Preview: The Anniversaries of Churchill's Death and State Funeral

On Monday, January 27, I'll start a new series on the Son Rise Morning Show discussing some important historical anniversaries in 2025. Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim and I will review the life and career of Sir Winston Churchill, statesman and author as we celebrate the 60th anniversaries of his death on January 24 and State Funeral on January 30, 1965.

I'll be on the air at my usual time at the top of the second national hour of the Son Rise Morning Show on EWTN, about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

I don't think there is much doubt that Winston Churchill, born on November 30, 1874, was one of the most important political leaders of the early and mid-20th century. He was the son of Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill and Jennie Jerome, an American heiress. He was a soldier, war correspondent, member of Parliament, Prime Minister (twice: 1940-1945 and 1951-1955), author and artist; he led England through the Second World War, and with FDR and Joseph Stalin, helped create a new Europe after that war. He famously made the term "Iron Curtain" a powerful image to describe the post-war aggression of the Soviet Union at a speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946. He received many honors, including honorary citizenship in the USA.

As an author--his main source of income after his public service--Churchill wrote and published biographies, histories, collections of his speeches, etc. and won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."

One human value I thought we could focus on, especially in view of the anniversaries of his death and funeral, is his views on religion, particularly Christianity, including his views on Catholicism. He was baptized in the Church of England and his funeral was celebrated in St. Paul's Cathedral according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer. 

Sources indicate that he while he believed in a Providential Higher Power that guided his destiny, he rejected the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Our Savior. After years of attending Anglican church services at Harrow he decided as an adult that he'd gone to church often enough. It was his reading while in India in the late nineteenth century that formed his views on religion. According to Anthony Roberts:

In between polo chukkas, Churchill became a voracious reader, and three authors in particular plunged him into the disbelief in Christ’s divinity that was to stay with him for the rest of his life.

Although William Lecky’s The Rise and Influence of Rationalism and his History of European Morals, as well as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, established in Churchill’s mind what he later called “a predominantly secular view,” it was William Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man that convinced Churchill that Jesus was an inspired prophet but not the Son of God.

Reade was a Victorian explorer, novelist and war correspondent whose two-volume book went into eight editions over the twelve years after its publication in 1872. It employed quasi-Darwinian terms to explain the rise and fall of empires such as those of the Persians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Macedonians and of course the Romans. Reade was particularly scathing about all forms of religion, which he dismissed as worthless superstition. . . .

Roberts quotes Paul Addison's Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992) in summary of Churchill's religious views, "For orthodox religion, Churchill substituted a secular belief in historical progress, with a strong emphasis on the civilising mission of the British and the British Empire. This was accompanied by a mystical faith, alternating with cynicism and depression, in the workings of Providence."

Regarding Catholicism, Churchill shared rather common English anti-Catholic views. As John Charmley noted in the Catholic Herald ten years ago, commenting on Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples:

Churchill imbibed, and later served up, the classic Victorian Anglican version of our island story. The medieval popes were foreign tyrants who always backed absolutism and opposed liberty. The Reformation was portrayed as Henry VIII’s declaration of independence from Rome, with the additional virtue of putting Bibles into the hands of the ordinary Englishman. This was contrasted with the obscurantism of papists like the bigoted Duke of Norfolk, who said he “never read the Scripture nor never will read it. It was merry in England afore the new learning came up.”

In a discussion of Churchill's religious views in Duty and Destiny: The Life and Faith of Winston Churchill by Dr. Gary Scott Smith in Catholic World Report, Dr. Paul Kengor notes:

As for Churchill’s negative appraisal of Catholicism, Smith says that Churchill in his youth “developed a strongly anti-Catholic view, which continued into his mid-twenties.” In 1898 he wrote to his brother that Oxford University “has long been the home of bigotry and intolerance and has defended more damnable errors and wicked notions than any other institution, with the exception of the Catholic Church.” In a letter the next year, Churchill declared that “as a rationalist I deprecate all Romish practices and prefer those of Protestantism, because I believe that the Reformed Church is less deeply sunk in the mire of dogma. We are … a step nearer Reason.” Churchill declared, however, that he was reluctant to rob the lives of people who worked in ugly factories devoid of beauty of the “ennobling aspiration” that Catholicism provided, even though it was expressed “in the burning of incense, the wearing of certain robes and other superstitious practices.”

