St. Thomas More on How a Christian Responds to Suffering

In the Introduction to this edition of A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation from Scepter Publishers, Gerard Wegemer comments that this English masterpiece of Thomas More is less well known than his famous Latin work, Utopia. That's because Utopia has been translated from Latin into accessible English while this Dialogue's Renaissance era English has been an obstacle. So this "translation" into modern English by Mary Gottschalk is very helpful, as are the indices, outline, and other supporting material.

There are two good reasons for reading this book:

First, because of its content and purpose: explaining how Christians should respond to trials, suffering, poverty, and even persecution. Uncle Anthony helps his nephew Vincent deal with his fears of suffering in the course of the Turkish invasion of Hungary. While he is on his sickbed, he counsels the younger man on facing those fears by relying on his faith in Jesus Christ. Anthony and Vincent discuss many aspects of life on earth: poverty, riches, ambition, power, charity, the four last things (death, judgment, Heaven, and hell), purgatory, repentance, torture, imprisonment, etc. In every situation, Anthony reminds Vincent that our time here on earth is short and that what really matters is how we prepare for the life to come. Blessed John Henry Newman offers a famous summary of what Anthony tells Vincent: "Life is short; death is certain; and the world to come is everlasting." Ever tribulation we may suffer should be considered in the context of eternal life. We have to imitate the early Christians as described in the Letter to Diognetus:

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.

They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. . . . 

We all face tribulation: my brother and sister and I have been helping our elderly mother settle into a nursing home. The transition may have been easier for her than it has been for us; a little thing like cancelling her phone service and eliminating our parents' home phone number for the past 56 years and more is troubling to us--and there are bigger things to come with the dissolution of our family home. But as I've read this dialogue, I'm reminded that these little burdens, oppressive as they might seem to us, are nothing compared to the joys of the life to come. Our bearing them with patience and fortitude prepares us for those joys, detaches us from our life here on earth, and reminds us that we have no lasting city here on earth. Much as we love our life, love all our family and friends, love the earth and nature, our true and first love must be for God--He loved us first, He wants what is best for us; we should and must trust Him.

Second, because reading this dialogue, which Gerard Wegemer calls one of More's greatest works in the introduction, helps the reader appreciate the wit and wisdom of Thomas More. Throughout the text, he demonstrates his knowledge of Scripture and the teaching of the Church. He also displays great experience both in secular life and in the spiritual life, understanding the realities of public life and the depths of private life. More knows the weaknesses of humanity: one example is his description of sinners kept awake by the thought of their sins and the need to amend their lives. Finally, they turn over their pillows, plump them up a little, get comfortable, and go back to sleep! More is also aware of the pitfalls of power and influence; no matter how much power and control a statesman may achieve, unless he is the monarch, there will be someone else who tells him what to do and how. Even as he fulfills his ambition to achieve higher and higher rank, he still encounters setbacks and tribulations. 

By using the dialogue form, writing a fictional conversation between two characters, More thoroughly explores the themes of suffering and comfort. He also displays his humor through funny stories about people, like the nun who talks so much that her visiting brother can't get a word in; or the doctor who can cure others but not himself; or the prisoner who notes the incongruity of a visitor who locks herself in every night in her own house being upset that he is locked in his cell every night, or the man who plans to please him self during his life, planning to say words of repentance at the last moment to safe himself: his last words are "Well, I'll be damned", etc.

If we read this dialogue for its autobiographical insight, it shows us that Thomas More--just as he did in The Sadness of Christ and just as he told Cromwell and his daughter Meg--was distancing himself from worldly cares and preparing for death. He was thinking about Jesus in His Passion and how he should imitate his Savior. Many of the anecdotes are about his family, including his wife Alice and adopted ward, Meg Giggs, so he was thinking about them too.

Highly recommended. Scepter only has a few copies left, so order today!

