Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor by Ronald Truman John Edwards

Author:Ronald Truman, John Edwards [Ronald Truman, John Edwards]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780754652366
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2005-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Pope, the saints, and the dead:

Uniformity of doctrine in Carranza’s Catechismo and the printed works of the Marian theologians*

William Wizeman SJ

‘Just as men have been corrupted here even more by books than by the spoken word, so they should be recalled to health through the written word’.1 In expressing this view in his 1558 letter to his friend, Bartolomé Carranza, Cardinal Reginald Pole was describing part of the strategy that he and his fellow churchmen were employing in the renewal of early modern Catholicism in England during the reign of Mary Tudor. From 1553 to 1558, numerous books were printed that explained England’s traditional religion once again, after twenty years of religious tumult. I will attempt to delineate Marian Catholicism as found in these books of doctrine, devotion, apologetics, and sermons regarding two of the most disputed issues of the English Reformation: the Papacy, and what Ronald Hutton has described, I think inaccurately, as the ‘abiding casualties of the previous Reformations’: prayer to the Saints and purgatory. I will also compare these elements of Marian ecclesiology and escha-tology to similar material in other texts, especially the Catechism written by Carranza and intended for England, Comentarios sobre el catechismo christiano, which provided the basis for the Tridentine Catechism and was being translated into English in the summer of 1558.2 Comparing this work of Carranza, who was one of the leading proponents of Catholic Reform, with that of the religious writers whose works were published during Mary’s reign is invaluable in any attempt to delineate the theology, spirituality, and strategies for reform of the Marian Church. Was it, as Geoffrey Dickens wrote, a benighted Church that ‘failed to discover the Counter-Reformation’, or was it a Church that was intimately connected to currents of renewal in what John O’Malley has described as early modern Catholicism in Europe, and which anticipated, as Eamon Duffy has argued, Tridentine reforms?3

England’s reconciliation with Rome, after two decades of intense vilification, commences with the publication of numerous declamations regarding the role of the Pope in the Church. Bishops Edmund Bonner of London and Thomas Watson of Lincoln, as well as other writers, presented unequivocal discussions of the Papacy. Two sermons in Bonner’s frequendy reprinted collection of homilies, sermons by Archdeacon John Harpsfield and Leonard Pollard, and John Standish’s book, The triall of the supremacy, treated the Papacy at length. But most authors, including Carranza, chose to relate discussions of the Pope’s authority to other points of doctrine in their texts. For example, in his Catholyke doctryne, a collection of sermons on the Sacraments, Watson, the most erudite Marian Catholic theologian, referred to the role of the Pope with ardour. And the 1521 sermon by John Fisher, in which he had defended Papal Primacy at length, was reprinted twice during Mary’s reign, the first edition appearing within a month of England’s reunion with Rome, on 30 November 1554. As for Carranza, he treated the Papacy while discussing the Sacrament of Order and Christ’s resurrection as well as in the more obvious context of the article on the Church in the Aposdes’ Creed.

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