Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

Anna Mitchell asked me yesterday to talk about Guy Fawkes Day this morning on the Son Rise Morning Show, so Matt Swaim and I will discuss the continuing celebration of this historical event even though many in England don't know what they are celebrating or why. It's become a long weekend of fireworks and hooliganism. So Matt and I will talk about what Guy Fawkes Day or Bonfire Night "remembers" every November at 6:45 a.m. Central/7:45 a.m. Eastern.

UPDATE: This interview will be repeated tomorrow morning--on the Fifth of November--during the EWTN hour of the Son Rise Morning Show between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. Central/6:00 and 7:00 a.m. Eastern!

The Fifth of November, Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night: November 5th marks the anniversary of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605.

I think this is one of the saddest episodes of Catholic reaction to the recusancy and penal laws imposed upon them by the English government. It was so desperate and impossible, not to mention absolutely murderous and immoral. Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and the other conspirators thought that they could blow up Parliament and the Royal Family, except for Elizabeth, the oldest daughter whom they would kidnap and force to rule under their control--and the people of England would rise up against their rulers and put them in charge!

Instead they either died on the scaffold as traitors or in fights with local constabularies. They implicated priests accused of hearing their confessions and not betraying the sanctity of the Sacrament by reporting them to the government and those priests were also sentenced to death. And, of course, the government passed even stricter penal laws against Catholics, restricting their travel, increasing the fines for recusancy, making Catholics liable to search at any time, and requiring all marriages, baptisms, and funerals be registered first in the Church of England, or the family would be fined.

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot...
For a couple of centuries, the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot was marked by prayers of thanks for deliverance from Catholic plotting. Bonfire Night and the burning of Guy Fawkes and sometimes the current Pope in effigy also continued for two centuries--and there are still bonfires throughout England and former colonial areas today, but some of the historical and religious implications have faded. James Sharpe, in his book on the commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot, traces the fascination with Guy Fawkes, the fading of anti-Catholicism, and the more recent concerns about frightened pets and rowdy drunks. The Guardian posted this review essay in 2005, the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot.

Note that during the Revolutionary War, George Washington forbade his soldiers' celebrating of the Fifth of November. It just didn't make sense at the time.

November 5 also recalls the invasion of Prince William of Orange, landing at Brixham, Torbay in 1688. And this, also, to me is one of the saddest responses of the Anglican elite to the possibility of religious tolerance in England--invite an invasion and depose a legitimately ruling king! William the new conqueror brought a force of around 21,000--mostly foreign mercenaries--including cavalry and artillery. The fact that 1688 was the 100th anniversary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada also seemed providential to the Whigs and Tories who rejected James II and his young son and heir. Unlike the Spanish attempt 100 years ago, this invasion would succeed!

Image Credit: Festivities in Windsor Castle by Paul Sandby, c. 1776

September 29, 1850: Universalis Ecclesiae

"Am I the Queen of England or am I not?" So said Queen Victoria when news of the Restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy was announced in 1850. Pope Pius IX issued the Papal Bull "Universalis Ecclesiae" on September 29th that year. The first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman issued a pastoral letter to English Catholics, "Out of the Flaminian Gate," on October 7, 1850. His tone of exultation offended the Queen and her government, especially in its praise of the Pope.

As Cardinal Wiseman progressed on the Continent toward the British Isles he heard about the anger expressed in the British papers. Queen Victoria expressed herself in the strongest terms and the Cardinal responded by publishing a pamphlet and giving lectures that indicated the Catholic Church had no intention of opposing Her Majesty's Government in any way.

Queen Victoria's Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, introduced a bill in Parliament which passed making it illegal for the new Catholic Bishops to be physically present in their new dioceses--a law which was never enforced by the next government under Gladstone. There were still flare ups of anti-Catholic rioting and violence, but the Cardinal Archbishop had toned down his rather triumphalistic rhetoric and settled down to the restoration of simple things, like schools, chapels, seminaries, and churches. Because of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851, the hierarchy did not restore the pre-Reformation sees. 

The illustration above, from Punch, represents the anti-Papal reaction to the Restoration of the Hierarchy. Indeed, effigies of Cardinal Wiseman were added to the festivities on Guy Fawkes Night that year.

