From the editor’s desk

New light on the Reformation

7 January 2012

The news that the Lutheran and Catholic Churches are to embark on a joint review of their shared history sets an example that others could usefully follow. Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, has announced that both Churches have agreed to collaborate in their preparations to mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517.

Challenged to withdraw them, he refused and was excommunicated in 1521. So 1517 has always been taken to mark the start of the Protestant Reformation, which spread outwards from Germany triggering war, massacre and persecution. Only slowly did the tension between the two settle down into uneasy coexistence. In the last 50 years, have we started to understand how much we have in common, and how much of the former conflict came from myths, misunderstandings and misrepresentations, which were exaggerated to suit political ends and sustained by pride and obstinacy. Many of the changes the ori­ginal Reformers sought have now been conceded by the Catholic Church, and substantial theological agreement has been reached on the once contentious issue of justification.

Indeed, few Catholics would now deny that the Church of 1517, including the papacy itself, was overdue for reform. Meanwhile, many Lutherans would admit that Luther’s attacks on it were nevertheless excessive and inflammatory.
It was another 18 years before Henry VIII, taking advantage of the weakening of Rome’s position under Luther’s onslaught, precipitated what was to become the English Reformation. As on the Continent, both sides constructed a narrative that was as much myth as it was history; each side treasured the memory of its martyrs; each side’s version of the facts put the entire blame on its opponents.

A BBC TV series with the ironic title How God Made the English, presented by the newly knighted church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, is about to remind the nation of the extent to which its national identity depends on an overly national­istic interpretation of the English Reformation. Most modern historians of the period are no longer comfortable with this, thanks to the influence of Eamon Duffy’s ground-breaking 1992 book The Stripping of the Altars. Professor MacCulloch, himself an Anglican clergyman, wants to show how much of the national identity really goes back to the time when England was ardently Catholic, an insight which previous generations of English historians have preferred not to acknowledge.

With goodwill and open-mindedness, none of this need affect the transformed state of relations between the Catholic and Anglican Churches, either in England or worldwide, which is one of the ecumenical movement’s best achievements. Indeed,  they could benefit from an English version of the collaborative study that Catholics and Lutherans are to embark on.

Catholics need not flinch from asking whether Pope Clement VII’s refusal of Henry’s request for an annulment from Catherine in 1527 was motivated by fear of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V; that the excommunication of Elizabeth I by Pope St Pius V in 1570 was both an affront to national dignity and a fatal mistake is no longer really in dispute. The Church of England needs to be equally honest: it too has skeletons in the cupboard. The blood of martyrs was shed on both sides. True reconciliation among Christians requires the healing of memories.