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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 22, 2021 15:56:31 GMT
It's three years old, but I recently read this First Things article where Peter Hitchens argues that the received history of the English Reformation is biased unfairly towards Catholicism. I think he makes some interesting points. Could it be that one historical caricature has been replaced by its opposite? www.firstthings.com/article/2018/06/latimer-and-ridley-are-forgotten
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 29, 2021 18:22:51 GMT
To begin - Hitchens quite characteristically equates English nationalism and Protestantism in such a way that he doesn't really "get" the points at issue. (An Irish example would be Des Fennell's remarks about Protestantism and Irish nationality which treats as completely irrelevant the question of whether Protestantism might actually be true; for him a true patriot should be Catholic because Catholicism is bound up with the maintenance of Irish identity.) Hitchens sees Catholicism simply in terms of papal supremacy, which he regards as political, and ignores the issues of doctrine. (He talks as if all Elizabethan Anglicans were Catholics in doctrine and ignores the Calvinists and evangelicals who made up a large portion thereof - nor does he mention that the Protestant Tudors persecuted Anabaptists and Puritans.) He likes Anglicanism because it is a fudge. Personally, I believe it would have been far better for the English to have become consistent Puritans and Calvinists rather than that gallimaufray which is the C of E. The fact that he prefers Cranmer, who was a despicable opportunist and coward, over Latimer who was a consistent Puritan and was quite capable of denouncing the nobility for injustice to the poor and criticising Henry VIII to his face, is very revealing. (I am perfectly aware BTW that Latimer also preached while a Catholic martyr was being burnt alive, and that if England had experienced a Scottish-style Reformation the cathedrals would have been demolished - as in St Andrew's - or turned into parish churches.) That said, hitchens does have a point. Because Protestant culture was the dominant one in the Anglophone world well into the C20, the Catholic critique/narrative is seen as subversive and taken up not only by actual and lapsed Catholics, but by antiestablishmentarians of various types. (This is true to some extent of the Protestant version as well - I do not think the Reformers would be pleased at the terms in which Diarmuid McCulloch praises them.) The Protestant/Whig narrative, except in a very secularised version, is difficult to accommodate as one of several (also in the C of E case because it was so tied up with the state and the vanished empire). One interesting example of this is that visitors to Hampton Court are asked which of Henry VIII's wives they identify with, and virtually everyone goes for Katherine of Aragon or Ann Boleyn. The C19 cult of Catherine Parr (the sixth wife) as godly Protestant heroine and shrewd enough to make it out alive seems extinct.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 30, 2021 22:02:54 GMT
Hitchens reflects a fairly widespread conservative C of E tendency to see Anglicanism as a civil religion reflecting the civil order (or an idealised past civil order) though for all his muddles Hitchens seems to me to really believe in a way Roger Scruton, for example, did not. I might add that it's easy to undervalue civil order if you haven't seen what anarchy or social collapse looks like close up- as Hitchens as a foreign correspondent has done. An experience of my own which partly supports Hitchens' point is that when I read Eamon Duffy's study of England under Mary Tudor I was horrified to read the descriptions it contains of some of the Marian burnings of heretics, often involving the condemnation to death of sincere believers (however mistaken) by men who had apostasised under henry Viii and Edward VI and in some cases turned Protestant again under Elizabeth I. (Duffy suggests one reason why Roper's life of St Thomas More was not published under Mary was that Richard Rich was one of the most influential figures in the regime.) The flaws of denominational history can be exaggerated, but one of them is failure to see how things looked from the other side. I have read that in the 1960s Maureen Wall of UCD expressed exasperation that graduates of Irish Catholic schools tended to arrive at university with the belief that the Penal Laws were uniquely wicked rather than part of an European pattern of persecution by both Catholics and Protestants.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 14, 2021 17:36:18 GMT
Is there any other example in Europe of a majority religion persecuted by a foreign power as Catholicism was persecuted in Ireland?
With regard to the Vicar of Bray approach of a great many political figures in England between the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, did I hear correctly that Sir Richard Rich remained a Catholic until his death?
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 14, 2021 22:19:49 GMT
Is there any other example in Europe of a majority religion persecuted by a foreign power as Catholicism was persecuted in Ireland? With regard to the Vicar of Bray approach of a great many political figures in England between the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, did I hear correctly that Sir Richard Rich remained a Catholic until his death? The Hussites?
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Sept 15, 2021 8:28:38 GMT
Is there any other example in Europe of a majority religion persecuted by a foreign power as Catholicism was persecuted in Ireland? With regard to the Vicar of Bray approach of a great many political figures in England between the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, did I hear correctly that Sir Richard Rich remained a Catholic until his death? The Hussites? Were they a majority? I think the size and strength of the Hussites in Bohemia very much depends on who you read.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 25, 2021 8:11:50 GMT
Part of the problem is that there were different varieties of Hussitism. The largest and most conservative was reabsorbed into Catholicism as a result of persecution after the Battle of the White Mountain, so there is a tendency to see the more radical "Protestant" factions as more representative of the whole movement than was in fact the case. In the twentieth century influential Czech nationalists, including founders of the Czech state, adopted the view that the Hussites represented authentic Czech identity and were a sign of instinctive Czech modernity, which has complicated matters further. The interesting thing about the Irish case is not the persecution but its failure.
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