Eamon Duffy on "The Stripping of the Altars" after 30 Years

In March 22, 2022 issue of The Catholic Herald-UK, historian Eamon Duffy offers some background on the publication of his seminal work, The Stripping of the Altars, especially the influence of Mary Douglas:

. . . I absorbed a brilliant anthropological work, which drew some of its most telling material from the recent upheavals in the English Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. Dame Mary Douglas, herself the product of a Catholic convent education, was also one of the most original cultural anthropologists of the mid-20th century. Douglas’s work was much concerned with the relative claims of form versus formlessness as values in the ordering of human society. In Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, she deployed this analysis to argue for the vital importance of ritual for social life. Written against the background of the sexual revolution, the social and political unrest of the 1960s and the transformation of the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Douglas’s book was an attack on what she saw as a disastrous and culturally and socially naïve abandonment of vital symbolic and ritual structures which made for orderly communal life, both secular and religious. . . . 

Please read the rest there. As the Holy Triduum begins tomorrow on Holy Thursday, when "the stripping of the altars" still occurs after Mass (but without much of the symbolism Duffy highlights) when the Blessed Sacrament is processed to an Altar of Repose for the night as we share in prayer the time of Our Lord's Agony in the Garden, this will be my last post until after Easter. 

Duffy indeed mentions the choice of the title in his piece:

The title, borrowed from one of the now-suppressed but most eloquent ceremonies of the old Latin liturgy for Holy Week, was a manifesto in itself, summarising the overall argument of the book. On Maundy Thursday, after the Mass of the Last Supper and procession with the Host to the Altar of Repose, the other altars in the church were ritually stripped of their altar cloths and ornaments in preparation for the stark liturgy of Good Friday, while the ministers and choir recited Psalm 21, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, with its anticipation of the incidents of the Passion. The altar here becomes a surrogate for the stripped and scourged Christ – resonances which would of course not have been lost on religious conservatives during the iconoclastic destruction of altars and imagery in the reign of Edward VI.

Please read the rest there. And if you haven't read The Stripping of the Altars, I highly recommend it. This article is abridged from Duffy's introduction to the 2022 edition of the book. I admit that I'm rather tempted to buy the new edition, partially because my old paperback copy is rather worn and the price of the new edition is most favorable!

Best wishes for a Blessed Holy Triduum and a Happy Easter!

The English Reformation and the American Protestant Empire

I break my posting fast again to comment on some recent reading.

As followers of this blog may know, one of its themes is religious freedom and the lessons of the English Reformation reflected in the Constitution of the United States of America. Earlier this year--seems a very long time ago now--when researching the anniversary of Prohibition in 1920, I found an article by one Michael DeHaven Newsom (Howard University School of Law): "Some Kind of Religious Freedom: National Prohibition and the Volstead Act's exemption for the Religious Use of Wine" published in the Brooklyn Law Review, Volume 70, Issue 3, 2005.

Then I found Professor Newsom's previous article, "The American Protestant Empire: A Historical Perspective", published in the Washburn Law Journal (Washburn University is in Topeka, Kansas), Volume 40, Issue 2 (Winter, 2001), which I finished reading last week. (I purchased a copy of the journal since I could not access it on-line.)

And I've found another article online, "Common School Religion: Judicial Narratives in a Protestant Empire", published in the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal (Volume 11, 2002), which I have not yet read.

In the two articles I've read, Newsom traces the history of the English Reformation in its religious settlements through the Tudor and Stuart dynasties and how they impacted religious practice and political systems in the British American colonies and in the Federal Constitution and the States' Constitutions of the United States of America. In the Washburn Law Journal article he provides a historiographical overview of the religious settlements of the English Reformation from legal, political, social, and judicial enforcement perspectives as the background to the American religious settlements from those same perspectives. In other two articles, he applies that background to specific events and laws, specifically, Prohibition of the production, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages and the public school or common school system in the United States of America, having previewed both causes in the Washburn article.

His thesis is that the establishment clause of the First Amendment was not really for the protection of religious liberty for all in the United States of America, but an effort to protect the British colonial Protestant Empire by allowing the states to establish official Protestant churches and thus protect Protestantism in the states, individually and united. In a footnote at the beginning of the Washburn Law Journal article, he offers his opinion that this Protestant Empire has been an unmitigated disaster for Native Americans and African Americans, and detrimental to ethnic whites (Jews, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox). He focuses on American anti-Catholicism in the latter part of that article, noting that fear of Catholics influenced Protestant support of Prohibition and the religious instruction in the Public/Common Schools.

