450th Anniversary of Cranmer's Martyrdom

meam commemorationem ^ | 3/21/2006

[sionnsar]

Archbishop's sermon at the service to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the Martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer

St Mary the Virgin, Oxford

From today’s epistle: ‘The word of God is not bound’.

When it was fashionable to decry Cranmer’s liturgical rhetoric as overblown and repetitive, people often held up as typical the echoing sequences of which he and his colleagues were so fond. ‘A full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction; ‘Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders; Spare thou them which confess their faults; Restore thou them that are penitent’; ‘succour, help and comfort all that are in danger, necessity and tribulation’; direct, sanctify and govern’; and of course, ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. The liturgical puritan may well ask why it is not possible to say something once and for all, instead of circling back over what has been said, re-treading the ground. And in the same vein, many will remember the arguments of those who complained of the Communion Order in the Book of Common Prayer that it never allowed you to move forward from penitence to confidence and thanksgiving: you were constantly being recalled to your sinful state, even after you had been repeatedly assured of God’s abundant mercies.

Whether we have quite outgrown this reaction, I’m not sure. But we have at least begun to see that liturgy is not a matter of writing in straight lines. As the late Helen Gardner of this university long ago remarked, liturgy is epic as well as drama; its movement is not inexorably towards a single, all-determining climax, but also – precisely – a circling back, a recognition of things not yet said or finished with, a story with all kinds of hidden rhythms pulling in diverse directions. And a liturgical language like Cranmer’s hovers over meanings like a bird that never quite nests for good and all – or, to sharpen the image, like a bird of prey that never stoops for a kill.

The word of God is not bound. God speaks, and the world is made; God speaks and the world is remade by the Word Incarnate. And our human speaking struggles to keep up. We need, not human words that will decisively capture what the Word of God has done and is doing, but words that will show us how much time we have to take in fathoming this reality, helping us turn and move and see, from what may be infinitesimally different perspectives, the patterns of light and shadow in a world where the Word’s light has been made manifest. It is no accident that the Gospel which most unequivocally identifies Jesus as the Word made flesh is the Gospel most characterised by this same circling, hovering, recapitulatory style, as if nothing in human language could ever be a ‘last’ word. ‘The world itself could not contain the books that should be written’ says the Fourth Evangelist, resigning himself to finishing a Gospel that is in fact never finishable in human terms.

Poets often reinvent their language, the ‘register’ of their voice. Shakespeare’s last plays show him at the edge of his imagination, speaking, through Prospero, of the dissolution of all his words, the death of his magic; Yeats painfully recreates his poetic voice, to present it ‘naked’, as he said; Eliot, in a famous passage of the Quartets, follows a sophisticated, intensely disciplined lyrical passage with the brutal, ‘that was a way of putting it’. In their different ways, all remind us that language is inescapably something reflecting on itself, ‘talking through’ its own achievements and failures, giving itself new agendas with every word. And most of all when we try to talk of God, we are called upon to talk with awareness and with repentance. ‘That was a way of putting it’; we have not yet said what there is to say, and we never shall, yet we have to go on, lest we delude ourselves into thinking we have made an end.

So the bird is bound to hover and not settle or strike. Cranmer lived in the middle of controversies where striking for a kill was the aim of most debaters. Now of course we must beware of misunderstanding or modernising: he was not by any stretch of the imagination a man who had no care for the truth, a man who thought that any and every expression of Christian doctrine was equally valid; he could be fierce and lucidly uncompromising when up against an opponent like Bishop Gardiner. Yet even as a controversialist he shows signs of this penitent scrupulosity in language: yes, this is the truth, this is what obedience to the Word demands – but , when we have clarified what we must on no account say, we still have to come with patience and painstaking slowness to crafting what we do say. Our task is not to lay down some overwhelmingly simple formula but to suggest and guide, to build up the structure that will lead us from this angle and that towards the one luminous reality. ‘Full, perfect and sufficient’ – each word to the superficial ear capable of being replaced by either of the others, yet each with its own resonance, its own direction into the mystery, and, as we gradually realise, not one of them in fact dispensable.

You can see a poignant concomitant of this in Cranmer’s non-liturgical prose. When he wrote to King Henry in unhopeful defence of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell, the convoluted sentences and sentiments show, not only a constitutionally timid man struggling to be brave (and all the braver for that), but a man uncomfortably capable of believing himself deceived and of seeing the world in double perspective. What both letters in effect say is: I thought I saw the truth about this person; if I was wrong, I was more deceived than I could have thought possible; how in this world can even the King of England know the truth of his servants’ hearts? I see both what I always saw and the possibility that it has all been a lie; is this a world where we can have certainty enough to kill each other?

