Belloc notes something supernatural about Pope Clement VII's ultimate decision not to grant Henry VIII the annulment/divorce he requested:
We may sum up the situation by saying that if a stronger and more direct mind had been at work in the successor of St. Peter the English schism would have arrived with less loss of honour and moral authority to Rome. But we must add that much as Clement's weakness and shuffling must be regretted, he never passed the boundary beyond which there is abdication or denial of authority. He never compromised the fundamentals of the Papal power and of its awful claim to moral supremacy among men. There is something supernatural in all this.
We always
have to be careful in history not to exaggerate evidence of
the supernatural, nor to ascribe to supernatural causes what
may legitimately be ascribed to natural ones, but here
there seems to be evidence of supernatural guidance. Just
one step too far at one moment in Papal history would have
compromised the Papacy in the eyes of posterity and have
given solid argument against its claims. That moment fell
in the reign .of Clement VII. And in that moment the
Papacy did not fail, even though the Pope had sailed so very
near the wind. Clement just might, at the most critical
moment when he was being hardest pressed, bullied, not
knowing what to do between the great contending forces of which he was the victim, he just might, I say, have overstepped the limit. He might, for instance, have issued
a Bull in which he declared the original Papal power of
dispensation for marriage with a sister-in-law to be void.
He might have got out of his difficulties by allowing the
verdict of the universities to be, not advisory to the Holy
See, but upon an equality with it. He might have taken
any one of half a dozen steps, each of which would have
been, for the first time, an admission by a Pope that the
Papacy was not what it was. And, by a sufficient margin,
Clement happily was preserved from so fatal an excess of
weakness.
He was preserved from it by that Divine safeguarding
of the Church which never fails; but he was also preserved
from it by that element in him which, for all his faults,
remained strong: a recognition of what was essential to his
office.
On Cranmer's ultimate decision--his recantation of other recantations--Belloc is not so sympathetic:
Up to the last moment he did not know whether these
protestations of his had been effectual or not in deceiving
the authorities. On the day fixed for the execution he was
taken to St. Mary's Church in Oxford for his recantation
to be made as public as possible and for a sermon to be
preached upon it. The rule was, of course, that on such
public recantation the prisoner for heresy was pardoned,
and Cranmer had his recantation all ready to read. But
while he sat there listening to the sermon preached about
him, there came a phrase in that sermon which suddenly
destroyed his hopes. The preacher had been told by the
Government to announce their decision that they could not
pardon Cranmer after all.
He then did a dramatic thing. He went up to read his
recantation, but at the most critical point in it suddenly
declared that all he had said in favour of the Church and
against his former errors was insincere, and had merely been
said in order to save his life! Now that he had to die
anyhow he would confess that he was utterly opposed
to the Catholic system and the Papacy and all the rest
of it.
Of course, Cranmer had already been condemned to death as a traitor for supporting the succession of Lady Jane Grey to the throne. Mary I had delayed the executions of the usurper, her husband, and Cranmer. Belloc is clear that Cranmer would have renounced his Evangelical beliefs if it would have saved his life; only because he realized that renunciation would not save his life would he stand up for them.
Image Credit: Stained glass window depicting the Oxford Martyrs.
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