In the Washburn Law Journal article I am particularly interested in Newsom's analysis of the religious settlements of 1534 (Henry VIII); 1549 (Edward VI); 1554 (Mary I); 1559 (Elizabeth I); 1662 (Charles II and Parliament); and 1688 (Parliament and William & Mary). Except for the religious settlement of Mary I which restored England's religious connections to the universal Catholic Church and the Papacy to some extent, these English religious settlements have certain things in common:

• Anti-Roman Catholicism (either against the Church or individual Catholics)
• Protestantization (transitioning from a Catholic to a Protestant England)
• Pan-Protestantism (wide-ranging, sometimes inchoate Protestant beliefs)
• Suasion and Coercion (either letting change occur over time by slow or lax enforcement or forcing change by punishment, including torture and death)
• Social Reform (sometimes; sometimes good and sometimes bad)

Newsom relies on some definitely Whiggish sources, especially in his evaluation of Mary I (he was writing before the mini-wave of re-evaluations of her reign), citing attacks on her intelligence and character in a footnote(!). He ignores the work of Christopher Haigh, John Bossy, and Eamon Duffy entirely, referencing A.G. Dickens, G.R. Elton, Jasper Ridley, etc. He cites J.J. Scarisbrick's biography of Henry VIII but not his The Reformation and the English People.

Newsom has some blunt opinions: he minimizes Cromwell and Cranmer to emphasize Henry VIII's methods and intentions; he opines that "the Edwardians went too far too fast" (216); that the Marian "obsession with persecuting heretics had much to do with the inattention to propaganda" (217), which Eamon Duffy's later Fires of Faith would prove not as true as Newsom thought in 2001, relying on Loades and Ridley; and even though he admires Elizabeth I's overall balance of Suasion and Coercion, he admits that "ideology obviates the need to establish the fact of a particular case" in her dealing with Catholics and real and supposed plots against her. (219)

In his estimation of the state of the Catholic Church in England before the Reformation, Newsom is insistent that there had been a "medieval distortion of the liturgicological meaning of the Mass" (212), emphasizing a new division between the priest and the people during the celebration of the Mass and the fact that the priest alone received both forms of Holy Communion (the Body and the Blood), while the people received Holy Communion infrequently. This means of course that he puts the emphasis on the Sacrament of Holy Communion and does not acknowledge the power of the Sacrifice of the Mass, nor the people's participation in that Sacrifice, nor the community of the Church, expressed in what Newsom calls the "extra-liturgical" elements of parish life, like the Corpus Christi Guilds--again, if he had read Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of Altars, first published in 1992, he might have had more corporate and less individualistic view of late Medieval Catholicism. As I read his commentary on the liturgical and devotional practices of that era it seemed that Newsom was viewing it through the lens of a post-Vatican II emphasis on the participation of the laity (I don't know if he is a Catholic or not!), finding a dualism that Catholics in the late Medieval era might not have deprecated as he seems to do. Some lay Catholics, as Duffy showed, attended Mass often--Henry VIII himself several times a day--whether or not they received Holy Communion more than once a year. They knew the sacrificial depth of the Mass and wanted to participate in it through attentive and informed attendance, preparing for the great annual events of Lenten penance, sacramental Confession, and reception of Holy Communion. Newsom emphasizes that Henry VIII destroyed all this extra-liturgical devotion during his religious settlement(s) and reformation, but cannot demonstrate that Henry did anything to replace it or was successful in making lay participation any more obvious or reception of Holy Communion any more equal between the laity and the priest--if any equality was achieved through the English Reformation settlements, it was probably by lowering the priest to the level of the laity, not raising the laity, as Newsom seems to perceive it!

I'll look at what Newsom says about the Stuarts, British Colonial America, and the founding of the USA, with an emphasis on religious liberty next week.

Sarum Rite Holy Thursday: The Stripping of the Altars

As this blogger notes, the Sarum Use celebration of Holy Thursday is more solemn than the Latin Rite. As the Ordinary Form of the Latin Rite remembers the institution of the sacraments of Holy Communion and Holy Orders, the priest wears white vestments; the Gloria is sung; bells ring, and the Altar is quietly stripped after the Blessed Sacrament has being processed to the Altar of Repose. An air of solemnity sets in with that procession and the chanting of St. Thomas Aquinas's Eucharistic hymn, Pange, lingua and we try to meet Jesus's challenge in the Garden of Gethsemane, "Could you not watch one hour with me?"

The Sarum Use Holy Thursday omits the Gloria, uses Red vestments (as on Palm Sunday and Good Friday), and the Altar is ceremoniously and significantly stripped in preparation for Good Friday, as this post describes.

• When the Altar is stripped, that symbolizes the stripping of Jesus at Calvary before He is nailed to the cross.

• When the Altar is washed with wine and water, that symbolizes the blood and water that poured from His wounded side, representing Baptism and Holy Communion.

• When the Altar is scrubbed with a brush, that symbolizes the scourging at the Pillar. 

