Separation of Church and State: Part 5 - Reformation

We previously saw how ignoring the principle of Separation of Church and State adversely affected the Church while benefiting the State inasmuch as a seduced and corrupted Church might be co-opted as an arm of State control it was never meant to be.

In Part 5, we shall see how this distortion not only harmed the Church but eventually provoked resistance.

Armed with the trappings and power and of State authority and control, the Roman Church came to dominate the known world, gradually overshadowing its Eastern Orthodox twin. And it used its power to tremendous effect, gradually subsuming lesser independent denomination, like the Celtic Church in Ireland and Western Scotland, while ruthlessly crushing any voices of dissent. Nevertheless, despite centuries of repression those voices would not be stilled and the Church split and survived again and again and again.

That is until the early 16^th Century when the ambitious and intellectually gifted son of a Florentine banking dynasty entered the Church. His name was Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici, and he had only two weaknesses - money and more money. As a Medici, young Giovanni was an extremely well-educated and extravagant patron of the arts. And as a Medici he was also a son of the Vatican’s bankers. In those days tithing (the practice of giving a tenth of one’s income to the Church) was compulsory on pain of excommunication, and the Medicis were the Church‘s appointed tithe collectors. This made young Giovanni extremely wealthy, but his extravagance exceeded even his wealth which made his ordination quite a sensible career move, because the Church of Rome was the most wealthy and powerful organisation in the world. His family connections didn’t hurt either, because a large part of the Church’s wealth to the generous overdraft facilities extended to it by…well, the Medicis.

Nepotism, as they say, is a game for all the family, and for some extraordinary reason Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici rose to become Pope Leo X. Good for him. And, as a generous patron of the arts, Leo wanted to make his mark as Supreme Pontiff by rebuilding Saint Peter’s Basilica, a project which had already begun under his predecessors and was a work in progress. It was also extremely expensive. Now, neither the Church nor the Medici family were particularly short of cash and in any case, if the Church needed money the Medicis knew where to find it and Leo X was well placed to know where all the skeletons were buried. Nevertheless, he decided he was not going to turn to either source when he had an even more lucrative seam he could tap into - guilt.

Yes, that’s guilt, not gilts, because Leo wasn’t proposing a bond issue, but the sale of indulgences to raise the funds to build Saint Peter’s. These were analogous to the ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ cards found in Monopoly, except that you could buy one for the forgiveness of sins. It was a load of old guff, of course, but in a Church that told people how and what to think, and which controlled access to the Bible, with whom you couldn’t argue on pain of excommunication, it seemed a good idea at the time. Except that not everyone was ignorant of the Bible. One of those was a certain Augustinian friar and professor of theology called Martin Luther who openly articulated what many others thought in secret, and questioned the practice of buying what he saw in Scripture was freely available by grace. And, long story short, Luther ignited the biggest schism in Church history, the Protestant Reformation.

What neither Martin Luther nor many of his contemporaries initially envisaged was that Reformation was the start of a new Church. He and all the other early reformers considered their movement just that - a movement to reform and not to replace the Church. The Church was not the problem in their view, just some of its ideas and practices which had strayed from the integrity of God‘s Word. For example, since 1414 it had been unlawful for the ordinary laity to partake of Holy Communion, which was now the sole prerogative of the clergy. Sort such problems, thought Luther, and you would sort the Church, but at no time did he consider himself as departing from the Catholic faith. However, their actions threatened more than just the faith of millions, but the very prestige and secular power enjoyed by the Church, and that the Pope could not tolerate. Courts were convened, reformers tried and Luther’s works were banned while he was exiled from the German territories known as the Holy Roman Empire. Certain German princes contested these political manoeuvrings in a letter of protest in 1529, resulting in the accusation of being ‘Protestant’. The name stuck and the rest is history.

For the most part, the Protestant Reformation took hold in men’s hearts on doctrinal grounds. Many believers had long been disillusioned by the excesses of the Roman Church and were ripe for reform, and the ‘Lutheran heresy’ of Protestantism quickly spread across Northern Europe.

In England, however, things were very different. There the king was a charismatic young ruler who was also extremely devout. His father, Henry ap Tudor was the Welsh claimant to the English throne who defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and became Henry VII.

