A 10 CATH OLI C HERAW Fri da y, Fl,

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small, stubborn, small-minded man
whose death ennobled a dicey life
Charterhouse Chronicle
PROTESTANTS do not allow themselves the comfort of the luxuries of saints. They have no mechanism for their making though they keep the saints days of those who came safe and early in the history of the Church.
Still they have plenty of divines and poets and good women and
poor threadbare persons who would qualify by Catholic standards. But they were not Catholics so that is that.
This leads to certain anomalies of the sort that would only be tolerated in Canon rather than Common or Case Law. Take the Ugandan martyrs.
The Kabaka, Mutesa 1, had a lot of young pages rather horribly executed. The Catholic ones are saints and the Protestant ones are ,not, though they all died the same death for the same reasons. Pope Paul VI venerated the whole lot of them when he went to Uganda when Adi Amin was still a very simple soldier with unpleasant habits, though apparently admired by his white officers.
But a part of the Anglican Church does revere one Mall. There were two "In Mentoriain The Times of January 30th. They celebrated Charles I. King and
Martyr. They also announced that there would be a service at the foot of his equestrian statue which is the only thing that is not vulgar in Trafalgar Square. No, St Martin's in the Fields is splendid but you can have the rest, including the front of the National Gallery.
with all that traffic swirling past. The statue was made in the king's life time and somehow survived Cromwell's Commonwealth. It is French. On a plinth by Wren.
There was also an earlier Communion Service in !nig() Jones' Banqueting 1 lall — which is one of the secular glories of England. But Charles was a dicey sort of king. He is. of course, a figure of vast and tragic romance.
He was a very small man. He was slow-minded and stubborn
and believed in the divine right of kings about as strongly as he believed in God. He was rough on Puritans, only intermittently so on Catholics.
He achieved a marvellous collection of Renaissance art which Cromwell sold to the Tsars of Russia. And they have still got them in Leningrad. But he was not a good politician though I am sure he was a good man.
"King and Martyr". We have piled canonisations upon monarchs and their spouses. Edward, King and Martyr, Edmund. Edward the Confessor, Oswald and there must be others that escape me.
But Charles' whole life was justified by his death. He kept his executioners waiting while he said his prayers and said good-bye to some of his children.
They had built a high scaffold that opened off a window of the Whitehall banqueting hall. Its sides were high so that the crowd that filled Whitehall from end to end could not see the actual hacking off of the head.
The good Bishop of London, William Limn, was within the scaffold enclosure to see his monarch off and then when it was over, the executioner lifted the head in the traditional manner to show that it was done. Contemporary accounts tell of a vast, slow groan from the multitude which was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. Vox Populi? No wonder they welcomed Charles II back with a sort of joy that England, even in victories over the French, has never known before or since.
Yes, it was a very noble death. Some friends of mine used to show me an old farm house that had been given to the executioner. He is said to have hanged himself upon the restoration of the monarchy.
After the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, the British shot a number of the Irish leaders in a prison yard. An English officer said that they died like heroes. He also said that one of them died like a king. It was the greatest praise that he could find in his vocabulary. Charles' trial and death was as noble if not holy, as that of St Thomas More.
Offensive articles
FLEEING the need to be difficult a few weeks ago, I wrote that the Anglican Thirty Nine Articles were much more offensive than the Papal Bull of Leo XIII which declared that Anglican orders were utterly null and absolutely void or words to , that effect.
1 have been in the most gentle possible way reproved for this by John Satterthwaite, the Bishop or Fulham and Gibraltar which means that the Bishop of Rome lives in his diocese (1-his is not, alas, an original observation).
Something very English or Anglican has happened to these once sacred things. It is true that nine tenths of them are quite acceptable to Catholics, but there are a few remarks about the authority or the Bishop of Rome and abdut the idolatOry of the Mass which are quite startingly
rude. .
And 1 confess that from time to time, not altogether in that spirit of charity that should inform Charterhouse, I like to refer to them. Keeps them feeling a touch guilty, like.
One of the civilised pleasures of life is going to Anglican Evensong of a Sunday afternoon. Alas as the Anglicans become more Catholic in their attitudes and worship and the Catholics become more Protestant — we are in danger of behaving like ships that pass in full daylight waving madly from the bridges to each other as we continue to go in opposite directions — this measured service is losing its popularity to the Parish Eucharist.
But should the service drag a little, I do recommend you to take up the Book of Common Prayer and read the Articles. They make Catholic hair curl. They now embarrass most Anglicans.
can never quite make up my mind whether King Edward VI, was a little creep of a sort of Protestant saint. t, ertainly for a young man succeeding Henry VIII his piety was monumental.
And the flint-hearted nobles who governed him. and were for practical reasons committed to the Reformation, in 1551 set up a commission consisting of eight bishops. eight divines, eight lawyers and eight representative laymen to codify their Reforms. They produced the Articles. Even committees wrote like angels in those days and the Articles still thunder at us. Archbishop Cranmer and Bishop Ridley both had a hand in them.
There used to be forty two of them. hut under Elizabeth 1 they were moderated and reduced to 39. Now they are more or less shelved. Because the Church of England is by law established. they would be exceedingly hard to get rid of. Though outside of' England, within the Anglican Communion, they are now so thick in dust that they are practically invisible. When an Anglican clergyman is licensed as a curate or something of that sort. he no longer has to read them out. When he takes his oath he has to swear to this: "The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church ... Led by the Holy Spirit, it has borne witness to Christian truth in its historic formularies. the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the ordering of Bishops, Priests and Deacons." So they are given an historical role, a product of their bitter times perhaps a part of history. I confess that I urn not too happy with this current apologia.
Leo XIII's Apostoliate C'urae is an even harder nut to crack. II' you are exercised about the validity of Anglican orders, (and the historical interpretation of the matter has not been closed by any inlallible declaration,) can I recommend a C.T.S. pamphlet? Its by Jesuit, Fr Edward Yarnold and is invigoratingly Jesuitical.
And I use that adjective in the purest form of praise. It's called Anglican Orders — a Way