In 1950, Pope Pius XII broadcast a radio message to English Catholics, celebrating the centenary of the Restoration of the Hierarchy:

That ancient Hierarchy was first established by Our august Predecessor St. Gregory the Great, and for nearly a thousand years it was linked to this Holy See by the bonds of filial obedience: a thou-sand years, during which a glorious legion of saints honoured your country and a wholesouled devotion to the Mother of God made it worthy to be called  "the dowry of Mary". 

When those bonds were severed and by a mysterious providence of heaven the blackness of night settled down on the Church of Augustine and Thomas and Edmund, of Wilfrid of York and Hugh of Lincoln, then it was, God raised up that generation of amazing heroes, trained in the school of a crucified Leader to fear neither rack nor rope, who came to sustain the flickering light of Faith that would not die. With what veneration and hallowed memories one prays before the painting of the King of Martyrs in the Venerable English College chapel, while before the mind's eye there pass a Sherwin, a Campion, a Southwell and a host of others cleric and lay. They died, and the Faith in England lived on. 

Almost three centuries passed, and Our predecessor Pius IX of blessed memory decided the time had come for the Catholic Church in England to resume its proper place in the normal constitution of the Church, and by the Apostolic Letter "Universalis Ecclesiae" he re-established in England and Wales the Hierarchy of Bishops Ordinary, each to rule the Catholics in his own diocese.

Pope Pius XVII mentioned the progress Catholics had made in England and highlighted the achievement of Newman and Manning, while also mentioning two more martyrs:

It were too long to call the roster of all those who deserve a grateful remembrance today; but We cannot pass over in silence two names that add particular lustre to the pages of your nineteenth century history: John Henry Newman, most human, most eloquent expositor of the word of God, whose immortal sermon keeps fresh the memory of the First Synod of the restored Hierarchy; and Henry Edward Manning, champion of the working-man, herald and apostle of an age of increasing social justice and harmony. 

We know full well, Venerable Brethren, that this progress has not been achieved without difficulties and trials. Our heart goes out in sympathy especially to the bishops and priests of Wales, where Catholics are few and scattered, and where poverty and loneliness must so often be the companions of those valiant apostles who would enlarge the kingdom of Christ on earth. To them We say : look to your illustrious martyrs, Blessed Richard Gwyn and Blessed David Lewis, and go forward with courage and good cheer.

In 33 years, they'll celebrate the bicentennial!

The Fifth of November: Is It Time to Forgive and Forget?

Britain Magazine reflects on the Fifth of November and the burning of the "Guy": is it time for forgive and forget?

The classic rhyme “Remember, remember the fifth of November” features one of the few dates that stick in the collective imagination from our school days. As the headmaster of Guy Fawkes’s old school in York has recently pointed out, the man found by guards underneath the Houses of Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder in early hours of 5 November 1605 is “a global brand. Most people with an appreciation of English culture know something about him.”

Arguing in the The Daily Telegraph that it is time for us to forgive St Peter’s School’s most famous alumnus and to stop burning effigies of the guy on bonfires, Leo Winkley suggests that the custom encourages religious intolerance.

There are some surprising twists to the familiar story of Guy Fawkes. For example, while James I was, in fact, the son of a famous Catholic, Mary, Queen of Scots, Fawkes was born in 1570 into a largely Protestant family (although his maternal grandparents were ‘recusant’ Catholics, who refused to attend Protestant services). However, Guy’s stepfather, Dionis Baynbrigge, whom his mother married after the death of his father in 1578, seems to have affected Fawkes’s convictions – Guy converted to Catholicism as a teenager – and thus the course of his life.

Guy and his fellow Catholic plotters were disappointed by James I’s lack of sympathy for their cause. After the long reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth I, English Catholics were optimistic that the new king would herald change. During Elizabeth’s reign, and particularly after the Spanish Armada, Catholics had suffered persecution: they were forbidden to hear Mass and compelled to attend Anglican services, with steep fines for recusants who refused. However, despite positive signs at the beginning of James’s reign, the discovery of two small Catholic plots in 1603 and an ill-fated conference at Hampton Court in 1604 meant that by February that year the new king went as far as to announce his ‘utter detestation’ of Catholicism. Within days, all priests and Jesuits had been expelled and recusancy fines reintroduced.

