I have been reading about Queen Elizabeth I and the fact that in 1570, Pius V issued a papal bull excommunicating her as a heretic, calling her “that servant of all iniquity. . . pretended Queen of England.”
(By the way, that somewhat falsifies the allegation in another thread that Pius XII could not have named Hitler specifically and condemned him, if he had wanted to. But I digress. This is about Elizabethan England, not Nazi Germany).
This pronouncement absolved all Roman Catholic Englishmen from loyalty or obedience to Elizabeth or her laws, and even went so far as to say that anyone who WAS loyal to her “shall incur the same sentence of malediction.”
Of course, this put English RCs in a terrible quandry, since they were now either traitors to their Queen or disobedient to their Pope. Elizabeth was in fact VERY tolerant compared to the savagery of the era, such as the massacre of French Protestants or the Inquisition in Spain. All she really required was that RCs in England be discreet so as not to start riots against them.
But the Papal Bull of 1570 FORCED RCs to be her enemies.
Anyhow, my quesion is this. Was this Papal Bull ever retracted?
If not, are Roman Catholic Britons still technically affected by it? If, as I have heard, Prime Minister Tony Blair is pretty much converted to his wife’s Roman Catholic beliefs, does that mean the Blairs must consider the PRESENT Queen Elizabeth to be a heretic to whom they need have no loyalty?
Why do you assume that a Papal Bull against one specific monarch (Elizabeth I) applied to her successors, or anyone other than her? As far as I’m aware, once Elizabeth died in 1603 that was the end of it. Indeed, there was one openly Catholic monarch after Elizabeth’s time, namely James II. It’d be pretty odd if English Catholics were required to be disloyal to him.
Regnans in Excelsis made no mention of Elizabeth’s successors, so, to be casuistical about it, there is nothing in it that creates a problem for any Catholic obeying those successors. (Can excommunications be applied in advance?) Of course, many of those successors could have been excommunicated on exactly the same grounds as she was, but no subsequent Pope bothered to do so.
Moreover, although Regnans in Excelsis denied the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s title to the throne, that, as it happens, also makes no difference to her successors, as none of them claimed the throne via her. Indeed, her successors would claim the throne through the Pope’s preferred claimant, Mary, Queen of Scots.
That was a bit obscure, what I meant is that Theocracy is not very pleasant for the part of the population that does not share the faith
and theocracies are not necessarily set up in the interest of those governed
especially when they are run from overseas
The British problem was that they did not like the monarch being subordinate to the Pope - especially when he was quite a political animal, when he wasn’t being manipulated by someone else.
Roman Catholicism nowadays is nothing like its old setup.
That argument only makes sense if the English had replaced James II’s government with a non-sectarian government. They didn’t. They replaced his Roman Catholic preferences with Anglican preferences, and denied Roman Catholics the right to participate in public affairs for well over a century. So if you’re saying that James II’s government was a theocracy (and I don’t know that I would accept that characterisation, in any event), then he was replaced by an Anglican theocracy, and your analogy fails.
A pretty broad church, yes - unless you were a Roman Catholic. From the Wiki article: Catholicism in Great Britain:
And what definition of “theocracy” are you using? Remember, the monarch is also the head of the Church of England. That seems a stronger connexion between the church and the government than the situation with James II, since the Pope had no official standing in the English constitution.
This theocractic role of the monarch is well illustrated by the Coronation Oath, established by an Act in 1689, following the expulsion of James II:
So you’ve got a monarch who is required to be a Protestant, who swears to do everything to maintain a Protestant church, and who is the head of that Protestant church.
If James II’s Roman Catholicism was enough for you to say he was establishing a theocracy, what do you say the situation under William & Mary and their successors was?
But the Anglican Church, or the kings who automatically became head of it, didn’t order restrictions against any other faiths (excepting the RC, which they considered loyal to a foreign authority first); they allowed the teaching of other religions, they allowed secular laws (not religiously motivated ones) etc.
So citizens who weren’t members of the Anglican Church could still be good citizens and have all rights, yes? This is different from a true or hard-nosed theocracy, where only one faith is allowed to be taught, and laws are based on the Holy book of that faith, and people of differing faith (or who have been banned from that faith) also loose their rights as citizens.
