Ecumenical Martyrs

Today in our OHC calendar we observe the feast of Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher as martyrs, who were executed by the English government of Henry VIII for opposing the new structural definition of the Church of England, making the King the Supreme Head of the Church.

I'm reasonably sure that this is a quirk of OHC's practice. More and Fisher are not in Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2006, nor are they in the new Holy Women, Holy Men, the greatly expanded LFF. I think they are there because our community wants to acknowledge the suffering on all sides which the English Reformation occasioned.

I had not thought about it until recently, but three times in my experience visits to Roman Catholic Benedictine monasteries have occasioned something rather different. Years ago I would visit the monastery at Valyermo for spiritual direction, with the estimable Thomas Duscher, OSB, later Fr. Romuald of the Camaldolese, now regretfully departed. On my last visit one of the masses was dedicated to the English martyrs, by which was clearly meant the RC martyrs. The same thing happened on a visit to another major monastery in the last two years (I don't want to identify it). I didn't think much of it at the time. But recently one of our brothers on a monastery visit also encountered the same commemoration at the mass. Hmm. Makes one wonder.

The Episcopal Church does observe the martyrdoms of Latimer, Cranmer and Ridley on October 16. Usually at these celebrations no great point is made of accusing the Roman Catholic regime then in power of wickedness. Rather, the point is often made of Cranmer's changeableness when faced with the stake. His witness was not one of undaunted principle and courage. In religious history, of course, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the lives and deaths of the Marian Martyrs, was hugely important. For a very long time Foxe was the second best-selling book in the English-speaking world. The anti-Roman prejudice it whipped up was enormous, deep and long-lasting. Knowing this, I am not surprised at the continuing depth of RC sentiment about their own martyrs. But I am surprised how often they seem to be trotted out in monastic contexts when Anglican monks come visiting.

The Reformation is not over, of course. Some of what is going on in the Anglican Communion at the moment is a resurgent Calvinism, suppressed by Charles I just as it was getting going in a serious way in the early seventeenth century. It went underground, eventually finding a home in overseas missionary societies like the Church Missionary Society, whose work is now bearing much fruit in African and Australian contexts. And all the decades of friendly contact between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, with the present Pope at the middle of much of it, could be coming to an end in his oddly and obviously anti-ecumenical bid for Anglicans to become Roman Catholic.

I wish there had been some RCs at the Eucharist today. I wish that some of them had been monks, who could go home and say, Those Anglicans observed Fisher and More as saints at the altar when I was there. Maybe something pointed toward mutual understanding could grow from it, instead of something that sets us against each other, even after all these years.