The Rosary and Anachronism

I noticed this post on the English Historical Fiction Authors page about the use of beads in prayer and the term "rosary":

The image of a Catholic kneeling in prayer, rosary in hand seems timeless. Having a Dark Ages character rub the beads while murmuring a prayer wouldn't be an anachronism, would it?

Yes and no. Christians, and people of other faiths such as Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, have used beads to keep track of the prayers they were repeating. In the fourth century, Egyptian Abbot Paul used 300 pebbles that he would drop. (Would picking up all those little stones count as penance, too?)

By the seventh century, at least some of the faithful used strings of beads.

The author notes that the term "Rosary" was not used in English until 1547. 

Reading this post reminded me of an historical anachronism I found in a novel, Leonardo's Swans, set in Renaissance Italy. A character prays the Rosary and ends the decades with the Fatima prayer:  "O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of Your Mercy". That prayer dates from the early twentieth century so a person in that era would not have added it to the recitation of the Rosary.

Another note for thinking about how Catholics have prayed the Rosary through the centuries: the Ave Maria ("Hail Mary") was just the two verses from St. Luke's Gospel, the first chapter (28 and 42) with the addition of the name Mary: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee (the Angel's greeting) and Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb (her cousin Elizabeth's greeting). The second part--Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death--was a later addition, as was the name Jesus at the end of the second verse.

Anne Winston-Allen wrote Stories of the Rose, published by Penn State University Press, to trace the development and popularity of the Rosary prayer throughout the medieval period. Nathan Mitchell picks up the story of the Rosary and its importance to Catholic identity during the Counter- or Catholic Reformation period in his book The Mystery of the Rosary.

Stephen Langton and the Magna Carta

King John sealed and accepted the Magna Carta on June 15, 1215. This article by Ed West from The Catholic Herald contends, based on a study published by Thomas Andrew, that the 800th anniversary celebrations of this great event are not paying enough attention to the Catholic Church's contributions to this document:

“No account of the Magna Carta can be complete without reference to the Church. Indeed, given the prominence placed on the principle of ecclesiastical liberty within the text, no account of the Magna Carta should even begin without acknowledging the Church’s role in its formation. And yet popular thinking seems all too willing to ignore it altogether. While academic scholarship has produced some notable studies into the theological background of the Archbishop of Canterbury, material aimed at the general public has largely failed to recognise the contribution of Christian theology or the Church in the formation of the Magna Carta. When the British Library ran a series of events exploring the 800 year-old roots of ‘Britain’s struggle for freedom [and rights'] . . . [the] contribution of the Church was all but ignored. And as the professor of political science Cary Nederman points out, while commentators will often pay lip service to the principles of ecclesial liberty enshrined in the first clause of the Magna Carta, this is generally done with the attitude of someone fulfilling a formal requirement, before they can move on to the meatier parts of the text.”

To miss the role played by the Church is to “miss a crucial part of the Magna Carta’s story”, he argues. “This is particularly true of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was instrumental not only in negotiating the Charter of 1215, but also in the important reissue of 1225 under Henry III, which confirmed the Magna Carta’s place in history. Perhaps more important than this, however, is that a failure to acknowledge the Christian theological context within which the Magna Carta arose is to miss out on an understanding of some of the most important roots of our political and intellectual heritage.”

West points out that the contributions of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, were crucial:

In particular Andrew addresses the unsung hero of Magna Carta, Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton, who played a huge part in drawing up the treaty and implementing it.

Langton was a strange and unusual choice for the role; he was the former tutor to Pope Alexander III, and was a rather otherworldly scholar who wrote page upon page of totally impenetrable commentary on the Bible. However, there was a theme in his later writing, much of which seemed to focus on the bad kings of the Old Testament who broke God’s law and who therefore had terrible things done to them. Biblical kings, he wrote, had a book of laws written down by the priests; today’s kings though ignore the advice of priests and rule without restraint. The archbishop gave lectures in which he attacked these modern rulers who tax not out of necessity but greed and vanity, and where he said kingship was a punishment to mankind.

Read the rest of The Catholic Herald article here and the entire Theos study by Thomas Andrew here.
 

We should also remember that the Pentecost sequence Veni, Sancte Spiritus is usually attributed to Stephen Langton--and that, in keeping with his biblical scholarship, Langton is usually credited with dividing the books of the Holy Bible into chapters and verses. 

