The breakthrough for the cause of Christian unity and ecumenical progress within the Catholic Church in the twentieth century can trace its origins in the seventeenth century, as England grew out of the mutual recriminations between Protestants and Catholics that had caused blood to flow through most of the Tudor years.
Since the 1530s, for over 70 years, successive monarchs had sent fellow Christians to be hanged, drawn and quartered or burned to death, Catholics and Protestants in almost equal number. From Thomas Bilney in 1531 under Henry VIII to William Richardson in 1603 under Elizabeth I, in or from London alone 105 Protestants and 110 Catholics lost their lives.
Virtually all of these people died in innocence, strongly convinced of their commitment to the truth of Christ and all believing, in different ways, in the need for the Church to be pure in its following of Christ and above all to be absolutely at one. The memory of Christians inflicting these cruelties on each other is a cause for shame, and a penitent promise that we will never allow these things to happen again. We are also moved by the heroism and obedience to Christ that the martyrs on both sides displayed. Nowadays we acknowledge the history to be neither Catholic nor Reformed, owning the story and the people on all sides as truly part of our own. Pope John Paul II has reminded us that, in the moment of martyrdom, those who shed their blood on account of Christ's name are most perfectly united with Jesus' own sacrifice on the Cross. In other words, from the world's perspective these martyrdoms signify our worst points of strife and division. But from the perspective of God our Father, they reveal our point of closest union with his Son.
The mutual martyrdoms continued until 1681, beyond the Civil War. But from the accession of James I different attitudes began to make their mark from time to time. King James I & VI regarded the Pope as the leading bishop of Christendom. But he believed that separations within Christendom did not so much signify disunity between Christians, as the independent power of the princes of sovereign nations. He believed that his Kingdom of Scotland could have one form of Protestantism, Calvinist Presbyterianism, while his Kingdom of England had another form of Church life, with an Anglican polity. The Stuart monarchs partly permitted Catholicism to be observed by members of the Court and in Ireland; and none saw reason for other countries to follow Britain's forms of Christianity, if that was what they determined. King James had no desire to extend the Reformation for its own sake, or to increase the extent of separation from Rome. Indeed he resisted the desire of Puritans and Presbyterians to distance the Church of England from the Catholic Church further, because he was aware that there were actually many areas of agreement.
Furthermore, James I's desire for a degree of peaceful co-existence among his subjects of different nations and religions led to a proposed oath for separating civil and ecclesiastical loyalties - it deliberately did not deny the Pope's spiritual authority - which he hoped would be uncontroversial. The Holy See forbade Catholics from signing the Oath of Allegiance, on the grounds that there could be no such distinction. After all, both Catholics and Protestants had laid down their lives because such civil oaths had gone to the heart of faith in previous generations, and penalties were applied to Catholics not signing.
Remarkably, a dialogue ensued, with King James hoping that both sides could come to terms. He appointed the saintly and learnèd Bishop Lancelot Andrewes to put forward his proposals in an eirenic spirit. The Holy See appointed Cardinal (later Saint) Robert Bellarmine, the great scholar on Protestant thinking and the leading theologian at the Council of Trent. It was an extraordinary match, as both disputants were alike in mind and temperament, yet their participation, indeed leadership, in controversy they felt went fully against the grain. It is well known, however, that this dialogue, robust and academically polemical as it was (something in which King James revelled), it created considerable mutual respect. It ensured previously closed channels were now to be kept open. It represented two separate bodies of Christians frankly and in a Christian spirit facing their differences, advocating their beliefs and listening to those of others. Of course, each side intended to prevail, but this was out of loyalty to truth as the only reliable foundation for genuine mutual recognition. Instead of looking back to the past and the mutual persecutions of the sixteenth centuries, they broke new ground in looking forward to visible unity.
With the coming of King Charles I and his Catholic queen Henrietta Maria in 1625, contacts with Rome were increased. The king sent a resident representative to Rome in the hope of a coming to a better understanding. In exchange, the Barberini Pope Urban VIII sent representatives to the Court of St James. In 1634, Dom Leander Jones, who had been a contemporary at Oxford with the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, observed that Rome was actually poorly informed about the Church of England and how it was a different case from the continental Protestant and Reformed churches. He suggested that an 'assembly of moderate men' should be brought together 'out of a sincere regard for Christian union'. But he was soon replaced. His successor, Gregorio Panzani, proposed that King Charles' admiration for Pope Urban meant that an opportunity could be found for a deal on the form of Oath of Allegiance, to make it possible for Roman Catholics to sign it. This too was ruled out in Rome. Again in 1634, the Franciscan Fr Christopher Davenport published a work to establish the compatibility of the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion with the decrees of the Council of Trent. It proved highly influential in the long term, and eventually inspired Newman's Tract 90 of 1841, which aimed to establish the Church of England's ecclesiological identity as essentially Catholic, and not Protestant.
But Charles I's hopes to move closer to Rome were held in check by Puritans in the ascendant in parliament. Suspected of trying to undo Reformed Christianity, and to reintroduce the Roman religion as in the reign of Queen Mary I, his religious policies raised fears of foreign domination and the abolition of spiritual traditions and patterns of belief, which had by now taken root for over a century. The matter of the Oath would remain unresolved for two more centuries. And the time for penitence for the sins of division, reparation for the suffering all had inflicted, and prayer to see once more the overarching unity of the Church beyond national - and what would come to be seen as denominational - interests was yet to come.
Charles I lost his crown and his life in the midst of this. Antipathy towards European Catholicism once again became politicised, Catholics and Anglicans were persecuted alike during the Civil War and the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, and contacts between the Catholic Church abroad and British Christians asserting their self-determination at the dawn of their Empire and the Industrial Revolution which fired it, receded.
But the first foundations had been laid:
In the following centuries, a small number would keep these ideas alive, until the prayer of Christ calling people to unity once again made itself heard throughout the Church.
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