It is surprising how many things we accept second hand and assume they are true without questioning them. In my case, the process of becoming a Catholic has meant re-learning my history. This is embarrassing. I considered myself an amateur but relatively well informed historian. So as someone who is constantly offended by contemporary government and media propaganda, and writes assiduously to challenge it, it is frankly embarrassing to discover I have to re-learn the whole of the 16th century.
“Good Queen Bess”, for example, who refused to make windows into mens’ hearts to examine their theology. Benign, liberal before her time and generous of spirit; Anglicans are very proud of her. “Middle way”, and all that generous stuff. In fact she ran the most ruthless, anti-Catholic, despotic state. My way into this refreshed reading of the 16th century began when I met St John Southworth and William Cobbett.
Southworth first. When visiting London for the day when I was an Anglican, it was my habit also to go to Westminster Cathedral to pray. Neither St Paul’s Cathedral nor Westminster Abbey appeared to me to hold any numinous atmosphere. With the exception perhaps of the shrine of St Edward the Confessor in the Abbey, there was a certain vacancy to them. They fell into the categories of places that made prayer unnecessarily harder.
Not so Westminster Cathedral. On stepping through the doors, atmosphere and dimension changed; time and space loosed their grip. And so to a day 10 years ago, when on entering the cathedral something most unusual happened: I almost fell over the vested body of St John Southworth.
This was one of those surprising changes of culture that Anglicans are entirely unprepared for. With no significant experience of relics and no real theology of the spirituality of matter, the preserved bodies of martyrs don’t really figure on the Anglican spiritual journey. I stood and looked at St John and prayed by him and asked for his prayers.
And then I went away and looked him up. He had been hanged, drawn and quartered by the state as late as 1654. Although I had realised that Catholic priests were executed for some considerable period, the length of time for which the ruthlessness of the state (and its extensive secret service of spies run by the Cecil father-and-son dynasty) continued, still took me by surprise.
Of course Queen Bess was “nice”. She only had priests and those who hid them executed for treason against the state, not for heresy like her sister Mary. But the state set out to crush all Catholics in a barbaric and ruthless way, and by the end of the Elizabethan reign of terror 126 priests and 63 laity who sheltered them had been killed. Hundreds of others died in prison. So much for the much-vaunted continuity of Anglicanism (before you ever get near the radical changes in ordination liturgy). The scale of the economic persecution was also mind-boggling. For hearing Mass the penalty was 100 marks (about £16,000 or $20,000 today), and a year’s imprisonment.
The same legislation established that the penalty for not attending church would be £20 (now £5,500 or $7,000) per month, per head, for those over 16 years of age. The object of this legal development was essentially to outlaw and ruin the Catholic community.
Under this code a family of four adults who elected to lead a regular Catholic life, attending Mass on days of obligation and eschewing the Protestant services, were liable, if they were fortunate enough to keep out of prison, to a total yearly payment of over £15,500 (or in modern currency about £4,500,000 or nearly $6,000,000).
And so to William Cobbett. Cobbett was not a Catholic, but after something of a varied political career he argued loudly for Catholic emancipation in England in the 1820s. He was incandescent with the injustice of it all and in particular the enforced economic ruination that accompanied it.
“See a gentleman of perhaps 60 years of age or more,” he wrote; “see him, born and bred a Catholic, compelled to make himself and his children beggars, actual beggars, or to commit what he deemed an act of apostasy and blasphemy … Those who had no money to pay fines with were crammed into prison until the gaols could (which was very soon) hold no more, and until the counties petitioned to be relieved from the charge of keeping them. They were then discharged, being first publicly whipped, or having their ears bored with a hot iron. This not answering the purpose, an act was passed to compel all ‘recusants’ not worth 20 marks a year to quit the country in three months after conviction, and to punish them with death in case of their return…”
So: death or destitution. The courage and fidelity the convert is invited to bring to the faith can only start to emulate the courage of the recusants, and to try to be worthy of their sacrifice, integrity and love of the Lord and the miracle of His Mass.
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