saw the possibility of snagging the King—a more advantageous marriage in mind for the young lady.  Wolsey may have wanted to see Anne married to remove her as a threat to Katherine as he preferred the Spanish alliance over a French one.  But when Henry was determined for an annulment, Wolsey set about his work, promising the king it would be no problem.
And it should not have been a problem except for the complications caused by the relationship between Pope Clement VII Medici and Katherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V.   Whether from fear of Charles’ army that had sacked Rome in 1527 or in hopes of a Medici-Hapsburg alliance that would restore the Medici to Florence, Clement was determined to prevent the annulment.  After sending Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio to England to “hear” the case along with Wolsey, Clement recalled the Cardinal in 1529 and said the case would be resolved in Rome. In other words, it would not happen.
This was Anne’s chance to attack Wolsey.  To paraphrase an episode of The Big Bang Theory, Anne was pushy and Henry was whipped.  Wolsey was finished.  Anne drew Henry’s attention to the Wolsey’s lavish residences in London—York Place and, upriver outside the city, Hampton Court.  Where did Wolsey get the resources, she wondered, to build such marvelous palaces.  Why did the King’s servant live even more grandly than did the King?  In 1529 Henry dismissed Wolsey as Lord Chancellor, replacing him with Sir Thomas More.  Hampton Court and York Place were confiscated.  Wolsey was particularly disturbed about signing over York Place as it was not his—it belonged to him only because he was Archbishop of York; it belonged not to him personally but to the Archbishopric.  Nevertheless, Henry got what Henry wanted; or what pushy Anne wanted.  York Place was renamed Whitehall, and would become the principle royal residence for the next 168 years.  (It was destroyed by fire in 1698.)  Hampton Court became the King’s favorite residence and it too would remain a royal palace throughout the Stuart period.  It is not to be missed if you go to London today.
Wolsey was forced to retire to his see in York—which he had not yet visited though he had been Archbishop there for fifteen years.  In 1530 he was arrested for treason—Henry sent Henry Percy—Anne’s old boyfriend—to arrest him in Yorkshire.  On his way south to London he stopped at Leicester Abbey, an Augustinian foundation where he told the Abbot and canons, “I have come to lay my bones among you.”  And so he did, taking ill and dying there on November 29, 1530.  His final words were allegedly: If I had served my God as diligently as I have served my King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”
Prior to becoming a bishop, Wolsey had been in long term monogamous relationship with Joan Larke who bore him two children, both of whom survived to adulthood.  As his advancement drew more attention to himself, he arranged a marriage for Joan and provided her a handsome dowry.  The King built a home for the couple, though given Wolsey’s running the government, Henry may not have been aware of it. 
In the end, Wolsey had been a most industrious servant to the King and was treated quite shabbily but then that is the fate of those who step on people on their way up and who must suffer the consequences of how others treat them on their fall from power.  Henry and his daughter Elizabeth would each be served by several great ministers who took the day to day affairs of government into their hands.  The difference is that Henry didn’t watch closely what these ministers did while Elizabeth was assiduous in her attention to government.  Despite the impression Catholic historians give, Henry was a great King—and I will give reasons for that over several postings to come—but Elizabeth is undoubtedly the best monarch England would ever have.  That is ironic given Henry’s fears that a woman could not rule England, but then Mary—his daughter by Katherine of Aragon and his first heir—would prove his point and be a disaster on the English throne.  But all that is a ways down the road yet. 