And in his last days, this was Cranmer’s curse. If there was no easy certainty enough to kill for, was there certainty enough to die for? That habit of mind which had always circled and hovered, tested words and set them to work against each other in fruitful tension, sought to embody in words the reality of penitence and self-scrutiny, condemned him, especially in the midst of isolation, confusion, threats and seductions of spirit, to a long agony, whose end came only in this church minutes before his last hurrying, stumbling walk through the rain to the stake. It is extraordinary to think of him drafting two contradictory versions of his final public confession, still not knowing what words should sum up his struggles. But at the last, it is as if he emerges from the cloud of words heaped up in balance and argument and counterpoint, knowing almost nothing except that he cannot bring himself to lie, in the face of death and judgement. What he has to say is that he has ‘written many things untrue’ and that he cannot face God without admitting this. He cannot find a formula that will conceal his heart from God, and he knows that his heart is, as it has long been, given to the God whom the Reformation had let him see, the God of free grace, never bound by the works or words of men and women. Just because he faces a God who can never be captured in one set of words, a God who is transcendently holy in a way that exacts from human language the most scrupulous scepticism and the most painstaking elaboration possible, he cannot pretend that words alone will save him. ‘If we deny him, he also will deny us’. He must repent and show his repentance with life as well as lips; ‘forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished’.


My father-in-law at the mark where Cranmer died. I am behind the camera.

[sionnsar]

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Speak the truth in love. Eph 4:15

[AnAmericanMother]

While I think Cranmer was in error on many points, when it came down to the point he was extraordinarily brave. I do not think he erred out of malice, but in his honest belief.

He also wrote some of the most beautiful English prose ever.

[wmfights]

Excuse my ignorance but what happened?

[Upbeat]

Thomas Cramner, Archbishop of Canterbury, was burned at the stake during the reign of Queen Mary. He was one of the Protestant martyrs during her reign.

[Robertsll]

After all, the "Church of England" was started by a chap named King Henry VIII of the House of Tudor who wanted to be rid of his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and sought a decree of nullity from the Pope so that he could marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. The rest, as they say, is history, and very bad history at that. Henry VIII took England out of the Catholic Faith, starting a fierce persecution of Catholics who remained steadfast in their loyalty to Rome and to the Mass of Tradition in 1534 that saw over 72,000 Catholics, nearly three percent of the population of England at the time, slaughtered by the brute force of the State by the time that Henry died of a certain contagious disease in 1547. Monastery and convent lands were seized, under cover of law, you understand, and the properties re-distributed to both reward Henry's political collaborators and to bribe others to be beholden to the Crown at all costs. The poor who had lived good lives as perpetual tenants on these lands were eventually thrown off, creating the conditions for economic injustice and misery that blighted England for centuries thereafter.

Only one bishop, the Bishop of Rochester, Saint John Fisher, opposed King Henry VIII's re-marriage and his declaration to be the supreme head of the Church in England ("as far as was possible). He lost his head in 1535 for his brave defense of Catholic Truth and the primacy of the Successor of Saint Peter. So did the prominent layman, the former Chancellor of the Realm, Saint Thomas More. However, Saint John Fisher was the only bishop out of about one hundred who remained faithful to the point of death. True, about thirty or so remained faithful when Elizabeth I took England out of the Faith for a second time thirty years later. John Fisher, though, was the only bishop who resisted King Henry VIII and who would not let the exigencies of personal expediency nor exaggerated nationalism get in the way of doing his Catholic duty. Cardinals Murphy-O'Connor and O'Brien have followed the easy path of Saint John Fisher's cowardly colleagues, including the infamous Thomas Cranmer.

Free Republic story

Did Thomas Cranmer, patron saint of unhappy husbands, mind the killing of tens of thousands of Catholics so that Henry VIII could get rid of his wife and marry his mistress?

[kalee]

ping

[wmfights]

"Did Thomas Cranmer, patron saint of unhappy husbands, mind the killing of tens of thousands of Catholics so that Henry VIII could get rid of his wife and marry his mistress?"
__________________________________

Why is it that RC's feel so compelled to interject their view of events? I can't help but notice that the RC's never will admit to their church's participation in atrocities.

[Sans-Culotte]

Why is it that RC's feel so compelled to interject their view of events?

Many RC's are fond of stating their belief that the Reformation (in Great Britain, at least, if not Europe) only came about so that Henry VIII could get a divorce.

Gets old after awhile. I'd say Cranmer showed at the end that his faith did mean something to him when he plunged the hand that had signed his recantation into the flames.

[Robertsll]

Many RC's are fond of stating their belief...[the Anglican split] came about so that Henry VIII could get a divorce.

That was the origin of the whole mess in England.

What? You think if the pope gave into Henry VIII's ("defender of the faith") demands, Henry VIII would have still split from the Catholic Church?

