Belloc's "Charles II" (or "The Last Rally: A Story of Charles II")

This is the fifth historical character study by Hilaire Belloc I've read. Mysterium Press has sent me their handsome hardcover editions for my opinions on each: Wolsey, Cranmer, Charles I, and Cromwell, and now Charles II. (I also have James II in queue.) The cover of each book features a striking portrait of the subject, with a tag line that offers a great summing up of Belloc's theme for each man:

Wolsey: "The cardinal who unwittingly steered England to its ruin" [and specifically, regrettably steered the Catholic Church in England to its ruin]

Cranmer: "The archbishop who helped destroy England's founding faith"

Charles I: "The king who stood for liberty and lost his head for it"

Cromwell: "The killer of the king and the butcher of the Irish"

Charles II: "The king who pitted monarchy against money"

and 

James II: "The last king of England's ancient monarchy"

You can see the covers of the entire "Hilaire Belloc English Histories Collection" here. In the USA, these books are available from Os Justi Press. It's kind of surprising that Belloc did not write a study of the other Cromwell, Thomas. You can find his analysis of "The true creator of the English Reformation" (my idea of a tag line) in Characters of the Reformation!

In each of these books I've been impressed by Belloc's political and strategic acumen; his sympathy for the challenges and struggles each man faced; his effort to be honest and straight-forward in his analysis of how their backgrounds and education prepared them for their most crucial decisions and actions; his careful judgment of their strengths and weaknesses--and all those strengths are present this book, which was first published with the title The Last Rally: A Story of Charles II in 1939. 

Belloc adds the ground of a beautiful metaphor to the structure of this book: the young, exiled Prince of Wales's love of being on the sea, captaining a ship, struggling with the elements, winning the battle, and returning to port. That metaphor is expressed in many chapter titles (and remember that Belloc loved sailing too!):

1. The Last Rally
2. The Task
3. The Formation
4. The Annealing
5. First Grasp of the Helm
6. The Fair Run
7. The Fleet and Empire
8. The Sunken Reef
9. The Triangle
10. Gathering Storm
11. Whiggery
12. The Women
13. Full Gale: The Popish Plot
14. Hurricane and Harbor
15. Drop Anchor

An elegant feature in this book.

Throughout this series, the great theme is power: how to get it, how to hold it, and how to lose it. Each man achieves power either by inheriting it (Charles I--with the honorable mention of his father James I and VI--and his heirs Charles II and James II) or by talent, opportunity, and influence (Wolsey, Cranmer, and Cromwell). The variable of this theme is how Charles II tried to restore the power of the monarchy in England after the English Civil War, the Interregnum and Protectorate. As Belloc explains:

As I dealt in my former book with the leading case of Louis XIV of France as a monarch standing up to the Money Power (and, upon the whole, successfully), so in this book I deal with the parallel and complementary case of his contemporary and first cousin, Charles II, Stuart King of England.

He also found himself faced by that unescapable conflict between the Money Power and Monarchy; but, unlike his cousin Louis, Charles failed. The Money Power was too much for him. So long as he lived he managed to fend it off though not to tame it; but immediately after his death, in the less competent hands of his brother James (the last real and active King of England, as also the last by hereditary right), Monarchy went down. (p. 1)

One of the important early chapters is "The Annealing". Annealing is a term of art in metallurgy. This website provides a good, not-too-technical definition: "the process of heating a metal to a high temperature and then cooling it slowly. The slow cooling allows the crystalline structure to settle into a lower-energy, more stable configuration. Fast cooling (quenching) locks in stress and brittleness; slow cooling produces resilience." Applied to human experience, it is "the analogous process by which competing patterns of action gradually resolve into a stable configuration." 

Belloc proposes that from age 17 to 30, Charles, the exiled Prince of Wales, went through this annealing process as he struggled to make his claim to the throne of England after his father's execution and during the Commonwealth and Protectorate. He developed his characteristic responses to danger, decision, and success.

During this struggle, Charles attempted to gain the throne in Scotland, at least, by making a covenant with the Kirk. It included renouncing the Church of England, the Anglican doctrine and structure his late father had held so firmly. He was crowned the King of Scotland and then faced the English military response. In the midst of that struggle, and the subsequent military defeat he and the Scots suffered at Worcester, he met Father John Huddleston, a Catholic priest, and read a book of Catholic apologetics and was convinced it taught the Truth. Of course, we know that he did not follow up on that conviction until on his deathbed, because the restoration of the monarchy in England was his main goal.

Belloc is careful about weighing this dichotomy in Charles's behavior, just as he is in examining Charles's pattern of unfaithfulness to his wife, Catherine of Braganza. He describes how Charles never succumbed to any influence of his mistresses and made sure that his wife was respected, at least outwardly, at Court. It seems the two women who had the most influence on his Court and Reign were Anne Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon's daughter and his brother James, the Duke of York's wife, and his sister Minette (Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans), King Louis XIV's sister-in-law--both through their Catholicism. Minette influenced him in signing the Treaty of Dover, in which he promised to convert to Catholicism at some point.

Another great issue was the conflict with Parliament over funding the government, especially the British Navy to protect trade. This problem led Charles to negotiate for funds with King Louis of France and to triangulate three foes: Louis, Holland, and Parliament against one to another as needed. To Belloc, here Charles succeeded, however briefly, to attain true Royal power and authority. Belloc also notes throughout his discussions of the conflict between King and Parliament that the House of Commons was not at all representative of the population of England and not even of the men who had the privilege to vote in Parliamentary election in proportion to city and county size and commercial etc. influence.

Belloc expresses the greatest condemnation of Charles's behavior in the course of the Popish Plot, especially when he allowed William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford (a Blessed martyr and grandson of Saint Philip Howard) and Oliver Plunkett (a Sainted martyr) to be executed when the Popish Plot had been exposed as a lie. It is Belloc's opinion that the Popish Plot "gave the deathblow to Catholicism in England." (p. 225). Belloc avers that even as he acknowledges the change in the Catholic legal position in England, the English converts from Newman in 1845 until his own day, and the influx of Irish Catholics. If he is paying attention to matters now, I wonder what he thinks about Catholic revival in England, especially vis-a-vis the Church of England.

In some ways it seems that Belloc expresses greater concern for the triumph of the Monarchy in English government than he does for Charles's dedication to his conscience and the truth of Catholicism. It's one way, of course, that Belloc avoids the accusation of letting his own Catholic faith influence his historical analysis of Charles II's character and reign. I don't think he is betraying his Faith but he is upholding his general thesis in each of these books that a strong executive is essential in governance of a nation. Writing as he was in the age of Roosevelt, Mussolini/Victor Emmanuel, and Hitler (not that I'm suggesting any similarity between Roosevelt and the others--although I do recall that Alistair Cooke stated in his America that FDR basically ignored the Constitution of the United States in his implementation of The New Deal), one can see his concern for the balance of power.

His narration of Charles's deathbed conversion is moving, of course, but the reader knows that the hereditary monarchy would soon fail during James II's reign, especially once the Catholic convert King and his Catholic wife would have a Catholic son and heir. (Belloc had published his study of James II in 1928--this book was published in 1939.)

As usual, Mysterium Press presents a excellent edition of Belloc's work and I appreciate the publisher sending me these copies in exchange for my opinion of them. 

I'll be reading and reviewing James II next.

Boris Johnson and Catholicism in England

Crisis Magazine posts an interesting story that poses the question: is the Prime Minister of England a practicing Catholic? or is he still an Anglican? Sean Fitzpatrick notes that this question arises because Johnson married a Catholic woman in a Catholic ceremony in Westminster Cathedral:

When asked by a journalist after his Catholic marriage and the Catholic baptism of his son, “Are you now a practicing Catholic?” Johnson, an Anglican since Eton, replied, “I don’t discuss these deep issues—certainly not with you.” Fair enough, sir.

