In answer to CBCD’s question just above, Anglican? Christian?
I received a nice e-mail from the Beardless one, and need to clarify –
The Church in England was around 500 years before the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox split. It remained in existence up through the early 1500s, in communion with Rome but with its own hierarchy, just as the Church in France, in Spain, in Germany, and in Sweden did. In the course of this, there were any number of disputes between monarch and Pope about the scope of the latter’s authority over the laws of the local realm.
Henry VII, newly king of England after overthrowing Richard III and with the most precarious claim possible for kingship, took every step possible to cement his authority, including marrying the Yorkist heiress and making marriage alliances for his children by her. One of these entailed marrying Prince Arthur, heir to the throne, to the younger daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, Catherine of Aragon. This was a typical “political union” between two kids, and Arthur, sickly, never consummated the marriage before he died.
Trying to salvage the mess his death left, Henry negotiated her marriage to his surviving son, Prince Henry, who would become Henry VIII. To do so, he needed to get relief from the canon law prohibiting someone from marrying his brother’s widow, and the Pope of the time was willing to grant this.
Henry VIII ascended the throne on his father’s death, and had a daughter and a number of stillbirths by Catherine. When Luther condemned Catholic teaching, Henry wrote a book in defense of the Catholic position, and was awarded the title Defensor Fidei by a grateful Pope. Falling for Anne Boleyn and concerned for the absence of a male heir, he convinced himself that the dispensation that had permitted him to marry Catherine was actually against God’s law, and that his sonlessness was due to God’s anger, he sought an annulment, a fairly common occurrence in the days of matrimonial alliances. However, Catherine’s nephew was now King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V, and his troops were occupying Rome – and he was not at all pleased at the idea of his aunt’s marriage being annulled. He prevailed on the Pope to refuse the annulment.
Henry did what kings and emperors before had done – got a complaisant Parliament to declare that the Pope had no authority over civil matters affecting the realm. And got his annulment, assuming headship under Christ over the English church, which he kept firmly Catholic in doctrine but outside the Pope’s authority.
Matters stayed like this through five more wives until Henry’s death. He had one son, who took the throne as Edward VI at age nine – and his guardians, his mother’s kin the Spensers, were Protestant, largely Bucerian in theology. Under the Spensers, England moved rapidly Protestant. Then Edward died at fifteen, unmarried. After a brief spasm involving Lady Jane Grey, Edward’s older sister, Catherine’s daughter Mary, took the throne, reversed her mother’s annulment, and brought England back under the Papacy, marrying Emperor Charles’s son Philip II of Spain. But they had no children, and, ironically, she was excommunicated in a bit more Papal politics. Her successor was the only surviving child of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth. And she stabilized the church in a position midway between Catholicism and Protestantism, preserving the Apostolic Succession and episcopal rule, retaining the ecclesiology and sacramental theology of Catholicism but with some abuses corrected and an emphasis on Scripture and evangelism taken from Protestantism. For the first 15 years of her reign, she was in communion with the Pope, though independent of his authority. Then Philip II, who continued to claim the English throne through his marriage to Mary, prevailed on the Pope to excommunicate her and her loyal subjects.
And that’s where things have stood ever since.
To say that Henry founded the Church of England is to deny the fact that the same bishops and priests and the same doctrine were in place before and after his separation from the Pope. The same Church continued in place throughout his reign as had been before and, save for the backing-and-filling under his children and the Commonwealth and Civil Wars, continued from then until today.
Anglicans use the adjective catholic to mean an ecclesiology that adheres to the traditional three orders of clergy and the transmission of authority from the apostles by laying on of hands down to the present leadership, a focus on grace mediated through the sacraments, and generally an adherence to Scripture, Tradition, and Reason as the three sources of authority, none of which may be disregarded without damage to the faith. This flies in the face of Protestant sola Scriptura teachings. So we claim to be catholic, one element of the broken Church, other pieces of which include the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Lutheran Churches of Sweden, Finland, and ELCA, and the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht.