I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the Religion Forum here, and all the vehement Henry VIII haters are Catholic. Just about all of the Freepers who trash the UK or England in general are, too. It’s religious. They’re apparently only taught positive spin on the role of their religion in history, because knowledge of anything outside of that is sorely wanting.
Huh? My friend, Stephen Lark, the historian, who is vehemently anti-Tudor & anti-Henry VIII (he estimates the number of people Hank killed approaches 52,000) is Jewish. It has nothing to do with Catholicism and everything to do with his corruption and cruelty.
Even my fourth grade world history book (probably not written by a Catholic) only had maybe four lines about him one which was he wanted to divorce his first wife and so broke with the Catholic Church. The next line was something about him marrying five more times.
That was it.
So the only Americans who would know anything more about him would be the Catholics to whom he was a great villain.
People tend to ignore subjects that they don't know a great deal about so you have the preponderance of American Henry bashers being Catholic.
I am an observant American Roman Catholic, converted to Catholicism for 25 years. In all this time, I have never read/heard any Catholics in my parish or officially through my church (priests’ writings and homilies etc.) say one bad word about Henry the 8th. Not one word.
I stay away from the religious threads here at FR, they usually become very ugly. I also don’t like it when a well-meaning religious Freeper posts a 35 screen rant trying to score points on his/her interpretations of the Bible.
Before I was Roman Catholic I was non-denominational “born again” Christian. Then, it was routine for whoever the pastor was to regularly denounce Catholics and Mormons in particular. These pastors were VERY concerned about pronouncing who was and wasn’t going to go to hell (and of course, they assumed they weren’t LOL).