More about the Sarum Use here.

A friend of mine posted on his Facebook page that his students were having trouble understanding or relating to Josef Pieper's theories of the relationship between religious ritual and leisure. They are Catholic high school students, but they have been secularized to degree that they don't see the connections between the great public work of the Church and their private lives. Sadly, I think the post-modern Catholic Church liturgy--not because of the Holy Thursday rites at all, which I think are wonderful--has contributed to this problem. The suppression of the prayers of Tenebrae, for example, stripped Holy Week of some of its mystery, not to mention the great cultural riches of musical settings of Jeremiah's Lamentations. Note that many Mainline Protestant churches celebrate Tenebrae, because they recognize the conflict between good and evil during Holy Week, and that we all participate in that conflict and live it everyday. When we remember the Passion and Death of Jesus, we should experience darkness and silence in the liturgy.

Father James V. Schall, SJ, identified the issue in his Foreword to the Ignatius Press edition of Leisure: The Basis of Culture:

When a culture is in the process of denying its own roots, it becomes most important to know what these roots are. We had best know what we reject before we reject it. If we are going to build a chair, the first thing we need to know, above all else, is what a chair is. Otherwise, we can do nothing. We are not a culture that never understood what a human being was in his nature and in his destiny.

Rather we are a culture that, having once known these things, has decided against living them or understanding them. Indeed, we have decided to reject most of them, almost as an act of defiance—as an act of pure humanism—as if what we are is not first given to us. We have let an empty future that we propose to make by our own standards become the ideal over and against a real past that revealed to us what man really was and is: namely, a being open to wonder who did not create himself or the world in which he dwells.

During Holy Week, being "a being open to wonder who did not create himself or the world in which he dwells' also means being a being open to wonder who did not redeem himself and whose suffering and striving only has meaning because of Jesus, who suffered for us, died for us, and rose for us. Something indeed to wonder about through prayer and meditation--which require leisure and time and attention.

Holy Week: The Triduum Before the English Reformation

Please note: I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning to discuss St. Margaret Clitherow, whose execution was on Good Friday, March 25, 1586--470 years ago. The show is live today but tomorrow they'll run "best of" programming. Listen live here a little after 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central. The National Catholic Register will publish my article on St. Margaret Clitherow tomorrow too! Since Margaret Middleton Clitherow was born just two years before Elizabeth I became queen and established the rituals of the Church of England as law, she probably had no memory and may never have heard of the Sarum Use rituals of Holy Week: the stripping of the altars, the creeping to the Cross, the Easter Sepulchre--although "stubborn" Catholics still crept to the Cross on Good Friday in spite of the fact it was not part of The Book of Common Prayer ritual and was indeed condemned as popish superstition.

The “Maundy” of Maundy Thursday comes from the Mandatum, the new commandment Jesus gave his Apostles after washing their feet at the Last Supper--love one another as I have loved you. The ceremonial re-enactment of Jesus' humility was not part of the parish celebration of Holy Thursday in Pre-Reformation England. It was performed at monasteries and abbeys, and the monarchs of England used to wash the feet of twelve poor people and then give them money and food. The last monarch to perform this ceremony of humility was King James II. William and Mary turned the duty over to their Almoner, the official in charge of charity, and now Queen Elizabeth II hands out “Maundy Money” designed by the Royal Mint.

But the Sarum Use had another great ceremony: after Mass on Maundy Thursday, all the altars were stripped, washed with water and wine, and scrubbed with sticks--certainly gestures filled with meaning. Jesus was stripped before the Crucifixion; water and blood, representing the Eucharistic water and wine, poured from His side when pierced by the lance; the sticks surely represented the scourges used to whip Him before He carried the cross. The section on the celebration of Holy Week in Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars is, to me, an entirely convincing demonstration of the focus of Catholics in England before the destruction of these ceremonies on the reality of Redemption and devotion to Jesus Christ. It was part of peoples' lives--every gesture, every ritual meant something and made the events of that Holy Week present to them.

Good Friday was a solemn day of fasting, just as it is today. The sacramental reality of Jesus’ redemptive suffering and death were commemorated by the ritual of "Creeping to the Cross" which compares to our current form of Venerating the Cross as one of the four parts of the Good Friday service. Henry VIII allowed the performance of this ritual throughout his "rule" as Supreme Head and Governor of the Church in England, but wanted to make sure that no one celebrated it, and other observances, out of superstition, as this narrative indicates:

"Holy water, holy bread, the use of vestments, Candlemas candles, ashes, palms, creeping to the Cross, sepulchres, hallowing of the font, and “all other like laudable customs, rites, and ceremonies” were allowed by the Ten Articles of 1536 “as good and laudable things to put us in memory of what they signify.” On February 26, 1539 (Wilkins, III, 842), Henry issued a proclamation in which holy water, holy bread, kneeling and creeping to the Cross on Good Friday, setting up lights before the Corpus Christi on Easter Day, bearing candles at the Purification were allowed since “as yet” they had not being abolished. But they were to be used without superstition. “Let the minister on each day instruct the people on the right and godly use of every ceremony. On every Sunday let him declare that holy water is sprinkled in remembrance of our baptism and of the sprinkling of the blood of Christ. On every Sunday let holy bread be given, to remind men of the housel, or Eucharist, which in the beginning of the Christian Church was received more often than now, and in sign of unity, for as the bread is made of many grains so are all Christian men one mystical body of Christ. Let candles be borne at Candlemas, but in memory of Christ, the spiritual light. On Ash Wednesday let ashes be given to every Christian man to remind him that he is dust and ashes. On Palm Sunday let palms be borne, but let it be declared that it is in memory of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Let it be declared on Good Friday, that creeping to the Cross and kissing the Cross signify humility and the memory of our redemption.”

During the reign of Edward VI, Archbishop Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer omitted the ceremony and Parliament forbade it. Mary I's restoration of Catholicism revived the practice which then was forbidden again under Elizabeth I. The people, however, did not want to give it up and Anglican bishops complained that some still "creeped" on their knees to the Cross on Good Friday well into Elizabeth's reign.

After the ceremonies of the pre-sanctified Communion (which only the priest received) on Good Friday, the priest took off his vestments and placed a pyx containing a consecrated Host with the Cross that had just been venerated, wrapped in linen cloths, in a sepulchre on the north side of the church. This was the Easter Sepulchre and candles were kept lit before it while the parish guarded it in vigil until Easter Sunday morning. Parish accounts document the expenses for candles and for food and drink supplied to those who remained on guard through the night of Good Friday, all day Holy Saturday and through the vigil of that night until dawn. (The Triduum did not include a nighttime Easter Vigil; the Great Service of Light was restored in 1955 in the Roman Rite.)

Then early Easter morning, the parish clergy would place the consecrated Host in the hanging pyx by the high altar and carry the cross in procession after it was solemnly removed from the Sepulchre, risen and acclaimed, with the church bells ringing and the choir chanting "Christus Resurgens" (Christ, risen from the dead, dieth now no more). The cross was then placed on a side altar and the people again venerated it throughout the octave of Easter.You can hear a sixteenth century version of the chant set by the English Catholic exile, Peter Phillips, here.

Eamon Duffy's essential and seminal The Stripping of the Altars again is our source for understanding how deeply this devotion and ritual had taken root in medieval English Catholicism before the Reformation. As he says, these actions were "designed to inculcate and give dramatic expression to orthodox teaching, not merely on the saving power of Christ's cross and Passion but on the doctrine of the Eucharist." (p. 31)

The Easter Sepulchre was part of the furniture of the parish church, either as a freestanding wooden frame or as a niche or table tomb in the structure of the wall. Images of the sleeping soldiers, St. Mary Magdalen, the Risen Christ and adoring angels adorned the sepulchre.

The ritual was condemned by Archbishop Cranmer and the reformers especially during the reign of Edward VI, when it was forbidden. It was restored during Mary I's reign and church records document the expenses for the candles and the guards' supplies again--and then the sepulchres were destroyed and the ritual was forbidden again during Elizabeth's reign.

As we celebrate the Latin Rite services of Holy Week and the Holy Triduum, this background on the Sarum Use in Medieval England may inform our devotion to Jesus Christ, Our Savior, as we recall His suffering, death and glorious Resurrection from the Dead.

Chesterton, Duffy, Dawson, and Lewis: 50 Best Books of the 20th Century

Intercollegiate Review re-published their list of "The Fifty Best Books of the 20th Century" on their blog and I'm glad to see that several of my favorites made the list:

The turn of the century is a time to take stock of the path we have followed, the better to discern where we ought to be going. Historical discernment requires coming to judgment about what has been noble, good, and beneficial in our time, but also about what has been base, bad, and harmful. In the life of the mind, what has our century produced that deserves admiration? What has it produced that deserves only contempt?

Earlier this year, the Modern Library published a list styled The Hundred Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century. A list of significant books can make a compelling statement about how we are to understand an age. In judging the quality of a book, one necessarily judges the perception and the profundity which the book displays, as well as the character of the book’s influence.

Yet many were dissatisfied with the several “Best” lists published in the past year, finding them biased, too contemporary, or simply careless. So the Intercollegiate Review (IR) set out to assemble its own critically serious roster of the Best—and the Worst—Books of the Century. To assist us in this task, we relied on the advice of a group of exceptional academics from a variety of disciplines.

