Fact-Checking Pope Francis: Saints and Monasteries

I posted yesterday on Pope Francis's visit to All Saints, the Anglican Centre in Rome, on Sunday. In The Catholic Herald, Father Alexander Lucie-Smith commented on the Q and A that took place after Evensong, noting that "Ecumenism can't be based on wishful thinking about the past":

When wishing to emphasise what Anglicans and Catholics share, the Pope had this to say:

“We have a common tradition of the saints … Never, never in the two Churches, have the two traditions renounced the saints: Christians who lived the Christian witness until that point. This is important.

“There is another thing that has kept up a strong connection between our religious traditions: [male and female] monks, monasteries. And monks, both Catholic and Anglican, are a great spiritual strength of our traditions.”

This is interesting from a historical perspective and suggests that the Pope should perhaps take a close look at the history of England or the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Anglicanism was born out of a movement that saw the destruction of all of England’s religious houses, many of whose mute ruins stand as a witness to this catastrophe today. Moreover the Thirty-Nine Articles specifically forbid the cult of the saints, and our Tudor forebears made a point of destroying all the shrines of England bar one (that of Saint Edward the Confessor, who was spared as he was a king.) The XXII article states:

“The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.”

If ecumenism is to progress, it has to do so on a sound historical basis. There is no other way. It is true, as the Pope avers, that there are Anglican monks and nuns, but these religious foundations date to the nineteenth century at the earliest, and are fruits of the Oxford Movement. For four hundred years there was no religious life lived under vows in community in the Church of England. Many (though not I) would see the influence of Anglican religious life as marginal in the Church of England. Again, Anglican devotion to the saints of our own times is certainly present and to be encouraged . . .

Perhaps Pope Francis should read Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation? A few people have mentioned to me that they were reading my book for Lent; my husband considers it to be perfectly penitential reading!

"The English Reformation Today" Podcasts

After the live Saturday broadcast of "The English Reformation Today", Radio Maria US repeats the show on Wednesday morning, and then the most recent podcast is uploaded to this page on their website.

Saturday, September 8's episode was the first part of a two part discussion of the reign of Elizabeth I and what it meant for Catholics in the 16th century:

Describe the legislation that established the Church of England as a via media compromise between Calvinism and Catholicism (The Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles). Catholic Reaction: The Northern Rebellion.The controversial excommunication of Elizabeth I by Pope St. Pius V--casting suspicion on all Catholics in England and leading to recusancy and martyrdom. Stories of early martyrs like St. Edmund Campion and St. Margaret Clitherow.

The most relevant issue today of the episode is the issue of divided loyalty and obedience to authority. To whom did English Catholics owe their homage? Their queen or the pope? For some reason--and this would be an interesting research project--the sixteenth century political order could not apply Jesus's Gospel admonition to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's and to God what is God's to the vision of a united polity. In the sixteenth century there was little or no notion of diversity or certainly plurality. Throughout Europe the motto cuius regno, eius religio (the religion of the ruler was the religion of the ruled) prevailed. The pope's position as a temporal ruler of the Papal States also confused the issue: were Catholics being loyal to their own nation or to a foreign power? The English government was convinced that Catholics could not be loyal to England even temporally if they were loyal to Rome even spiritually.

Now, our situation in the United States has parallels but some important distinctions too: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been pointing out since January this year, through the Fortnight for Freedom and even into the current political season, that religous liberty has been endangered by the U. S. Government through the HHS Contraceptive, Abortafacient, and Sterilization Mandate--especially because of the limited definition of a religious organization AND the lack of an opt-out conscience clause. Like the English Catholics of the sixteenth century, Catholic business owners, for example, have to choose between two loyalties, between their Church doctrine and the US Government law--if they wish to be faithful to God and His Church's teachings, they cannot comply with the state's new demands for loyalty. They will not suffer blood martyrdom, but they will be fined; they can fight the law in the Courts, but their risk is great. The most important distinction is that Catholics in the U.S.A. as citizens have opportunities/rights to campaign for change through legislation, the justice system, and the electoral system: Elizabeth I's Catholic subjects did not have these opportunities.