Foundations of The Anglican Church XXXVIII

Young Luther in his days as an

Augustinian Friar

In posting his theses for debate Martin Luther had no intention of leading a revolt against the Catholic Church—far from it.  He was a most devout priest but he was also a serious academic and wanted these 95 points argued out in an academic forum in hopes of refocusing the Church and returning it to its roots in scripture and Apostolic Tradition.  Europe was alive with such debate and desire for Church Reformation.  In England you had John Fisher who had been tutor to young Henry before he succeeded to the throne and was now Bishop of Rochester.  And there was John Colet, Dean of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. His friend and collaborator in the desire for Church Reform was the Flemish scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, who came to England and taught five years at Cambridge before returning to the Continent where he preached and wrote about Christian humanism and its potential for a renewed Catholicism.  Prior Houghton of the London Carthusians was another enthusiast for Reform as was the rising political star, the lawyer Thomas More.  Throughout Europe—and especially in northern Europe: England, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Bohemia—academics, churchmen, and serious laity discussed ways in which the Church might be revitalized. 
There had been in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Rhineland—both German and Dutch—a flowering of spiritual writers including Henry Suso, Johannes Tauler, Thomas á Kempis, Jan Ruysbroeck, and others who made spirituality something for the everyday Christian.   The influence of this spiritual renaissance had spread to England as well with Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich and other spiritual authors who created a vast body of spiritual and devotional literature.  Luther himself had been very much influenced by Tauler and Suso. 
Nothing is more dangerous for the institutional Church than when you have an educated and devout laity and a lazy and comfortable clergy.  Of course many priests and religious had been touched by the revival of spirituality and by a desire for reform in the Church, but the hierarchy, for the greater part,  consisted of men who held their positions for reasons of politics and family.  They were more interested in maintaining their comfortable lives and social prestige.  (Does this sound familiar???  I mean an educated laity interested in renewal and Church leadership interested in protecting the institution for its own sake and their own sake???)  
As I said Luther had personally undergone a deep conversion, not from a sinful life to a graced one, but from a religion of fear of God’s Justice to a faith in God’s mercy.  He wanted to see others learn to trust that faith in Jesus Christ was sufficient and to be freed from the compulsive religiosity that too many clergy were instilling—or trying to instill—in the faithful.  His 95 theses represented not an attack on the Church but on a superficial and unhealthy religiosity that distorted the faith presented in the Scriptures.
The great events of history usually are rooted in conflicts of interest.  Luther—and others—were interested in a spiritual renewal for the faithful.  You may remember that back in 2011 we did a series of posts on the history of Saint Peter’s Basilica. (You can review those posts by clicking on Saint Peter’s Basilica in the column on the right of your webpage marked “labels.”)  In 1505 Pope Julius II—the patron of Michelangelo—had made the decision to demolish the basilica that Constantine had built almost twelve centuries earlier over the tomb of the Apostle and build a new basilica there.  He wanted a grand basilica to hold the elaborate tomb for himself that he had Michelangelo design.  And so the project of building the current basilica began.  It was an enormously expensive project and special indulgences were offered in return for contributions that would go to the building.  (In fact half the proceeds went to Albert of Brandenburg to enable him to recover the immense sum of money he had paid the Holy See to be named Archbishop of Mainz.  You see the problems?)  A Dominican friar by the name of Johann Tetzel was named the Commissioner of Indulgences for Germany and in his zeal to raise the required funds made some outlandish claims about indulgences.  Two of Luther’s 95 theses concerned these claims.  As Tetzel went about preaching indulgences, Luther went about preaching against them.  Luther’s theology was sounder and appealed to the more thoughtful and educated populace—and to the many who did not give a fig about theology but who resented the vast sums leaving Germany for Rome—and sales of indulgences began to drop.   Luther appealed to Pope Leo X, whom Luther mistakenly believed would be more concerned about souls and orthodoxy than basilicas and money but ended up being admonished by the Pope to back off his objections to the sales campaign.  Luther, who had been scandalized by his 1510 visit to Rome, now became increasingly disillusioned with the papacy and with the institutional Church in general.  He stated that far from being assured that “when money clinks in the collection chest” that souls are released from purgatory, one can be assured that “when money clinks in the collection chest” greed and avarice are increased in the hearts of prelates.   By 1521 sales had been in sufficient decline that Luther was excommunicated by the Pope.  (Keep in mind that Leo X was a Medici—that is an important piece of information for when we pick up with Henry and his request for an annulment.  And we will get there—this background is an important piece however to understand what led to Henry’s being refused.) 
Luther did not much bother about excommunication.  Plenty of good people, including saints, had been excommunicated at one time or another.  (And since as well, if you remember the story of Saint Mary MacKillop, the Australian foundress of the Sisters of Saint Joseph.)  What did happen was that more and more people flocked to Luther’s side of the argument.  The Elector Frederick was delighted with the reputation this brought his university.  And Luther began to write extensively attacking the theological exaggerations of the Scholasticism and Late Medieval Theological meanderings and to bring doctrine and practice more in line with the New Testament texts.  Unfortunately Luther did not have much of the historical critical tools we have today and his exegesis is by our standards rather primitive but in the sixteenth century it was state of the intellectual art. 
One of the defenders of Catholic doctrine at this time was no less than King Henry VIII who in 1519 wrote his own theological treaty against Luther, In Defense of the Seven Sacraments.  Henry dedicated the work to Pope Leo X who awarded Henry the title Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith.  Ironic, isn’t it; but the title is still carried today by the British Monarch. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church, XXX