In any event, the Prime Minister is now under suspicion of being England’s first Catholic prime minister, which would complicate his relation to the Church of England (God save the Queen). Mr. Johnson known for his wry and ready wit, and he wielded it in that moment to keep to himself what so many seek to fling into public scrutiny. Whether it be our religion, our political affiliation, or our vaccination status, the deep issues of our lives are boarding themselves up against undue exposure as they become increasingly divisive.

Fitzpatrick follows his own of inquiry in the rest of his essay, but what interests me is the church-state relationship in England: the government (the United Kingdom doesn't have a Constitution the way that we in the USA have one) still has an officially anti-Catholic stance. No monarch can be a Catholic, and it's not very clear whether or not a Catholic can be Prime Minister. According to the amended Catholic Relief Act of 1829:

It shall not be lawful for any person professing the Roman Catholic religion directly or indirectly to advise his Majesty, or any person or persons holding or exercising the office of guardians of the United Kingdom, or of regent of the United Kingdom, under whatever name, style, or title such office may be constituted, or the lord lieutenant of Ireland], touching or concerning the appointment to or disposal of any office or preferment in the Church of England, or in the Church of Scotland; and if any such person shall offend in the premises he shall, being thereof convicted by due course of law, be deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor, and disabled for ever from holding any office, civil or military, under the Crown.

Yet the question of Boris Johnson's Christian religion was broached when he was elected, as this in July, 2019 article from The Irish Times (Northern Ireland) evidences :

BORIS Johnson has become the first baptised Catholic to become prime minister.

The 55-year-old, whose mother Charlotte Fawcett is Catholic, was baptised as a child.

His godmother is Lady Rachel Billington – daughter of the devoutly Catholic Lord Longford.

However, Mr Johnson was confirmed an Anglican while studying at Eton as a teenager.

That Confirmation in the Church of England probably smoothed over the issue; his marriage to a Catholic in a Catholic Cathedral and the baptism of their child has raised it again.

One of the duties of the Prime Minister is to advise the Queen on episcopal appointments in the Church of England. I cannot imagine Boris Johnson refusing to pass along recommendations for a woman to succeed in an English diocese or to otherwise interfere in those appointments on doctrinal, spiritual, or moral grounds. Nor would Queen Elizabeth II veto any on such grounds, the Anglican church being so thoroughly Erastian. In view of that fact, I'd imagine his Catholicism is a moot point. That's probably why there haven't been any "Johnson Riots" in England. Some would probably have other reasons for burning the Prime Minister in effigy on Bonfire Night, but not because he was baptized Catholic and married a Catholic woman.

As Sean Fitzpatrick concludes, citing Chesterton:

G. K. Chesterton (who was definitely a Catholic) wrote, “The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” Boris Johnson may or may not be Catholic, but he is certainly Chestertonian, and that goes somewhere beyond his doughy build and rumpled hair. He is elusive and playful and insightful—and those are traits that often go with the faithful. But let us not, as Catholics, be as the slavish children of the age sniffing for social controversy or social stigma—or even stigmata. Let us worry about being Catholic rather than who may or may not be Catholic.

Nevertheless, these are interesting considerations, leading to one more question: when will the monarch be able to be a Catholic? or another way to ask it: when will the Church of England be dis-established as the State Church of the United Kingdom? Should it be? What purpose does its establishment serve now? Those questions lead us all the way back to July 14, 1833!

Image Credit (public domain): The Gordon Riots by Charles Green (1840–1898)

Book Review: Lisa McClain's "Lest We Be Damned"

Clearly, I did not buy this book based on its cover!

From Routledge, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation & Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 was written by Lisa McClain. She is an "Assistant Professor of History and Director of Women's Studies at Boise State University. She studies popular religion during the Reformation era, and has authored articles in journals such as the Sixteenth Century Journal and the Journal of Religious History", according to Routledge. As the publisher blurbs the book:

Through compelling personal stories and in rich detail, McClain reveals the give-and-take interaction between the institutional church in Rome and the needs of believers and the hands-on clergy who provided their pastoral care within England. In doing so, she illuminates larger issues of how believers and low-level clergy push[ed] the limits of official orthodoxy in order to meet devotional needs.

Table of Contents (from my notes and including the subheads in the chapters):

Introduction

Chapter 1. "Knitting the Remnants": Catholic Challenges and Priorities in Protestant England

--A Changing Religious Environment: Penal Laws against the Practice of Catholicism

--How Many Catholics Were There?

--Who Was a Catholic?

--Catholic Priorities

   --Immanence

   --Saints, Priests, and Sacraments

   --Salvation

--Meeting Catholic Priorities

   --Evolving Goals

--Book Trade

Chapter 2. A "Church" Without a Church: English Catholics' Search for Religious Space

--Three Degrees of Separation

--Prisons

--Examinations, Trials, and Executions

Chapter 3. Using What's at Hand: English Catholic Reinterpretations of the Rosary

--Praying the Beads

--Sacraments Versus Sacramentals

--Obtaining the Beads

--Society of the Rosary

--Changing Role of the Rosary and Mary

--One of Many Emerging Views of Mary

   --Pre-Reform Use and Interpretation of the Rosary in England

   --In Contrast to Post-Tridentine Continental Portrayals of Mary

Chapter 4. Reclaiming the Body: Receiving the Benefits of the Mass in the Absence of Priests

--Functions of Catholic Sacraments

--Filling the Need

--Spiritual Reception of the Body of Christ

--Finding the Body

--Reclaiming the Body: Christ's and One's Own

Chapter 5. Lawyers, Jailbirds, Grocers, and Diplomats: Catholic Options for Piety and Community in London

--Inns of Court

--Prisons

--Catholic Geography of London

--Executions

--Relic Takers

--Merchants and Tradespeople

--Foreign Aid

Chapter 6. Katholic Kernow: Catholics of Cornwall

--Cornish Independence

--Cornwall's Celtic Past: "An Ancient Song, Lilting Before You Came"

--Lives of the Celtic Saints

--Celtic-Cornish Immanence: Places, People, and Things

   --Places

   --People

   --Things

--Cornish Catholic Participation in a Larger Catholic Community

Chapter 7. "Border of Wickedness?": Catholics in the Northern Shires

--A Convenient Partnership

--New Experiences in the North

--Protecting What was Theirs: Distinctive Attempts to Thwart Protestant Authority

--The Importance of the Borders

   --Border Instability
--Why and How Catholics Flowed Back and Forth Across the Border
   --Why Was This Possible?
   --How Was This Possible?
--Northern Catholic Identity and Community
--Conclusion

Chapter 8. From the Old Comes the New: Catholic Identities and Alternative Forms of Community
--English Catholic Identity: How English Catholics Perceived Themselves
--Identifying with Persecution and Martyrdom
--Building New Catholic Communities
--Communities of Prayer
--Communities of the Book
--Communities of the Living and the Dead
--Conjunctions of Identity and Community: How English Catholics Perceived their Relationship to Rome
--Increasing Frustration with Rome
--Oath of Allegiance Controversy

Conclusion

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

McClain does present many compelling stories and much rich detail--sometimes repetitiously--in delineating the response of English Catholics to the loss of their churches, their parishes, their public devotional life, their communities, and most crucially, their Church's Sacraments. She carefully traces the changing circumstances of Catholics in England from the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign until the end of Charles I's reign, not strictly chronologically, but topically. For example, McClain notes that during the first years of Elizabeth's reign enforcement of the Acts of Uniformity (worship) and Supremacy (authority) was rather lax. She continues her examination of the development and variations in that enforcement during Elizabeth's reign by looking at the prisons in London, the distance and independence in Cornwall, and the distinctive issues of distance, the border with Scotland, and nobles' authority in the northern counties.

In another example of this topical treatment of changing circumstances during the period (1559 to 1642), she examines the controversy over the Oath of Allegiance during James I's reign but does not continue that theme into the reign of Charles I. So a reader should not expect a strictly chronological description of Catholic issues in England during this recusant period.