English Catholics pressed for a view that they were temporally loyal to Elizabeth I but spiritually loyal to Pope Pius V, and their respective successors. Elizabeth I, because of her instability on the throne, could not accept that view, although it was expressed by many of the Catholic martyrs even as they faced death--they could accept her as monarch but not as governor of the church in England. And then there came the "bloody question": when it came to armed conflict or invasion, with whom would they side, England or attacking Catholic power. That's the crucial question coming up in the next episode when we look at the Spanish Armada or the plots against Elizabeth I to replace her on the throne with Mary, the former Queen of Scots.

This Saturday, Sepember 15's episode will conclude the discussion of Elizabeth and introduce the new dynasty, the Stuarts of Scotland. By focusing on the two dangers to Elizabeth's throne, we'll also see the result of this divided loyality--even when Catholics DID support their country when facing invasion, they were punished by the state and when Catholics despaired of receiving any tolerance for their Faith in their own country, they turned to desparate measures, hoping for a change in leadership as the only means of relief:

Explain the two great dangers to Elizabeth and how they affected Catholics: her rivalry with Mary, Queen of Scots and the Spanish Armada (plots led by Catholics to depose Elizabeth and replace her with Mary on England's throne and the Catholic position on the Spanish Armada). Describe the wave of martyrdoms of Catholic priests and laity after the Armada: why are they martyrs?  Describe the end of the Tudor dynasty and the transition to the Stuart dynasty--the status of Catholics in 1603.

Once the Elizabethan government designated all Catholic priests as traitors and most Catholic laymen as potential traitors, a long-lived anti-Catholicism developed in England: a prejudice that certainly emigrated from England to New England in the 17th century.

One of Ours Now? Cranmer and the Ordinariate

Father Alexander Lucie-Smith posts on his perspective of Evensong, that Book of Common Prayer amalgamation of Vespers and Compline in his blog on The Catholic Herald:

Yesterday I was in a cathedral city in the south of England, and having time to spare, and because it was raining, I decided to visit the cathedral and stay for Evensong. I am, like so many in this country, familiar with Evensong; I find it both beautiful and alien at the same time. I both love it and hate it. I only go to Evensong to listen to it, never to take part.

Evensong’s beauties are the work of Coverdale and Cranmer, two men who led the revolt against the unity of the Church, and overthrew the great work of time, the historic faith of this country. Cranmer’s liturgical reforms were not reforms in any true sense, they were a wrecking of the monastic offices and their replacement with something superficially like yet utterly alien. The Cranmerian Prayer Book provoked rebellions in England, let us remember. The West Country rebels of 1549 protested that they found the Cranmerian service that replaced the Mass no more than “a Christmas game” . The Northern Rebels who entered Durham in 1569 tore up the Prayer Book and had the Mass celebrated in the Cathedral once more. In 1596 one of my collateral ancestors, the Blessed George Errington, was hanged, drawn and quartered at York, along with three others martyrs, because of his Catholic faith, a faith he and many others simply could not recognise in the Cranmerian Prayer Book.

Thus the experience of Cranmerian English leaves me feeling conflicted. I love it and I hate it, and I feel I ought to love it, as it is so beautiful, and because it has inspired so many of our great poets, not least among whom is T.S. Eliot.

On our trip to London years ago, we slipped in the back door at St. Martin-in-the-Fields and found a pew box , wincing a bit when the boards creaked, to hear Choral Evensong, already in progress. One of the sopranos had that sure and steady, glittering voice that carrries over all the rest of the voices, and the performance was beautiful, but of course we did not stay for their Communion service, so we snuck out the way we snuck in. So far, so good, I agree with Father Lucie-Smith--it is beautiful but we were a little uneasy.

