Tag: Church History

The Church of England: A Brief (Catholic) History

If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you’ve probably figured out that I’m a grade-A nerd. I love old books and math jokes and I once consoled myself after a terrible football loss by reading a commentary on the Code of Canon Law (Bush Push 2005. I don’t want to talk about it.).

So I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I literally squealed with joy when I was invited to attend an Anglican use Catholic Mass on Thursday. By the (Catholic) priest’s wife, no less! I want to tell you all about the Mass, but I thought we might need some background first to clarify why this liturgy exists and how it connects to Anglicanism and to more mainstream Catholicism. So here you have a brief history of the Church of England1 (from a Catholic perspective, of course) from 1534 to Thursday at 1pm. Now, I’m not a historian, but I’ve studied this period some. I do think the background is necessary to understand the current situation, so I’m going to do my best. If you have to correct me, please be nice.

Courtesy of David M. Luebke

In the early 16th century, the Church was being torn apart like never before. Martin Luther began it all in 1517 by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg. That wasn’t in itself an act of rebellion,2 but it opened the door for the Protestant Reformation. Before long, most of Northern Europe had declared for Luther (or Calvin or Zwingli or anybody but Rome) and France was on the brink. England, though? England was strong. Often called Rome’s most faithful daughter, England had no interest in reformation. King Henry VIII was even declared a defender of the faith after St. Thomas More ghostwrote a tract for him that argued against Protestantism.

But then, tragedy. Henry wanted a divorce.3

Now, to be fair, this was rather a sketchy marriage. Henry had married the wife of his dead brother. Canon law forbids this. But Henry had gotten permission from Rome to marry her, so the marriage was valid. The Church can dispense from her rules,4 after all, just not from God’s rules.5

So Henry was married to a woman who “couldn’t give him a son.”6 Divorce is impossible,7 so Henry had to claim that the marriage had been invalid, that he couldn’t have married his late brother’s wife because the Pope didn’t have the authority to dispense him. Because the Pope didn’t have jurisdiction in England.

And so, because he wanted a male heir,8 Henry declared himself head of the Church in England.

But–and this seems ludicrous to Catholics today but it wasn’t as unreasonable before Vatican I reaffirmed papal infallibility–Henry still wanted to be Catholic. He wanted Mary and the Saints and Mass and Purgatory and really everything but, well, the Church. Henry was decidedly not a Protestant, so when he split, he created a church that was in schism, not a heretical sect.9

And throughout Henry’s lifetime, it stayed pretty darned Catholic. He considered himself an “English Catholic” and repeatedly condemned Protestantism. Without Rome, though, things can devolve rather quickly, and Englishmen were becoming Protestants in dramatic numbers. But the Church itself stayed fairly Catholic in “conservative” Henry’s lifetime.

When he seceded from Rome, Henry appointed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, the head bishop in his church. Unfortunately for Catholics, Cranmer had very Protestant sensibilities. He maintained much of the pomp and circumstance (and Catholic doctrine) during Henry’s lifetime, but when Edward VI took the throne in 1547, all bets were off.

Cranmer’s reforms were fairly gradual, beginning under Henry and continuing until Cranmer’s death in 1556. The great challenge he faced was developing a theology for one united church composed of every type of Christian, from the most traditional Catholics to the most radical Protestants. What resulted was a church defined by compromise and filled with language so vague as to allow for widely varying interpretations.

This is most evident in the gradual development of the language of the Eucharistic liturgy. In the 1549 liturgy, Cranmer changed the Roman “let this bread and wine become unto us the body and blood of Christ” to “let this bread and wine be unto us”—leaving room for physical or symbolic interpretation and widely regarded as a compromise between Catholics and Protestants. Three years later, the liturgy was changed to ask that those who receive the bread and wine “may be partakers of his most blessed body and blood,” language even less oriented toward the doctrine of transubstantiation, yet still without excluding it entirely from the language of the liturgy (although the rubrics very clearly deny it).10

Cranmer’s reforms were significant enough (rejecting purgatory, the Deuterocanonical books, and five of the Sacraments) to make the Church of England a decidedly Protestant church. The basic tenets of the CofE are expressed in the Thirty-Nine Articles, a document written after Cranmer’s execution11 but based largely on his writings.

Then follow a few centuries of great music, beautiful language, and some significant theological confusion (as some eras were more Catholic, others more Protestant). I’m going to skip over all that and jump to the twentieth century, where the Church of England’s roots in compromise begin to bear fruit.

Since its foundation, the CofE’s congregations have varied widely in their interpretation of church teaching. While the structure of services is generally the same, they can look dramatically different depending on how “high” or “low” the congregation is. It’s not just a matter of incense and statues, though, but of core beliefs. Some congregations, for example, believe in transubstantiation and sacramental absolution;12 others wouldn’t touch that popery with a ten foot pole. It’s even possible to find two priests in the same congregation with views on the Eucharist that are diametrically opposed, one saying it is actually Jesus, body, blood, soul, and divinity, the other saying it’s a piece of bread that symbolizes Jesus.