Because of my great devotion and interest in St. Robert Southwell, I was fascinated by her citation of his advice to Catholics during his time as a missionary priest to use their imaginations in their homes and in their environments. He encouraged them to dedicate rooms or areas in their houses to Jesus, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, to angels and saints; to use walking in fields or forests as pilgrimages to holy sites, to consecrate time and space to God in prayer and unity. These passages, cited from his Short Rule to a Good Life, accorded very well with what Anne R. Sweeney had written of St. Robert Southwell in Snow in Arcadia as images and imagination--inspired in him by the art and architecture of Counter-Reformation Rome--were so essential to his Ignatian poetic.

On the other hand, I was confused by her final statement about Blessed John Hambley, whose life and career she traces in two chapters (5 and 6): offering Mass at the Inns of Court in London and being born in Cornwall and leaving to become a missionary priest. She indicates that he died in prison in 1587 (p. 198) but he was hanged, drawn, and quartered on March 29 that year, according to martyrology.

McClain also alludes often to the trial and questioning of St. Margaret Clitherow, especially on the question, "What is the Church?" to which Clitherow had a good answer:

"It is that wherein the true word of god (sic) is preached which Christ langhs [launched] and left to his Apostles and they to their successors: ministering the seven sacraments which the same church has always observed, doctors preached, and martyrs and confessors witnessed. This is the church which I believe to be true."

McClain emphasizes the continuity recusant Catholics sought while they had to adapt to a great disruption: they could not practice their faith as they had done before (or as their parents and grandparents had done before Henry VIII's break from Rome) and yet they wanted to maintain the connection with the past because it was still alive and well in the world, just over the English Channel. At the same time that she emphasizes how they sought continuity, McClain explores how they had to change: praying the Rosary privately; reading their breviaries or Little Offices of the Blessed Virgin Mary in secret; if they did attend Anglican services to avoid paying the financially crippling fines, praying Catholic prayers; holding their rosaries in their pockets, etc.

Sometimes she stresses how far English Catholics were deviating from standard Catholic practice, but they were only doing so because it was the only thing they could do to maintain some continuity with the faith. When they couldn't attend Mass, confess their sins, receive Holy Communion, or even join their fellow citizens in the parish church their ancestors may have built and contributed to, they had to make Spiritual Communions, confess their sins to God and make a perfect act of contrition (declaring they never wanted to sin again!), join their intentions to Masses said on the Continent, etc. McClain notes that many of these devotions were based on late-medieval mystical piety, once considered rather dangerous because it bypassed the mediation of the ordained priesthood--but it was all that Catholics had, absent the regular ministrations of a priest, unless they were able to shelter their own chaplain, afford the fines, or benefit from friendly laxity in the enforcement of recusant laws. I think she might press this view of deviation too far, especially since it was Catholic priests recommending these practices to devout Catholics. They were not dissenting from Catholic teaching.

She does adopt what could be considered a controversial view of who was Catholic, accepting that Church Papists, those who outwardly conformed to the Church of England by attending services (not receiving Communion) but inwardly remained semi-faithful (?) to the Catholic Church were indeed still Catholic. In this, she could be following William Cardinal Allen's advice to the missionary priests he sent to England: if the laity confess attending an Anglican service as a sin, grant them absolution mercifully and gently, even if it's a sin they confess again and again (as most penitents do confess the same sins again and again).

Again, this study provides a great deal of detail: stories of arrests, imprisonments, conversations; data about books, martyrs, executions, prisons, embassy chapels; individual examples, etc, to develop a view of English Catholics' experience and life as a persecuted/prosecuted religious minority in a country that had once believed, prayed, and worshipped exactly as they did.

In her Conclusion, however, McClain tries to make more global claims of this history's significance in current situations of dissent within churches on doctrinal matters--something that never really occurs during this period among these Catholics--and the struggle to live in pluralistic societies, accommodating one another's beliefs and religious practices, bringing up book burnings, religiously inspired terrorism, all in the passive voice! ("Books are burned, martyrs are made, holy wars are declared, acts of religiously motivated terrorism proliferate"). Who burns the books, who executes the martyrs, who declares holy wars, who proliferates acts of religiously motivated terrorism? The passive voice avoids naming the actors. That's a lot of significance to cram into four paragraphs at the end of the book, especially when the purpose of the book was to help us understand the past, not necessarily help us understand the present, and especially when the situation, at least in the democratic West, is not that comparable.

I wish the book could have more illustrations and especially maps. And have a pretty cover!--but it's print on demand like so many scholarly books are now. It's an excellent resource, based on analysis of both primary and secondary sources, as McClain demonstrates familiarity with current scholarship.

Newman the Briton: Saint John Henry Newman

Note that The Catholic Herald will have another issue highlighting Newman's canonization, reactions to it, and the celebrations thereof. In the meantime, The National Catholic Register has an article by K.V. Turley, "John Henry Newman: A New Saint and a New Joy for England and Beyond".

He summarizes HRH Prince Charles's stunning praise of St. John Newman and then quotes the British Ambassador to the Holy See, Sally Axworthy:

“This is the first British saint to be canonized in 40 years,” she said, “so we are celebrating this weekend.” She went on to say that the canonization marks “a high point in the relationship between the U.K. and the Holy See.”

The U.K. delegation for the canonization was led by Prince Charles and included two cabinet ministers, the special envoy for freedom of religion or belief, the lord mayor of Birmingham, and representatives of the Anglican communion and Newman’s Oxford colleges. Ambassador Axworthy sees such a varied delegation as a reflection of “Newman’s roots,” but she added that the occasion was one for “celebrating the impact of this quintessential Englishman on the wider world, recognizing the importance his writings still have for many individuals around the world today.”

Reflecting on the preparation for Newman’s canonization, Axworthy said it had meant for her “a lot of work! But also an opportunity to get to know the writings of John Henry Newman. From my student days, I was familiar with his role in the Oxford Movement, but now I have read much more about him, visited the three English oratories and been to Littlemore. I can see why he is such an influential figure. The way he wrote about his own faith, and the seriousness with which he explored his faith, seem unique.”

I thought it was impressive that she took such pains to know more about Newman, reading his works, visiting the oratories and the College at Littlemore.

The Vatican News website excerpted additional remarks from Axworthy, also showing her historical (she "read history at university") knowledge:

Ambassador Axworthy recalls that “the emancipation of Catholics came in 1829”, and the restoration of the hierarchy in England and Wales came about in 1850. After that, she says, there was a “return to respectability,” and as Cardinal Newman was around for most of the 19th century, he was “very much a part of that”.

She then goes on to say that Cardinal Newman was a “towering intellect” in the 19th century and that, though he was “initially vilified for it”, in time he wrote some “very reasoned accounts”. If you read the history around that period, continues Ambassador Axworthy, you can see that his "vilification turned to acceptance, and not just of him, but of Catholics in general."

So, she says, though he was “very important for Catholics in the UK”, both as an historical figure and for the history of English Catholicism he is also important to many Catholics worldwide.

Newman's canonization, like his death, is not the end of the story; it is the beginning. How this greater acceptance of Newman in England--as it leads to people reading his works, understanding his life, and following his example--will develop is important to the growth of holiness and virtue among the people of England, especially Catholics.

O God, who bestowed on the Priest Saint John Henry Newman the grace to follow your kindly light and find peace in your Church; graciously grant that, through his intercession and example, we may be led out of shadows and images into the fulness of your truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

St. John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Why Was England So Slow to Embrace Religious Toleration?