To make the task more manageable, our lists include only nonfiction books originally published in English, and so certain giants of the century such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn will not be found here, on two counts. We left the definition of “Best” up to our consultants, but we defined “Worst” for them as books which were widely celebrated in their day but which upon reflection can be seen as foolish, wrong-headed, or even pernicious.

There was broad agreement about a majority of titles, but there were also fierce disagreements. Several titles appeared on both “Best” and “Worst” lists. We have tried to be faithful to the contributions of our consultants, but the responsibility for final composition of the list lay with the editors of the IR.

Among their choices:

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947)--Number 2 on their top five list!
Preferable to Lewis’s other remarkable books simply because of the title, which reveals the true intent of liberalism.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)
The master of paradox demonstrates that nothing is more “original” and “new” than Christian tradition.

Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950)
An essential work of European history that shows how the rise of Christianity altered civilization in the West. Credits the Roman Catholic Church with keeping civilization alive after the fall of Rome and during the barbarian invasions.

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992)
Revisionist history as it was meant to be written: as a correction to centuries of Whig historiography. Demonstrates that the brute force of the state can destroy even the most beloved institutions. What do you know . . . Belloc was right.

and a book I have not read, but certainly should:

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)
Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better? No, and Butterfield provides the intellectually mature antidote to that premise of liberal historiography.

Check out the rest of the list here. How many have you read? Do you think they chose the right books?

Book Review: The Late Medieval English Church

Subtitle: Vitality and Vulnerability Before the Break with Rome, by G.W. Bernard.

Before I make my comments on this important study, here's a brief review from David Hamid, the Anglican bishop for the EU community:

G W Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability Before the Break with Rome, Yale (Hardcover; Kindle edition also available)

In his biography of Richard III, Paul Murray Kendall describes the late medieval English church as ‘rather like a fat whale stranded in a lagoon abounding in its food – not uncomfortable enough and too well fed, too inert, to try to move in any direction at all. Though pricked by the Lollards and stung by hostile criticism from the laity into holding tight to its privileges, the church was not sufficiently challenged to attempt or even imagine reform.’ This negative view of the late medieval English church is one that was widely accepted until recent times. It has been seen to be a key explanation for the English Reformation: that it occurred and took a Protestant direction because of popular discontent with the corruption and complacency of the Catholic Church of England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This account of the causes of the Reformation has been challenged in recent years by a number of historians, notably by Professor Eamon Duffy in his book The Stripping of the Altars. It is challenged again by G W Bernard, the Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton, in this new book. In his view the English church of the late Middle Ages was a church marked by vibrant faith and great energy. He explores the structure of the church, the nature of royal control over it, the role of the bishops and other clergy, the intense devotion and deep-rooted practices of the laity, the existence of anti-clerical sentiment, and the prevalence of heresy. He argues that the Reformation was not inevitable, nor was it caused by the fact the church was corrupt, superstitious or outdated. The late medieval church had its vulnerabilities, but paradoxically these were often a sign of its great vitality. This is a book that needs to be read by anyone who is interested in the history of the English Church and the background to the English Reformation. The question it raises, like the work of Eamon Duffy before it, is why, if the pre-Reformation church was so vibrant, did the English Reformation take place?

And here are the author's own comments about his interpretation of Henry VIII and the English Reformation, from his page on the University of Southampton website:

My study is in two parts. The first is a consideration of the condition of the church on the eve of the Reformation. In common with many scholars in the last two decades, I came to question the tenaciously held orthodoxy view of the late medieval church as riddled with abuses and thus an easy and inevitable and justified target of reformers. My own developing interest in parish church architecture - especially the rebuilding of churches in the perpendicular style - reinforced my conviction that there was an extraordinary vitality in the life of a late medieval church very much cherished by an overwhelming majority of laypeople. And yet such an approach seemed somehow insufficient, a deficiency crystallised for me by Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars (1992), doubtless against the writer's intentions. The central problem is that it makes the subsequent reformation inexplicable: how could so vital and so popular a church be overturned?

The answer, it has increasingly seemed to me, is that the late medieval church was characterised not just by vitality but by vulnerability, and that perception has guided my researches on such themes as the bishops, the clergy, confraternities and chantries. My published paper on pilgrimage shows how I am exploring this counterpoint between vitality and vulnerability. More broadly the vitality of practices such as pilgrimage must be measured against the level of theological knowledge of those who took part in them. How much did lay religious activity reflect mere social conformity, how far deep conviction and genuine understanding? How mechanical and superstitious was late medieval lay piety, and how far did that leave the church highly vulnerable to criticism from an Erasmian or protestant approach? One of my principal claims is that the church was in many respects a 'monarchical church', a theme I have explored for the century after the break with Rome in a paper in History. By that I mean that the interests and ambitions of monarchs tended to be predominant, and also that monarchs saw themselves, and were seen by their subjects, as the guardians of the spiritual well-being of the church within the realm. In many ways such close association with the monarchy was a source of strength for the church, but in other respects - for example the involvement of leading churchmen in secular government - it left the church ill prepared to resist the hostility of Henry VIII.

