Originally published at The Catholic Thing
The Catholic Church recently celebrated the feast of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, in which “hundreds of British men and women died for their [Catholic] faith in wake of the dispute between the Pope and King Henry VIII during the 16th century,” forty of whom were selected to represent people who made the mistake of contradicting their king’s decision to break with the Catholic Church.
Almost all of this had to do with politics, not religion. Because the British king’s authority was legitimized and administered by the Catholic Church, Henry treated British Catholics as dissenters from his rule even if they never publicly dissented or rebelled against it. Presumably, Henry believed that imprisoning and beheading Catholics, including his friend and Lord High Chancellor St. Thomas More, would help safeguard his rule.
Instead of a prosperous time of peace, the threat of a Catholic usurpation along with a foreign invasion from a Catholic monarch loomed large in those decades, and a civil war erupted between the Anglican Royalists and non-Anglican Parliamentarians nearly a century later. In brutally suppressing would-be dissenters, Henry cultivated a multitude of actual dissenters who in time really did overthrow the monarchy.
As Joseph