When Hilaire Belloc described the goals of Cardinal Richelieu to make his king and his nation strong, secure, and united, he cited Richelieu's view that a country could be divided in religion and still maintain unity. Both Catholics and Protestants in France could be loyal subjects and participate in the governance and the community of the kingdom. Richelieu wanted to reduce the power of some Huguenot leaders, because his young king--remember that Henry IV was assassinated while Louis XIII was a child--was in danger of a permanent loss of power:

He had noticed how during his own youth the great nobles and especially the great Protestant nobles were black- mailing and weakening the Crown, after the assassination of Henry IV. The worst culprit was old Sully, who went off with enormous loot as the fruit of threats to aid civil war against the Queen Regent. The King, the heir of Henry IV, was only a boy, under the title of Louis XIII; until he should be of age his mother, Marie de Medici, a violent but unpractical woman, was left in control. The result was that the rich could do pretty well what they liked. The Protestant nobles and the large Protestant middle class of the towns took full advantage of this position. It will be remembered that Henry IV, by the Edict of Nantes, had allowed them to hold a number of strong walled cities and to govern them as a sort of State within the State, and had also permitted them to call national assemblies of their faction, which were a perpetual menace to the central power of the King. Richelieu saw that the first thing to be done if the Crown was to be saved, its power increased and thereby the whole nation consolidated, was to take away these dangerous special favours, and treat the Huguenots like everybody else. He was determined when he came to power that there should no longer be a realm within the realm, and a rival power strong enough to threaten the monarchy. 

But by so much as he was determined upon this was he also determined upon the fullest toleration for Calvinism. Richelieu was the first of that long line of public men from his day to ours to treat religious difference as a private matter, and to believe that one can have a united country without unity of religion. James I of England, as we have seen, had some such idea at the back of his head; but he never really put it into practice, for the hatred and fear of the Catholic Church of the great land-owners his subjects, whose fortunes had come from the loot of the Church, was too strong for him. And what is more, the great landowners proved in the long run too strong for the English Crown, and destroyed it, substituting their own two assemblies, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, known as "Parliament," for the old popular kingship of England. Richelieu saw the menace, though it had not fully developed in his own time, and he was determined that France should follow the opposite course. It is therefore due to him not only that France became politically united as a strong monarchy, but also that the peasantry won the long battle with the noble classes and became the main owners of the soil of France; whereas in England the noble classes, that is the squires, ate up the peasantry and became the main owners of the soil themselves.

Even after he had destroyed the Huguenot power center and completed the siege of La Rochelle, for example, Richelieu maintained the Edict of Nantes:

All the more was Calvinism tolerated as a religion. In that very lifetime which saw priests butchered in England after the cruel fashion for which the Puritans were openly responsible during their period of power, Calvinism in Catholic France was perfectly free. It had no martyrs and suffered no persecution. 

And Huguenots could be doctors, lawyers, own property, travel freely, visit Paris, etc--while Catholics in England had many restrictions against them and had to pay crippling fines.

Of course, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, but nevertheless, the French monarchy had adopted religious tolerance as an acceptable administrative policy within his kingdom and both Catholics and Protestants were trusted--as much as a monarch ever trusts his subjects' loyalty--to be loyal subjects. But in England at the same time, Catholics were not trusted as loyal subjects because of their faith. The English monarchy presumed that any Catholic, unless he denied his religious allegiance to the Pope (abjured his faith and was no longer a Catholic) was a traitor or an imminently potential traitor, plotting or liable to plotting against the king.

Why did France progress for a generation at least into a more modern, tolerant view of religion in their country than England did?

Belloc would say it was because the land-owning nobility and upper class  in England, exemplified by the Cecils (father and son), would not permit the monarch to adopt even so much toleration as to allow Catholics to attend the Mass freely. James I promised a measure of toleration to Catholics at Court when he wanted to marry his son Charles to Catholic princesses of Spain and France, but the promises were never completely kept. He still enforced his Oath of Allegiance, had the recusancy fines levied, and restricted Catholics from taking full part in English society.

I'd suggest that the English monarchy was stuck on the issue of the papacy and never could separate the religious and regal aspects of the papal office at the time. The pope was a monarch as well as the Vicar of Christ. James I could not accept Catholic loyalty to the pope and even would have limited the spiritual authority of the papacy if Catholics had accepted the Oath of Allegiance. English leadership could not imagine a nation in which subjects or citizens would not be Protestant. What a lack of progress, a complete denial of the Whig view of British history--and they wouldn't catch up until 1829!

Shakespeare's Henry V's Prayers for Richard II

In Shakespeare's historical play Henry V, the king leaves his headquarters to mingle with his soldiers on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. After some discussion of the relationship between the justice of the king's cause and his subject's responsibility for doing the right thing, Henry V reflects upon his father Henry IV's role in the death of the deposed Richard II.

Richard II died in Pontefract Castle--probably of starvation--on February 14, 1400 (the usually accepted date). He had surrendered to Henry IV at Flint Castle on August 19, 1399, on promises that his life would be spared. He was held in the Tower of London and abdicated on September 30 that year. Parliament formally deposed him on October 1 and Henry IV was crowned on October 13. Richard was moved to Pontefract Castle. After the discovery of the Epiphany Plot, in which several noblemen planned to kidnap Henry IV at Windsor on Epiphany (January 6, 1400), kill him, and restore Richard II to the throne. Richard was not allowed to remain alive, a target for conspiracy--Mary, Queen of Scots' situation during Elizabeth I's reign comes to mind--even though he might have known nothing of the plot, which also called the Revolt of the Three Earls.

In terms that defied the Church of England's rejection of the doctrine of Purgatory and the practice of prayer for the dead, Henry V describes how he has tried to demonstrate his repentance for the death of Richard at the hands of his father. He has founded chantries, those chapels set aside for praying the dead, which had be suppressed by Edward VI; he has paid poor men and women, as Henry VIII had done in his will, to pray. He prays and promises to do more:

O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts;
Possess them not with fear; take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them. Not to-day, O Lord,
O, not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!
I Richard's body have interred anew;
And on it have bestow'd more contrite tears
Than from it issued forced drops of blood:
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,
Who twice a-day their wither'd hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard's soul. More will I do;
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.

I've always wondered how post-Reformation audiences responded to these words? Henry offers these prayers not for his father's sins, but for Richard II's soul. Henry V's repentance for his father's sins recalls Catholic teaching and piety and would have reminded them that at one time--not so long ago--English kings and queens were Catholics, as the gloriously gorgeous Wilton Diptych attests.

The word chantry might have reminded some in the audience of the celebration of the Catholic Mass, which of course had been declared illegal. It might have reminded them of ordained Catholic priests, who were now traitors, hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. Recusant Catholics or Church Papists in the audience would have definitely known what Shakespeare was describing.

Happy St. Valentine's Day! Best wishes for a holy and spiritually beneficial Ash Wednesday and Lent! I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show Friday morning to continue my discussion with Anna Mitchell on Hilaire Belloc's Characters of the Reformation--preview to come tomorrow!

Putting the Roman in English "Roman Catholicism"

Father Dwight Longenecker writes for the National Catholic Register:

Since King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church to found the Church of England, you would imagine that Anglicans would never claim to be Catholic. But they do.

When I lived in England I often heard members of the Church of England say, “We’re Catholic too; we’re just not Roman Catholic.”

The theory is that the English Church was always Catholic, but in the 16th century it was “reformed”: The popular idea is that jolly old King Henry VIII saw that the monasteries were full of fat old monks and he went through and tidied things up a bit. The Church had become fat, old and corrupt, and Henry and his children, Edward and then Elizabeth, straightened things out, streamlined a few things and got everything shipshape.

This is not only a complete whitewash of the depredations, iconoclasm and wholesale destruction of the Catholic Church, but it is also a misreading of English Catholic history. Along with this view of the English Reformation is a strange idea that the Church in England was, from the beginning, separate from Rome and that only in the Middle Ages onward was it under Rome’s thumb.