St. Thomas More's Ward, Margaret Giggs Clement

On June 10, 1537, Blessed Thomas Green, choir monk, and Blessed Walter Pierson, laybrother, both of the London Charterhouse, died from starvation in Newgate Prison. 

As we are in the midst of the anniversaries of the deaths of the Carthusians, chained and pinioned in the Newgate prison and thus dying of dehydration and starvation because they would not swear the Oaths of Succession and Supremacy, we should remember Margaret Giggs Clement. She was St. Thomas More's ward and one of the most learned women in England, educated and fostered in his household. Her specialty was algebra!

As much as More valued her intellectual attainments, I presume he might have admired even more highly her great, dangerous, audacious, and humble acts of charity in May and June 1537, as the Carthusians suffered in prison. This website describes her loving charity:

But Henry was bothered. He feared more rebellion from his intransigently Catholic people. Although he had not yet allowed the country to drift too far into heresy, the sensus catholicus of the people was outraged by his actions. He could not inflame such rage by another display of martyrdom. And so the Carthusians remained in Newgate. They remained, unfed and unattended. They were left to rot, and rot they did. Their names? John Davy, Thomas Green, Thomas Johnston and Richard Bere (choir monks) and William Greenwood, Robert Salt, Walter Peerson, Thomas Scryven, Thomas Reding, and Willam Horne (conversi, or brothers). Bound hand and foot, iron collars about their throats, they were chained to posts in a single cell and abandoned. Margaret Clement, the adopted daughter of St Thomas More, for a while managed to gain entrance to the cell (largely on account of the fact that her husband was physician to the King — and due to her disguise, as a milk-maid), and there fed them what food and water she could, and cleaned them for their own filth. This was discovered and she then attempted to find a way in from above, breaking through the roof of their cell and lowering food to their mouths. Eventually, too, this was not possible.

And so the good fathers and brothers died together in that dark and fetid place, one by one in prayerful silence, abandoned by Man but not by God. Greenwood, then Davy, then Salt; Peerson and Green upon the same day, mid-June; Scryven and Reding some days later. Somehow, Richard Bere (the nephew of a former Abbot of Glastonbury) survived until August 9th. Astonishingly, Thomas Johnson was still alive by September 20th, some sixteen weeks after his incarceration. He was removed to the Tower of London where he languished for a further two-and-a-half years before being martyred at Tyburn in the company of St Thomas More's son-in-law, Giles Heron, on 4th August 1540. These are all accounted Blessed by the Church. May they all pray for us who are unworthy of them.

Margaret Giggs Clement died in exile 35 years to the day of St. Thomas More's martyrdom. On her deathbed she reported seeing those blessed martyrs of the Charterhouse at her bedside, according to this website: 

But the time had now come that God had appointed to reward her for her good works done to the Fathers of the Charterhouse. He visited her with an ague which held her nine or ten days, and having brought her very low and in danger, she received all the sacraments with great devotion, and being desirous to give her blessing to all her children who were all present except her Religious daughters and one more that remained at Bruges with her husband, she caused her to be sent for in all haste. Wednesday being now come, which was the last day before she died, and asking if her daughter were come, and being told no, but that they looked for her every hour, she made answer that she would stay no longer for her, and calling her husband she told him that the time of her departing was now come, and she might stay no longer, for there were standing about her bed the Reverend Fathers, Monks of Charterhouse, whom she had relieved in prison in England and did call upon her to come away with them, and that therefore she could stay no longer, because they did expect her, which seemed strange talk unto him. Doubting that she might speak idly by reason of her sickness, he called unto her ghostly Father, a Reverend Father of the Franciscans living in Mechlin, to examine and talk with her, to whom she constantly made answer that she was in no way beside herself, but declared that she still had the sight of the Charterhouse monks before her, standing about her bedside and inviting her to come away with them, as she had told her husband. At the which they were all astonished.

Edward Short Interviews Paul Shrimpton

Newman scholar Edward Short interviews Paul Shrimpton for The Catholic World Report (Short had previously reviewed Shrimpton's book for The Weekly Standard). Two questions piqued my interest: a look at other books about Newman and university education and a discussion of the misunderstanding of Newman's purposes and achievement in founding the Catholic University in Ireland:

CWR: You mention a few highly regarded studies in The “Making of Men”—those by Fergal McGrath, for example, and A.D. Culler. How does your study differ from those? Are there other scholars from whom you have benefited in your work on Newman?