Music from the Court of Charles I

From Linn Records, this two CD set of the complete The Royal Consort of Williams Lawes presents music from the Court of one of England's most cultured monarchs, King Charles I. Per the liner notes:

With Lawes’s Royal Consort, one mustn’t mince words. To put it frankly, this is one of the greatest collections of ensemble dance music ever composed. In it one finds 10 ‘Setts’ or suites of dances boasting a range and depth of expression on a par with Dowland’s Lacrimae, J.S. Bach’s orchestral suites, Rameau’s orchestral dances, even the waltzes of Johann Strauss, Jr. The Royal Consort deserves such a status because of the startlingly individual way Lawes crafts his pieces: in every sett there are astounding moments that excite both mind and body. Not only are you touched by the striking musical invention, but you feel summoned to dance. And all this Lawes achieves with four bowed string instruments and a plucked theorbo.

A theorbo is a kind of lute, developed in the sixteenth century, with an elongated neck and a second peg box as shown on the cover of the cd of Bach and De Visee works at right. It was used for bass continuo in Father Claudio Monteverdi's operas, for example, including Orfeo.

According to Wikipedia, based on the entry in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

Lawes was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire and was baptised on 1 May 1602. He was the son of Thomas Lawes, a vicar choral at Salisbury Cathedral, and brother to Henry Lawes, a very successful composer in his own right.

His patron, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, apprenticed him to the composer John Coprario, which probably brought Lawes into contact with Charles, Prince of Wales at an early age. Both William and his elder brother Henry received court appointments after Charles succeeded to the British throne as Charles I. William was appointed as "musician in ordinary for lutes and voices" in 1635 but had been writing music for the court prior to this.

Lawes spent all his adult life in Charles's employ. He composed secular music and songs for court masques (and doubtless played in them), as well as sacred anthems and motets for Charles's private worship. He is most remembered today for his sublime viol consort suites for between three and six players and his lyra viol music. His use of counterpoint and fugue and his tendency to juxtapose bizarre, spine-tingling themes next to pastoral ones in these works made them disfavoured in the centuries after his death; they have only become widely available in recent years.

When Charles's dispute with Parliament led to the outbreak of the Civil War, Lawes joined the Royalist army and was given a post in the King's Life Guards, which was intended to keep him out of danger. Despite this, he was "casually shot" by a Parliamentarian in the rout of the Royalists at Rowton Heath, near Chester, on 24 September 1645. Although the King was in mourning for his kinsman Bernard Stuart (killed in the same defeat), he instituted a special mourning for Lawes, apparently honouring him with the title of "Father of Musick." The author of his epitaph, Thomas Jordan, closed it with a lachrymose pun on the fact that Lawes had died at the hands of those who denied the divine right of kings: "Will. Lawes was slain by such whose wills were laws." Lawes' body was lost or destroyed and his burial site is unknown.

Happy Birthday, Father Edward Caswall

According to John Julian in the 1907 Dictionary of Hymnology:

Caswall, Edward, M.A., son of the Rev. R. C. Caswall, sometime Vicar of Yately, Hampshire, born at Yately, July 15, 1814, and educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, graduating in honours in 1836. Taking Holy Orders in 1838, he became in 1840 Incumbent of Stratford-sub-Castle, near Salisbury, and resigned the same in 1847. In 1850 (Mrs. Caswall having died in 1849) he was received into the Roman Catholic communion, and joined Dr. Newman at the Oratory, Edgbaston. His life thenceforth, although void of stirring incidents, was marked by earnest devotion to his clerical duties and a loving interest in the poor, the sick, and in little children. His original poems and hymns were mostly written at the Oratory. He died at Edgbaston, Jan. 2, 1878, and was buried on Jan. 7 at Redwall, near Bromsgrove, by his leader and friend Cardinal Newman. Caswall's translations of Latin hymns from the Roman Breviary and other sources have a wider circulation in modern hymnals than those of any other translator, Dr. Neale alone excepted. This is owing to his general faithfulness to the originals, and the purity of his rhythm, the latter feature specially adapting his hymns to music, and for congregational purposes. His original compositions, although marked by considerable poetical ability, are not extensive in their use, their doctrinal teaching being against their general adoption outside the Roman communion.