While I usually don't like the use of the term "Roman Catholicism"--it ignores the Eastern Rite communities in the Catholic Church--in the case of this article, it makes perfect sense. Reading Father Longenecker's article, I was reminded of a book I read six years ago, The English Church and the Papacy in the Middle Ages, which I reviewed here:

Introduction by C.H. Lawrence
Chapter 1: The Celtic Church and the Papacy, by Kathleen Hughes
Chapter 2: The Anglo-Saxon Church and the Papacy by Veronica Ortenberg (new for the 1999 edition)
Chapter 3: From the Conquest to the Death of John by Charles Duggan
Chapter 4: The Thirteenth Century by C.H. Lawrence
Chapter 5: The Fourteenth Century by W.A. Pantin
Chapter 6: The Fifteenth Century by F.R.H. DuBoulay
Index

The first chapter is refreshingly free of the Thomas Cahill-type conflict between Celtic and Roman Catholicism in which the Roman Catholic Church is rigid and evil and the Celtic Church all humane and wonderful. Instead, Kathleen Hughes surveys the interaction between the Papacy and Celtic bishops and culture without that polemic edge, while still covering the issues about the of Easter and discipline throughout the Church.

In the second, new chapter for the 1999 edition, Veronica Ortenberg describes the very close relationship between the Catholic Church in England  and the Papacy during the Anglo-Saxon era, including of course, Pope St. Gregory the Great sending St. Augustine of Canterbury to Kent. She demonstrates how devoted Catholics in England at that time were to the Popes as the successors of St. Peter, how regularly bishops and laity travelled to Rome on pilgrimage, and how much correspondence, usually requesting and offering papal guidance, was exchanged.

As expected from the title, the third chapter covers, although with the assumption of the reader's prior knowledge of the outline of events, the conflicts between Henry II and St. Thomas a Becket, and John and Innocent III, noting that in the latter case, at least, once the crisis was resolved John gained a great deal of support from the pope, especially after making England a vassal of Innocent III.

Father Longenecker's argument accords with the material presented in this book as he concludes:

Was the Anglican church founded on some pure, serene and ancient apostolic church that existed in Britain for 600 years before the arrival of St. Augustine sent by Pope Gregory? There’s no evidence for it.

Instead, the British Church was started by Romans, converted the locals, and remained linked to Rome even after the legions departed from Britain. After that, the missionary efforts to the British Isles were of Roman origin.

Pugin, and Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, and Tolkien . . .

From the original edition's entry on the Yale University Press website:

The style of the medieval period, which flows through the bloodstream of western culture, was vigorously re-established in post-Enlightenment England. This one-volume history of the Medieval Revival is the first coherent account of it, especially those aspects that are expressed and reflected in literature. The book focuses on the period 1760 to 1971, with an Epilogue on the reverberations of medievalism in the present day.

The rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, after its destruction by fire in 1834, re-established Gothic as the national style. But medieval imitation manifests itself wherever one cares to look: in literature, architecture, the applied arts, religion, politics, and even Hollywood. In this skilled dissection of the components of this pervasive cultural movement, Michael Alexander rejects the idea that medievalism was confined to the Victorian period, and overturns the suspicion that it is by its nature escapist.

The style of the medieval period, which flows through the bloodstream of western culture, was vigorously re-established in post-Enlightenment England. This one-volume history of the Medieval Revival is the first coherent account of it, especially those aspects that are expressed and reflected in literature. The book focuses on the period 1760 to 1971, with an Epilogue on the reverberations of medievalism in the present day. The rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, after its destruction by fire in 1834, re-established Gothic as the national style. But medieval imitation manifests itself wherever one cares to look: in literature, architecture, the applied arts, religion, politics, and even Hollywood. In this skilled dissection of the components of this pervasive cultural movement, Michael Alexander rejects the idea that medievalism was confined to the Victorian period, and overturns the suspicion that it is by its nature escapist.

From the new paperback edition's entry on the Yale University Press website (I read it on my Kindle Fire):

Now reissued in an updated paperback edition, this groundbreaking account of the Medieval Revival movement examines the ways in which the style of the medieval period was re-established in post-Enlightenment England—from Walpole and Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and Tennyson to Pound, Tolkien, and Rowling.

“Medievalism . . . takes a panoramic view of the ‘recovery’ of the Medieval in English literature, visual arts and culture. . . . Ambitious, sweeping, sometimes idiosyncratic, but always interesting.”—Rosemary Ashton, Times Literary Supplement

 “Deeply researched and stylishly written, Medievalism is an unalloyed delight that will instruct and amuse a wide readership.”—Edward Short, Books & Culture

The Table of Contents, with the last names and titles of works listed in each chapter, demonstrates the range of Alexander's survey:

Introduction

1. The Advent of the Goths: The Medieval in the 1760s 

2. Chivalry, Romances and Revival: Chaucer into Scott: The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Ivanhoe 

3. Dim Religious Lights: The Lay, Christabel and 'The Eve of St Agnes'
4. Residences for the Poor: The Pugin of Contrasts 

5. Back to the Future in the 1840s: Carlyle, Ruskin, Sybil, Newman 

6. 'The Death of Arthur was the Favourite Volume': Malory into Tennyson

7. History, the Revival, and the PRB: Westminster, Ivanhoe, visions and revisions

8. History and Legend: The subjects of poetry and painting

9. The Working Man and the Common Good: Madox Brown, Maurice, Morris, Hopkins

10. Among the Lilies and the Weeds: Hopkins, Whistler, Burne-Jones, Beardsley 

11. I Have Seen . . . A White Horse: Chesterton, Yeats, Ford, Pound 

12. Modernist Medievalism: Eliot, Pound, Jones 

13. Twentieth-century Christendom: Waugh, Auden, Inklings, Hill 

Epilogue: 'Riding through the glen' 

Bibliography 

Notes 

Index

Acceptance and interest in the Middle Ages--the period between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance--meant an encounter with Catholicism in Protestant, anti-Catholic England. Michael Alexander acknowledges this fact throughout his study of "The Middle Ages in Modern England". Reformation and Enlightenment Scotland and England had regarded those centuries as the Dark Ages of Faith--the Catholic Faith--and had derided them for superstition and error. As Alexander notes, however, the English parliamentary system had developed in the Middle Ages, so they were wrong to jettison that period. When the Houses of Parliament in Westminster were rebuilt after a devastating fire, the English style of architecture was ordered, and that style was Gothic. The designer of new buildings was A.W. Pugin, but he did not receive the credit for his contribution because he was a convert to Catholicism.

Alexander goes back often to Sir Walter Scott's poetry and historical novels as great inspirations to the revival of interest in the Middle Ages. He notes that John Henry Newman commented on how Scott created interest in the Catholic Middle Ages, even though Scott was not that sympathetic to Catholicism. I think that Alexander misses out on Newman's research into the Middle Ages--because he rightly notes that Newman was most interested in the early centuries of the Church--and neglects his "Second Spring" sermon and his study of the history of the university, which certainly addresses Medieval issues. Alexander does not list Newman's The Rise and Progress of Universities in his bibliography, nor does he cite Newman's eloquent praises of Catholicism in England before Henry VIII and its horrific destruction in the "Second Spring":

Three centuries ago, and the Catholic Church, that great creation of God's power, stood in this land in pride of place. It had the honours of near a thousand years upon it; it was enthroned on some twenty sees up and down the broad country; it was based in the will of a faithful people; it energized through ten thousand instruments of power and influence; and it was ennobled by a host of Saints and Martyrs. The churches, one by one, recounted and rejoiced in the line of glorified intercessors, who were the respective objects of their grateful homage. Canterbury alone numbered perhaps some sixteen, from St. Augustine to St. Dunstan and St. Elphege, from St. Anselm and St. Thomas down to St. Edmund. York had its St. Paulinus, St. John, St. Wilfrid, and St. William; London, its St. Erconwald; Durham, its St. Cuthbert; Winton, its St. Swithun. Then there were St. Aidan of Lindisfarne, and St. Hugh of Lincoln, and St. Chad of Lichfield, and St. Thomas of Hereford, and St. Oswald and St. Wulstan of Worcester, and St. Osmund of Salisbury, and St. Birinus of Dorchester, and St. Richard of Chichester. And then, too, its religious orders, its monastic establishments, its universities, its wide relations all over Europe, its high prerogatives in the temporal state, its wealth, its dependencies, its popular honours,—where was there in the whole of Christendom a more glorious hierarchy? Mixed up with the civil institutions, with kings and nobles, with the people, found in every village and in every town,—it seemed destined to stand, so long as England stood, and to outlast, it might be, England's greatness.