Shrimpton: Fergal McGrath’s Newman’s University (1951) is an impressive piece of scholarship, and it has been the definitive work on the Catholic University for 60 years, but it does have important gaps. McGrath says nothing about Newman’s previous educational activity in Oxford; he does not really give a picture of day-to-day life at the Catholic University while Newman was rector (which is surprising, because the book is full of detail); and he says very little about what happened after Newman’s departure. I was able to fill in the gaps using the archival material that McGrath could not find or did not know about, and so bring out the pastoral dimension of Newman’s vision.

The other major study, Dwight Culler’s Imperial Intellect (1955), focuses on Newman’s idea of a liberal education and his theory of knowledge, but the section dealing with Dublin is actually quite short. A lot of new material has appeared since the studies of Culler and McGrath were published; and the development of the history of higher education means that we can now put the subject within a broader context.

Besides the leading Newman scholar, Ian Ker, I have drawn ideas from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and the historian of education Sheldon Rothblatt. Of course, I have benefitted in countless ways from many others, and I have credited their input in my copious footnotes and bibliography.

CWR: Two vulgar errors dog Newman and his educational work. One, that he was an advocate for a kind of education for the sake of education, with no concern for the practical implications of education; and two, that his work in Dublin with the Catholic University was an immitigable failure. What do you have to say about these two misconceptions?

Shrimpton: In the first place I think Newman was very much alive to the practical side of education. I think that few people today realize that the most successful faculty of the Catholic University—by far—was the medical faculty: when the Catholic University Medical School was absorbed into University College Dublin in 1909, it was the largest medical school in the country. Newman had a good understanding of the dynamics of science and its need for “elbow room”: you can see that in some of his lectures in the Idea of a University. He set up the faculty of science in Dublin 20 years before Maxwell opened the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge; he had chemistry and physics laboratories and ensured that the library was well-stocked with scientific papers and journals, he offered scholarships and prizes for science students, and he urged the scientists at the university to undertake research. And the chemistry laboratory was not just for medical students or those doing pure scientific research, but also for practical purposes—agriculture, mining, metallurgy, bleaching, even brewing and sugar-boiling and paper-making. He also tried to set up a faculty of law, though he did not succeed. But despite all this, Newman believed that a university “should be formally based (as it really is), and should emphatically live in, the Faculty of Arts.”

It is true that the Catholic University failed to take off; but it does not follow that this was Newman’s fault. In fact the venture was simply impossible: no one could have made it work. Ireland was devastated after the Great Famine of the 1840s; the British Government would not give the university either a charter or an endowment; there was no tradition of university education among Irish Catholics, and people failed to understand what it meant; Irish society was deeply divided politically, and clericalism and anti-clericalism were prevalent too. Interestingly, Newman was sanguine about the long-term prospects of the university. On leaving Dublin he remarked, “It does not prove that what I have written and planned will not take effect sometime and somewhere because it does not at once. […] When I am gone, something may come of what I have done at Dublin.” He also explained that the Dublin “disaster” fitted a pattern that was not man’s, but of a higher order: “It is the rule of God’s Providence that we should succeed by failure.”

Read the rest there.

Why Do I Remain a Catholic? Corpus Christi!

Today is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, whom I receive sacramentally in Holy Communion at Holy Mass. On Thursday, June 4, our Extraordinary Form of the Latin Liturgy of the Roman Rite community at the parish of St. Anthony of Padua celebrated Holy Mass and then processed around a block with the Blessed Sacrament before concluding with Benediction in the church. We chanted the first four verses of Pange Lingua as we processed in the evening sunlight and concluded with the Tantum Ergo once back in the church--with a rousing "Holy God We Praise Thy Name" as the recessional. The Knights of Columbus honor guard was there too!

Pange, lingua, gloriósi

Córporis mystérium,

Sanguinísque pretiósi,

Quem in mundi prétium

Fructus ventris generósi

Rex effúdit géntium.

Nobis datus, nobis natus

Ex intácta Vírgine,

Et in mundo conversátus,

Sparso verbi sémine,

Sui moras incolátus

Miro clausit órdine.

