Traditional Catholic Teaching - Lesson 20 - The Catholic Faith in England

Lesson 20 - The Catholic Faith in England

The Old Faith

You may sometimes hear people in England speak of the Catholic Faith as the "Old Faith". It is indeed the old faith of England, so old that nobody knows exactly when it was first brought to this country. We do know that before England was England, when it was still called Britain and was a province of the Roman Empire there were Catholic bishops and the Catholic Church. It was at this time that our first martyr, St. Alban, was put to death. (His name is still perpetuated in the town of St. Albans near London.) There were British bishops at the Council of Aries in France in 314 and there is still on record the letter of filial homage and obedience which they wrote to the Pope.

But the Roman Empire weakened. The Roman Legions were withdrawn from Britain and there came in the Anglo-Saxon pagans from across the North Sea. They drove the Christian Britons up into the mountains of Wales and into the west country. The conversion of England and the English to Christianity had to begin anew. In the year 432 St. Patrick began his conversion of Ireland and within the next hundred years Irish missionaries were already working in Scotland and the north of England. The great St. Columbanus and many others went as apostles all over Europe. Even parts of Italy and France owe their first knowledge of the Faith to these missionaries.

Pope Gregory the Great sends St Augustine, A.D. 597

THE man whom we venerate as the apostle of England was St. Augustine who was sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great in the year 597. His missionaries working from the south and the Irish missionaries working from the north converted the country. There were sometimes quarrels, (naturally). But for nearly a thousand years from that date England was a Catholic country. England in fact was a Catholic country much longer than it has been a Protestant one.

In all this time England was outstanding for its loyalty to Rome. The Anglo-Saxon kings long before William the Conqueror and 1066 endowed a Church in Rome called "St. Mary of the Saxons". A colony of people from England grew up there and to this day the district around St. Peter's is called the "Borgo" which is simply the English word "Borough".

Some of the kings resigned the throne in their old age and went to live in Rome to spend their last days and to die in the shadow of St. Peter's. Missionaries too went out from England, the greatest of them St. Boniface, the apostle of Germany.

In later days there arose those great churches and cathedrals which were built for the Mass and for the teaching of the Catholic Faith and which may still be seen in so many cities of this land.

The Change of Religion — HENRY VIII

So things endured until the time of King Henry VII when there came what is sometimes called the Reformation. The people of the time called it The Change of Religion and that is a more accurate term. The story is well known. The Pope refused to allow Henry to put away his wife and marry another and so Henry declared himself Head of the Church in England.

There were, of course, many things which needed reform in England. There were unworthy priests and unworthy bishops, though, in fact, in England conditions were very much better than in many other parts of the Church. But Henry was not concerned with reform. He was concerned with his own matrimonial wishes and with the plunder of the Church lands and the monasteries,

He summoned the bishops and demanded that they should take an oath to him as Head of the Church in England. They did not want to do so. They debated it for some days, But the only one who stood out to the end was St. John Fisher. When the question was put to the vote the bishops remained silent. But fear got the better of them and they took the oath.

St. John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, refused and was beheaded by Henry.

St. Thomas More, the Chancellor of the Kingdom, one of the holiest and most learned men in Europe refused. He too was beheaded.

The Carthusian monks of London refused. Henry starved them to death.

A handful of others also refused and were imprisoned or executed.

The rest of the kingdom, terrified, took the oath. There were revolts. Forty thousand men rose in rebellion in Lincolnshire. The rebellion was put down. The whole of the North, especially Yorkshire and Lancashire, rebelled. But they too were defeated.

The Attack on the Mass — EDWARD VI

Henry wanted the impossible: to be a Catholic without the Pope. He kept the Mass. He kept most of the Catholic teaching. In fact those who denied the Real Presence were put to death by him, too. But when he died and his son the boy king Edward VI came to the throne Protestantism was imposed. The leading figure was Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, a Catholic priest and bishop who had long been in league with the continental Protestants.

They struck at the Mass. On Whit Sunday, 1549, all churches in England were ordered to throw out the Missal and to use the new Prayer Book. This was in English and contained a communion service from which every mention of its being a true sacrifice had been removed.

The parish priests of Oxfordshire refused. Lord Grey with an army of German mercenary troops hanged them from their own church towers.

The men of the west, Cornwall and Devon, rose in revolt. They demanded that the Mass should be restored and the Blessed Sacrament worshipped again. They were defeated, mainly by an army of Germans and Italian gunners.

The Catholic Faith Restored — Mary

Then the young King died and Mary came to the throne. She was a Catholic, the daughter of Henry and his Catholic queen, Catherine of Aragon. For five years England was restored to the Faith. All was as it had been before except that the stolen Church property was not restored. The nobility kept their plunder. But they felt that their newly acquired wealth would never he safe so long as the Catholic Faith was not stamped out. Mary was a woman of her time and so she too used the weapon of persecution. She put Protestants to death for their religion, mostly members of the stranger sects like the Anabaptists. But her executions left a memory that has never been effaced, Her persecution did some of the greatest harm that has ever been done to the Church in England. Moreover she married the King of Spain. And the Catholic cause came to be thought of as in league with the political enemy of England.

