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Chapter One

The Three Reformations

One of the biggest mistakes that a student of history can make is to confuse the so-called English “Reformation” with its namesake on the continent. Whereas the Protestant Reformation in Europe was animated by the genuine theological differences that separated those who followed Luther or Calvin from those who accepted the apostolic and ecclesial authority of Catholicism, the so-called “Reformation” in England was animated solely by the political ambitions and lustful appetites of the king.

Henry VIII was not a Protestant but a tyrant. In declaring himself the head of the Church in England, he was making religion a servile subject of secular power. He was demanding that the things of God be rendered unto Caesar. Parallels with the secularism of our own time and its war on religious freedom are palpable.

Considering the parallels between Tudor England and the secular fundamentalism of our own age, it is worth considering the English Resistance to the Tudor Terror in the hope that it will inspire similar holiness and heroism today.

Those who defied the secular powers in England by refusing to kowtow before the state-imposed religion were known as recusants. These noble souls paid huge fines and often suffered imprisonment or exile for refusing to conform to the state religion. There were many others who suffered martyrdom, laying down their lives for their friends and forgiving their enemies from the scaffold, preferring the hangman’s noose or the executioner’s axe to the slavery of secularism.

The heroic London Carthusians were among the first victims of Henry’s “reformation.” Some were starved to death on the king’s orders; others were hanged, disemboweled while still alive, and then quartered, suffering the grueling and gruesome fate that would befall many other martyrs throughout the remainder of the bloody reign of the Tudors. Two other early martyrs of Henry’s cynical “reformation” were Thomas More and John Fisher, both of whom were beheaded on the orders of the king.

If things were bad under Henry, they would arguably be worse during the reign of Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry’s adulterous relationship with the ill-fated Anne Boleyn. It was during Elizabeth’s blood-stained reign that the Jesuit Mission to England demonstrated the courage, zeal, and evangelizing spirit of the Catholic Reformation. Perhaps the two most famous Jesuit Martyrs were Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell, martyred in 1581 and 1595 respectively, both of whom have an intriguing connection with William Shakespeare, as we shall see.

Although it is not possible to pay due tribute and homage to the hundreds of martyrs who laid down their lives for God and neighbor during the Tudor Terror, it would surely be a sin of omission to fail to mention Margaret Clitherow, Margaret Ward, and Anne Line, three holy women who were martyred for their faith during Elizabeth’s reign. These martyred saints are but a handful of the many holy souls who chose death and the glory of martyrdom over submission to a secularist tyranny which had sought to destroy religious liberty.

The Tudor Terror lasted from Henry VIII’s declaration of himself as head of the Church in 1534 until the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. Sadly, the Terror would continue under the Stuarts, the last Catholics being executed in the 1680s, and would linger in less deadly forms of persecution until Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Then, after three centuries of heroic and defiant resistance, the remnant of the recusants were joined by a new wave of converts and a new wave of Irish immigrants, heralding the beginning of the Catholic Revival. It was not the first time in the glorious and bloody history of the Church that her scourging and “death” had led to a glorious resurrection. It was not the first time, and doubtless it will not be the last.

Meanwhile, as the English martyrs spilled their blood in heroic resistance to tyrannical secularism, the Catholic Reformation in Europe brought forth an array of great saints whose zeal for the Faith shines forth across the centuries. In Spain, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross reformed the Carmelite order, and another great Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola, founded the Society of Jesus, which epitomized the spirit of the Catholic Reformation in its meditative prayer and its militant resistance to the errors of Protestantism. Francis Xavier, a friend of Ignatius Loyola and a cofounder of the Jesuits, showed another side of the Catholic Reformation with his missionary zeal. As the Apostle to the Far East, this pioneering saint took the Faith to the far-flung corners of the world, spreading the Gospel in India and preaching in virgin territory, such as Japan and Borneo, lands which had never before seen a Christian missionary.