In suprémæ nocte coenæ

Recúmbens cum frátribus

Observáta lege plene

Cibis in legálibus,

Cibum turbæ duodénæ

Se dat suis mánibus.

Verbum caro, panem verum

Verbo carnem éfficit:

Fitque sanguis Christi merum,

Et si sensus déficit,

Ad firmándum cor sincérum

Sola fides súfficit.

TANTUM ERGO SACRAMÉNTUM

Venerémur cérnui:

Et antíquum documéntum

Novo cedat rítui:

Præstet fides suppleméntum

Sénsuum deféctui.

Genitóri, Genitóque

Laus et jubilátio,

Salus, honor, virtus quoque

Sit et benedíctio:

Procedénti ab utróque

Compar sit laudátio.Amen.

The Thursday after Trinity Sunday is traditionally the date of this feast (as Pope Francis observed it at the Vatican), but in the United States it is being celebrated today. There was a beautiful connection with the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary on Corpus Christi Thursday, since the fifth mystery is the Institution of the Eucharist.

In England before the Reformation there was tremendous devotion to the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament--although the laity did not often receive Holy Communion. English Catholics eagerly embraced the feast of Corpus Christi with processions and adoration--and the cycle of Mystery Plays depicting salvation history from the Old Testament to the New. More about that background from a previous year here.

Inspired by a post by Tod Worner on the the Patheos Catholic Channel, Elizabeth Scalia has asked other Catholic bloggers to post an answer to the question: Why Do I Remain a Catholic? I am not unique among those answering the question when I say that the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is one of the main reasons I am a practicing Catholic. (#WhyRemainCatholic)

In keeping with my interest in Church History, however, I would say that another reason I remain a practicing Catholic is that the past has demonstrated, even to historians not sympathetic to her cause like Thomas Babington Macaulay for example, that we may face hard times in the Church today but the Church has faced harder times and greater dangers before from enemies within and without. Except that the Church has been led and protected by Jesus and inspired by the Holy Spirit, we would have failed completely a long time ago. I do not fear Church history and in fact it helps me face Church presence with Hope--not pollyanna, cover-it-up, ignore that man behind the curtain folly--but real Hope. Especially because of our troubles in the past, I am confident in the midst of the troubles in the present. If we survived Roman persecution, the Renaissance popes, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, etc, etc, we will survive--Christ has promised; He fulfills His promises.

The history of Catholicism in England demonstrates this reason perfectly. Catholicism should have been eradicated completely from the country by the eighteenth century. Between fines, imprisonment, martyrdom, and other penal and recusant laws, every Catholic in England should have become an Anglican and given up the Faith. But Catholics did not abandon the Faith; missionary priests kept coming, the laity kept hiding them, and the Catholic community endured. Bringing this post back to the theme of Corpus Christi, here is a link to a recording of the great sequence for the feast, Lauda Sion, with a handout including the Latin original, a literal translation--and St. Robert Southwell's translation in English.

Why did Catholics remain during English persecution? Because of Corpus Christi!

Father Gerard, SJ in Historical Fiction

From the English Historical Fiction Authors blog, English historical fiction author Linda Root writes about how Father John Gerard, SJ, started taking over a novel she was working on:

I had never heard of John Gerard until I was adding finishing touches to my work-in-progress. The novel interjects a fictional Scottish aspect into the Gunpowder Treason. A mystery surrounding the accountability of Lord Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, for allowing the plot to remain undetected until the Eleventh Hour sent me exploring the impact of the conspiracy on the Jesuit mission to England.

Almost any historical novelist lured into that last wee bit of clarifying research before declaring a novel finished will have faced the dilemma created by a pestiferous fact challenging the novel’s premise. Do we go on, or do we set the current work aside and begin anew, perhaps with an entirely different story? What action should be taken when just before we type the words ‘c’est fin’, we uncloak a larger than life character whose exploits tarnish our protagonist? While we are not historians and can invoke the principle of artistic license and continue, it is often difficult to put the new character aside. The word that comes to mind is ‘sequel.’

I was well into my recent work In the Shadow of the Gallows, featuring Daisy Kirkcaldy and her husband, Will Hepburn, when I realized the priest I had written into the story sounded incredibly like the Jesuit John Gerard of my research, one of the few Jesuits of the English mission who survived the aftermath of November 5, 1605. The more I wrote, the larger his part in the tale became until I faced the prospect of marketing a tome. In today’s market, a historical novel the size of the Los Angeles Metropolitan telephone directory is doomed. The solution was to shave his role into something manageable and promise myself to do justice to his exploits in my next book in the series. In my case, I call it Deliverance of the Lamb.