The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, on

the site of the Palace of Placentia, principal home

to Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon

I mentioned in my last post that Henry and Katherine of Aragon were married in a private ceremony in the Greyfriar’s Church in Greenwich, near the royal palace of Placentia which was at the time the principal royal residence.  The palace, which fell out of royal favor later in the reign of Henry VIII—perhaps because it was associated with his first marriage—eventually fell into disrepair and was demolished in the 17^th century during the English Civil War.  It stood on the site of the present royal naval hospital and observatory which marks “Greenwich Time,” longitude 0^o, by which the world’s clocks are set. 
The Greyfriars are the Franciscans, so named for the color of the Franciscan habit in the middle ages when it was made of undyed wool.  (Today elements of the Franciscan family have returned to wearing grey rather than the brown robes we usually associate with the family of the Assisi saint.)  Dominicans were called “Blackfriars” and Carmelites “Whitefriars” for the color of the mantles of their habits for the same reason.  But the Greenwich Greyfriars were not merely Franciscans, they were Franciscan Observants.  Almost from the time of the death of Saint Francis in 1224 there had been a faction among the friars calling for a reform that would keep alive the simplicity of Francis.  The pressures of the Church for the friars to be highly educated and the pressures of civil society for the friars to become involved in civic affairs were challenging the Franciscan spirit.  Francis had wanted his sons to remain simple brothers who by their poverty and gentle spirits would witness to the humility of Christ.  In the developing economic culture of medieval Europe with the rise of mercantile capitalism and the polarization of society into a small very wealthy capital class and large and semi-impoverished working class (hmm, sound familiar) Francis felt that the witness of men voluntarily adopting the life of the working class would align the Church with true Christianity of the masses rather than being the Church being coopted by the hierarchy for the service of the wealthy.  (hmmm, and why did the current Pope choose the regnal name “Francis?”  Cardinal Burke, Archbishop Lori, and others, are you paying attention?)   This was especially true because most of Francis’ followers came, as he did, from the wealthy merchant class not from the lower working classes.  For the sons of the wealthy to embrace voluntary poverty in witness to the poverty of Jesus the Carpenter, was indeed a powerful evangelism tool, as the current Pope keeps telling us.  Nevertheless the temptations of a comfortable life were hard to resist.  Bonaventure, Francis’ seventh successor as head of the movement, pushed education.  The brothers should study at the University.  Even in Francis’ lifetime students and professors had flocked to the Franciscan movement and education is an important tool for the clergy.  Simplicity is fine, but not stupidity.  Ultimately a sound theological education would have to be part of the friars’ formation.  But education requires books and books were a very expensive luxury in the thirteenth century.  And in education you constantly talk about abstract ideas and ideals—and few are less savvy in the everyday practicalities of life than the intellectuals.  Just spend some time among university faculty today and you will see the difference between knowledge and wisdom.  It was not long after the death of the Saint that the Franciscan spirit began to slide down the slippery slope to spiritual mediocrity.  The friars, once educated, were entrusted by the bishops with urban ministries among the professional classes.  The friars were invited to build churches and convents in the better neighborhoods.  The wealthy began showering them with gifts.  “Nothing is too good for the friars…” and the friars began to believe that themselves.  They wanted to look respectable and the patched robes of Francis’ day were replaced by habits of better fabric and more elegant tailoring.  They were living in the better neighborhoods so the ramshackle barns or wattle huts of Francis’ days gave way to fine stone convents with large rooms and airy courtyards.  The occasional treats which people sent for their table for feast days became the ordinary fare ordered from the grocer.  But some of the brothers could not let go of the ideals of their saintly founder and tried to return to the original spirit.  The first movement in this direction went overboard and the “Spirituals” as they were called were condemned by John XXII and ordered to give up their extreme poverty or face excommunication.  But the spirit of reform did not die and it was not long before new reform movements, very careful to avoid criticism of the wealth of the Church lest the face the fate of the Spirituals, sprang up.  They wore simpler habits.  They lived in smaller houses, often in more out of the way towns or villages rather than in the large cities.  They did not disdain education but neither did they allow their members to give in to its conceits.  In 1517 Pope Leo X separated the “Observants” from the “Conventuals” and the various observant groups became independent of the unreformed friars.  It was to one of these “observant” movements that then Greenwich friars belonged.  The observant Franciscans were admired throughout Europe, wherever the movement spread, but they had especially strong ties to the English royal family and to the Spanish royal family of Katherine as well.  Isabella’s confessor and spiritual mentor, Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros was an Observant Franciscan.  Indeed Ximénez and Isabella had been responsible for great reforms in the Spanish Church that purged it of much of the decay that in other countries would lead to the Protestant Reformations that would break out in Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century.  And the Franciscans at Greenwich were a sign of reform beginning in the English Church as well—reform that had it continued on a Catholic trajectory could have resulted in a very different England that would eventually come about.  But historians know you can’t play the game of “what if?” 
The Church in England, like the Church in most of Europe, was in desperate need of reform.  The Spanish Church, due to Isabella and Ximénez, had faced its decay and reversed the trend early on, creating an almost puritanical and certainly a rabid Catholicism, but a spiritually healthy one none the less.  England had potential for reform.  There was a strong and educated professional class—families of guildsmen—whose sons entered the service of the Church and the Crown—often entering the service of the Crown by beginning in the Church and then as bishops and abbots holding royal appointments.  Among the laity, the professional classes tended to be devout and had a taste for spiritual reading.  The Rhineland mysticism of Eckhardt, Ruysbroeck, Tauler and others had spilled over into England and England had its own mystics and spiritual writers in Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and others.  While most of the monasteries of England had settled into comfortable complacency there were those such as Glastonbury which had undertaken some reform and observance.  In addition to the Franciscan Observants, the Charterhouse monks (Carthusians) were known for their zeal and integrity.  Intellectual circles were alive with discussion of Church reform.  The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus spent much time in England where he was friends with Dean Colet of Saint Pauls’ in London, Bishop Fisher of Rochester who had been tutor to the young Henry VIII, and Thomas More who was later to be Lord Chancellor. 
The type of reform envisioned by Erasmus, Colet, Fisher, and More was the culture of the old fashioned pan-European “Christendom” rooted in Christian antiquity and patristics that saw the Church as a transnational Christian imperium, the ark of salvation in which all humanity could be gathered without distinction of race or nation.  This was distinctly out of step, however, with the growing national consciousness of the emerging nations of Europe where people no longer saw themselves primarily as Christians with a commonality with other Christians but as Frenchmen, or Englishmen, or Spaniards, or as Portuguese, or as Scots, or as Genoese or Neapolitans, or Franconians, or as Saxons.  (Germany or Italy would emerge as nations only much later than the French or English or Spaniards.) 
In any event, the impetus for reform from within the Church would not have time to mature in England as it had in Spain.  Reform in England would initially be imported by the universities, Cambridge in particular, from Luther’s Germany and then become of tool of the Crown for ends more political than religious.  Finally the Crown would lose control of Church Reform and it would become a tool of the landed aristocracy for self-enrichment and then of the mercantile classes to justify their self-interested commercial revolution.  In the process the Church of England would first become far less Catholic and then more Calvinist and finally attain a sui generis identity as England’s organ of moral self-validation.  This would transplant to America where the expectation of religion would be to uphold the traditional social order and, in the case of Catholicism, give us the Spellman Catholicism of the 1950’s.  But all that is in the future. 