You can see both from the Anglican bishop's review and Bernard's own remarks that Eamon Duffy's work seems to haunt this book--and indeed Peter Marshall makes that point in his review of this book in the Literary Review:

The Late Medieval English Church does not quite bill itself as an extended commentary on Eamon Duffy's work, but that is the clear subtext. The book is notable for its focused attention to areas of late medieval religious life that Duffy chose not to consider in detail: the role played by bishops, the state of the religious orders, the significance of Lollardy. . . . But Bernard's superbly researched and coherently argued study is far from being either a hatchet job on Duffy or an atavistic reversion to Protestant instincts about pre-Reformation Catholicism. We could reasonably characterise (sic; Literary Review is published in Edinburgh!) its overall thesis as 'yes, but . . . '.

Sometimes that "yes, but . . ." thesis bothers me as Bernard goes back and forth with questions about how we in the 21st century should judge how well the laity, nuns, monks, priests and bishops lived up to the ideals and standards of the Catholic Church in the late medieval era. Bernard tells us what contemporary critics of the Church in England tell us now about how some abuses were regarded, and then points out how seldom the abuses occurred--a priest behaving badly stood out and created such alarm and outcry because relatively few priests behaved badly, considering the population of the time. Yes, some of the bishops were not present in their dioceses, but they were serving the King, they made arrangements for vicars to cover their duties, and when they did go home, they regretted their absences and repaired any damage as soon as possible. Yes, some of the monks and nuns left their cloister, but they were landlords too and needed to oversee their tenants, distribute charity, or in the case of an Abbot, attend Parliament in the House of Lords. These abuses don't answer Bishop Hamid's question at all--they don't automatically mean that the English people would reject the Catholic Church once Henry VIII broke away from the Pope and Cromwell and Cranmer started introducing reforms to the liturgy and closing the monasteries, convents, and friaries.

Bernard discusses the "monarchical" nature of the Catholic hierarchy, serving the Tudor monarch and basically obeying his demands on church matters--although the bishops sometimes balked. But as Peter Marshall notes in that Literary Review article, French and Spanish rulers had as much control and there was no state led Reformation in either country. Bernard is fair and effective in his analysis of the vitality and vulnerability of the Catholic Church in England before the Henry VIII's Break from Rome/the English Reformation, but he doesn't solve the mystery yet of how the English people accepted religious change at the hands of its monarch with compliance, even though that compliance was not easy, immediate, or complete. Although Bernard fills in gaps that Duffy might have left (he did not claim to be comprehensive in The Stripping of the Altars), we still have a historical mystery, it seems.

I think the real solution is in human nature, not historical causes and effects.It's just easier to go along with the legitimate secular authority that has the means here and now to force you to do what it says to do: drop the pinch of incense in Rome; whitewash the Last Judgement in London; buy the HHS mandated insurance in Wichita. Father George Rutler wrote an article called "Post-Comfortable Christianity and the Election of 2012"--I'm not citing it for political/election year reasons--and he points out "The surrender will not come by a sudden loss of faith in Transubstantiation or doubts about Papal Infallibility. It will happen smoothly and quietly, as the raptures of the Netherworld always hum victims into somnolence, by the cost factor of buying out of government health insurance." And he continues,

As the bishops, by the acknowledgement of many of their own number, failed to articulate the cogency of doctrines on contraception and other moral issues, so will they now, despite the best intentions, not be able to stem the radical attrition among native Catholics whose eyes are on mammon, and among recent immigrants whose privileges are guaranteed only if they vote for opponents of the Church. The general election of 2012 may rally the fraction of conscientious Catholics among the sixty million or so sympathetic Catholics. If their influence is not decisive, and the present course of federal legislation accelerates, encouraged by a self-destructive appetite for welfare statism on the part of ecclesiastical bureaucrats, the majority of Catholics with tenuous commitments to the Faith will evaporate, as did the lapsed baptized in North Africa during the oppression of the emperor Diocletian.

Most of us (in the sixteenth or the twenty-first century) are just too dependent on our comforts and like to get along. Martyrs are the exceptions that test that rule and shock us because they will risk their lives.

The English Reformation Today, Episode Two

Today we are going to look at the history of the history of the English Reformation briefly on my radio show, just to set up the context for examining the status of the Catholic Church in England before Henry VIII broke away from Rome. The great guide to this era for me has been Eamon Duffy, whose books The Stripping of the Altars, The Voices of Morebath, Marking the Hours, and his latest, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations, offer great insights into the religious changes that occurred during the Tudor Dynasty. His work is always based on research from primary sources.

