MGB:_There are a few additional points to add. The Puritans came to purify English Protestantism which they though was decidedly uneven. Indeed, some braches were ritualistically Catholic, some less so, all within Anglicanism. They wanted to create a city on the Hill. Garry Wills covers this extensively in Head and Heart. Of course, neither book gets into the weeds of some of the personalities. My mother’s family is a who’s who of American protestant and Quaker revolutionaries, culminating in our branch establishing a major toe hold in the Disciples of Christ, although my mother and her sister, andn later her mohter, found it to be bland fare and became Catholic and married Catholic husbands.
Of course, our family’s issues with Rome go back to the time of Elizabeth when the Pope encouraged the branch of the Allen Family who were Earls of Arundel to attempt revolutuion and regicide. That branch is now, justifiably extinct, although not the Lords of Thaxted or their American cousins, which include the vast majority of Allens in America, including yours truly.
The other key point is that Rome was not exactly innocent in its dealingS with Britian and the ideas of liberalism, liberty and even through St. John Paul, freedom of thought. Again, I have a book on that out with the annotated Encyclicals that prove my points, starting with Gregory XVI, through three of the four modern Piuses andn on to St. John Paul and his counter-revolutionary encyclical Veritatis Splendor. Nowdays, of course, this couter-revolution against democracy is taken up under the guise of the Pro-Live movement, as Evangelium Vitae makes clear. Indeed, Rome was suspeicious of American Bishops, lest they commit the phantom Americanist Heresy insisting that American ideals forced Catholic doctrine to be adapted to our culture. This was crazy, of course, like many curial rantings, although it is true that the question of abortion occurs differerntly in American law than in European Parliamentary democracies.
No comments:
Post a Comment