The Church of England must stop feeling guilty about the Reformation

Spectator

2 days ago

Thomas More has a richly ambiguous place in our religious and political history. Like a brave hero of conscience, he defied the will of a tyrant, even unto death. A herald of modern liberty, then? Not quite. Before he found himself on the wrong end of the axe, as Lord Chancellor he calmly sent many dissidents to their death. His cause was not modern liberty, but the defence of the old version of authoritarian order. The Catholic Church calls him a saint.
He is back in the news because a church in Canterbury has said it wants to exhume his remains, which the Catholic faithful are obviously keen to venerate. The surprising thing is that this church, St Dunstan's, is Anglican.
As a few GCSE students still know, the Church of England was launched by the very tyrant who ordered More's death, Henry VIII. Some well-meaning types will see it as a lovely sign of harmony between the old rival traditions, that an Anglican church wants to maximise the veneration of this Catholic martyr.
I don't. To me it is a sign that the Church of England lacks self-confidence. It is inclined to apologise for its birth. It is hypocritical to honour a man who wanted to strangle the CofE in its cradle.
Yes, there was a bloody side to the birth of our national Church. Revolutions are bloody. You can't make a holy omelette without breaking holy eggs. Maybe it could all have happened in a slightly nicer way, but it is good that it happened. The English Reformation was a good thing. More was on the wrong side of history.
You might be neither Catholic nor Protestant, and feel you have no dog in this fight. But, if you care about the tradition of British liberty, you have a puppy in this fight. For that tradition was born here, in the rather brutal national take-over of the Church. Paradoxically, the Tudor tyranny paved the way for the first major liberal state. It was the Reformation that led to a break with the medieval unity of religion and politics, which was basically a form of theocracy. It used to be part of British identity, to have some awareness of this.
The Church of England should try to rekindle that awareness. Instead it is crippled with guilt about its origins. This guilt explains its current failure to sort out its divisions.
In a story that is seemingly unrelated to the remains of Thomas More, the bishop of Fulham was cross with a community choir that was borrowing his church this week. He came down in his dressing gown and told them to can it.
The real significance of this story is an omission in the Times report of what happened. It tells us at the end that this bishop, called Jonathan Baker, 'is responsible for episcopal oversight in the dioceses of London, Southwark and Rochester.' It sounds as if he is therefore the chief bishop of these places, which puts him on a par with the archbishops of Canterbury and York. In reality, he is responsible for the episcopal oversight of parishes in these dioceses that reject the ordination of women.
The Church of England is divided, with a sub-group of bishops running a church-within-the-Church. These traditionalist bishops effectively reject the spiritual leadership of the archbishops, often declining to receive communion from them.
What's the link with the More story? The Church allowed this division to emerge due its guilt at the Reformation. A Church shouldn't impose unity and force tender consciences, so let's allow the traditionalists to have their own bishops. It was a weak-minded decision, which has opened the door to opponents of homosexuality now demanding their own bishops too. The Church is disintegrating because of its victor's guilt at the excesses of Tudor times. Let it rediscover some pride in its remarkable, if a little brutal, history. And let St Dunstan's donate the remains of More to the local Catholic church.