Then he goes to say that with the Ordinariate, the Catholic Church in England can reclaim Thomas Cranmer because the Ordinariate is preparing the Customary of Our Lady of Walsingham, "a daily prayer book for the Ordinariate - those former Anglicans who have recently become a distinct part of the Roman Church. In creating the Ordinariate, Pope Benedict recognised the treasures that Anglicans brought with them from their own tradition and this book is replete with the riches of Anglican patrimony. It contains material from the Anglican tradition, adapted according to the Roman rite including: * an order for morning, evening and night prayer throughout the year * an interim order of the Mass * spiritual readings for the Christian year * the minor offices * calendar and lectionary tables." Thus, Father Lucie-Smith says that the Ordinariate will "posthumously reCatholicise Cranmer and reclaim him for our tradition; it will make the Cranmerian liturgy, which I find a cause of division and conflict, into something that will bring about unity. It will mean that from now on, I need not find Evensong alien. Perhaps Dr Cranmer himself would approve. I hope so! It certainly promotes the healing of a cultural and religious wound."

I think this might be a step too far; we can't posthumously proclaim that Cranmer was a Catholic underneath it all, in spite of his rejection of the Sacrifice of the Mass, of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, etc, and all the other non-Catholic doctrines he developed in the Thirty-Nine/Forty-Two Articles of the Church of England. The Ordinariate is promoting healing in the Church by recognizing the goodness and beauty that was present in the Church of England all these hundreds of years past (and is), but it can't canonize Cranmer and ignore the real hurt and wounds--the martyrs, the persecution, procecution, fines, imprisonment, torture, and the destruction of an entire culture that Cranmer set in motion by supporting Henry VIII and Edward VI, placing the monarch in the first place, at least, as the Supreme Head and Governor of the Church. Cranmer has to be allowed his own free will (although a strict Calvinist would deny it!) and maintain his own version of integrity (although I have doubts about that!); we can't change him and claim him.

Tract 90--January 25, 1841

The last of the Tracts of the Times came out on January 25, 1841 and received a very cold reaction that had nothing to do with the winter weather. The full title of Tract 90 is "Remarks on certain Passages of the Thirty-nine Articles."

In it, Tractarian John Henry Newman examined the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and argued that they had more in common with Roman Catholicism than with Protestantism: as he noted in the introduction, "while our Prayer Book is acknowledged on all hands to be of Catholic origin, our articles also, the offspring of an uncatholic age, are, through GOD'S good providence, to say the least, not uncatholic, and may be subscribed by those who aim at being catholic in heart and doctrine." Because of Tract 90, the Oxford Movement was effectively shut down; Newman soon retreated to Littlemore. The Tract was condemned and Newman barely escaped censure--it was a good time to leave town!

As he wrote later in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua:

I saw indeed clearly that my place in the Movement was lost; public confidence was at an end; my occupation was gone. It was simply an impossibility that I could say any thing henceforth to good effect, when I had been posted up by the marshal on the buttery-hatch of every College of my University, after the manner of discommoned pastry-cooks, and when in every part of the country and every class of society, through every organ and opportunity of opinion, in newspapers, in periodicals, at meetings, in pulpits, at dinner-tables, in coffee-rooms, in railway carriages, I was denounced as a traitor who had laid his train and was detected in the very act of firing it against the time-honoured Establishment.

When he compiled works from the Tractarian movement in The Via Media of the Anglican Church Illustrated in Lectures, Letters and Tracts Written between 1830 and 1841, then Cardinal Newman explained the background and purpose of the Tract:

THIS Tract was written under the conviction that the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, of which it treated, were, when taken in their letter, so loosely worded, so incomplete in statement, and so ambiguous in their meaning, as to need an authoritative interpretation; and that neither those who drew them up, nor those who imposed them were sufficiently agreed among themselves, or clear and consistent in their theological views individually to be able to supply it.