But it was the high decree of heaven, that the majesty of that presence should be blotted out. It is a long story, my Fathers and Brothers—you know it well. I need not go through it. The vivifying principle of truth, the shadow of St. Peter, the grace of the Redeemer, left it. That old Church in its day became a corpse (a marvellous, an awful change!); and then it did but corrupt the air which once it refreshed, and cumber the ground which once it beautified. So all seemed to be lost; and there was a struggle for a time, and then its priests were cast out or martyred. There were sacrileges innumerable. Its temples were profaned or destroyed; its revenues seized by covetous nobles, or squandered upon the ministers of a new faith. The presence of Catholicism was at length simply removed,—its grace disowned,—its power despised,—its name, except as a matter of history, at length almost unknown. It took a long time to do this thoroughly; much time, much thought, much labour, much expense; but at last it was done. Oh, that miserable day, centuries before we were born! What a martyrdom to live in it and see the fair form of Truth, moral and material, hacked piecemeal, and every limb and organ carried off, and burned in the fire, or cast into the deep! But at last the work was done. Truth was disposed of, and shovelled away, and there was a calm, a silence, a sort of peace;—and such was about the state of things when we were born into this weary world.

Newman is not a medievalist, I concede, but there's more there than Alexander may be aware. I think Alexander misses out on exploring the Oxford Movement and High-Church Anglicanism after Newman's conversion even more. See this essay, for example. Alexander mentions how the High-Church Ritualists "sought true beauty in holiness," but does not describe how they combined great concern for beautiful churches and liturgies with care for the poor in other practical ways; the poor deserved beauty too: in art, architecture, and music in their churches and chapels.

I was also surprised that Alexander spent so little time on William Cobbett, whose extensive interest in the social history of the Middle Ages in England is prominently displayed in his History of the Protestant Reformation. Cobbett's defense of the monasteries in England before and during the English Reformation should be mentioned in those passages when Alexander discusses modern views of medieval monasticism. He mentions Lingard in passing too, but Father Lingard was no defender of the monasteries, especially just before their dissolution.

Alexander likes G.K. Chesterton and even comments that his students actually enjoyed reading The Ballad of the White Horse. He hints at the medievalism of some of Chesterton's followers like Christopher Hollis, Christopher Dawson, and others, but does not follow up on them, except for Eric Gill and David Jones. I'd like to read some of Hollis's works. I was surprised at his inclusion of Ezra Pound because I did not know that Pound was "an academic medievalist" with "two degrees specializing in early romance languages"!

Alexander expresses various concerns about how literature and history are taught, studied, written, and read. For all the advances in knowledge made in various academic fields since the eighteenth century, he recognizes that the Middle Ages have lost ground again. A unified, cohesive view of English history and literature is thwarted by specialization and uncertainty. No professional historian would present a Whig interpretation of history anymore, but without it, what creates the narrative? Belief in progress means the story goes somewhere. Modern secularists will not accept religion, that is Christianity, as the unifying vision of English history and literature, so we are left with a great and widening divide between academic study and popular history. Alexander notes that the BBC presents surveys of English history by Simon Schama, for example, and they are popular with audiences. He makes a derisive comment: "In popular legend, the only golden age which is reliable at the box office is the age of Elizabeth I, unspotted by the blood shed in enforcing religious uniformity and in colonising Ireland"; of course, the only martyrs in England were Protestant!

The author acknowledges that he could have explored other themes: the Jacobites, liturgical studies, cathedrals, public ceremonials like coronations and funerals, the Arts and Crafts movement, etc. Nevertheless, this is an entertaining and thought-provoking survey of Medievalism in England after the Reformation and the Enlightnment and through the 20th century. Excellent illustrations, too.

Evelyn Waugh, RIP--But Brideshead Lives On!

Of course, Evelyn Waugh lives on too, in eternal life, but as we mark the 50th anniversary of his dead in 1966, Harry Mount writes about the ongoing fascination of Brideshead Revisited for The Catholic Herald:

Evelyn Waugh’s life and work still captivate us. It’s not hard to understand why – he is one of the prose stylists of the age, and one of its funniest writers. His comic gift is all the greater for being shot through with pleasing melancholy and joyful malice.

The curious thing is that, of all his books, it’s Brideshead Revisited that enchants the public more than any other. Waugh obsessives, including me, prefer A Handful of Dust – for its macabre chill – or Scoop, for its mixture of comedy and eternal accuracy about the ridiculous side of journalism.

But it is Brideshead that dominates the popular vision of Waugh; Brideshead that was a huge hit in America after it came out in 1945; Brideshead that was made into the excellent Granada series in 1981, and the third-rate film in 2008.

Waugh was clear about the main point of Brideshead in his 1959 preface to the revised edition. “Its theme – the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters – was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.” And, it’s true, Catholicism provides the spine of the book.

Charles Ryder begins, at his own admission, with “no religion … The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth.”

By the end of the book (spoiler alert), Ryder is kneeling before the tabernacle in Brideshead’s chapel, saying a prayer, “an ancient, newly-learned form of words”. The implication is that he is about to become a Catholic. Lord Marchmain receives the sacraments on his deathbed. Sebastian ends up in a monastery. A devout Julia separates from the divorced Rex Mottram, and backs out of marriage to Charles, who has already been married.

So, yes, Catholicism is the central theme of the book – but it is only one of several themes. Even Waugh acknowledged that religion is concealed below them. He said to A D Peters, his literary agent, “The whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that the theologians won’t recognise it.”

Read the rest there.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in the peace of Christ. George Weigel, reviewing a biography of Waugh in two volumes by Martin Stannard for First Things, quotes the dearly departed: “I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.” Weigel also quotes Father D'Arcy, who received Waugh into the Church:

Few [converts] can have been so matter of fact as Evelyn Waugh. As he said himself, “On firm intellectual conviction but with little emotion I was admitted to the Church.” All converts have to listen while the teaching of the Church is explained to them”first to make sure that they do in fact know the essentials of the faith and secondly to save future misunderstandings . . . . Another writer came to me at the same time . . . and tested what was being told him by how far it corresponded with his experience. With such a criterion, it was no wonder that he did not persevere. Evelyn, on the other hand, never spoke of experience or feelings. He had come to learn and understand what he believed to be God’s revelation, and this made talking with him an interesting discussion based primarily on reason.

Pray for him. As St. Thomas More noted in his Supplication of Souls, prayer for the dead is never wasted.

An Earlier Second Spring? Dom David Knowles on Father Augustine Baker

I purchased a copy of this book at Eighth Day Books last year and have dipped into it every so often, reading one or two of the essays. (There is another copy available at EDB.) It contains essays on Aelfric of Eynsham, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, The Cloud of Unknowing, Dame Julian of Norwish, St. John Fisher (by E.E. Reynolds), St. Thomas More, Father Persons, SJ, Father Augustine Baker, Bishop Richard Challoner, Cardinal Newman (two--one by Dessain), Cardinal Manning, Father Faber, John Chapman, Monsignor Ronald Knox, and "Spiritual Reading for Our Times".