Henry’s elder son Arthur was groomed to succeed his father to throne but tragically died of an unknown cause at the age of 15. As a result, his younger brother Henry, who had been destined for the Church, was now catapulted into the succession as the unexpected heir to his father’s throne.

Not only did young Henry inherit the throne of England, but also his late brother’s widow, Catherine, the daughter of Philip II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. This was problematic however, as marriage to his brother’s widow required a papal dispensation, but with pressure from the Spanish side this was eventually forthcoming, and Catherine of Aragon became Henry’s bride. The marriage appears to have been reasonably happy and Catherine bore Henry several babies, including their daughter Mary but no surviving son. In time, therefore, Henry became impatient and began to regret their union.

Henry was the consummate renaissance man, a polymath polyglot poet, musician, athlete and scholar, whose relationship with Rome hitherto had been a good one. Indeed, his famous anti-reformation rebuttal of 1521, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (Defence of the Seven Sacraments) - which among things re-asserted the dogma of papal supremacy - so impressed the pontiff that Leo X granted Henry the title, Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith) which is still emblazoned on the obverse of every British coin of the realm.

However, he now wanted a divorce from his wife Catherine in order to marry Ann Boleyn, and that meant re-petitioning the pope. Abut this time the pope was not to be so obliging.

For one thing, Henry was citing grounds that would have contradicted the pope’s earlier ruling that his marriage to Catherine was lawful, and for another thing, Catherine’s parents, Ferdinand and Isabella were enormously influential with Rome, having established the Holy Inquisition in Spain in 1478, and the Pope apparently judged a time when the very papacy itself was under attack from dissenting factions was not the best moment to turn on one’s friends.

What ensued was a vicious bout of political wrangling that ended in Henry seceding from Rome and establishing himself as the head of the Church of England.

Once again the Separation of Church and State was ignored in the interests of a secular power struggle and Henry got his divorce. Not only that, but he dissolved the monasteries and confiscated most of the Church‘s wealth. Henry, however, was not a reformer by conviction, only by expediency, and his changes were half-hearted by Continental standards and his newly liberated Church of England has often been described as the English Catholic Church. Nevertheless, England was now a Protestant country.

It should be noted here, that the Spanish Inquisition mentioned earlier in relation to Henry’s mother-in-law Isabella, was not the first of its kind. That emerged in 1184 as an instrument designed to root out heresy in a kind of medieval McCarthyism.

Such Inquisitions would arise from time to time to purify the Church and quell the spread of any dissent by fear. And feared it was, by those who witnessed the burning of such opponents as the Knights Templar and Joan of Arc. But, while the Spanish Inquisition was cognisant of all heretics, its particular remit was virulently Judaeophobic and especially directed at those considered crypto-Jews (Jews posing as Christians), being fashioned after the mindset of its psychopathic Dominican inquisitor, Tomá s de Torquemada.

However, the excesses of the Inquisition disturbed even Isabella but exemplified the general atmosphere of paranoia that pervaded the Roman Church throughout Europe at this time, prompted not only by the pressures of Reformation but also by memories previous Church divisions such as the Avignon Papacy between 1305 and 1437.

Ironically, the Inquisition’s zeal to rid the Church of heresy was also its downfall, because in order to promulgate fear among the faithful it could make no secret of its activities, and these excited the aversion of outside observers.

Then as today, millions of faithful Roman Catholics lived blameless lives of exemplary morality, but then as today, it was not the conduct of the silent majority that was judged to exemplify the Church, but the brutality for which the Inquisition had become a byword. Perhaps nothing served the cause of Reformation better than the perception that Protestantism stood for freedom while Catholicism represented tyranny.

Nevertheless, throughout all this turmoil what we must not lose sight of is how little it had to do with Christianity per se but everything to do with power politics being played out beneath a Christian veneer that provided its protagonists with a convenient pretext of principle.

This was no more true than in the case of the dissolution of the monasteries which proved extremely lucrative as a massive amount of wealth was transferred from the Church to the Crown.

Many noble families also made a packet during this period, which would provide a tremendous incentive in the future to maintain the new status quo, and what was spun as a spree of religious freedom was in actuality an orgy of greed. Once again, what we are witnessing is the utter chaos that can ensue when God’s admonition to maintain the Separation of Church and State is singularly ignored.