The Catholic Political Conscience

Who would have thougt that a saint would write this: 

“Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws…”

Do you see why Catholics didn't follow their bishops into the Romney/Ryan camp?  Saint Thomas More would have a few things to say today about certain political philosophies. 

The Nuns' Story Plays On

I was at a funeral the other morning where I heard a story that explained why the deceased was not the most devout of Catholics.  When the 87 year-old deceased was in the first grade at the Polish Parish in Jersey City (80 years ago) the nun slapped her twin brother across the face for some offence.  The seven-year old twin then slapped the nun across the face.  He was expelled for this.  (He’s lucky, when I was his age I had always had thought you were struck dead for something like that.)  The pastor called in his parents.   They were poor folk, immigrants from Poland.  The step-father (the father had died some years before) was a barkeep; the mother stayed at home with her four children but took in laundry to make a few dollars.  The pastor said that for a healthy contribution he would let bygones be bygones, all would be forgotten and the boy could return to school.  The mother reached into her pocketbook, pulled out a roll of bills, put them on the desk in front of the pastor.  Then she stood up, looked him in the eye, and said “Thank you, but public school will be just fine for my children.” She turned and walked out, leaving the money on the desk.  The pastor kept the money.   I had thought, hoped perhaps, that this paternalistic Church where Father was always right and the people were expected to put up with injustices at the whim of the clergy—and be grateful for the opportunity to put up with it—was finished with the Second Vatican Council.  Apparently not.  