Dom David Knowles writes about Father Augustine Baker in what seems to have been the introduction or review of an edition of Baker's great work the Sancta Sophia. In establishing the context of Baker's lifetime, Knowles refers to a "Second Spring" of English Catholicism--and when I think of the Second Spring of English Catholicism, I think of Blessed John Henry Newman's 1852 sermon. Nevertheless, Dom Knowles makes a good argument for his use of that term:

The life of David (in religion Dom Augustine) Baker covered almost exactly (1575-1641), the period between the final break with Catholicism in the early years of Elizabeth I and the beginning of the civil disturbances which were to put to an end any hope there might have been of a massive re-establishment of the old religion as a powerful minority among all classes in the country.

Knowles is referring to the Northern Rebellion and various plots against Elizabeth, blaming them for the alienation of many Catholic nobles and landowners for fear of being aligned with traitorous plots.

Seen from another viewpoint, it was the period in which the new Catholicism, that of the Council of Trent, of the Jesuits, and of the Counter-Reformation, made its impact on England; it was a time of anguish and persecution; and yet it was a very real Second Spring, in which the first newcomers from the recently founded seminaries and colleges fired their relatives and converts at home with a zeal that had been lacking in the generation that had lost the faith, and that peopled monasteries and convents in France in the Low Countries with religious in exile; it was also, unhappily, a time of feuds and quarrels and mistakes, and of a clash of aims and hopes and ideals that ultimately did as much as the spirit of Puritanism to check the spread of faith in this country. David Baker had experience of all this.

In this long sentence, Knowles balances the achievements and the failures of the Catholic missionary project, referring to the conflicts for example between the Jesuits and the Appellants, etc. He also refers to "the generation that had lost the faith": the generation during the reign of Henry VIII that let Thomas More, John Fisher, and other martyrs of that time bear the burden of the faith while they compromised and plundered.

Knowles had a remarkable ability, probably through great effort and practice, of summing up historical trends. In those two sentences, he provides extraordinary insights into not just the lifespan of one man's life (66 years) but an age in England's history.

St. Catherine of Alexandria in England

According to this site, today's saint was very popular in medieval England:

The main center of Katherine's cult in the Middle Ages was an Orthodox monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, which claimed to have acquired her tomb and her relics by miraculous means. Since Katherine's tomb exuded an oil with healing powers that could be sold to pilgrims, it became a major source of fame and revenue for the monastery - aided by the advertisements for this pilgrimage site that ended many retellings of her legend. Some medieval readers were skeptical about the miracles that supposedly occurred at Mount Sinai (see Mirk's account, for example), but the rest of Katherine's legend was widely accepted, and by the end of the Middle Ages she had become one of the most popular saints in Europe. The main impetus for her cult in the west came not from Sinai itself, but from the abbey of the Holy Trinity and Saint Katherine at Rouen, in Normandy, which had acquired some of her relics by the end of the eleventh century. From Normandy, of course, her cult easily spread across the English Channel. Her great subsequent popularity in England is suggested by such facts as these: her name appears in the dedications of 62 medieval English churches, countless side altars, and many parish guilds; at least 56 churches had wall paintings with scenes from her life; and over 170 bells with inscriptions in her honor have survived until recent times. She was also one of the saints most frequently portrayed on church screens, in stained glass windows, and in small works of art for private use.

Katherine's appeal was even broader than Margaret's because her legend cast her in a wide range of roles, inviting different kinds of people to take her as their patron saint. For example, she was considered a suitable patron for aristocratic women because she was a princess who had been brought up to rule a kingdom. She was a good patron for nuns and other women with religious vocations because, like them, she was a consecrated virgin, a faithful bride of Christ. Her courage and outspokenness were clearly important to some exceptional women, including Catherine of Siena and Margery Kempe, who emulated her example when they spoke out against abuses of power in their own society. More surprisingly, she was a favorite patron and role model for (male) university students and preachers, since she was such a brilliant scholar and debater that she had once defeated the arguments of fifty pagan philosophers at once. Her legend also made her an advocate for women with evil husbands, a patron for nursing mothers (because milk flowed from her neck when she was beheaded), and a powerful intercessor for those who invoke her when they are dying or in great need (because of her final prayer and its answer). Since the climactic instrument of torture devised by her persecutor was a diabolical set of wheels, she was often portrayed with a wheel as her emblem - with the paradoxical result that she even became the patron saint of wheelwrights, millers, and other craftsmen who worked with wheels.

One church or chapel dedicated to St. Catherine of Alexandria was a pilgrimage site founded by the Benedictine monks of abbey of St Peter at Abbotsbury. As the English Heritage site for the chapel notes:

Its isolated setting allowed the monks to withdraw from the monastery during Lent for private prayer and meditation. . . .

Although no records survive of its building, the chapel can be dated in style to the late 14th century. It is a sturdy rectangular structure, built entirely of the local golden buff limestone. The walls are high and heavily buttressed to take the stone vaulted roof; rainwater drains off the roof through holes in the parapet wall between the buttresses.

At the north-east corner a stair turret, octagonal on the outside, rises above the roof and gives access to the parapet. It also contains a tiny oratory at roof level. Originally the buttresses and the stair turret were crowned with pinnacles. There are porches on both north and south walls.

The overall effect of the chapel is of a structure far larger than it actually is. The high walls and tall parapets are designed to impress, while the sense of grandeur is further enhanced by the chapel’s lofty position.

Inside, the effect in medieval times would have been just as rich, with stained glass in the windows, and details of the roof picked out in bright colours. At the intersections of the vaulting are bosses carved with foliage, figure subjects and animals. A large triple window lights the east wall, and there are smaller windows on the other walls.

The walk up to the chapel provides excellent views down over Abbotsbury village and the abbey site.

The chapel survived the suppression of the abbey in 1539 because it was used as a beacon, being on the southern coast of England. Sir Giles Strangways received the abbey's property from Henry VIII. Sir Giles, like many, could not know what was going to happen in England after the Reformation. Strangway's will "bequeathed £6 13s.4d. a year for two years for a priest to say mass for the repose of his soul and the souls of his wife and son"--he died in 1546, a year before Henry VIII died in 1547: those Masses may or may not have been said during the reign of Edward VI.

Tonight at Eighth Day Books: CHESTERTON and Cake

While the cake mix is still in the box, I am otherwise prepared for tonight's meeting of the Greater Wichita branch of the American Chesterton Society (Eighth Day Books, 6:30 p.m.). We are reading two essays tonight from The Well and the Shallows: "Mary and the Convert" and "A Century of Emancipation".

In the second essay, Chesterton is discussing the anniversary of the 1829 Emancipation of Catholics in England:

WHEN we really wish to know how the world is going, it is no bad test to take some tag or current phrase of the press and reverse it, substituting the precise contrary, and see whether it makes more sense that way. It generally does; such a mass of outworn conventions has our daily commentary become. An excellent example occurred recently concerning the prospects of Protestantism and Catholicism. The editor of the Sunday Express, once better known as a sympathetic critic of letters, summed up the matter by saying that he had no prejudice against Catholicism or Anglo-Catholicism, that he had every respect for them, but that England (evidently including himself) was solidly Protestant. This is a very neat and convenient statement of the exact opposite of the truth. I have most friendly feelings to the gentleman in question; and it is without the least animosity to him that I say that what is sincere and alive and active in him is Anti-Catholicism and nothing else. What is really working in the world to-day is Anti-Catholicism and nothing else. It certainly is not Protestantism; not half so much as it is Pelagianism. And if the religion of modern England is to be called Protestant, there is at least one other adjective which cannot conceivably be applied to it. Whatever else it is, it is not solid Protestantism. There might perhaps be a case for calling it liquid Protestantism. . . .