Fortunately, in dealing with Father Gerard, there is a plethora of material on which to base a sequel. After his final flight from England in May 1606, a high-ranking Jesuit recognized the potential of using his life story as a recruitment tool. Gerard was ordered to document his life story in writing. The original was written in Latin, but it has since been translated into English and embellished with excellent notes. Anyone who fears an autobiography written by a cleric in 1611 will be tedious drivel is in for a shock.

I certainly agree with her, although I don't know whether or not she read the same edition of his autobiography as I did (from Ignatius Press):

Even the Gunpowder Plot Society calls Father John Gerard, SJ, "one of the most fascinating of the Jesuit priests in England".

Reading his memoir of his time in England as a missionary priest, I can see why--and in this Year of Faith, he provides a magnificent example of absolute trust in the Providence of God. As Father Gerard hides, finds places for other priests to hide, wears disguises, works to convert fallen away Catholics and sympathetic Anglicans, he is always reliant on God's protection and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He describes his efforts to convince potential converts as never being his own successes, but inspired by the Holy Spirit. Father Gerard endures torture, experiences danger and discomfort, and enjoys comfort and safety, all with the same spirit of faith in God, love for the Church and the people he converses with, and hope that everything he does in the mission for the good of others will be rewarded with success. Father Gerard is even concerned for the wellbeing of the gaoler when he escapes from the Tower, doing all he can to divert blame from the man and his wife! He writes vividly and directly of his efforts and also of those who suffered martyrdom: St. Anne Line, Blessed Edward Oldcorne, St. Nicholas Owen, and several others. His memoir also highlights the Catholics who suffered fines and imprisonment, arrest and questioning, especially the many women who ran their households as safehouses and often yearned for the religious life (for which they had to go into exile, of course).

The Unintended English Reformation

The Longbows and Rosary Beads blog traces the changes in religious practice in England through the reigns of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, not ignoring the Interregnum and Protectorate. Then the post addresses the last Stuart and the Hanoverians:

During the subsequent reigns of Queen Anne and the four Hanoverian King Georges, religious life in Britain took a downward spiral. Everyone was sick of religious infighting, and just threw up their hands with almost all the experiments except a luke-warm state-run Anglicanism that was more a matter of social status than religious belief. Certainly, there were some devout Anglicans who took their religion seriously, including King George III, but they seemed to be the exception instead of the rule. Indeed, the spiritual vacuum was opening ever wider, creating an apathetic society that gradually became more dependent on nationalism for its identity.

A good example of this is when the British captured Quebec, they took down a Catholic French statue of St. John the Baptist and erected on of British General James Wolfe. Meanwhile, Westminster Abbey, once the site of saints and kings, had since become a resting of predominately “secular saints.” While I have nothing against Gen. Wolfe or the present residents of the Abbey, the embrace of purely secular culture was nothing more than a blatant disconnect. One might “drink like a Londoner” and “swear like a Briton” and it was considered normality, but religion became more-or-less a thing viewed as hypocrisy by the masses.

In the British military, a moving microcosm of British society, religion sunk to an all-time low. Much of this was because upper-crust Anglican chaplains tended to be out-of-touch with the men, and were there only to provide some sense of outward structure. But few were willing to put their lives on the line for their men, and viewed it as merely another job for a salary as opposed to a mission for the salvation of souls. Of course, there were exceptions here as well, among Anglicans and other Protestant ministers of the gospel. But again, the problem remained, because the clergymen were seen as merely another wing of the secular authorities. Indeed, history shows that for a church to truly make a difference, it has to be independent of the state for its own safety.

Read the rest there. As the author notes, Henry VIII may not have intended that any religious changes in worship or devotion would take place, but they started during his reign once he identified the Church in England with the Empire of England with himself as the Caesar-Pope. G.W. Bernard, in his 2007 book from Yale University Press, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church, argues for more intentional change in Henry's actions, particularly the Dissolution of the Monasteries:

Henry VIII’s reformation remains among the most crucial yet misunderstood events in English history. In this substantial new account G. W. Bernard presents the king as neither confused nor a pawn in the hands of manipulative factions. Henry, a monarch who ruled as well as reigned, is revealed instead as the determining mover of religious policy throughout this momentous period.