Here's a couple of articles I wrote for PraytheMass.org summarizing his descriptions of Holy Week and the Triduum.

The other study that informs my understanding of how historians have written about the history of the English Reformation is English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation by John Vidmar, OP. Unfortunately, it is very expensive, as is Aidan Nichols' The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism, which covers some very good ground of how historians/theologians in the Church of England viewed its history, especially Richard Hooker:

At a time if division and crisis in the Church of England, its identity and mission have come into question as never before. Its own members, but also the wider community of Christians in both East and West, need to understand its history and the reasons for its present crisis, as well as the distinctive contribution it can make to the Great Church of the future. Aidan Nichols provides a clear summary and analysis of the history of the Church of England by way of a sensitive appraisal of its rich theological tradition. This also gives the reader a firm grasp of the context of the issues currently being discussed by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. Aidan Nichols, O.P. is a member of the Dominican community at Blackfriars, Cambridge. He is the author of Rome and the Eastern Churches, The Shape of Catholic Theology and many other books.

I welcome all listeners of Radio Maria US to my blog, whether you're listening on one of their radio stations or on line or through one of their apps. Next week on The English Reformation Today we'll discuss Henry VIII, the Break from Rome, and its consequences during his reign. I invite you to call in with questions and comments toll-free at 866-333-MARY(6279).

And here's the mystery to consider this week and the next couple of weeks: if, as the evidence Eamon Duffy and others have offered demonstrates, the Catholic faithful in England were so devoted to the services and Sacraments of the Church, why did they ultimately go along with the changes that Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I introduced through Parliamentary laws and enforcement?

The Five Wounds and the Sacred Heart

In 15th century England, the Friday following the Octave of the Feast of Corpus Christi was dedicated to the Five Wounds of Christ. Devotion to the Five Wounds of Christ, as I mentioned to Brian Patrick on the Son Rise Morning Show last week, is kind of a medieval precursor of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which the Catholic Church celebrates today as a Solemnity. The Five Wounds are the piercing wounds to the hands, the feet, and side of Jesus on the cross.

As Eamon Duffy demonstrated in The Stripping of the Altars, this was a very popular devotion to the Passion of Christ in England before the Reformation. Through prayers and meditiations, the penitent recalled the suffering of Jesus on the cross and pleaded for the forgiveness of sins.

During the English Reformation, it developed a powerful symbolism beyond the devotion: Pilgrims opposed to the dissolution of the monasteries carried banners depicting the Five Wounds; Blessed Margaret Pole was attainted of treason because an emblem of the Five Wounds was found in her belongings so Thomas Cromwell argued that she favored the Pilgrimage of Grace. During the Northern Rebellion, the banners flew again, an obvious reference to that earlier rebellion--and a statement to Elizabethan regime that, the Act of Uniformity notwithstanding, some in England still wanted the old time religion of Catholicism.

The connection between the devotion to the Sacred Heart and the Five Wounds of Jesus is surely most clearly seen in the piercing of His Heart by the Roman soldier: "But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust his lance into his ide, and immediately blood and water flowed out." (John: 19:34). The blood and water were interpreted from early on in the Church's history as symbolic of the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, and as the life and spirit of the Church, itself a Sacrament of God's Grace. You might notice that the banner of the Five Wounds makes that connection very clearly, with the Heart and the Chalice at the center instead of a pierced heart.

More on the connection between the Solemnities celebrating the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (Corpus Christi) and the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus here.

Devotion, Destruction, and the English "Deformation"

The Wall Street Journal featured this online article by Barrymore Laurence Scherer, whom I used to hear make presentations during the Texaco Sponsored Met Opera broadcasts, about an exhibition of medieval alabasters at the Princeton University Art Museum--with a definite connection to the English Deformation, I mean English Reformation:

Medieval luxury came in various materials and forms, alabaster carvings among them, and a new show at the Princeton University Art Museum reveals the intimate beauty and expressiveness of this art. "Object of Devotion" highlights a selection of 60 Medieval English alabaster panels and freestanding sculptures from the vast collection of London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Touring for the first time in North America, these carvings of holy figures and narrative scenes were produced for churches, royal chapels and domestic altars in England and exported to the Continent. And they represent an English industry that thrived from about 1350 to 1530, after which the Protestant Reformation's ban on religious imagery, combined with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England by King Henry VIII, not only ended the demand for such works but also led to their outright destruction.

According to the museum website:

The dates of the sculptures range from ca. 1370 through 1530, when the Protestant Reformation put an end to the creation of new religious art.

