Victor R. Claveau, MJ
In 1521, just four years after purportedly posting his famous “Ninety-five theses” on a church door in Wittenberg, and on the same month he was excommunicated, Martin Luther published a controversial work called The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. This book denounced the seven sacraments as corruptions and papist inventions. When Luther’s book reached England, Thomas More, in refutation of Luther’s work, composed a superlative theological treatise called Assertio Septem Sacramentorum contra Martinum Lutherum (In Defense of the Seven Sacraments Against Martin Luther). King Henry claimed authorship of it and he was conferred the handsome title, Fidei defensor, “Defender of the Faith,” by Pope Leo X in recognition of his vitriolic denunciation of Martin Luther’s attack particularly on the sacramental nature of marriage and the supremacy of the Pope. In gratitude, King Henry raised More to a Peer of the Realm and he became Sir Thomas More.
King Henry VIII concluded the Defense of the Seven Sacraments with these memorable words: “But I beseech and entreat all other Christians, and through the bowels of Christ, (whose faith we profess), to turn away their ears from the impious words and not to foster schisms and discords, especially at this time when most particularly it behooves Christians to be concordant against the enemies of Christ. Do not listen to the insults and detractions against the Vicar of Christ which the fury of the little monk spews up against the Pope; nor contaminate breasts sacred to Christ with impious heresies, for if one sews these he has no charity, swells with vain glory, loses his reason and burns with envy. Finally with what feelings they would stand together against the Turks, against the Saracens, against anything infidel anywhere, with the same feelings they should stand together against this one little monk weak in strength, but in temper more harmful than all Turks, all Saracens, all infidels everywhere.”
Yet, it was Henry himself who first led his beloved country England into schism, by hoping in vain to solve his own marital problems, which had developed. The Church of England would still be in the fold were it not for Henry’s unsuccessful attempt to introduce divorce into Christianity. Henry VIII was the most habitual bridegroom in English history; he had an almost confirmed habit of beheading his wives or otherwise ridding himself of them, once they could no longer serve his purpose.
Martin Luther demanded that the Roman Catholic Church fix what he considered to be her internal problems, and Henry, on the other hand, had his own personal problems and he wanted the Roman Catholic Church to fix them. They were two very powerful men with two completely different agendas who, although they originally clashed, would rally together to change the shape of centuries of Catholicity by splintering it into entirely new denominations of altered belief.
Both men were driven from the bosom of the Holy See—Henry for carnal reasons and Luther for reasons of pride and insanity. Both of these men’s “churches,” which promote a bastardized version of the one true Church of Jesus Christ, persist in their heresy today. The Church of England remains with the Monarch of England as its reigning head, and the Lutheran Church has fractured into numerous versions of Christian heterodoxy.
Ultimately, Henry’s egomaniacal self-image, when dissatisfied with the Church’s position on his request for marital dissolution, superseded Mother Church in the majority of his home land, but there still remained a staunch minority of faithful observers.
mist.
[1] William Warham (c. 1450 – 1532) was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1503 until his death.
[2] Henry FitzRoy, First Duke of Richmond and Somerset (1519 –1536), was the son of King Henry VIII of England and his mistress, Elizabeth Blount, and the only illegitimate offspring whom Henry VIII acknowledged. He was the younger half-brother of Mary I, future Queen of England (daughter of Catherine of Aragon), as well as the older half-brother of the future Elizabeth I (daughter of Anne Boleyn) and Edward VI (son of Jane Seymour).
[3] Henry VIII’s 2nd wife, mother of Elizabeth I.
[4] Mary Boleyn was one of the mistresses of Henry VIII, from a period of roughly 1521 to 1526. It has been rumored that she bore two of the king’s children, though Henry did not acknowledge either of them.
[5] Matthew 5:32, Mark 10:12 and Luke 16:18.
[6] Thomas Cranmer (1489 – 1556) was Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He helped build the case for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. During Cranmer’s tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, he was responsible for establishing the first doctrinal and liturgical structures of the reformed Church of England. Under Henry’s rule, Cranmer did not make many radical changes in the Church, due to power struggles between religious conservatives and reformers. However, he succeeded in publishing the first officially authorized vernacular service, the Exhortation and Litany. When Edward came to the throne, Cranmer was able to promote major reforms.
[7] McAfee, Cleland Boyd, D.D., A Study of The King James Version of the Bible and its Influence on Life and Literature, (New York: Harper), 1912, pp. 30-31.
[8] John Foxe (1516/17 – 1587) was an English historian and martyrologist, the author of Actes and Monuments (popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), an account of Christian martyrs throughout Western history but emphasizing the sufferings of English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the fourteenth century through the reign of Mary I. Widely owned and read by English Puritans, the book helped mold British popular anti-Catholic opinion about the Church.
Father Robert Persons (1546-1610), a major figure in establishing the 16th-century “English Mission” of the Society of Jesus, wrote the following critique of Foxe’s. Book of Martyrs: “I have had occasion these months to peruse a great part of his last edition last editions of Acts and Monuments, printed the fifth time in the year 1596 and do find it stuffed with all kind of falsehood and deceitful manner of telling tales, as I could never “truly” have believed it, if I had not found it by my own experience. And I do persuade myself fully…that there is scarce one whole story in that huge volume, told by himself, except when he related other men’s words out of records and thereby is bound to the formality thereof, but that it is falsified and perverted one way of another, either in the beginning, middle of end, by adding, cutting off, concealing, false translating, wrong citing, or cunning juggling and falsification, which I do not speak for any tooth against the man, that is dead, and whom I never knew, but in respect of truth only, and of so many deceived souls as are in danger to perish by his deluding them. Nor when I speak of Master Fox his falsehoods, do I make account of any errors or oversights (though never so gross0 that are found in him, as to reckon some for martyrs that were alive at the making of the book: (for this he excuses in his later edition, in that he was deceived by false information) nor do I urge that others are made Calendar-martyrs by him, who he cannot gainsay that they were malefactors and some of them either mad or denied Christ himself, and yet he places them in his calendar for saints….The points that I for the present accuse him of are willful corruptions and falsifications that cannot be excused , as among other things 9for example’s sake) when he recites any point in controversy of the Catholic doctrine, he puts in down commonly in plain contrary words and sense to that which he must needs know they hold and teach, for so much their public books are extent in every man’s hands to testify the same.” (A Declaration of the Trial)
“Foxe wrote biased, protestant history, and that in the nineteenth century and through the early decades of the twentieth it was a widely held and influential opinion that he was not to be trusted, reviving the charges laid against Actes and Monuments by Catholics in Foxe’s own time, that it was a tissue of lies: ‘so many lines, so many lies.’ (Anglican historian Patrick Collinson, (1929 – 2011), Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in Elizabethans (London and New York, 2003), pp. 151-52.)
[9] A queen consort is the wife of a reigning king. A queen consort usually shares her husband’s social rank and status. She holds the feminine equivalent of the king’s monarchical titles, but historically, she does not share the king’s political and military powers. A queen regnant is a queen in her own right with all the powers of a monarch, who (usually) has become queen by inheriting the throne upon the death of the previous monarch.