The Blood of Martyrs Is The Seed of Christians

Martyrs of the 20th Century--
Great West Door of Westminster
Abbey

This past Sunday I noticed a middle-aged man get up and storm angrily out of Church when the priest mentioned the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, bishop of San Salvador, who was murdered while saying Mass in 1980.  Though Father did not mention that the Archbishop was murdered by American-backed forces in the Salvadoran army, the very mention of the Archbishop and his upcoming beatification obviously stirred the memory of this gentleman and triggered his anger.  It was particularly surprising as our parish, while somewhat heavier than we would like with us “late middle-aged” folk, is pretty liberal, both politically and religiously.   But the mention of the murdered Archbishop, as the preacher was saying, is a reminder that the age of martyrdom is not over. 

Over the great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London, the gothic niches have been filled with statutes with the “Martyrs of the 20^th Century.”  Archbishop Romero stands among them.  In addition to Archbishop Romero, the Catholic Church is commemorated with the memorial to Saint Maximillian Kolbe , the Polish Franciscan who, in 1941, voluntarily took the place of another prisoner in a starvation cell at the Nazi Auschwitz Concentration Camp. 

The Anglican Church is represented by Manche Masemola, Archbishop Janani Luwum, Wang Zhiming, Lucien Tapiedi, and Esther John.  The Orthodox Church is represented by the Grand Duchess Saint Elizabeth of Russia, and the Protestant faith by the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoffer and the Baptist, Dr. Martin Luther King. 

Martin Luther King, of course, is familiar to us Americans as the great preacher and apostle of non-violence who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 until his murder by a white racist in 1968.  Just as attempts were made to tarnish the reputation of Romero by his foes both in El Salvador and here in the United States, King was subjected to character assassination by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI who wanted Americans to think that the preacher was a Communist agitator in an effort to discredit his objectives of an America in which there was an equal opportunity for all regardless of race. 

The Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia was a German Princess who married into the Russian Royal Family and converted to Orthodoxy.  (Her younger sister also married into the Romanoffs—married Nicholas II and became the Tsarina Alexandra.)  Elizabeth’s husband, the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei, was assassinated in 1905.  The young widow sold her jewelry to fund a convent of Orthodox nuns who worked among the sick and poor.  She herself headed the convent as its Abbess.  She was arrested during the Revolution and like her sister, the Tsarina, was brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.   

Manche Masemola was a young South-African woman murdered by her own family in 1928 for converting to Christianity from the traditional tribal religion.  Esther John similarly was murdered in the Pakistani Punjab region in 1960 for having converted from Islam to Christianity.  Archbishop Janani Luwum has a story much like Archbishop Romero’s.  Luwum was primate of the Anglican Church in Uganda and spoke out against the reign of terror in Idi’ Amin’s Uganda just as Romero had spoken out against the death squads in El Salvador.  He was arrested and died in police custody.  When the body was released to the family, it was riddled with bullet wounds.  Some present claimed that Idi Amin had personally shot and killed the Archbishop. 

Dietrich Bonheoffer was a German Lutheran Pastor who, with other Lutherans formed the “Confessing Church” when they found that the official Lutheran Church was collaborating too closely with the Hitler Regime.  Although already in prison by the time of the 1944 plot to kill Hitler by placing a bomb in the conference room where the dictator was meeting with his staff, Bonheoffer was connected with the would-be assassins.  He was hanged on April 9, 1945—just a few weeks before the fall of the Nazi regime.  

Lucian Tapiedi was a Papuan New Guinea Anglican lay evangelist who was killed during the Japanese invasion of that Island during World War II. 

Wang Zhiming was a Chinese Protestant brutally murdered during the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” in 1973  in a stadium before a crowd of 10,000 (mostly Christians) in an attempt to terrorize Christians to give up the practice of their faith.  These ten figures from different parts of the Christian family alert us to the sufferings of Christians today.  Christians in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, India and other countries often hold on to their faith at the cost of their lives. 

When I lived in Rome, I always attended a very special prayer service each Holy Week sponsored by the Community of Sant’ Egidio to commemorate those men and women who in the 20^th and now the 21^st century have laid down their lives for their faith.  We too should remember them—the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.  