In other words, Father Caswall was a Catholic, writing hymns for Catholics! English Catholics needed these hymns for their renewed worship and devotion in the nineteenth century. His translations have been influential outside England too, as they are commonly used at Benediction (his translations of St. Thomas Aquinas), for the few Sequences that remain for Sunday Mass (for example, Veni, Creator Spiritus and Pange lingua gloriosi), and during the Stations of the Cross (the Stabat Mater/At the cross her station keeping).

He translated St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Je­su, Rex ad­mi­ra­bil­is for his Lyra Catholica: Containing All the Hymns of the Roman Breviary and Missal, with Others from Various Sources: Arranged for Every Day in the Week, and the Festivals and Saints' Days Throughout the Year: with a Selection of Hymns, Anthems, and Sacred Poetry, from Approved Sources, published in 1849:

O Jesus, King most wonderful,

Thou Conqueror renowned,
Thou Sweetness most ineffable,
In Whom all joys are found!

When once Thou visitest the heart,
Then truth begins to shine,
Then earthly vanities depart,
Then kindles love divine.

O Jesus, Light of all below,
Thou Fount of life and fire,
Surpassing all the joys we know,
And all we can desire!

Thy wondrous mercies are untold,
Through each returning day;
Thy love exceeds a thousand fold,
Whatever we can say.

May every heart confess Thy Name;
And ever Thee adore;
And seeking Thee, itself inflame,
To seek Thee more and more.

Thee may our tongues forever bless;
Thee may we love alone;
And ever in our lives express
The image of Thine own.

Here is the text of the original and here is setting by Palestrina!

At Last! The Irish May Criticize Henry VIII's Marriage to Anne Boleyn!

News from Ireland (via The Irish Times):

A proclamation of 1533 prohibiting criticism of the marriage of Henry VIII to his second wife, Anne Boleyn, after he divorced Catherine of Aragon, is one of almost 6,000 obsolete laws in Ireland that have finally been repealed.

A reward for the capture or death of the “arch traitor” Earl of Tyrone Hugh O’Neill is no longer available, after the 1601 proclamation offer was finally revoked more than 500 years later.

A 1618 proclamation ordering the Irish to depart with all their belongings from lands given to planters during the Plantation of Ulster has also been revoked, as part of an overhaul of Irish laws that began 13 years ago.

In the first paragraph, the writer could be referring to a proclamation of England's Parliamentary act, 25 Hen 8 c 22: "An Act declaring the Establishment of Succession of the King's most Royal Majesty in the Imperial Crown of this Realm", also referred to as the First Succession Act.

The English Parliament went through this process in 1969, removing many of the crucial acts of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I in establishing the Anglican/Protestant Church of England, including the latter's Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity (almost entirely). The Penal Laws against Irish Catholics were repealed in 1920 with the Government of Ireland act (10 & 11 Geo. 5 c. 67) in section Section 5(2) which eliminated: 'any existing enactment by which any penalty, disadvantage, or disability is imposed on account of religious belief or on a member of any religious order'.

Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, Novelist

Ann Applegarth surveys all of the fiction, historical and contemporary by the convert son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson for The Catholic World Report:

Both Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI (when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) have encouraged Catholics to read Lord of the World, Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 novel that eerily predicted the state of the world at the beginning of the 21st century.

Catholics have listened. Back in print and apparently selling well, Benson’s dystopian tale that, as Pope Francis said, depicts “the spirit of the world which leads to apostasy almost as if it were a prophecy,” is generating much talk and not a few articles, including Dorothy Cummings McLean’s pithy commentary in Catholic World Report (January 15, 2014).

But Benson—Hugh, as his family called him—was not a one-novel novelist. During the years from his ordination to the Catholic priesthood in 1904 until his death in 1914, a month shy of his 43rd birthday, he published 16 novels—in addition to writing several non-fiction books, hundreds of homilies, devotionals, plays, apologetics, essays, children’s books, poetry, letters, and introductions to books of other authors!