Leo Winkley's comments in The Daily Telegraph include:

“Burning a Guy is likely to be seen as an expression of religious intolerance at worst or more likely, an inexplicable historical throwback,” he said. “Consider this: how would we explain it to a seven year old? If we're not comfortable explaining it, we shouldn't do it! Most people call it bonfire night. Time to move on and let the poor soul rest.”

Mr Winkley added: “He was hung, drawn and quartered. That was the full force of the law at his time.”

Fawkes, who with a group of English Catholics who planned to assassinates King James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne, has become a symbol of dissent in recent years – his image adopted by activists who wear masks of his face to hide their identity.

Mr Winkley said Fawke’s legacy still had the power to divide.

“It’s debatable whether he was a freedom fighter or a terrorist. Those who argue he was a freedom fighter would say he grew up in a time when about one per cent of the population was openly Catholic and he was therefore part of a persecuted minority,” he said.

“On the other hand, nobody could approve of the act of trying to blow up the instrument of democracy. One can’t condone it even 400 or so years on. You could argue that he’s an icon of the complex and flawed nature of human beings.”

Sometimes the Pope is burned in effigy too; that practice should certainly cease!

British and Colonial Anti-Popery

Reflecting on Guy Fawkes day in colonial America, author and politician Daniel Hannon makes these surprising comments in The Catholic Herald--surprising in that a culture that feared Catholicism (Papistry/Popery) as inimical to freedom and liberty yet realized that religious freedom was necessary and that Catholics must be able to practice their faith:

Guy Fawkes Night used to be popular in North America, especially in Massachusetts. We have excised that fact from our collective memory, as we have more generally the bellicose anti-Catholicism that powered the American Revolution. We tell ourselves that the argument was about “No taxation without representation” and, for some, it was. But while constitutional questions obsessed the pamphleteering classes whose words we read today, the masses were more exercised by the perceived threat of superstition and idolatry that had sparked their ancestors’ hegira across the Atlantic in the first place. They were horrified by the government’s decision, in 1774, to recognise the traditional rights of the Catholic Church in Quebec.

To many Nonconformists, it seemed that George III was sending the popish serpent after them into Eden. As the First Continental Congress put it in its resolutions: “The dominion of Canada is to be so extended that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to Administration, so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power, to reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.”

Puritans and Presbyterians saw Anglicanism, with its stately communions and surplices and altar rails, as more than half allied to Rome. There had been a furious reaction in the 1760s when the Archbishop of Canterbury sought to bring the colonists into the fold. Thomas Secker, who had been born a Dissenter, and had the heavy-handed zeal of a convert, had tried to set up an Anglican missionary church in, of all places, Cambridge, Massachusetts, capital of New England Congregationalism. He sought to strike down the Massachusetts Act, which allowed for Puritan missionary work among the Indians and, most unpopular of all, to create American bishops.

The ministry backed off, but trust was never recovered. As the great historian of religion in America, William Warren Sweet, put it: “Religious strife between the Church of England and the Dissenters furnished the mountain of combustible material for the great conflagration, while the dispute over stamp, tea and other taxes acted merely as the matches of ignition.”

John Adams is remembered today as a humane and decent man – which he was. We forget that he earnestly wondered: “Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?” Thomas Jefferson’s stirring defences of liberty move us even now. Yet he was convinced that “in every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

Americans had, as so often, distilled to greater potency a tendency that was present throughout the English-speaking world: an inchoate but strong conviction that Catholicism threatened freedom. Daniel Defoe talked of “a hundred thousand country fellows prepared to fight to the death against Popery, without knowing whether it be a man or a horse”. Anti-Catholicism was not principally doctrinal: few people were much interested in whether you believed in priestly celibacy or praying for the souls of the dead. Rather, it was geopolitical. . . .

And here’s the almost miraculous thing: they ended up creating a uniquely individualist culture that endured when religious practice waned. Adams and Jefferson led the first state in the world based on true religious freedom (as opposed to toleration). From a spasm of sectarianism came, paradoxically, pluralism. And, once it had come, it held on. “I never met an English Catholic who did not value, as much as any Protestant, the free institutions of his country,” wrote an astonished Tocqueville.

The title of Daniel Hannan's forthcoming book is Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World--I wonder how he will interpret the so-called Glorious Revolution? Will he acknowledge James II and the campaign for religious toleration and freedom of conscience or will he repeat the old canards about William and Mary invading to defeat tyranny?