Foundation of the Anglican Church CXII

Coronation Portrait of
Charles II 

The Reign of Charles II marked not only the restoration of the monarchy but of the Anglican Church as bishops were restored to their sees and conformity to the Book of Common Prayer marked the worship of English churches.  Those clergy who had not been episcopally ordained and would not submit to reordination by a bishop and/or who would not conduct worship according to the liturgical norms of the Book of Common Prayer were deprived of their posts.  The meant that pretty much the entire Puritan wing of the Church of England went into a Non-Conformity from which the Congregational and (English) Presbyterian Churches emerged.  Baptists who had broken with the Puritans during the time of Cromwell and the Commonwealth also fell into the Non-Conformist category.  In 1661 Parliament had passed the Corporation Act which required all local government officials to take the Sacrament according to the Prayer Book Ritual and to formally foreswear the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant which had replaced the Anglican Prayer Book during the Puritan Commonwealth/English Civil War.   Furthermore, by this act, those who would not take the Sacrament according to the Rites of the Established Church could not hold office in the Army or the Navy, nor could they take a University Degree. This meant that Non-Conformists were ineligible for public office and many professions were closed to them.  In 1662 the Act of Uniformity, as mentioned above, required episcopal ordination for all clergy and adherence to the Prayer Book liturgy on pain of deprivation of office.  Parliament also passed a law that year demanding an oath of allegiance to the King.  Quakers could not take this oath as their beliefs proscribed the swearing of all oaths.  This act emarginated the Quakers from the larger English Society even more.  In 1664 Parliament passed the Conventicle Act which prohibited gatherings of more than 5 people for religious purposes unless they were under the auspices of the Church of England.  This law was meant to make Non-Conformist worship illegal.   In 1665 Parliament passed the Five Mile Act which prohibited Non-Conformist clergy from coming within five miles of towns or of the parishes they had held during the Commonwealth period.  They also were not allowed to be schoolteachers.  These acts, known collectively as the Clarendon Code, were attempts to make religious membership and worship outside the Established Church illegal and suppress religious dissent.  These laws were also grossly unsuccessful.  It is unknown just how many English followed their Non-Conformist clergy out of the Church of England as no census number were taken at the time, but later figures might indicate that at least a third of the population rejected the Established Church in favor of the Non-Conformist sects.  

The Jewish community in England was alarmed by the Conventicle Act as it technically proscribed Jewish Worship as well as Non-Conformist worship, but the King assured a delegation of English Jews who appealed to him not to worry, and the Privy Council granted them a explicit exemption so long as they obeyed the laws of the realm.  There was no such provision for Catholics, of course, but neither was there an aggressive campaign at this point to make life difficult for Catholics as Charles’ Queen, Catherine of Braganza, was a Catholic as was also Charles’ chief Mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland.  In 1672 Charles issued the Declaration of Indulgence which lifted the penal laws against both non-Conformists and Catholics, but the following year Parliament made him rescind the declaration in put in its place the Test Act which required one to swear an oath against the doctrine of Transubstantiation as well as take the Sacrament according to the Anglican Rite—this excluded both Catholics and non-Conformists from public life.