This spectrum of acceptable beliefs has increased divisions in the Church of England for centuries (sometimes but not always resulting in new denominations), but it came to a head in the late twentieth century with disagreement over the ordination of women. Different bishops’ conferences began ordaining women in the 1970s; the 1978 Lambeth conference allowed each region to determine its own policy on women’s ordination, saying, “…the holding together of diversity within a unity of faith and worship is part of the Anglican heritage.”13 The Church of England14 voted to allow women’s ordination (and got it signed off on by the Queen) in 1992.

Not surprisingly, all this didn’t go over so well with the more “Anglo-Catholic” communities, who agreed with Rome that women weren’t capable of holy orders. According to some reports,15 some 500 priests (and many more lay people) left the church over this development, most becoming Catholic.

In response to this mass exodus (and predating much of it), Rome issued a pastoral provision allowing that former Episcopalian priests might petition to be ordained as Catholic priests, even those who were married. Hundreds of priests have been ordained by virtue of this pastoral provision, issued in 1980. Many of these priests were permitted to celebrate the “Anglican use” of the Roman rite, a version of the Roman Catholic Mass that is heavily influenced by CofE language and traditions, based on the Roman Missal (Catholic) and the Book of Common Prayer (Anglican).

When this flow of converts slowed to a trickle, another controversy began to shake the Church of England: the question of homosexuality. Just as members differed widely on matters of faith, they disagreed vehemently on matters of morals. The issue came into the spotlight in 2003 when Gene Robinson was ordained a bishop despite being openly gay and living with his partner. Naturally, this event was extremely divisive in the Episcopal Church,16 with some entire congregations severing ties from the Episcopal Church and forming the Anglican Episcopal Church, a communion of traditional Church of England congregations in America.

In the years since, divisions between liberal and conservative members of the CofE have widened. I’ve been told that some of the more conservative congregations even use the Baltimore Catechism17 in their Sunday school classes. Those communities are far closer to Rome than they are to Canterbury, but their particularly Anglican traditions and liturgy and communities are rich and beautiful. Many have felt drawn to communion with Rome but are rightly reluctant to forsake their Anglican heritage.

Enter Benedict XVI.18 Since 1980, converted CofE priests had been permitted to “retain certain elements of the Anglican liturgy.”19 But this was a concession to a limited group and considered temporary. It allowed for the establishment of Anglican use parishes, but the understanding was that this was a temporary solution. In 2009, in a document called Anglicanorium Coenibus, the Holy Father announced the establishment of ordinariates, canonical groups with essentially the status of a diocese (think Archdiocese for the Military) formed to “allow Anglicans to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church whilst retaining much of their heritage and traditions.”20 These ordinariates are permanent groups intended to preserve perpetually the Anglican use liturgy and the communities with Anglican roots.

So here we have a community of Christians–fully in union with Rome–with all the benefits of Canterbury and of Rome. But you’ll have to wait to hear all about their rules and liturgy and canonical status–my “brief” history of the Church of England is already too long, so the Ordinariate will get its own post. Get excited!

  1. I’m going to use this term or “CofE” throughout–Anglicans and Episcopalians are Church of England, but the words aren’t interchangeable. “Church of England” might not always be correct, either, but it’s the best I can do. [↩]
  2. 91 of the Theses were perfectly fine. Even those that weren’t were his proposal for debate, not his rejection of the Church or the Pope, of whom he speaks very highly in the Theses. [↩]
  3. It’s all so very much more complicated than this. Here’s the CliffsNotes version. [↩]
  4. No meat on Fridays in Lent, you can’t be ordained until you’re 25, etc. [↩]
  5. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not lie, etc. [↩]
  6. She bore him daughters. When a man can’t father sons, that’s his fault, not his wife’s. Y-chromosome and all. [↩]
  7. Lk 16:18 [↩]
  8. Not just an heir–he had an heir. Women can inherit the throne in England and he had a daughter–“Bloody Mary.” [↩]
  9. Schism: denial of Church authority without denying any Church doctrine, e.g. the Eastern Orthodox; heresy: denial of Church doctrine, e.g. Protestantism. “Heretic” is not a derogatory term. All it means is that you disagree with the Catholic Church on a central issue. Protestants disagree with Catholics on many central issues. This does not make them bad or stupid or damned. When I say “heretical,” I am not suggesting that we burn anyone at the stake. [↩]
  10. Search for “partakers” on this page–very interesting. [↩]
  11. He was executed under Queen Mary, the Catholic queen who followed Edward, for his Protestant beliefs. [↩]
  12. The Catholic Church does not recognize these Sacraments as valid in the Church of England. Although their priests do have apostolic succession in theory, the changes to the prayer of ordination were significant enough to make the Sacrament invalid. Without valid Holy Orders, only baptism and marriage can be performed validly. [↩]
  13. http://www.religioustolerance.org/femclrg3.htm [↩]
  14. kind of but not really in charge of all members of the Anglican communion [↩]
  15. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1032526/Church-England-plans-male-superbishops-rebel-clergy-refuse-led-women.html [↩]
  16. the CofE in America [↩]
  17. A traditional Catholic catechism. [↩]
  18. and the point of this whole post [↩]
  19. http://www.pastoralprovision.org/history [↩]
  20. U.K. Ordinariate [↩]