[Robertsll]

I can't help but notice that the RC's never will admit to their church's participation in atrocities.

There were (of course) atrocities committed by Catholics throughout the ages.

Today, we have Kennedy, Kerry, Durbin, et al.

[Sans-Culotte]

Maybe not, but it does not change the fact that a lot of Protestant martyrs (like Cranmer) went to their deaths not caring about Henry VIII, his wives, heirs, etc. The Reformation still happened, and was a real thing that grew bigger than Henry VII's marital problems.

I saw a recent documentary that suggested that Henry VII, late in life, was thinking of returning to Catholicism. His last wife was almsot executed for being too Protestant. Had Henry returned to Catholicism, do you think the rest of the Protestants in England would have done so too?

Whatever started the Reformation in England, it eventually had a life and momentum of its own. The constant assertion to say that "it only came about because of the divorce" is merely an attempt to belittle the movement, IMO.

[Robertsll]

I saw a recent documentary that suggested that Henry VII, late in life, was thinking of returning to Catholicism. His last wife was almsot executed for being too Protestant. Had Henry returned to Catholicism, do you think the rest of the Protestants in England would have done so too?

Henry VIII had opened the door to ultra-nationalism and anti-papist sentiment. There was no going back to the ways things were.

Whatever started the Reformation in England, it eventually had a life and momentum of its own. The constant assertion to say that "it only came about because of the divorce" is merely an attempt to belittle the movement, IMO.

So you are telling me the Reformation in England did not have its origins in King Henry VIII declaring himself head of the Church of England so that he could divorce his wife?

[Robertsll]

Maybe not, but it does not change the fact that a lot of Protestant martyrs (like Cranmer) went to their deaths not caring about Henry VIII, his wives, heirs, etc.

Cranmer opposed true presence and supported the destruction of statues and holy images (both polar opposite views of Anglicans today). The person responsible for his "martyrdom" was the same person he bastardized. Cranmer gave support and legitimacy to many of Henry VIII's public actions, including some barbaric activities.

Like I said, there are some bad Catholics today, among them bishops, priest, and members of the laity. If they were killed for their disturbed beliefs and actions, I would be appalled, mourn their deaths and pray for their souls. I would not call them martyrs.

[Upbeat]

Henry VIII's dispute with the Vatican over his marriage to Catherine of Aragon provided an opportunity for the reform movement to develop and emerge out into the open. It would have come without the dispute but may not have been successful. The reign of Queen Mary was comparably short so while it was brutal toward those who adopted the reformed faith, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimmer for instance, it effectively ended with her death. On the other hand Catholic priests were drawn and quartered when caught during the 16th and 17th centuries. The political machinations of the Catholic Mary queen of Scots to take the throne of Elizabeth I didn't help. I have wondered about the House of Norfolk. The Duke of Norfolk is the leading Catholic layman in the UK. The family remained Catholic during the reformation . It is sad to this Evangelical to see the present day Anglican/Episcopel church to be at best quasi-Christian. I find that I have more in common with my Catholic brothers -in-Christ than with many other Protestants.

[wmfights]

"Henry VIII's dispute with the Vatican over his marriage to Catherine of Aragon provided an opportunity for the reform movement to develop and emerge out into the open."
_____________________

Wasn't Catherine a relative of the King of France? If Henry VIII had a heir by her wasn't he concerned about the independent sovereignty of England.

BTW, I understand your feelings about the Episcopal Church today. I was raised an Episcopalian, but as I read SCRIPTURE and entered into a personal relationship with JESUS CHRIST I choose to become a Baptist.

[Robertsll]

Wasn't Catherine a relative of the King of France? If Henry VIII had a heir by her wasn't he concerned about the independent sovereignty of England.

The answer is no to both parts of your question.

[wmfights]

"The answer is no to both parts of your question."
_____________________________

Actually, I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. Have you ever asked WHY did Henry VIII want to end his marriage. He was King he could have had any number of affairs and nobody would have said a thing.

[Upbeat]

I'm fairly certain that Catherine was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. If I'm wrong someone will correct me. I believe the only heir by this wife was Mary,
who became queen.

We have worshiping with us a former Episcopalian who left his church over the gay bishop. Btw, one of my sons is a Baptist.

[Robertsll]

Actually, I'm pretty sure the answer is yes.

I know the answer is no. Catherine was from Spain, not France.

Have you ever asked WHY did Henry VIII want to end his marriage.

It is explain when you learn about it in history classes. Henry VIII wanted male heirs. Catherine, his wife, was older than him and had only provided him a daughter (and a couple miscarriages, one of which was a boy).

When she approached menopause, Henry VIII sought a male heir by other means.

The strange part about all this was the fact that after many wives Henry VIII ended up with no grandchildren by male heirs. All of his male heirs died young and childless.