Posted on 04/15/2010 6:49:53 PM PDT by grand wazoo
Ping rooo
Henry VIII did not end Catholic power in England. Nor did Martin Luther.
The name (if ther could be said to be a single name here) was GUTENBERG.
Henry's separation and dissolution of the monasteries was much earlier than any official switch to Protestantism. Henry considered himself still Catholic and was Catholic in all but allegiance to the Pope. He didn't intend to Protestantise England, but his desire to marry Nan Bullen and fund his various spending sprees set in motion a number of unintended consequences. He should have paid more attention to the advisers his son was consorting with. That was where the real change began.
I also enjoyed the reference to Anne Boleyn as the "google-eyed whore".
Way wrong. Even the Spanish were out there printing Bibles (in Spanish) and there were other translations in other languages circulating. The question was always the legitimacy and correctness of the translations, as well as the canon: Luther had an entirely different idea of what should be printed and he and other Protestants tossed out the canonical books that they didn’t like.
What ended Catholic power in England was the ruthlessness of one individual in his crazed desire for a physical heir to carry on his course of erratic and arbitrary power, and the weakness of the bishops, who had grown fat and lazy after many centuries of a fairly peaceful existence.
Because he was a Catholic, his natural first impulse was to print the Bible he knew well and was raised on.
His invention enabled Ximenes Cardinal Cisneros - when Luther and Tyndale were children - to print the first critical polyglot edition of the Bible.
It is a myth that the European civil war known as "The Reformation" was due to some mythical "rediscovery" of the Scriptures which Christian Europe had always known, studied and revered.
The Reformation was a political struggle.
England was a Protestant society (before it became the atheist society it is today) solely because Henry VIII and the new nobility he created wanted to seize the lands and the properties of the clergy.
Henry VIII's opportunistic conversion and the opportunistic conversion of his hand-picked elite not only gratified him sexually with as many wives as he desired, but it made him and his court the 16th century equivalent of billionaires by seizing the real estate and possessions of tens of thousands of his subjects in an act of outright theft.
The most amusing thing about Protestant mythmaking is the notion that an absolute monarch with the power of life and death over his subjects unilaterally naming himself the divinely ordained master of the church in his own realm - thereby combining all political and religious authority in one man's iron fist - was a "liberating" break from "Popish tyranny."
bfl
In 1537 it was not yet clear if Lutheranism would blow over quickly like Utraquism or if it would persist for centuries like Donatism.
Henry thought he could pick and choose the bits of the new heresy he liked (the divine right of kings, lay investiture, divorce) and keep the bits of the old ways he still liked (polyphony, sacramentals, requiem Masses, etc.) while rejecting anything that was not to his personal taste.
He didn't realize that by making his own personal tastes paramount he had thoroughgoingly adopted the central tenet of Lutheranism.
So while he did not think he was a Protestant, his attitude was entirely Protestant.
Actually, the names were Edward, Elizabeth, Cranmer, and William Cecil.
You mean Gutenberg's Bible didn't declare Henry Tudor to be the [sic] "Supreme Head of the Church in England"?
[gasp]
The name was hubris or lust or greed. Perhaps all three in Henry’s case.
Because you know the first thing about god?
A lot of people seem to think that Gutenberg and his printed Bibles were somehow Protestant. In fact, Johannes Gutenberg was Catholic, and the Catholic Church welcomed his new printed Bibles.
We were just in Rome, visited the English College there. They train priests now, but it was a hospice for pilgrims in the Middle Ages. They have an exhibit about the priests and Englishmen who stayed there during the Reformation; priests would go undercover back to England. Most were martyred there; then the college would sing a Te Deum for them. There is a long list of priests sent from this college who were martyred.
They also have a guest book of that time, and are pretty sure that Shakespeare visited several times. His signature/ dates correspond to the ‘silent’ years when not much is known about him, before he started writing plays.
It was so interesting. Be sure to visit if you are planning to be in Rome in the next 6 months.
That's what I'd have said, if asked. Now I know better!
It’s always amazed me what Shakespeare got away with.
Thanks so much for the posting. If we ever get an opportunity to visit England, Walsingham and Glastonbury will be on the must see list.
A common argument, but a completely unfounded one.
First it should be acknowledged that Queen Mary of England deliberately had her enemies killed. There is no moral justification for her actions.
It is likewise silly for her to be labeled "Bloody", because her immediate predecessor Edward VI and her immediate successor Elizabeth I had far more blood on their hands than Mary did.
To label her "Bloody Mary" while calling her half-sister "Good Queen Bess" is just transparent revisionism.
Historically it can be confirmed that 63 people were executed during Mary's reign for political/religious reasons. A common claim is 284, but that number cannot be documented by reliable sources. The main reason behind the executions was that many of them had plotted - as confirmed Protestants - to prevent her - as a confirmed Catholic - from taking her place on the throne. In her first year as queen she systematically killed about forty leading Protestants whom she personally blamed for putting her life in danger and stealing her throne from her. At least twenty more were killed over the next four years.
By way of comparison, her younger half-brother had approximately 900 Catholic prisoners killed in a single day: August 5, 1549 - an event known as the Massacre of Clyst Heath.
Hundreds more Catholics besides the victims of Clyst were killed under the regime of Edward VI, but no one calls him "Bloody Ned."
Elizabeth I had hundreds of Catholics hunted down by a newly-created secret police unit who were paid cash bonuses for the number of "recusants" they captured. The unfortunate prisoners were usually tried in secret without counsel before they were murdered.
However, Mary only lived for five years after she became queen and Elizabeth lived for 42.
Elizabeth defined history by outliving every last prominent Catholic in England and systematically eradicating traditional English Christianity over a period of two generations.
She created the myth of "Bloody Mary" because it served her purposes quite well.
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