Charles was to die a Catholic, being received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed by Queen Catherine’s chaplain, the Benedictine monk John Huddleston.  Ironically Huddleston was among a group of Catholics who had saved Charles from the Parliamentarians after Charles’ defeat at the 1651 Battle of Worcester.  When Huddleston was ushered through a secret passage into the dying King’s bedchamber on February 5, 1685, the Duke of York, Charles’ brother, said: “Sire, this good man once saved your life.  He has now come to save your soul.”  The room had been cleared of all members of the Court except for the Protestant Earls of Bath and Feversham who were confidants of the King.   The presence of these two Protestant peers gave the Privy Council, expelled into an anteroom, a false confidence that the King was safe in his Protestant faith.  In the event, Charles’ conversion would be keep secret until well into the next reign.  Huddleston heard the King’s confession, anointed him, and gave him viaticum.   Some modern writers claim that he was not conscious, or at least not fully aware of what was happening, and that the conversion was foisted upon him by his Catholic Queen and his Catholic brother, James the Duke of York, who was to succeed him as King, but the contemporary accounts do not report any of this and the argument against his conversion to Catholicism seems to be more polemical than historical.  Charles was buried in the vault of Henry VII—the last Catholic King of England who had died in 1509—in Westminster Abbey without any public ceremony to mark his final religious affiliation.  The funeral was held late at night on February 14, eight days after the King’s death.  (This was a remarkably short interval between death and funeral for a prominent person in the 17^th century. Charles niece, Mary II, was not buried until almost ten weeks after her death.)  The (Anglican) Dean and Chapter met the coffin at the West Door as was customary and escorted it the length of the Abbey to the chapel in the retro-choir where lay the royal vault.  Peers—including the (Anglican) bishops—attended in an official capacity but none of the late King’s blood relatives did.  They were represented by Prince George of Denmark, the Protestant husband of the King’s niece, Anne (later Queen herself).  The Dean read the Anglican burial service for this all-Protestant congregation and the King was deposited into his grave.

With Charles’ death and the succession of his brother James to the Crown, England found itself in the constitutional conundrum that a Roman Catholic was head of the Church of England.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church XCVII

James VI and I 

Monday July 25, 1603—the day appointed for the coronation of King James VI of Scotland and his wife, Anne of Denmark as James I of England and Queen Anne—dawned drab and wet.  It was not an auspicious omen.  Indeed it was a somber day in more ways than one.  Thirty-six years and one day before, his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been forced to abdicate in favor of her year-old son and the date, possibly chosen to commemorate privately his mother, had to bring back thoughts of her long imprisonment and her execution.  James would, within a few years, remove his mother’s remains from their original grave in Peterborough Cathedral and re-inter them among England’s Kings in Westminster Abbey.  James could not possibly have been close to his mother—or even to have had any memories of her—as they had been separated from his infancy, but she represented to him his royal patrimony and the legitimacy of his wearing the Crowns of Scotland and England.  Just as with the Tudors, the Stuarts too valued family over Creed or any other thing. 

The day before—that fateful anniversary of his mother’s abdication—the new King of England and his wife travelled in the traditional procession from the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster. They were accompanied by a retinue of guards as well as the leading members of the court and had been greeted along the way by speeches, tableaux, and decorations in their honor at such key places as the Guildhall and Saint Paul’s Cathedral.  The procession, part of all English coronations at the time, would have been an almost-all-day event.  The Palace of Westminster, today the seat of Parliament, had been a chief royal residence in London until the reign of Henry VIII and the monarch traditionally spent the night before the coronation in the palce so as to be near the Abbey where the coronation service began early the next morning.

Indeed workers in the Abbey had been busy all through the night putting the final touches on the “theatre” for the coronation—the area beneath the central tower where the transepts met the nave.  Outside the Abbey workers were laying a carpet of blue cloth from the throne in the Great Hall of the Palace down through the Hall and along the street to the great West Door of the Abbey Church.  About dawn the Abbey vergers began preparing the Church for the service.  This was a tricky matter as never before had the Protestant service found in the Book of Common Prayer been used for the Coronation.  Even the Protestant monarchs, Edward VI and Elizabeth, had been crowned with full Catholic Ritual and the Sarum Rite.  But now, gone was the altar with its jeweled cross and candles and in its place stood a plain wooden table covered with “a faire linen clothe”  for the Holy Communion.  Gone were the snow-white albs and rich brocaded chasubles and tunicles of the clergy.  In their place the bishops wore their rochets of fine white lawn beneath their black silk chimeres.  In place of the miters of previous days, they wore the plain square black caps of their university days.  The lower clergy wore their black gowns.  The Church had been stripped of its glory, but not the peerage.  The peers gathered in their robes of red velvet trimmed with furs, coronets in their hands to be donned at the moment the Archbishop placed the crown on the head of King James. 