The New Religion — Elizabeth 1

She died after only five years on the throne and was succeeded by Elizabeth, daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn. It was already clear that Elizabeth was Protestant at heart. She left the church at the Elevation of the Blessed Sacrament during the Mass and the bishops, knowing her mind refused to crown her Queen.

One of them with great misgiving finally agreed. She took the oath to preserve the Catholic Faith in England. But she broke it almost immediately. She did not call herself Head of the Church of England but she called herself Supreme Governor which came to the same thing. She demanded an oath of allegiance to herself under this title.

Fifteen of the sixteen bishops refused the oath and were deposed and imprisoned. Kitchen, Bishop of Llandaff, who had taken the oath, refused to consecrate any other bishop and so an Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, was consecrated according to the Protestant rite. The succession of the power of the Apostles was broken.

Elizabeth was very shrewd. The religion of the country was changed. The Mass was called a blasphemous fable. The Sacraments were reduced to two. Prayer to the saints, prayers for the dead, were forbidden. Many other changes were made. But she did not immediately impose any death penalty. She was content to force people to attend the Protestant services, If they refused they were heavily fined and sometimes imprisoned for life. In some places as in Lancashire the priest would say Mass secretly for the people and then all would go to the Protestant service and spend the time laughing and joking. But Elizabeth was patient. She knew that if this went on long enough the people would get used to it. In fact the chief means by which England lost the Faith was the attendance at Protestant services. People did get used to it and the rising generation had forgotten the Mass.

How the Faith was Kept Alive

It was impossible now to train men for the priesthood or to ordain them priests in England. And so Cardinal William Allen established colleges abroad in Rheims, Douai (in France and Flanders), and also in Spain, Portugal and in Rome. The Government announced the death penalty for any seminary priest trained abroad who came to England to exercise his priesthood. In the English College in Rome you may still see painted on the walls pictures of priests being put to death for their priesthood, The young men training for the priesthood would kneel there each morning and see the pictures of their companions who had been put to death for the Faith They would see, too, the empty spaces waiting for pictures of themselves. In spite of it they returned to England, and hundreds of priests and also of laymen and women suffered the horrible death of hanging, drawing and quartering for the Faith,

The Last Catholic King — JAMES II

Politics and nationalism entered again into the picture. The Spanish Armada was regarded as a Catholic attack on England. By the beginning of the seventeenth century England was Protestant. And yet for a hundred years the issue hung in the balance. There were still a considerable number of Englishmen who would have preferred to be Catholics but were not strong enough to bear persecution. In the seventeenth century the Queens of all the English Kings were Catholics. There was still hope that the faith might live. When James 2nd came to the throne in 1685, England had once more a Catholic king. For James was a convert to the Catholic Faith He wished to proclaim toleration for all, Nonconformists as well as Catholics. But James was expelled. William of Orange and Mary the Protestant daughter of James 2nd were brought to the throne and the penal laws were clamped down on Catholics.

The Penal Laws — 18th Century

A CATHOLIC became practically an outlaw. Catholic worship was forbidden. Catholics could hold no office of State, no commission in the army, could not be lawyers. They were in fact excluded from the life of the country. The Catholic cause seemed lost, Here and there in the country a noble family still remained Catholic, paying the heavy fines which ruined them. The villagers who worked for them would remain Catholics, too. But many who would have been Catholics but for the Penal Laws gave up the struggle during the eighteenth century. In the year 1730 there were only five known Catholics in the city of Manchester.

But the vine of Christ was not dead. As the years went by a more generous and tolerant spirit prevailed. Judges began to refuse to direct juries to bring in a verdict of guilty for men accused of being priests. Catholics were tolerated so long as they did not show themselves too openly.

The Catholic Revival

A great change came at the French revolution. There came into England many French priests who had left France because they would not take the oath to the new Church set up by the French revolutionaries. England was politically opposed to the French revolution and these exiled priests were welcomed. The Government even gave them a small pension and actually had Catholic books printed for them at the Oxford University press. To this day there are parishes in England which were first founded by these exiled French priests.

Then came the great immigration from Ireland especially later after the great Irish famine of 1846. In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed by Parliament.

Catholics were once more free and from that time the Church has grown strong until it is as we see it today. The Catholic Church in England has grown from three sources: the old faithful minority of English Catholics; the Irish immigrants; the converts from Protestantism. (Nowadays there are about 14,000 converts every year.) But it has not been an easy road. Through the nineteenth century Catholics in England were mostly the poorest of the poor. Sometimes when they were looking for work they would find a notice up: "No Catholics wanted here". A man once wrote under one of these notices:

"Whoever wrote this wrote it well
For the same is written on the gates of Hell."

It would have been often much easier for them if they had been prepared to give up their Faith. But they remained loyal. They have built up from their own hard-won wages at the cost of many sacrifices their schools and their churches. That is why we are so determined today to be loyal to our own schools and our parishes.

Catholics now number in England about three million and our numbers are growing.

During the time of persecution a Franciscan priest standing waiting to be hanged, his eyes blindfolded, hands tied behind his back and the hangman's rope around his neck. Just before he was hanged he said this prayer:

Jesus convert England. Jesus have mercy on this country. That is the daily prayer of Catholics today.

End of Lesson 20

Supplement A

Supplement B: "Rabbi, I Want To See"

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