At the heart of the Catholic Reformation was the solid figure of Pope Pius V, who brought to fruition the reforms of the Council of Trent. Countering the attacks on the Church’s liturgy by Protestant “reformers,” this indomitable pope standardized the rubrics of the Mass throughout the Church with the formal promulgation of the Tridentine rite. Responding to the humanist attacks on scholasticism, he declared Thomas Aquinas a Doctor of the Church, thereby solidifying the preeminence of Thomism in the Church’s philosophy. Responding to the threat of secularism in the north and Islam in the east, he excommunicated Elizabeth I for her heresy and persecution of Catholics in England and organized the Holy League of Christian nations to defeat the military threat of the Ottoman Empire, instituting the feast of Our Lady of Victory, now known as the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, to celebrate the triumph of the Christian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

Other saints of the Catholic Reformation, all of whom exhibited the heroism of holiness in times of trial, include Philip Neri, Charles Borromeo, Robert Bellarmine, Francis de Sales, and Vincent de Paul.

Having established that there were two distinct “Reformations,” one in England and the other on the European continent, we can see in the heroic lives of these saints, many of whom we celebrate in this volume, the holiness and dynamism of a third “Reformation,” one which was more truly a Reformation than either of the other two. This Reformation occurred within the Catholic Church as a direct response to the challenges to its authority heralded by Luther and Calvin, on the one hand, and by Henry VIII and his successors on the other. Although this Reformation is normally labeled the “Counter-Reformation” by historians, it was more truly a genuine reformation of the Church than anything set in motion by the Protestant Reformers or anything put in place by England’s rulers.

The name “Counter-Reformation” is really an ugly label for such a beautiful thing. Although it describes a period in history in which the Church was countering the Protestant and English Reformations, it is so much more than the mere reaction that the name signifies. It was magnificent, majestic, magisterial, and so much more glorious than the thing it was “countering.” It was also, in a very real sense, a Catholic Reformation and was not, therefore, in this sense, a “counter-reformation” at all. From the reforms of the Council of Trent to the fruits of a new generation of saints, the Catholic Reformation of this period was filled with the Spirit that had animated earlier Catholic Reformations, such as those heralded by Saint Francis and Saint Dominic three hundred years earlier or by Saint Benedict a thousand years earlier.

In contrast to this true Reformation, the so-called Protestant “Reformation” was more of an anti-Catholic Reaction, a Protestant Counter-Reformation! Indeed, the word “Reformation” is such a misleading label for the immeasurable damage to Christendom wrought by Luther, Calvin, and their cohorts that it should be exposed as an utter misnomer. The Protestant and English “Reformations” had the effect of sundering the faithful from the Church and severing much of Christian Europe from orthodoxy and tradition. Judging the thing for what it is, therefore, the works of Luther and Calvin in Europe and the power-hungry Tudor and Stuart monarchs in England could be called a Deformation or even a Defamation, since their results have been to deform Christian Europe and to defame the heritage of Christian unity.

Another truer label for the Protestant and English Reformations could be the Rupture, since they have led not merely to religious division but to the fragmentation of the Protestant denominations into a plethora of subdividing particles. Looking at the history of the past five hundred years, it can be seen that Protestantism is an explosion of faith, not in the positive sense of the fruits of “reform,” but in the negative sense of a violent disintegration of one body of Reformers under Luther into thousands of individual denominations. As with any explosion, the individual pieces do not simply fragment, they move further and further away from the center. So it is that the “churches” of the “Reformation” are becoming more eccentric, or, in the language of the Catholic Reformation, more heretical. Only the Rupture could have spawned the Rapture!

As we witness the disintegration of the misnamed Protestant and English “Reformations,” dare we see some mystical significance in the past five hundred years of religious conflict? Might we not see the Reformation as a catastrophe through which God had worked His mystical will? Tolkien invented a word, eucatastrophe, to describe the good that God brings out of evil; it is the good which could not have happened without the evil that preceded it.⁵ A eucatastrophe is the felix culpa, the blessed fault or fortunate fall, from which God brings forth unexpected blessings. Thus, the catastrophe of the Fall brought forth the eucatastrophe of the Redemption, and the catastrophe of the Crucifixion brought forth the eucatastrophe of the Resurrection. Might it not be equally true that the catastrophe of Protestantism brought forth the eucatastrophe of the Catholic Reformation?

If, as Christians, we believe that Christ calls us to be One, in His Name, it is hard to see how the accelerating fragmentation of Protestantism can be an authentic work of the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Reformation, on the other hand, reverberates down the ages as a living testimony of the promise of Christ that He will never abandon His Church. As the Protestant Reformation dissolves further and further into disintegrating (non) denominational particles, the Catholic Reformation remains as living proof of the heroism of the saints and of the timeless promise of Christ that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against His Church.