In Henry’s campaign to secure a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which led him to break with Rome, his strategy, as Bernard shows, was more consistent and more radical than historians have allowed. Henry refused to introduce Lutheranism, but rather harnessed the rhetoric of the continental reformation in support of his royal supremacy. Convinced that the church needed urgent reform, in particular the purging of superstition and idolatry, Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries and the dismantling of the shrines were much more than a venal attempt to raise money. The king sought a middle way between Rome and Zurich, between Catholicism and its associated superstitions on one hand and the subversive radicalism of the reformers on the other. With a ruthlessness that verged on tyranny, Henry VIII determined the pace of change in the most important twenty years of England’s religious development.

So that would date the "via media" vision or theory of the Church of England, not to Elizabeth I's reign, but to Henry VIII's reign. He was determining what to keep and what to lose of late medieval Catholicism in England: the monasteries and the shrines were to go, but the Mass and the sacrificial priesthood were to stay, thus making Catholicism in his own image. I have not read that book by G.W. Bernard, but I have read his 2012 book, pictured to the right, in which Bernard contends that any clerical corruption in the monasteries or at the shrines was already known within in the Church, and was the object of reform and renewal. What Henry did with the suppression of the monasteries and destruction of the shrines was correct the problem by eradicating it completely, or at least what he and Cromwell and some others identified at its source. But that meant that England lost its "religious" life (no monks, nuns, or friars fulfilling their particular and essential roles and charisms) and part of the source of its vitality: the devotion to the saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary, pilgrimage, and prayer. While Henry took advantage of the vulnerabilities of the Church, he did not realize that he was vitiating its vitality. His "via media"--just as Blessed John Henry Newman recognized in the mid-nineteenth century--was a razor's edge too fine to balance on. 

480 Years Ago Today: St. Thomas More to his Daughter Meg

Thomas More wrote to his daughter Meg on June 3, 1535 describing the latest interrogation he'd been called to in the Tower of London. He had not been questioned about his response to the Succession and Supremacy since late April 1535 (he wrote to Meg on May 2). Cromwell and the others wanted him to reveal why he wouldn't swear the oaths:

To this it was said by my Lord Chancellor and Master Secretary both that the King might by his laws compel me to make a plain answer there­to, either the one way or the other. 

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. 

Cromwell tried to compare More's conscience to the consciences of the heretics which More had investigated as Chancellor:

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. 

This is crucial to our understanding of More's integrity, as Richard Rex noted in his chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More: when More investigated charges of heresy, Rex notes, he referred to the egotism of the heretic, interpreting The Holy Bible idiosyncratically and ignoring the authority of the Church. He was acting upon his conscience as formed by the Church, not his own view and interpretation. The Acton Institute blog offers another summary of this distinction, commenting several years ago on The Last Letters of Thomas More edited by Father Alvaro De Silva:

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.”

More makes this point in a long, artful letter in which he relates to his daughter the story of “Company.” The letter opens with Margaret urging her father to take Henry’s oath in order to regain his freedom. More proceeds to tell her about Company, “an honest man from another quarter,” who cannot agree with the questionable verdict rendered by his fellow eleven jurors. Angered that Company is stubbornly getting in the way of their decision, the eleven urge him to be “Good Company” and agree with their verdict. Open to the possibility of correction, Company says that while he already has considered the matter, he would like the eleven “to talk upon the matter and tell him … reasons“ he should change his mind. After the jury declines his offer, Company decides to keep to his own company; otherwise, ”the passage of [his] poor soul would passeth all good company.“ As More reminds Margaret, he himself ”never intended (God being my good lord) to pin my soul to another man’s back … for I know not whether he may hap to carry it."

More would again explain his views on conscience when at trial on July 1, 1535.

May 30, Tyburn Tree in 1582 and 1612

Saint Luke Kirby, Blessed William Filby, Blessed Lawrence Johnson, and Blessed Thomas Cottam SJ, four priests and martyrs suffered at Tyburn Tree on May 30, 1562.  More about them here.

