F
Fr_Ambrose
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The conflicts did become acute from time to time…
Neuman, Carol, The Northumbrian Renaissance, Associated University Presses, N.J., 1987, ISBN: 0-941664-11-2, p. 58 -
"Elsewhere, however, matters were not so benignly worked out. Saint]Theodore of Tarsus [sent from Rome to succeed Augustine], on his arrival in Britain in 669, found it necessary to use forceful measures to quell the remnants of the Celtic heresy. Despite the direct and immediate effects of Whitby on the central Celtic house at Lindisfarne, it may be remembered that the Picts and Scots, including at this point the Columban motherhouse at Iona, remained unwilling to accept Roman orthodoxy.
[Saint] Theodore’s ‘Penitential’ clearly announced his views on the issues. He recognised neither episcopal consecration nor baptism as performed by the Celtic Church. Eddius tells us that he insisted on reconsecrating Chad, “through every episcopal grade,” and demanded the rebaptism of converts of the Celtic Church. He also ordered a year’s penance for anyone receiving communion from Celtic clerics. The hostility along the Welsh and Cornish borders was apparently mutual.
Aldhelm of Malmsbury wrote that the Welsh bishops considered the clergy of Rome to be excommunicated until they should individually perform forty days penance, and refused to pray with them or join them at meals. The leftovers of food touched by Roman clerics were ordered thrown to swine so that Celtic Christians would not suffer spiritual contagion. Their vessels were to be purified with fire or sand, and they were to receive neither salutation nor the kiss of peace. Apparently the British had not forgot the lessons of St. Augustine’s “Oak.”
“In Rome, on the other hand, the Celtic anomalies were considered full-fledged heresy into the seventeenth century, when Caesar Cardinal Baronius, Vatican Librarian, in describing the work of Augustine’s successor Lawrence, tells how the latter,“laboured with might and main for the purpose of extricating the Britons and the Scots from their schism and reconciling them to the Catholic Church”(79)” p. 288.
"A poem allegedly by the Welsh poet Taliessyn, translated by Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth century, puts in a nutshell the attitude of the Welsh Church before conformity:
Wo be to that priest yborn
That will not cleanly weed his corn
And preach his charge among:
Wo be to that shepard (I say,)
That will not watch his fold alway
As to his office doth belong:
Wo be to him that doth not keep
from Romish wolves his sheep
With staff and weapons strong."