C
Contarini
Guest
I was taught this growing up (through reading 19th-century Protestant sources), but my Protestant history professors challenged me on it. I do not find it generally held among educated Protestants today. YMMV.
Certainly the persecution of Catholics was religious persecution, and certainly the persecution of heretics often had political ramifications. But that doesn’t change the fact that heresy and treason were different crimes.
The fact that Protestants never prosecuted Catholics for heresy (even though they frequently did prosecute radicals for heresy, and occasionally burned them at the stake) is actually one of the strongest points in favor of Catholicism. Protestants could not get away with claiming that Catholics were heretics, because it was obvious to everyone that they were not making up a new form of Christianity (which is essentially what heresy was) but simply practicing what everyone in Europe had been taught to practice until recently.
Protestants did argue that the Mass and other Catholic practices were blasphemy. I read long ago that two Catholics were executed in Scotland, and this may have been the charge–I’m not sure. I’m also not sure what the formal charge against the martyrs of Gorkum was–their execution was an irregular act carried out in time of war anyway–but apparently they were asked to deny specific Catholic doctrines, so this was an even clearer case of religious persecution than the English martyrs.
For the reasons given above, I think this is simply wrong with regard to the Catholics killed under Elizabeth (and earlier under Henry). They were killed as traitors, and that meant something–the Henrician martyrs denied Henry’s supremacy, and the Elizabethan martyrs participated in underground Catholic worship at a time when the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth and in principle called on Catholics to abandon her allegiance. That’s not the same thing as executing someone for holding to false doctrines, even though the Catholics in question were required by their faith to do what they did, were not (in most cases) actually engaged in any attempt to overthrow the monarch and thus were genuine martyrs and genuine victims of religious persecution.
A rough equivalent would be if the U.S. government were to become convinced that Muslims as a whole were disloyal citizens, and thus were to make basic Islamic practices illegal and punishable as if they were themselves acts of terrorism. That would be blatantly unjust and a clear act of religious persecution. But it would also be unjust to discuss such a reprehensible act without discussing the context of Islamic terrorism that had led up to it, and to compare it with garden-variety religious intolerance.
On the fundamental issue at stake, as I see it, the Catholics were right and the Anglicans were wrong–Anglicanism had embraced an idolatrous view of the civil government.
Edwin