Around eight in the morning, James and Anne processed with their court from the Palace of Westminster to the nearby Abbey where, resplendent in their royal robes, they were greeted by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster in somber clerical black. The Dean, the canons, and principal bishops of the realm carrying the Crown, the Chalice and Paten, and the Bible were accompanied by noblemen carrying the scepters, Sword of State, and the orb.  This procession led James and Anne through the Abbey into the choir as the royal choristers sang psalm 112, I Was Glad When They Said Unto Me.  Archbishop Whitgift led the King to the four corners of the coronation theatre, facing East, South, West, and North to present him for “recognition” and the customary shouts of “Long Live the King” by those assembled.  He then administered the Coronation Oath to govern justly and by law.  The oath administered, all settled in for the drab Protestant Service with its multiple collects and turgid readings unbroken by any chants or whiffs of incense, or other bits of more sensual popery. 

It would be another two-hundred and thirty years before a romantic interest in things medieval would encourage the Church of England to root around in its dusty armoires and cubbyholes to find the silk vestments and brocaded hangings of a more vibrant era.  And while Tallis and Byrd had written beautiful music for the Anglican Service (both composers were Catholics and also wrote music for the Catholic Church), and while such music would most likely have been used in the coronation service, for the most part in sixteenth century Anglicanism there was no singing except for psalms, and organs were being allowed to fall into disrepair for lack of use.  In place of ritual and music, there was a preponderance of turgid verbosity and even Cranmer’s elegant English of the Prayer Book was just droned out without any passion.  But when the Gospel had been jumped like a hurdle and the Nicene Creed run through in rote repetition, the service came alive again.  It was time for the anointing.

It is most curious that the anointing survived the Reformation.  All things Catholic had been done away with unless there could be a direct scriptural command such as “do this in remembrance of me,” or “go baptize all nations.”  For many English Protestants with a Puritan bent, even the ring at a wedding was too “popish” for their delicate Christian consciences.  But anointing the king—that was retained.  Granted there was a scriptural precedent for it—Saul had been anointed in his day and David in his.  But all other anointings had been done away with in the revised rites of 1552 and 1559.  There was no long an anointing of the candidate for baptism or a chrismation after the baptism.  There was no anointing in the confirmation service.  There was no anointing of the hands in the ordination of a priest or the anointing of the head of a bishop at his consecration.  Even the anointing of the sick—for which the Epistle of Saint James gave a command—had been done away with.  But a king was still anointed. 

And it wasn’t just the anointing.  Before the anointing the king was divested of his Robe of State and his outer garments, he was vested in the columbium sidonis, a white gown that opened at the neck (to allow for the anointing) and which corresponds to the alb.  Over this, after the anointing, he is vested with the supertunica which corresponds to the Dalmatic.  Over this he is robed with a stole and the cope-like pallium regale.  In other words he is dressed similar to a bishop in his pontificals to show the link between kingship and priesthood.

This link between priesthood and kingship was also displayed in the coronation service of other nations.  The King of France at his coronation received Holy Communion from the chalice, a practice at the time reserved to the priest-celebrant of the Mass.  The Russian Czar also received Holy Communion at his coronation in the manner of a priest—entering the altar through the Royal Doors, the entry into the sanctuary reserved for bishops and priests, and then taking the particle of the Lamb (the consecrated bread) in his hands before drinking from the chalice.  (The normal way the laity receive Holy Communion in the Russian Church is that the priest drops the particle which has been soaked in the consecrated wine, into the mouth of the communicant from a spoon.)

It is ironic that while the Church of England had all but dropped the concept of priesthood for the clergy, it retained it for the Sovereign.   Don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying that the Monarch becomes “ordained” in the coronation rite or that he or she in any way is authorized for priestly ministry, but the symbols of priesthood are retained and conferred on the Sovereign as a symbol of his (or her) being “The Lord’s Anointed.”  It is a political gesture that draws on religious symbolism.

After James was anointed, he was then invested with the various swords, scepters, and orb that symbolized his rights and duties as protector of the people, administrator to them of Justice and Mercy, and their Ruler.  Queen Anne was then brought forward to the same spot, and anointed like James (though not vested in the priestly garments) and crowned.  They were then led to their thrones and the colorless Anglican Service continued.  Anne caused quite a stir, however, when she refused Holy Communion as this confirmed for many the rumors that she was secretly a Roman Catholic. 

