The Reformation was,
at its most basic level, an almost cosmic division, not only about religious
beliefs but about the very nature of the universe. Catholicism lived a
sacramental vision in which the material world mediated the spiritual, while
Protestantism found spiritual meaning only in realities entirely beyond time,
place, or human sense knowledge. (See my column in Catholic Dossier for
September-October.)
The Church of England, in this respect as in others, was famously a kind of
compromise, retaining more elements of symbol and ritual than were acceptable to
those Protestants called Puritans, while at the same time impoverishing the
religious world of traditional believers.
Thus in England “Catholic” resistance for a long time took mainly the form of a
deep attachment to traditional ritual practices—the veneration of the relics and
shrines of the saints, processions, the honoring of images. At its extreme this
piety confirmed the worst Puritan suspicions, as it merged into outright magic,
little distinction made between powers which came from God and those which came
from hidden forces in the universe.
There was, of course, great reverence for the Mass, with many people resisting
the English translation of the Eucharistic service and some refusing even to
receive communion because it was not “holy bread.” The peak of this resistance
was the Rising in the North in 1569, the last great feudal rebellion in England,
when it was revealed that many people had, for more than a decade, kept sacred
objects hidden in their houses, now triumphantly bringing them forth to use once
again.
The historian A.G. Dickens made a useful distinction between “recusancy” and “survivalism,”
and most Catholicism prior to the mid-1570’s was the latter. Only then did
English Catholics begin to receive the ministrations of priests specially
trained on the Continent for that purpose. Until then they relied on priests
ordained prior to 1558, some of whom functioned as Anglican pastors while
keeping Catholic practices alive. Many (perhaps most) Catholics attended
Anglican services, whatever doubts they might have had about their efficacy. As
has been said about many people in many situations, they were not the stuff of
martyrs.
St. Margaret Clitheroe was a woman of little formal education, the wife of a
York butcher. But at the time of her prosecution for harboring priests in 1586
she offered an informed and coherent defense of Catholic teaching—the seven
sacraments, transubstantiation, papal authority, and other things. Something had
happened over the previous decade. The Counter-Reformation had come to England;
the age of the survivalist had passed into the age of the true recusant.
Recusancy (from the Latin word to “refuse”) was not mere clinging to the old
ways, in a half-inchoate manner, but a self-conscious belief that the Anglican
Church represented a falsification of Christianity and that the Church of Rome
was the true church. Most of the recusants not only believed this, they
comprehended why it was so. No longer was it possible for a conscientious
Catholic to compromise by attending Protestant services. The issues were now
understood, and they were understood as issues of enormous seriousness, such had
been the work of the Jesuits and “seminary priests” who began coming into
England in the 1570’s.
While the Counter-Reformation has usually been seen as the theological
refutation of Protestantism and the tightening of Catholic discipline, one of
its major goals was to raise the level of religious knowledge of ordinary people
(including clergy), many of whom had fallen away from the Church out of sheer
ignorance or confusion. The formation of the English recusant community is one
of the great instances of its success.
A word of mitigation should be said for those who persecuted the recusants. St.
Margaret died in an especially horrible way—stretched on the ground and pressed
under heavy weights. But this was not a diabolical torture devised for use on
Catholics. It was the normal procedure called pein fort et dure (“pain strong
and lasting”), prescribed for those who refused to enter a plea at their trials.
(By not entering a plea the victim did not die a convicted felon.)
Modern Catholics rightly think that the stories about Bloody Mary and of the
Inquisition have been distorted and used for anti-Catholic purposes. But the
same historical understanding must be extended to Elizabeth I and her agents.
They did nothing that every ruler of the time was not doing, and in her 45 years
on the throne Elizabeth executed fewer people for religious reasons than her
half-sister did in five. It was not in itself a capital offense to be a Catholic
in Elizabethan England; harboring priests, who were defined as traitors, was.
But it was a capital offense to belong to any Protestant body other than the
Church of England.
The great Elizabethan Catholic martyrs went to their deaths joyfully. They
understood why Elizabeth did what she did, and they did not regard her as a
cruel tyrant. Their quarrel was not with her deeds themselves but with the fact
that she did them for tragically wrong reasons.
James Hitchcock is a regular columnist for
Catholic Dossier and professor of
history at Saint Louis University.