At Churchill's State Funeral 60 years ago, there was plenty of beauty, "the wearing of certain robes", and other "superstitious practices" in his view, including a Byzantine Kontakion of the Departed, "Give rest, O Christ, to thy servant with thy Saints". His favorite hymns were included: "Fight the Good Fight", "He Who Would Valiant Be", the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in honor of his American mother, and "I Vow to Thee My Country".

His widow, Clementine, who had attended church regularly before their marriage and began to again after his death, commented to one of their daughters afterwards, "It wasn't a funeral, Mary – it was a triumph".

When he turned 75, Churchill had commented, “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” He also had some concerns about the afterlife: "Heaven, he feared, might be an egalitarian place rather like the Welfare State, “and therefore no place for me,” although he relished the opportunity of meeting the great men of the past such as Julius Cæsar and Napoleon," according to Anthony Roberts.

None of this is to comment on whether Churchill is in any "egalitarian place" where at least every soul is a holy saint enjoying the beatific vision, of course. But it is always good to learn the truth and to pray for mercy and salvation for the dead. 

May Winston Churchill rest in peace.

Image Credit (Public Domain): 1941 photograph by Karsh.

Churchill's Historical Anti-Catholicism

In England last week they celebrated the 50th anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill's funeral. Professor John Charmley, head of the Interdisciplinary Institute at the University of East Anglia, Norwich writes in The Catholic Herald about Churchill's anti-Catholic bias in The History of the English-Speaking Peoples:

The volumes illustrate Churchill’s great strengths as a historian and have a strong narrative drive, as well as clearly delineated heroes and villains: the former are usually Protestant, the latter invariably Catholic. This reflected not only the reality that England’s hereditary enemies were the Catholic countries of Spain and France, but also the bias inculcated by three centuries of Anglican state-sponsored propaganda.

Churchill imbibed, and later served up, the classic Victorian Anglican version of our island story. . . .

Churchill was, naturally, equally celebratory about the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. He described how a “great Protestant wind” rose in the “hearts of men, rising in fierce gusts to gale fury” to blow away the Catholic tyrant, James II, a low fellow prepared to sacrifice English freedom to the dictates of his faith. The English people were, Churchill declared, convinced “from the whole character of the Catholic Church at this time, that once he wielded the sword their choice would be the Mass or the stake”. The “Protestant wind” that brought King Billy to England, blew away the dark shadows of priestcraft and opened the way to the sun-kissed uplands of liberty, which would be defended by gallant Whigs such as his own ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough.

Professor Charmley points out that Newman identified Churchill's historical type in Lectures On the Present Position of Catholics in England:

Churchill was, in fact, that archetype described by Newman in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, who justified his anti-Catholicism by declaring: “It is too notorious for proof; every one knows it; every book says it; it has been so ruled long ago.” The book was full of “that ungenerous spirit which energises and operates so widely and so unweariedly in the Protestant community”.

Far from Newman’s work being, in Owen Chadwick’s words, a sad example of “a refined mind bothering itself with trash”, it was a noble attempt to combat the “black legend” about Catholicism which formed part of the Victorian version of our history. Only a few years before, in 1851, the restoration by Rome of the Catholic hierarchy in England had led to an outbreak of anti-Catholic hysteria led by the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, whose hereditary prejudices led him to dub it “papal aggression”. In 1874 Gladstone would declare that no Catholic Englishman could be fully trusted because he owed his ultimate allegiance to a “foreign potentate”. So deep-rooted was this prejudice that Newman himself predicted that the response to his sallies would be: “It is rather too much in the 19th century to be told to begin history again, and to have to reverse our elementary facts.” Churchill’s History bore witness to the accuracy of that prophecy.

Churchill, however, does regret the atrocities of Henry VIII's reign--the executions of so many nobles, religious, St. Thomas More, St. John Fisher, etc--but since his focus is on and his delight is in the development of Parliamentary rule in Great Britain, Churchill maintains a progressive view of the past. If events in the past lead to the triumph of parliamentary principles and democracy, they were necessary if regrettable. He also does admit that if King James II really meant to establish religious freedom in England, it was regrettable that he had to be deposed. Perhaps even if the cause of religious freedom was delayed by Parliament in 1688, it was still all to the good since Parliament decided for religious freedom for Catholics in the late 18th and early (1829) 19th centuries.