There was but one authority to whom recourse could be had for such interpretation—the Church Catholic. She had been taught the revealed truth by Christ and His Apostles in the beginning, and had in turn taught it in every age to her faithful children, and would teach it on to the end. And what she taught, all her branches taught; and this the Anglican Church did teach, must teach, if it was a branch of the Church Catholic, otherwise it was not a branch; but a branch it certainly was, for, if it was not a branch, what had we to do with it? And it being a branch, it was the duty of all its members, priests and people, ever to profess what the Universal Church had from the beginning professed, and nothing else, and nothing short of it, that is, what had been held semper et ubique et ab omnibus. Accordingly, it was their plain duty to interpret the Thirty-nine Articles in this one distinct Catholic sense, the sense of the Holy Fathers, of Athanasius, Ambrose, Augustine, and of all Doctors and Saints; it being impossible that in any important matters those Articles should diverge from that sense, or resist the interpretation which that sense required, inasmuch as the Divine Lord of the Church watched over all her portions, and would not suffer the Anglican or any portion to commit itself to statements which could not fairly and honestly be made to give forth a Catholic meaning.

And the circumstances under which the Thirty-nine Articles came into existence, favoured this view. Its compilers were not likely knowingly to exclude the possibility of a Catholic interpretation of them. Doubtless they wished to introduce the new doctrine, but it did not follow from that that they wished to exclude those who still held the old. The ambiguity above spoken of, in the instance of men so acute and learned as they were, could only be accounted for by great differences of opinions among themselves, and a wish by means of compromise to include among the subscriptions to their formulary a great variety of the then circulating opinions, of which a moderate quasi-Catholicity was one. This would lead them to the use of words, which in the long-run, as they would consider, would tell in favour of Protestantism, while in the letter and in their first effect they did not enforce it.

It must be added, in corroboration, that, as is well known, the very Convocation which received and passed the Thirty-nine Articles, also enjoined that "preachers should be careful, that they should never teach aught in a sermon, to be religiously held and believed by the people, except that which is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments, and which the Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops have collected from that very doctrine." Could they mean their Thirty-nine Articles to be inconsistent with that patristical literature, which at the same time they made the rule even for the interpretation of inspired Scripture?

This primâ facie view of the Thirty-nine Articles as not excluding a moderate Catholicism (that is, Roman doctrine, as far as it was Catholic) became more cogent, when it was considered that one of these Articles recognized, approved, and appealed to the two Books of "Homilies," as "containing a godly and wholesome doctrine," and by this appeal determined the animus and drift of the Articles to be Catholic. It was evidence of this in two ways, positively and negatively:—positively, inasmuch as the Homilies, though hitherto claimed by the Evangelical party as one of their special weapons against the High Church . . . were found on a closer inspection to take a view more or less favourable to Rome as regards the number of the Sacraments, the Canon of Scripture, the efficacy of penance, and other points; and negatively, because the Homilies for the most part struck, not at certain Roman doctrines and practices, but at their abuse, and therefore, when, once these Homilies were taken as a legitimate comment on the Articles, they suggested that the repudiations of Roman teaching in the Articles were repudiations of it so far as it was abused, not as it was in itself.

Indeed, it may be further asked, if the Articles were not aimed at the abuses, doctrinal and practical, as drawn out in the Homilies, the abuses of times and places, of particular dioceses, schools, preachers, and people, against what could they be directed? Certainly not against any formal doctrines of Rome, call them Catholic or not, for the Tridentine Decrees were not promulgated till 1564, and the Thirty-nine Articles were agreed on in Convocation in 1562.
For these reasons it appeared likely, that when the Articles were carefully handled, little in them would interfere with the liberty of teaching in the Church of England the semper, ubique, et ab omnibus of the Catholic Religion, the unanimous teaching of the Holy Fathers, the present teaching, as far as concordant, of the East and West.

The all-important question followed, whether the Articles, when examined, actually fulfilled this expectation for which there were several good reasons; whether, one by one, they were (as was said at the time) "patient, though not ambitious, of a Catholic interpretation." The Tract which follows made that experiment.

Introduction.
1. Holy Scripture and the Authority of the Church.
2. Justification by Faith only.
3. Works before and after Justification.
4. The Visible Church.
5. General Councils.
6. Purgatory, Pardons, Images, Relics, Invocation of Saints.
7. The Sacraments.
8. Transubstantiation.
9. Masses.
10. Marriage of Clergy.
11. The Homilies.
12. The Bishop of Rome.
Conclusion.