English Catholics and the Reformation

The problem for English Catholics after the break with Rome was in essence one of politics: the head of the Universal Church was now no more than a foreign potentate, and as their principle allegiance was to the crown, any lingering attachment to the secular authority of the Pope opened them to a possible charge of treason, especially after the excommunication of Elizabeth I.

Yet it should not be assumed that English Catholics always had an uncritical devotion to the Papacy. In the period before the onset of the English Reformation, when Sir Thomas More, later a Catholic martyr, was advising Henry VIII on the composition of his book, Defence of the Seven Sacraments, a polemic against Luther, he advised the King to tone down some of the arguments in favour of papal authority,

The Pope, as your Grace knoweth, is a Prince as you are. It may hereafter so fall out that your Grace and he may vary whereupon may grow breach of amity and war between you both. I think it best therefore that that place be amended, and his authority more slenderly touched.

I suppose the point here is that pontiffs like Alexander VI and Julius II, were almost entirely worldly figures, who impinged very little on Catholic practice and conscience. It was possible, in other words, to be a sincere Catholic yet distrustful of the Pope. So, those who in the end held to the 'Old Religion' may very well have done so for other reasons than loyalty to Rome.

The real break, the crisis of English Catholicism, if you like, came not in the 1530s but in 1570, with Pope Paul V's bull, Regnans in Excelsis. In forbiding English Catholics to obey Elizabeth and her laws, whether they paid heed or not, Paul effectively forced the government to treat them as a source of potential treason. The new class of 'Recusants', those who now refused to attend their local parish churches, were treated with increasing degrees of severity.

Even so, while there was some plotting against the throne, centering on Mary Queen of Scots, the Catholic alternative to Elizabeth, most of those who continued to adhere to the Old Religion, had little or no interest in treasonable actions; and regardless of papal instructions they effectively trimmed and compromised where they could, rendering unto Caesar what was due to Caesar. There were even Catholics who declared openly at the time of the Spanish Armada that if the enemy landed they would come to the defence of the Queen.

By the end of Elizabeth's reign, and into that of James I the pragmatic tendency in English Catholicism was well-established, expressed most particularly in the views of a new class of priests, known as the Appellants. The argument was now put forward that one could be loyal by both Pope and Crown, because the Pope had no claim on the political allegiance of Catholics. In this it is possible to see a 'national' reaction to the 'internationalism' of the Jesuits. In effect, the Pope's authority in civil matters was denied, just as he continued to be recognised as the supreme arbiter in matters of faith. It's worth emphasising that there was nothing new in this. Even rulers as orthodox as Philip II of Spain placed clear limits on the degree of papal interference allowed within their realms.

It was, in short, possible for Catholics to be loyal subjects of a heretical crown, no matter how much the Pope may have disliked this development. The English Civil Wars were to provide the best demonstration of the new dual tradition, with Catholics high among the Royalists.

Elizabeth and the Catholics

Official attitudes to Catholics in Elizabethan England were, to begin with, fairly fluid, with patterns of conformity and dissent dictated as much by local considerations as by national policy. It was quite possible for people to be Catholic in some aspects of their lives, though not in others; conformist and non-conformist at one and the same time.

This flexibility gave way to more rigid attitudes in 1571, by which time the Church of England had given firm expression to its Protestant doctrine in the Thirty-Nine Articles, while the Council of Trent gave a far stricter definition of what it meant to be a Catholic, forbidding any kind of participation in heretical services.

At that point the whole question moves from one of faith to one of politics: the conflict and contradiction between loyalty to one's faith and loyalty to one's nation. Even so, it is important not to place too much weight on Pius V's Regnans in Excelsis, declaring Elizabeth to be a pretender, as most English Catholics made open and sincere declarations of loyalty to the crown.

Still, for obvious reasons, it made the general position of recusants that much more problematic. The government became more vigilant, though action against priests was restricted to the new cohort emerging from Douai College, and not the surviving native or Marian priests, who were allowed to continue with minimum interference. In 1585 all priests ordained abroad and returning to England were declared guilty of high treason, and those who helped them of a felony. At the same time the pressure of the recusants became more systematic.

It was possible for ordinary people to remain Catholic-and a great many did-though the financial penalties for doing so became ever more burdensome. By the end of Elizabeth's reign in 1603, while it is difficult to give precise figures, Catholics comprised no more than about 2% of the total population in England, more numerous in some places than in others. The most secure were the upper class and noble Catholics, those who could afford to pay the recusancy fines. But the faith survived also among sections of the working population. They survived, with difficulty, yes, but without the wholesale persecution that was the fate of religious minorities on the Continent.

Servant of the State; Servant of France; Servant of God

I've always found Cardinal Mazarin and intriguing and complex figure in much the same fashion as England's Cardinal Wolsey, servants of the state first and of God second.

Was Mazarin a disciple of Machiavelli? He certainly gives all of the outward signs of being so, an exponent of the arts of political realism, not over-troubled, perhaps, by more general ethical considerations. I'm not sure, though, what the alternative would have been to a policy that ensured the integrity of the French state at a point where it was threatened with political fragmentation. He was, moreover, one of the best statesmen and diplomats France ever had, guiding the country through some difficult times.

As far as religion is concerned, well, Mazarin was always more secular than spiritual, a Cardinal who never became a priest. He was no purist and no crusader, and was even prepared to do business with such noted anti-Catholics as Oliver Cromwell. It was all part of his pragmatic character, in which doctrine, and the imperatives of orthodoxy, played very little part.

Yet on his death he left 600,000 livres to help finance a crusade against the Ottoman Turks. Was this an act of a bad conscience? Perhaps; we will never know for certain. What we do know is that he was revered by Louis XIV and died a well-respected figure, unlike his unfortunate English counterpart. Of Mazarin it was said in 1661 "No one left his presence without being persuaded of his reasoning and struck by his graciousness. His intentions were good; he could never say evil of anyone...and was unable to hate even his own enemies." Not a bad epitaph.

Hell and Damnation

The whole concept of hell is so complex, subject to great variations across faiths, but I want to concentrate specifically on the Catholic view.

By their traditional teaching the souls of unbaptised children, all unbaptised children, are neither in heaven nor hell but in limbus infantum. The second limbo, the limbus patrum-the limbo of the fathers-was where the souls of those who died before the advent of Christ were confined, but who were still considered to stand high among the just: this would include, of course, all of the great Jewish patriarchs.

By the Middle Ages the established Catholic position was that all who did not accept Christ as their saviour and-just as crucially-the authority and teaching of the Church, were destined for Hell, understood in a very literal sense. This would embrace heretics as well as heathens, as Innocent III, the greatest of the Medieval popes, made plain when he said 'There is but one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which no one at all can be saved', a dogma confirmed by Boniface VIII in Unam Sanctum, a bull of 1302.

However, all this was changed by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, which met in Rome from 1962 to 1965, and is generally known now as Vatican II. In The Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, one of several documents to come out of this gathering, it is specifically written that

The non-Christian may not be blamed for his ignorance of Christ and his Church; salvation is open to him also, if he seeks God sincerely and if he follows the commands of his conscience, for through this means the Holy Ghost acts upon all men; this divine action is not confined within the limited boundaries of the visible church.

This was followed by Nostra Aetate, which says, amongst other things, that the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in non-Christian religions, and that God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers. The 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church also says that the church has a special relationship to both Jews and Muslims because of the common reverence for the prophet, Abraham. In 1999 Pope John Paul II simply said that Hell was 'absence from God'. The 'presence of God' thus must be seen to embrace both Jew and Gentile.