Chesterton analyses the state of Protestantism in the early nineteenth and contrasts it to its current state in the 1920's and 1930's, making a point I addressed earlier this month, the change in practice of praying for the dead after World War I. Chesterton states that the Protestant fundamentalism of the early nineteenth century is gone, and the surety that Protestantism is right is gone, but what remains is the automatic certainly that Catholicism is wrong:

To-day, as a national and normal thing, it has utterly vanished. Not one man in ninety really disapproves of praying for the dead. The War, in killing many million men, killed that pedantry and perversity. Not one man in ninety is either a Calvinist or an upholder of Faith against Works. Not one man in ninety thinks he will go to hell if he does not instantly accept the theological theory of redemption; perhaps it would be better if he did. Not one man in ninety believes the Bible infallible, as real Protestants believed it infallible. Of all that wonderful system of religious thought, thundered against Rome in so many sermons, argued against Rome in so many pamphlets, thrown out scornfully against Rome in so many Exeter Hall meetings and Parliamentary debates, nothing remains. Of all that, as it affects the forward movement of the educated classes, and the future of the world, nothing remains. 

But there is something that remains. Anti-Catholicism remains; though it is no longer Protestantism, any more than it is Albigensianism or Donatism. And that is the factor we must grasp and estimate, if we are to estimate the outlook to-day. Protestantism is now only a name; but it is a name that can be used to cover any or every "ism" except Catholicism. It is now a vessel or receptacle into which can be poured all the thousand things that for a thousand reasons react against Rome; but it can only be full of these things because it is now hollow; because it is itself empty. Every sort of negation, every sort of new religion, every sort of moral revolt or intellectual irritation, that can make a man resist the claim of the Catholic Faith, is here gathered into a heap and covered with a convenient but quite antiquated label. When the journalists sav that there is solid Protestantism, all they mean is that there is a pretty heavy reluctance or resistance in the matter of any return of the English to their ancient religion; and this, up to a point, may be quite true. But the heap is a hotch-potch; the resistance is not a rational resistance, in the sense of having a clear and commonly accepted reason; and in so far as it has a prevailing colour, it is quite the contrary colour to that which prevailed in Protestantism. It is even more against Calvinism than against Catholicism; it is even more insistent on works than were the Catholics; it would make a future life far less final and more purely progressive than did the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory; it would make the Bible far less important than it is to a Catholic. On every single point on which the Protestant attacked the Pope, he would now say that the modern spirit was a mere exaggeration of the Popish errors. In so far as there is such a vague modern spirit, common to all these things, a spirit that may be called either liberality or laxity, it never was at any time the spirit of Protestantism. It came from the Revolution and the Romantic Movement, indirectly perhaps from the Renaissance of men like Rabelais and Montaigne; and ultimately much more from men like More and Erasmus than from men like Calvin and Knox. When the Protestant orators in the present crisis repeat rather monotonously, "We will not lose the freedom we gained four hundred years ago," they show how little they share the religion which they defend. Men gained no freedom four hundred years ago; there was no particular freedom about creating the Scottish Sabbath or preaching nothing but Predestination or even yielding to the Tudor Terror or the Cromwellian Terror. But it is arguable that they gained freedom a hundred years ago, as Catholics gained it a hundred years ago. It is tenable that such freedom was the expanding effect of the American and French Revolutions and the democratic idealism which came with the nineteenth century and seems in some danger of declining with the twentieth. Above all, it is arguable that they have a certain kind of freedom now, not because they are Protestants, for they are not; but because they are anything they like and nothing if they like that better; because they are theists, theosophists, materialists, monists or mystics on their own. How much such freedom is worth, or how much chance it has of bearing any fruit in anything positive or creative, is another matter; but in order to anticipate the next phase, it is necessary to realise that this phase is one of negative liberty, not to say anarchy. Whatever it is, it is not Protestantism; and whatever it is, it is not solid. 

Someone--not me, since I am not in England and don't know all the current trends except what I read from trusted sources--should be preparing an update to Chesterton's essay as we approach the 200th anniversary of Catholic Emancipation in 2029. I wonder if the anniversary will be celebrated with some analysis of how Catholics have done as part of modern English society since 1829.

A Presentation and An Article

I wrote an article for the October issue of Tudor Life: The Tudor Society Magazine (membership/ prescription required) on "The Choices Catholics Faced in Tudor England", tracing religious change through the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I and what those changes meant for a Catholic who just wanted to attend Mass, receive the Sacraments, and live as his or her English ancestors had for years. Editor Gareth Russell specifically asked me to write an article from the Catholic perspective for this special Reformation issue.

On Tuesday, September 29, my sister and I will drive to Hutchinson, Kansas, where I'll make a presentation to the Hutchinson Theology on Tap group on "The Continuing Relevance of the English Reformation". I'll cover some highlights of English Reformation history but mostly discuss how that history is so relevant today, with examples of current events like changes in the Royal succession, the burial of Richard III (Anglican or Catholic service?), Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Scotland and England five years ago, the Anglican Ordinariate, religious freedom issues, etc. More information here on the facebook page for TOT in Hutchinson.

Religion and Secularism in England

One of my favorite authors, Father Aidan Nichols OP, writes about secularism and religion in England for the Imaginative Conservative: he outlines two possible ways to deal with the diversity of religion and secularism (separate "public spaces" and assimilation) and then proposes a third way, which recalls his book The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England:

The third response is recovery of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as what is most foundationally form-giving in English society and culture, while allowing that, on grounds of conscience, there are individuals and groups who cannot make that tradition fully their own. Freedom of conscience can and should be balanced against the interests of a particular historic society as a whole. What can be said in favour of this option?

A nation, like a civilization, needs a shared vision of reality, at any rate in fair degree. It is unclear that a great civilization can be formed except on the ground of metaphysical or religious principle. There is no other obvious way in which to secure the foundations of ethics, or to inspire a high artistic culture, or to animate institutions that will be seedbeds of the virtues. In the case of England, whose emergence as a nation coincides with its conversion, this can only be Christianity, with its Judaic background, and more especially, I unfashionably suggest, the “New Israel” of the Catholic Church.

The thousand years of Catholic Christianity that preceded the Reformation settlement are responsible for the origins of the English literary imagination, for the principles of the common law, for the concept of a covenanted people under God that permeates the induction of the sovereign, and for the range of virtues that have been commended, and sometimes practised, in English society and culture. In the context of an international Church, this entailed a measured trans-nationalism.

When the medieval idea of Christendom weakened, the early modern nation-state tried more vigorously to instrumentalize the Church, politicizing the divine rather than—by exposure to a transcendent Good—divinizing the polis. Of course the post-Reformation history of this country cannot be airbrushed out. Consonant with its presence—along with a promise to uphold the Catholic faith—in the coronation of the monarch, it has left its own legacy of moral exemplars and inspirational literary texts, as well as institutions involved in education and pastoral care. Despite the ecclesial differences, which at their worst led to the vilification of the older Church, much of this Anglican development built on foundations already laid. . . .

. . . England remains a Christian state, albeit a decayed example of the genre. I advert for the third time to the coronation ritual, since it is the clearest, though by no means the only, manifestation of the continuing sacrality of the public order. In this connection, the retention by the Church of England of its established status is an essential requirement if the nation as a whole is to retain narrative continuity with its own origins, which are found in the baptismal covenant reflected in the laws of the Anglo-Saxon kings.

The establishment of the Church of England at law is far from rendering superfluous the public role of the English Catholic Church. The capacity of the sacerdotium to influence the regnum was gravely weakened by the mid-16th century break with Rome, for this rendered official English Christianity Erastian, blunting its cutting edge. “No Popery”—anti-Catholicism, whether popular or sophisticated—drew its force from a disturbed conscience—one can sense its discomfort in the ambivalence of Shakespeare’s plays. The recusant community witnessed to something once well-known to the English people: The transnational reality of Christendom in the Catholic Church centered on Peter’s chair, and the consequent capacity of a wider communion to offset narrowness of temper, or distortion of aim. Protestant Nonconformity added its own protest against, not an organic relation between polity and ecclesia, but the effective identification of the two.

Read the rest there.