     I made a mistake in my entry yesterday about the nuns.  I should have caught it but I was working off news reports and took them at their word.  My bad.  This latest blast from Rome had nothing to do with the Vatican Investigation and Mother Mary Clare Millea’s report.  I had said, and correctly so, that this reaction from Rome had been written before the report of the Apostolic Visitation was even submitted.  It turns out that it wasn’t a reaction from the report on the Visitation at all.  If it were it would have come from Cardinal Braz de Aviz, the Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of the Apostolic Life, but it came from Cardinal Levada and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  On what then did Cardinal Levada base his decree?   The CDF had for several years been gathering information about the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—speakers at their programs, materials distributed at their programs,  programs of worship services, etc.  They were frightened.  The sisters were opting for prayer services led by Sister-members rather than formal liturgies conducted by priest-visitors.  Theologians were speaking to them of wider visions of Church than the Institutional and hierarchical structures.  Topics that Rome did not want brought up—topics such as women’s ordination or morality of same-sex relationships were being discussed.  The Sisters were formulating ideas and opinions for themselves, independently of hierarchical leadership.  This was a threat to patriarchy.  Or rather, that women are educated and intelligent and capable of discussing complex theological issues without the conversation being guided by men whose qualification is a pectoral cross, is a threat to patriarchy. 

      I have to admit, I had not thought of the Church as an overly patriarchal organization until yesterday and I am troubled by it.  This isn’t to say that I was naïve or closed my eyes to things. Patriarchal, of course the Church is patriarchal.  Hell, everything in our culture is patriarchal to some extent.  It is how western society is structured.  I point out to my students, monasteries of nuns are governed by an Abbess.  An Abbess is not a mother, she is a female father.  Abbess is the feminine form of the “Abba,” the father.  This isn’t unique to the Church.   Isabella (of Ferdinand and Isabella fame) was King of Castile—a female King.  In fact, Elizabeth II in England is legally male.  In her role as monarch, in her Body Political, she exercises male prerogatives.  (Read Ernest Kantorowicz’s book The King’s Two Bodies to understand the difference between the Body Politic and the Body Personal.  This applies in the history of law not only to monarchs but other officials—including Bishops—who have a public persona attached to an office and a personal persona of their own identity.  It is where we get the idea that one must respect the office even if one does not respect the man.  Oopps, there again—see how patriarchy is just built into our way of thinking). 

       Well, pardon that digression but as I was saying I had not thought of the Church as being exceptionally patriarchal, that is more patriarchal than most other institutions in our society, until I read Cardinal Levada’s decree on the LCWR.  Wow.  Why can’t he just sit down with the ladies and iron this out—dialogue wise.  Oh, I forgot, dialogue presumes and equality of partners and there is no equality of partners here.  And so we are back to the basic models of pastors who can bully their flocks and think their flocks should be grateful to them for the abuse.  Maybe LCWR should just go over, plunk a roll of bills on the Cardinal’s desk and announce to him that they really don’t need his CDF and walk out with their pride—and integrity—intact.    

      In the end Cardinal Levada’s response reminds me of the play A Man for All Seasons.  When ol’ Henry VIII can’t find the evidence to convict Thomas More, he brings in a ringer to give false testimony to justify the Saint’s beheading. And when Mother Mary Clare came back with her report that despite a few problems, the American Sisters were in pretty good shape, Levada had to trump up some charges to justify lowering the ax.  But at the end of the day, I just wonder why the boys in Rome are so frightened of 55,000 female American septuagenarians.  It must have something to do with their relationships with their mothers—but then, hey, isn’t that what celibacy is all about?   Dear God, can’t You give us some healthy people—even if they are men—for leadership?  At least until we are ready to trust women with leadership?  Well things are backing up.  I still want to do one more entry on the American Sisters and the historical context of this current conflict, and I just heard that the Bishop of Peoria made an ass of himself in the pulpit comparing the President to Hitler and Stalin.  Dear Lord, slow down the making of history so we can go back to the sixteenth century when the Cardinals were too busy poisoning one another to worry about the nuns.