Should we read Robert Hugh Benson’s other novels, too?

She answers "yes" with a list and brief summary of each novel. I would answer "yes" too, although I have not read all of his novels. Read the rest here.

I do have one recommendation regarding his historical novels set in the English Reformation era: Read The King's Achievement first and By What Authority second. They have common characters and the chronological order is important.

Emeritus Pope Benedict's Honorary Degrees and Sacred Music

From Vatican Radio:

Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI received Doctorates honoris causa on Saturday from the Pontifical John Paul II University of Krakow and the Krakow Academy of Music. The motivation for the honors issued by the University’s Academic Senate specifies five contributions Pope Benedict has made to knowledge and culture: his great respect for the musical tradition of the Church and remarkable sensitivity to the music of faith; the life-long and constant demonstration of a special concern for the noble beauty of sacred music and its proper place in the celebration of the sacred liturgical rites of the Church; his constant insistence on the didactic importance of the via pulchritudinis – the way of beauty – which can become a way of knowing and worshiping God for the modern man; his lifelong commitment to Truth, which strengthens the Christian faith in times of spiritual confusion caused by liberalism, postmodernism and relativism, and his tireless efforts to restore the spiritual dimension of Europe; his kind support for the work of transforming the schools of the Pontifical Academy of Theology into the Pontifical John Paul II University.

Father Benedict had some prepared remarks. In The Spectator, Damian Thompson writes:

One of the finest speeches Benedict XVI ever delivered was about sacred music. It is a small masterpiece, in which Benedict recalls his first encounter with Mozart in the liturgy. ‘When the first notes of the Coronation Mass sounded, Heaven virtually opened and the presence of the Lord was experienced very profoundly,’ he said.

Benedict robustly defended the performance of the work of great composers at Mass, which he insisted was necessary for the fulfilment of the Second Vatican Council’s wish that ‘the patrimony of sacred music [is] preserved and developed with great care’.

Then he asked: what is music? He identified three places from which it flowed. First, the experience of love, opening ‘a new grandeur and breadth of reality’ that inspires music. Second, ‘the experience of sadness, death, sorrow and the abysses of existence’. These open ‘in an opposite direction, new dimensions of reality that can no longer find answers in discourses alone’. Third, the encounter with the divine. ‘I find it moving to observe how, in the Psalms, singing is no longer enough for men — an appeal is made to all the instruments: reawakened is the hidden music of creation, its mysterious language.’

Our musical Pope Emeritus changed liturgical music practices at St. Peter's, as this Crisis article notes, and those changes have reverberated throughout the Church:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was different. He had written an entire book on the music issue. He had written another book on the liturgical question. He had spoken about the subject on many occasions. He never feared the subject and this is for two reasons: 1) he understood the goals of Vatican II and saw that they had been seriously distorted, and 2) he was a trained music (sic) of the highest calibre who understood the role of music in the Roman Rite.

When he became Pope, the changes began and they were relentless. We started hearing chant in Papal liturgy, just a bit at first and then more as time went on. With Summorum Pontificum (2007) he took away the stigma that had been attached to traditional chant by granting full permission to the liturgical structure that had originally given rise to chant. This was deeply encouraging for a generation that was ready to move forward. We started seeing chant workshops fill up. Groups began to form at the parish level. New resources started to be published by independent publishers. A real fire had been lit in the Catholic music world. And it all happened without any impositions or legislation.

The musical program of St. Peter’s Basilica began to attract the attention of serious musicians. A new standard came to be applied to visiting choirs: you must know the basics of Gregorian chant or you cannot sing at St. Peter’s. This was a gigantic decision that fundamentally upset the dynamic that had long developed between Rome and traveling choirs. Now choirs had to learn and discover chant if they hoped to take that long-sought pilgrimage to Rome.

