Part 4

What contributed no doubt to increase the trials of the English and Irish Catholics was the embarrassing excommunication pronounced by Pope Pius V against Queen Elizabeth. It furnished the government with a weapon they were not slow to seize upon, by making it appear to the popular mind as if a political offence, if not a criminal treason, was connected with the exercise of the Catholic faith. Catholics for being Catholics were henceforth treated as traitors. For the last twenty years of this reign, with one exception, there were numerous executions for religion in England. Most of those who suffered thus were priests--Mass-priests as they were called in derision of their sacerdotal character. Thousands of men and women also were punished under the penal laws for the exercise of the old religion. Fines and imprisonment were the lot of those who refused at any price to accept the religious settlement of the sovereign--to accept the form of religion which their consciences refused. The sad records of this period show that many a Catholic family was impoverished and destroyed by the fines levied upon it. Gradually even great estates had to be sold to meet the demands of penal laws against recusancy--the refusal to attend the Protestant service. Then followed a long period of repression and ostracism. For two centuries the unfortunate papist was shut out of the life of the nation and subject to every insult and baseless accusation. One writer who lived during this period says of this system: "The experience of Elizabeth's reign had shown that the infliction of actual death roused a life-giving enthusiasm among Catholics themselves and sympathy in the witnesses of their sufferings. The penal system now introduced was the preference for gagging a man, binding him hand and foot, bandaging his eyes and imprisoning him for life, rather than killing him outright."

Everywhere throughout England and Ireland there was a stolid and heroic resistance to the imposition of the new form of State church on the part of those who remained true to the old religion. Looking back to those days of darkness and despair it seems impossible to believe that any remnant of those who would not bow their knees to Baal could survive the system by which it was hoped to crush them. And when liberty of conscience was at last accorded it was more in the spirit of compassion than in any expectation that they could revive and live again that it was given. As well might the world think that the worship of Pan or of Jupiter would spring again into life as that the poor, despised, dying Catholics could expand and grow once more into a position of respect and influence, reasserting and publicly upholding the principles of the Catholic Faith, for which their forefathers in England and Ireland had suffered persecution and even death.

These principles I have endeavoured to set out during the past four Sundays. Mainly there were only three, which were attacked by the upholders of the Reformation doctrines. The Papal Supremacy over the Church, the safeguard of unity of Faith, and a mark of the Church, Christ established in this world; the Christian Sacrifice--the Mass, attacked and swept away by the Reformers; and the Priesthood in its sacrificial character, which was the necessary consequence of the Eucharistic doctrine upheld by the German and English Reformers. There were of course many minor points of Catholic belief and practice which were attacked and destroyed in these days; such, for example, as devotion to the Mother of God and the Saints, and the long established custom of blessed ashes and candles and the creeping to the Cross on Good Friday. But the main lines of departure from the Catholic Faith along which the Reformation moved were the three I have indicated. A return can be contemplated only by frankly facing the issues. To-day we find men of the highest intelligence and good faith claiming to have the same Christian sacrifice and the same sacrificing priests as the Catholic Church, and they are using a Communion Service from which of set purpose every notion of Oblation and Sacrifice has been ruthlessly removed, and their ministers are ordained by an Ordinal, which designedly was composed to express the rejection of the sacrificial character of the Christian priest. The prayer for Christian Unity must go up from every heart, but if it is to be something more than sentiment, the facts must be faced frankly and with courage.

BOOKS SUGGESTED FOR READING

Short History of the Church in England. _Gasquet_. Henry III and the Church. _Gasquet_. Roman Law and Canon Law. _Maitland_. Lollardy and the Reformation, 4 vols. _Gairdner_. History of the Reformation. _Blunt_. History of the English Church in the 16th Century. _Gairdner_. The Eve of the Reformation. _Gasquet_. England under the Old Religion and Other Essays. _Gasquet_. What then happened at the Reformation (in above). Henry VIII and the English Monasteries. _Gasquet_. Henry VI and the Book of Common Prayer. _Gasquet and Bishop_. What Edward VI did with the Liturgy (in England under the Old Religion). Anglican Ordinations (in above). Anglican Ordinations. _Canon Estcourt_. The Pope and the Ordinal. _S. Barnes_. The Elizabethan Religious Settlement. _H. N. Birt_. Hampshire Recusants. _Gasquet_. The Line of Cleavage (C. T. Soc.). _H. N. Birt_. Parker Society publications. Catholic Truth Society--various Historical Papers. The Ecclesia Anglicana, for what does it Stand? By the Bishop of Tanzibar, and subsequent correspondence in the _London Times_, December, 1913, and January, 1914.