The service over, the priestly vesture exchanged again for the Robe of State, the King and Queen were led from the Abbey back to the Palace of Westminster where the coronation banquet awaited them.  The service lasted about seven hours and it was mid-afternoon before they got to eat.  There was no shortage of food, however, with which to sate the royal appetite.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church XCV

James I

Elizabeth was not only having trouble with her Catholic subjects—she was also having trouble with her Protestant ones.  The issue was that the Church of England had become rigidly Calvinist.  The clergy who had embraced Cranmer’s reforms during the reign of King Edward VI and fled to the continent to escape persecution under the Catholic Mary (aka Bloody Mary) had been exposed while on the continent to Calvinist doctrine and polity.  They had already been disposed to continental models of doctrine under the leadership of Archbishop Cranmer who had gradually drifted from Lutheran style Protestantism to the more radical Swiss ideas of Zwingli and Calvin, but Cranmer wanted to retain bishops (he was one, after all) and was in no way anxious to embrace the Presbyterian polity of the continental Reformed Churches.  But Cranmer was now dead (Mary had seen to that) and the Church was more Calvinist in doctrine than ever.  The Puritan faction saw bishops as a holdover from the Catholic era and were anxious to rid the Church of them.  Elizabeth, for her part, saw that the bishops were one of the strong props of the monarchy.  The Presbyterian model of Church government was a tad too democratic for her liking.  Indeed, Elizabeth was no Calvinist.  She had a liking for pomp and ceremony and the Reformed ideas coming from the continent were not to her taste at all.  As we mentioned in an earlier posting, in her revision of the prayerbook she made sure that the vestments and altar furnishings of her father’s day were retained.  For the most part, of course, they weren’t, except in her chapel and there was a constant tension between the Puritan faction (which controlled the House of Commons and thus the taxes that furnished the royal purse) and the Crown over the direction of the Church of England.  Elizabeth shut her eyes to the stark puritan worship followed in the parish churches; the puritans grumbled about the papist trappings in the chapel royal but in the end did nothing confrontational other than an occasional “in-your-face” sermon decrying the Queen’s tendencies towards romish idolatry.  In the end the Puritans knew they were fortunate to have a Queen like Elizabeth who would turn a blind eye to their divergent religious practices, but it also left the Church of England in a certain ambiguity of being neither fully Protestant nor sufficiently Catholic to please anyone.  

Elizabeth died March 24, 1603 and was buried five weeks later with Protestant ceremonial (such as it was) in Westminster Abbey.  She was succeeded by her 3^rd cousin (some would say, and it is more proper but not common usage, “1^st cousin, twice removed”) James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots.  James was the nearest relative, but there were several others who could have made a claim for the throne, notably Lady Arabella Stuart.  A 1351 English law prohibited foreigners from inheriting England lands and titles—and thus the crown and its estates.  Moreover, in his 1547 will, Henry VIII had specifically excluded his Scots cousins from potential inheritance of the Crown.  Elizabeth, of course, died childless and had never named her heir before she died.  While Lady Arabella’s claim might have been a bit stronger—given that she was English born and thus neither a foreigner nor under Henry’s ban of a Scots heir—William Cecil (aka Lord Burghley) Elizabeth’s chief minister smoothly maneuvered the succession to James who had proven experience in governing and whose commitment to the Protestant faith was unquestioned.  James arrived in London on May 7^th 1603 and was crowned the following July 25^th.

The coronation is most interesting.  The Church of England had been purged of just about everything Catholic, including the use of consecrated oils for baptism, confirmation, and holy orders.  But what about the anointing of the monarch for his coronation?  The anointing of the monarch, even more than the crowning, is the conferral of Kingship in Christian theology.  Previous to James all the monarchs had been consecrated and crowned in Catholic rites—even Edward VI and Elizabeth, both of whom had inherited Catholic ritual and did away with it during their reigns.  James was the first monarch to be crowned according to the Protestant Book of Common Prayer.  It was decided that the use of chrism was too important to omit so even though it had been ruled out for every other use in the Church of England at the time, it was retained for the coronation of the king. It has remained part of the coronation rite until the present day.