Meanwhile, Joseph Ratzinger’s writings on music were selling more than ever, and having an ever larger influence. Benedict XVI spoke about the topic often in homilies and spontaneous remarks following concerts. He worked to elevate high art to a new status on his travels. His team worked hard to encourage groups that sang for liturgy for his trips to embrace chant and polyphonic music of the Renaissance. It didn’t always work but the progress was obvious.

Read the rest there. The issue that Pope Benedict addressed was that the Church, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, had mistakenly jettisoned our great heritage of beautiful Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphonic Mass settings, and even high classical Masses, like Mozart's Coronation Mass. The fathers at Vatican II had said positively that Gregorian chant should have pride of place in the celebration of the liturgy, and yet I grew up never hearing chant at all--until it became popular as background music and the different chant discs (for Meditation, Relaxation, etc) came out. 

This reminds me of course of that "Agatha Christie Indult" letter, the one sent from England to Pope Paul VI, descrying the elimination of the traditional Latin Mass. Remember that it was signed by many non-Catholics and several musicians and they were concerned of the loss of so much culture:

The rite in question, in its magnificent Latin text, has also inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts - not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians. In the materialistic and technocratic civilisation that is increasingly threatening the life of mind and spirit in its original creative expression - the word - it seems particularly inhuman to deprive man of word-forms in one of their most grandiose manifestations. The signatories of this appeal, which is entirely ecumenical and non-political, have been drawn from every branch of modern culture in Europe and elsewhere.

Perhaps along with the Anglican Ordinariate, this revival in sacred and liturgical music will be one of Pope Benedict's greatest legacies, God bless him!

St. Benedict of Nursia, pray for us!

Purcell and Cowley

We purchased this album of Purcell "catch songs", a cantata set to a poem by Abraham Cowley, and an ode to Saint Cecilia at one of the used record stores in Wichita. The LP was from the Musical Heritage Society, the budget mail-order record company, and the music is performed by The Deller Consort. The Musical Heritage Society licensed the material from Harmonia Mundi, which released the recording as a CD. The theme of the album is that composers like Purcell had to be active both in the secular and the sacred world--the "ale-house and the Chapel Royal, as well as the playhouse and the church."

The songs on A side of the LP combine "strict counterpoint and scatological verse", according to Denis Stevens' liner notes, while the B side contains the more serious works, including the setting of Cowley's poem:

If ever I more riches did desire

Than cleanliness and quiet do require, 

If e'er Ambition did my fancy cheat, 

With any wish so mean as to be great, 

Continue, Heav'n, still from me to remove 

The humble blessings of that life I love. 

Upon the slipp'ry tops of human state, 

The gilded pinnacles of fate, 

Let others proudly stand, and for awhile 

The giddy danger to beguile, 

With joy and with disdain look down on all, 

Till their heads turn, and down they fall. 

Me, O ye Gods, on earth, or else so near, 

That I no fall to earth may fear, 

And, O ye gods, at a good distance seat 

From the long ruins of the great. 

Here wrap'd in the arms of Quiet le me lie; 

Quiet, companion of Obscurity. 

Here let my life with as much silence slide 

As time, that measures it, does glide. 

Nor let the breath of Infamy or Fame 

From town to town echo about my name, 

Nor let my homely death embroider'd be 

With scutcheon or with elegy: 

An old plebeian let me die. 

Alas, all then are such as well as I. 

To him, alas, to him, I fear, 

The face of Death will terrible appear, 

Who in his life flatt'ring his senseless pride 

By being known to all the world beside, 

Does not himself, when he is dying, know, 

Nor what he is, nor whither he's to go.

Abraham Cowley was one of the Metaphysical poets and a friend and admirer of Richard Crashaw. According to this biography:

Poet and essayist Abraham Cowley was born in London, England, in 1618. He displayed early talent as a poet, publishing his first collection of poetry, Poetical Blossoms (1633), at the age of 15. Cowley studied at Cambridge University but was stripped of his Cambridge fellowship during the English Civil War and expelled for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant of 1644. In turn, he accompanied Queen Henrietta Maria to France, where he spent 12 years in exile serving as her secretary. During this time, Cowley completed The Mistress (1647). Arguably his most famous work, the collection exemplifies Cowley’s metaphysical style of love poetry. After the Restoration, Cowley returned to England, where he was reinstated as a Cambridge fellow and earned his MD before finally retiring to the English countryside.