The exhibition draws attention to the “alabastermen,” specialists in the English Midlands, around Nottingham, who sculpted the stone mined there, prized for its high quality. The subjects were chosen to appeal to churchmen, aristocrats, and wealthy non-aristocratic patrons. The relatively small works were assembled to form entire altarpieces recounting the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary, or used as devotional works dedicated to the most revered saints. The exhibition examines the working methods of the sculptors, the exportation of much of their work to the European continent, and the stylistic evolution and different levels of quality of the sculptures. Object of Devotion also chronicles the abrupt end of the alabaster-carving tradition in England at the time of the Reformation, when works in English churches were defaced or destroyed during outbursts of Protestant iconoclasm and the alabastermen sold off their stock in continental Europe.

Mr. Barrymore Laurence Scherer (I love that name!) likes the exhibition, which will be travelling on after Princeton:

Admittedly, the rendering of the figures may appear somewhat stiff and naive compared to contemporaneous Italian work by Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello and others, yet within their formulas these alabasters often reveal remarkable visual imagination. A panel representing "The Ascension of Christ into Heaven" (c. 1380-1400) features a group of astonished apostles gazing upward as Christ, represented only by his bare feet and lower part of his robe, ascends like the tail of a rocket into a stylized cloud. Similarly, a vigorous "St. Christopher" (c. 1450-80) fords a stream, his toes protruding from the carved band representing the flowing water. While the panel's overall linear carving suggests the crisp style of Albrecht Dürer's woodcuts a few decades later, the simplified planes of the saint's head, torso and drapery seem to anticipate the streamlined neo-classicism of Art Deco half a millennium in the future.

These works often convey considerable human emotion as well, especially those pieces inspired by themes taken not from the Bible but from such popular compendia of saintly lore as Jacobus de Voragine's "The Golden Legend," compiled in the late 13th century. For instance, in a panel of "The Beheading of St. Catherine" carved between 1450 and 1470, the figure of the blindfolded saint is brutally thrust downward toward the chopping block by the executioner's foot, yet the gentleness with which she seems to feel her way is heartrending, recalling the groping for the block of the tender, blindfolded figure in Paul Delaroche's Romantic painting of "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey," one of the 19th-century favorites in London's National Gallery.

Throughout, the exhibition conveys a lively sense of religious belief amongst the people and within the clergy in late-Medieval England while vividly revealing the sophistication of life and commerce that flourished on the sea-girt isle before, during and after the Wars of the Roses.

In addition to the show itself is the beautifully illustrated exhibition catalog, including essays by several eminent scholars in the field and full-page images of the individual works, which deserves to become a popular reference book on this genre of Medieval art.

So, Henry VIII, in addition to plundering the monasteries, executing some of the greatest men in his country, destroyed a livelihood. That fact fits well the picture drawn by W.G. Hoskins in The Age of Plunder.

The Rood and the Triumph of the Cross

Today is the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross, so a quick post on the Rood Screen and some background is appropriate, via The New Liturgical Movement blog, here and here. More beautiful images like the one above are included in those posts.

This site includes detail about Rood Screens in Norfolk Churches, with this detail about their purpose before the English Reformation and their fate after it began:

The purpose of the screen was to divide the chancel, with its altar, from the nave, which was often used for secular purposes. It was an invariable part of the furnishing of every church until the Reformation, usually placed directly beneath the chancel arch, though sometimes brought forward slightly so that it could stretch right across the nave and aisles. The screen was generally surmounted by a loft, upon which stood the Rood, a giant figure of Christ crucified. The Reformation saw the destruction of virtually every Rood and the great majority of lofts, though the screens themselves were often spared as they were a useful feature in the ordering of the church. Most figure sculpture and painting depicted thereon, however, was generally defaced.

The two principal areas where screens remain are East Anglia and the South-West, though the two types differ radically. East Anglia in the Middle Ages was the richer of the two areas, and the churches are therefore bigger and loftier. So in Norfolk and Suffolk the typical screen rises much higher than in the south-west, has tall, narrow openings and very slender posts between the bays, and a general air of lightness and elegance.

Once you've thought of the Rood Screen and the Rood, the next association is The Dream of the Rood.

Listen! The choicest of visions I wish to tell,
which came as a dream in middle-night,
after voice-bearers lay at rest.
It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree
born aloft, wound round by light,
brightest of beams. All was that beacon
sprinkled with gold. Gems stood
fair at earth's corners; there likewise five
shone on the shoulder-span. All there beheld the Angel of God,
fair through predestiny. Indeed, that was no wicked one's gallows,
but holy souls beheld it there,
men over earth, and all this great creation.
Wondrous that victory-beam--and I stained with sins,
with wounds of disgrace. I saw glory's tree
honored with trappings, shining with joys,
decked with gold; gems had
wrapped that forest tree worthily round.