From thereon in, religion in England became a bloody and dangerous affair, as Henry burned Protestant reformers at the stake for heresy, and while Roman Catholics were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason.

Six wives and two decades later, Henry VIII was dead: ‘Long Live the King’: In this case, Henry’s sickly son Edward VI who died, possibly of tuberculosis, at the tragically tender age of 15. Even so, Edward was a very devout proponent of the Reformed faith to a much greater degree than his father and in his short reign did much to further the distance between his kingdom and Rome, and even on one occasion exerted his royal influence on France to press for the release of a notable Scottish reformer from one of their slave galleys - the formidable John Knox.

Too young to have legitimate issue of his own, and fearing that his sister Mary might succeed him, reverse his reforms and restore Catholicism, Edward made questionable provision for a Protestant female successor who might fill the power vacuum on his death which would soon follow. And when it did Edward’s throne was inherited by the tragic teenager, Lady Jane Grey, whose reign lasted only nine days before she was removed by Edward’s older sister Mary Tudor, whose religious intolerance was worse than even he had feared, as she soon earned the gory epithet, Bloody Mary.

Although, like Edward, Jane was a Protestant, while Mary was a staunch Roman Catholic, the Queen was nevertheless inclined to take pity for her 17-year-old prisoner but sadly politics supervened as it became apparent that Jane’s very existence provided a destabilising influence and a potent rallying point against Mary’s monarchy, whereupon she reluctantly ordered that the youngster be beheaded.

Mary reigned for five more tumultuous years, during which she married Philip of Spain, restored Catholicism and burned innumerable Protestants at the stake. What she did not manage however, was to have any children and was succeeded on her death by her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth.

Elizabeth I was a canny queen of England, who had seen her own mother beheaded and been horrified by the bloodshed of her predecessors in the name of religion, and so her reign heralded an era of relative peace, prosperity and religious tolerance in England. Even so, her rule was an uneasy age in which Protestant England was surrounded by Catholic enemies.

Only Scotland to her north was Protestant, and even that land was ruled by her Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Indeed, many of Elizabeth’s Roman Catholic subjects were of the opinion that the Scotland’s Catholic Stuart queen had a more legitimate claim to England’s throne than their own Tudor incumbent. And that would have been cause enough for concern had not Mary run foul of her Protestant countrymen.

Queen from the age of six-days-old, following the death of her father at age 30, the daughter of James V and Marie de Guise was bundled off to the French court in early childhood to escape Henry VIII’s Rough Wooing in which he tried to kidnap Mary whom he wished to see betrothed to his son Edward with an eye to dynastic advantage and the Scottish throne.

Reputedly the most beautiful queen in Europe, Mary’s French education and upbringing lent her a sensuous sophistication which caused many of her more austere subjects to consider her no better than an immoral trollop; an impression that was hardly hindered by her flagrant dalliances with a succession of young men.

This attracted the particular vituperation of John Knox, the former French galley slave released at the behest of Edward VI of England. But what really turned Mary’s nobles against her was the suspicion that she was implicated in the murder of her husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.

This in turn, eventually led to civil war and Mary’s abdication and flight to England. There however, once there, her ever-fearful cousin Elizabeth had Mary imprisoned for nearly twenty years during which time she is alleged to have plotted against Elizabeth with the intention of seizing the English throne, resulting in her trial and execution for High Treason.

One means by which Elizabeth secured the peace of her realm and relative tranquillity of her people was her assumed persona of the Virgin Queen, because she was both politically savvy and very image conscious, being extremely astute in determining what image she should project. And that of Virgin Queen appears to have been deliberately calculated to ease her erstwhile Catholic subjects through their transition from a Roman adoration of the Virgin to the new Protestant paradigm of loyalty to the Crown. When Elizabeth died however, she departed as her siblings before her - childless.

Once again England was faced with the spectre of political upheaval and religious war, as the Separation of Church and State continued to go unheeded. The consensus of the Court was that a Protestant had to be found to assume the succession, and very quickly that person was found in none other than Mary, Queen of Scots’ son James VI.

Suddenly, the whole political dynamic changed as, in 1603, James VI, King of Scots assumed the English throne and became James I, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland.

Tudor England had become part of Stuart Britain.