Coming Home Network Newsletter

What a thrill to open my monthly copy of The Coming Home Network Newsletter and see that Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation is offered as a premium for a donation. I presume The Coming Home Network (CHN) chose my book because the featured convert makes some Catholic connections when exploring his family history in England and then reads more about Catholicism in England:

When I was well on the way to being received into the Church, an unexpected form of historical encouragement appeared. Somehow I became aware of Eamon Duffy’s book, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. (Note: This book can be purchased through the CHNetwork by calling 740-450-1175 or online at www.chresources.com. Only a limited quantity is available.) Duffy’s thesis, backed by considerable historical evidence, was that

[L]ate medieval Catholicism [in England] exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people up to the very moment of Reformation. Traditional religion had about it no particular marks of exhaustion or decay, and indeed in a whole host of ways, from the multiplication of vernacular religious books to adaptations within the national and regional cult of the saints, was showing itself well able to meet needs and new conditions. (p. 4)

This came as quite a surprise, because over time I had acquired just the opposite impression: that the English people by the time of the Protestant Reformation were clamoring to be rid of Catholicism. Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that many, if not most, of my English ancestors of the early Reformation period may not have been “intentional Protestants,” that is, people who affirmatively split from existing versions of Christianity. Instead, they were more likely to have had Protestantism forced on them from the top down. Catholicism in England was destroyed, not abandoned.

Supremacy and Survival is more accessible and more available for a premium, I suppose, than The Stripping of the Altars. When Matt Swaim of The Son Rise Morning Show appeared on The Journey Home, the CHN interview program on EWTN, he said I'd be perfect for the show--except that I'm neither a convert nor a revert. Marcus Grodi usually interviews one or the other; Matt suggested I could lapse ever so briefly to qualify, but that's not happening.

St. Thomas More and Conscience (Again)

In a letter to History Today, Hilary Mantel states that Thomas More's "conscience [was] captive to tradition and authority"--as though that were a bad thing. Thomas More's understanding of conscience, its formation, and its decision-making process was that the individual conscience must be responding to God's authority and the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church. I'm presuming now, but Mantel might think of conscience as being captive only to the individual's interpretation of events and actions and being consistent with oneself--what Blessed John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century would call conscience's counterfeit.

More offered Cromwell an explanation of the true meaning of conscience in his June 3, 1535 letter to his daughter Meg about his recent interrogation in the Tower of London. Cromwell was accusing him of a double standard, claiming his conscience was better than a heretic's conscience. More explained that the heretic was not appealing to conscience, which should have led him to follow the Church Jesus founded, but to his own ego, which had led him to reject the truth and develop individual ideas about the Church and salvation:

Whereunto I answered I would not dispute the King's authority, what his Highness might do in such case, but I said that verily under correction it seemed to me somewhat hard. For if it so were that my conscience gave me against the statutes (wherein how my mind giveth me I make no dec­laration), then I nothing doing nor nothing saying against the statute, it were a very hard thing to compel me to say either precisely with it against my conscience to the loss of my soul, or precisely against it to the destruc­tion of my body.

To this Master Secretary said that I had before this when I was Chan­cellor examined heretics and thieves and other malefactors and gave me a great praise above my deserving in that behalf. And he said that I then, as he thought and at the leastwise Bishops did use to examine heretics, whether they believed the Pope to be the head of the Church and used to compel them to make a precise answer thereto. And why should not then the King, since it is a law made here that his Grace is Head of the Church, here compel men to answer precisely to the law here as they did then concerning the Pope.