Thirty years after St. Luke Kirby and his companions suffered at Tyburn, two more Catholic priests joined the blessed clouds of witnesses at the site of martyrdom: Blessed William or Maurus Scott, OSB and Blessed Richard Newport. Read more about them here.

Holy and blessed martyrs of England, pray for us!

Samuel Pepys and the Popish Plot

Accusations of treason against Samuel Pepys were a side product of the Popish Plot: he was accused of being a Catholic (treason enough in England then) and of providing naval secrets to France. The two authors provide tremendous detail about Pepys' accuser, John Scott, the English justice system, the conspiracy against Pepys, and the defense Pepys is able to muster through his contacts and connections. The main connection against him, however, was that his mentor was Charles II's Catholic brother and heir, James, the Duke of York. The main thrust of the Popish Plot was to arrest, try, and execute Jesuit and other Catholic priests, primarily to harm the Jesuits, and Titus Oates took the lead as witness in that project.

The conspiracy against Samuel Pepys was led by John Scott, whose back story almost hijacks this book, as Long and Long trace his history, enumerate his crimes and scams, and detail his difficulties as a witness: he began to get confused about which lies he had told the Court. His animus against Pepys is part of the wider conspiracy against the Duke of York, as Parliament debated the Exclusion Act to keep the Catholic heir from the throne.

Long and Long dedicate a chapter to a Catholic layman who tried to mount the same kind of defense as Pepys, Richard Langhorne, who did have strong links to the Jesuit mission in England since he was their attorney, managing practical matters. Langhorne did not have the same connections Pepys had, however, and he was manifestly a Catholic, but he attempted throughout his trial to show that Titus Oates and William Bedloe were not reliable witnesses and could not have witnessed events as they said, for example, because they were somewhere else on certain dates. Langhorne tried to point out inconsistencies in their testimony but according to Long and Long, the court prevented many of those attempts. His witnesses were also roughed up and threatened.

This untold story has been thoroughly told but since the authors focus so much on the details of Pepys' efforts to make contacts to build his defense, including all the difficulties of conflicting interests, mail service, and diplomatic entanglements, when the case against him falls apart, the resolution is anti-climactic. Traitor to the Crown needed a summing up to identify the consequences of the Popish Plot, the inadequacies of the English judicial system, and what it means for a country and people when fear of the stranger (in this case, Catholics) overwhelms both the legislature and the judiciary--and how it can lead to accusations against the innocent and the unlikely. In a 2007 review in The Telegraph for example, Nicholas Shakespeare made the connections I wanted to see in the book:

For five impossibly happy years, I lived in Wiltshire in a converted Catholic chapel that Italian masons built in 1695 to house temporarily the relics of two early Christian martyrs, the curiously named saints, Primus and Secundus. Recent excavations have exposed a passage 150 yards long that possibly served as an escape route for harried priests who worshipped in what was my bedroom. As the father and son authors of this intriguing book remind us: "To be converted to Catholicism, to attend mass or to possess Catholic apparatus was illegal. Catholic priests were forbidden entry into England; any found within England could be executed."

We're always inventing dragons. In the 1960s, the Reds were under the bed. In the late 17th century, Papists were feared to be in the bed. "If the Pope gets his great toe in England," believed one MP, "all his body would follow." Catholics formed just five per cent of the population, but their hysterical persecution by a Protestant Whig Parliament has unsettling echoes of the Mexican witch-hunt depicted in Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory.

In the summer of 1679, there unfolded "the great Holocaust of the Plot", in J P Kenyon's phrase. The invention by Titus Oates - a braying, dish-faced homosexual ex-Jesuit - of a plan to kill Charles II and replace him with his Catholic brother the Duke of York, ignited "a powder-keg of suspicion and anxiety".

Priests were rumoured to be seen tossing fire-bombs through windows to start another Fire of London. Tracts warned of "troops of papists ravishing your wives and daughters, dashing your little children's brains out against the walls". No one proved more adept at whipping up the London mob than the sour, thin-lipped Earl of Shaftesbury. In one parade, a wax pope attended by devils and nuns was set on fire. "For added realism the effigy was filled with cats, which screeched as the flames took hold."

A survey of several Pepys related websites reveals that this untold story now told has not had much influence on summaries of his biography. This episode is usually dismissed as a brief imprisonment in the Tower of London on charges of giving naval secrets to the French--without any connection to the Popish Plot or anti-Catholicism in English history.