I answered and said that I protested that I intended not to defend any part or stand in contention; but I said there was a difference between those two cases because at that time, as well here as elsewhere through the corps of Christendom, the Pope's power was recognized for an undoubted thing which seems not like a thing agreed in this realm and the contrary taken for truth in other realms. Whereunto Master Secretary answered that they were as well burned for the denying of that as they be beheaded for deny­ing of this, and therefore as good reason to compel them to make precise answer to the one as to the other.

Whereto I answered that since in this case a man is not by a law of one realm so bound in his conscience, where there is a law of the whole corps of Christendom to the contrary in matter touching belief, as he is by a law of the whole corps though there hap to be made in some place a local law to the contrary, the reasonableness or the unreasonableness in binding a man to precise answer, standeth not in the respect or difference between beheading and burning, but because of the difference in charge of con­science, the difference standeth between beheading and hell.

In his chapter on St. Thomas More in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More ("More and the Heretics"), Richard Rex notes that More--and in this he certainly was a man of his time--was certain that he knew the truth. Catholic Christianity was the truth and no one had the right to deny or ignore the truth. Rex notes that we post-modernists can hardly imagine this certainty (our only certainty would be perhaps that we cannot be certain!). In his role as Henry VIII's Chancellor, he was sworn to assist the Church in finding heresy and he fulfilled that role. More regarded the obdurate heretic as a danger to society, an egoist deciding his own interpretation of God's revelation, and a person in certain danger of damnation. Thus, when More made his appeal to his right to follow his conscience, he asserted that his conscience was responding not to his own interpretation but to the teaching of the universal Church, an authority high above Henry VIII, even if the monarch did take over the Church in England.

On the Acton Institute website, writer Marc D. Guerra sums up More's understanding of conscience well; he was indeed guided by tradition and authority:

Whereas modern doctrines of conscience characteristically emphasize the self-sufficiency of the individual’s judgment, More stresses its communal nature. More, to be sure, recognized the uniqueness of the individual conscience. More was, after all, imprisoned precisely because he could not, in good conscience, swear allegiance to Henry VIII’s oath. But in contrast to the modern claim that the individual can create his own moral values, More saw the “formation of conscience” as “the fruit” of an education “in the truth.” Far from being the arbitrator and creator of its own moral order, the human conscience is in need of conforming to the truth. For More, the formation of conscience is the result of a long process in which one discovers a preexisting created moral order. This was, in some sense, the issue in More’s dispute with Henry. Henry sought to substitute his own law for the “higher law of God and Christ’s Church.” Nothing underscores the profound differences between More’s and the modernist’s understanding of conscience more than this fact: Whereas modern thought views the individual’s conscience as being above all other authorities, More’s conscience testifies to the superiority of the church’s authority to his king’s. More’s refusal to take Henry’s oath was not an act of civil disobedience but, rather, of obedience to truth and thus, in his view, an act of “genuine liberty.”

1776: The Musical

Turner Classic Movies broadcast 1776 on Independence Day. I missed some of it on Saturday but I have seen it before. Of course I know we should always be careful of taking our history from dramatizations like this and we have to grant that they may or may not be attempting to depict history accurately, but this movie and the musical play on which it is based is very disappointing.

It's disappointing in part because the musical numbers are so dull compared to my favorite musicals. Then all the historical inaccuracies pile up--John Adams was not the irritating man he's depicted to be; Martha Jefferson never came to Philadelphia that summer; James Wilson was certainly not the non-entity his character wants to be, and Caesar Rodney was not an old man when the Continental Congress was meeting etc, etc.

The inaccuracy--through omission not commission at least--that irritated me the most was leaving Charles Carroll of Carrollton out among the signers at the end of the movie/play, which were I know only representative of all the signers. Since he was the only Catholic and the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, passing him over seems dramatically and historically foolish.

Turner Classic Movies did make up for this lackluster musical offering with Meredith Wilson's The Music Man later Saturday night. It has clever, rousing, poignant, and beautiful songs, including counterpoint numbers. Even though it's not about Independence Day, it is about brass bands, small-town America, and love. You know, of course, that Marian's song Goodnight, My Someone" is just "Seventy-six Trombones" in waltz time.