Catholics From England

"It is in this wrestling that Jacob 'prevails with God', and realises that he has seen God face to face. He has overcome not God but his own rivalry. After this mysterious struggle he was able to recognise his wrongdoing and look his brother Esau in the face. Thus he was able to learn to live in peace with his brother—and become Israel, a community of brethren."

"What is new is that this sort of belonging to a group defined by an inherited paternity is shown to be an idolatrous belonging, and by idolatrous, understand a belonging demanding sacrifice. Jesus appears in the midst of such a group and, by showing up its structure for what it is, provokes it into tightening its group frontiers, into acting ever more obviously according to sacrificial type. And the threatening, destabilising element in Jesus' teaching and mode of acting out is that he refuses to concede any divine element at all to inherited group belonging."

"There is nothing harder than to be told that what we hold sacred is an idol. (64)."

"The structure of our desire, which precedes our consciousness, is murderous. That desire ensures that our cultural constructs, our language and our knowledge are radically inflected by the lie which fails to recognise this, fails to see God in humans who are 'other', or ourselves in our victims, which is to say the same thing."

"In the face of those who have no voice, we must, above all, avoid being strong with the weak (cf. 1 Cor. 10:23-30)."

"The 'I', the 'self' of the child of God, is born in the midst of the ruins of repented idolatry."

"All human paternity comes internally structured by fratricide and, as paternity, is incapable of truth, because it will always be protecting itself against the 'other'."

"The moment I realised that I was dealing with a mechanism whose participants were its prisoners, at that moment I was able to take distance from what had happened, and forgiveness started to become possible."

"... [I]t is our being bad brothers and sisters that leads us to be bad fathers and mothers, not our having bad fathers and mothers that has made us bad brothers and sisters."

"We cannot understand the preaching of the resurrection if it is understood as a miraculous moment which founds a new religion. If it is taken thus, we are in fact denying the force and efficacy of the resurrection. For the resurrection brings about the definitive installation in our midst, as a constructive hermeneutical principle, of the cult of Yahweh who knows not death, and who is worshipped in a continuous apprenticeship in participating in and not being scandalised by the collapse of the sacred. A sacred whose secret is always the victims which it hides, and on whose sacrifice it depends."

"In one case as in the other, the question which gives away the sacrificial mentality underlying group belonging is the same: are you for us, or are you one of them? It is the question which reveals the impossibility of a cracking of heart, and thus the impossibility of Eucharist."

"All of Paul's preaching, all of his theology, is characterised by the process of the collapse of a certain sacred structure, and by the slow discovery of the perspective given by a new focus on Yahweh, the Pauline equivalent of Elijah's still, small voice."

"For catholicity doesn't mean a unity of perspective from which we start, but the discovery and construction of a real and surprising fraternity which begins with overcoming the tendency to forge from our own perspective a sacred which excludes."

"The process which we see is the process of an upset which forces the gradual learning of how to become unattached from everything which seemed divine and holy, the collapse of zeal for the Lord of hosts. At the same time it leads to an apprenticeship in listening to the still, small voice, and the reinvention of a new type of zeal."

"Now, here is Jesus' point: he is not only the culmination of the project, but the project itself, God made brother, offering us to become siblings, but vulnerable to fratricide."

"In fact, for those who feel themselves excluded, or treated as defective, by the reigning social and moral order, it is of incalculable importance to discover that this feeling of being excluded or defective has nothing to do with God. It is purely a social mechanism, and God rather wants to include us and carry us to a fullness of life which will probably cause scandal to the partisans of the reigning order."

"The problem is that this 'being identified with the victim' can come to be used as an arm with which to club others. The victims become the group of the 'righteous just' in order to exclude the poor Pharisees, who are never in short supply as the butts of easy mockery."

"Sin ceases to be a defect which excludes, and comes to be participation in the mechanism of exclusion."

"In a world where nobody understood the viewpoint of the victim, we would all be right to side with the victim. But we live in a world where almost nobody 'comes out' as a Pharisee or a hypocrite, and it seems to me that the way to moral learning proceeds in that direction."

"Sin is resistance, in the name of God, to the creative work of God which seeks to include us all."

"Being good can never do without the effort to learn, step by step, and in real circumstances of life, how to separate religious and moral words from an expelling mechanism, one which demands human sacrifice, so as to make of them words of mercy which absolve, which loose, which allow creation to be brought to completion."

"Elijah, when he entered into rivalry with the prophets of Baal became one of them, because God is not to be found in such circuses, nor in the murders which go along with them. At the end of his undeceiving, Elijah is more Yahwist, more atheist, less of a shaman, less of a sacrificer, because God is not like the gods, not even so as to show himself superior to them."

"God has not the slightest difficulty in bringing to a fullness of creation the person who is in some way incomplete and recognises this. The problem is with those who think that they are complete, and that creation is, at least in their case, finished."

"Nevertheless Kosovo is not the only indicator of a change of mood, of the sort of moral interventionist internationalism which has come to be associated particularly with Tony Blair. [...] in fact, after a quarter of a century of doing nothing, the 'international community' in precisely the same year as Kosovo did engineer the independence of East Timor."

"Chomsky just has not entered deeply into what he is talking about and he is not greatly interested in anything except digging out material for anti-American invective."

"A Christianity split into a diversity of ecclesiastical streams, the dualism implicit within its political agenda – nation-forming on the one side, universalism on the other was further accentuated. The classical eastern orthodox form stressing the power of the emperor was in principle universalist enough in its vision of Constantinople as the New Rome, but in practice Byzantium became a rather thoroughly Greek empire, alienating non-Greeks in Egypt, Syria or the west. This combined with its considerable degree of Caesaropapism led to the generation of a type of church-state relationship characteristic of eastern autocephalous churches of a highly nationalist type."

"For the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat may also have a significant effect as, in some circumstances, does state formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is certainly assisted by it to a greater self-consciousness. Most such developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and of the world as a society of nations originally 'imagined', if you like the word, through the mirror of the Bible, Europe's primary textbook, but turned into a formal political philosophy no earlier than the nineteenth century and then next to canonised by President Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace settlement of 1920."

"A nation is a far more self-conscious community than an ethnicity."

"James's Catholicising policy might seem insane; it can be explained only by his naive and grossly inflated expectations of conversions. Fortified by his sense of divine mission, he believed with a conviction born of faith that converts would appear, not because he had any rational grounds for thinking that they would but because he desperately wanted them to... He blundered on with the blind optimism of a man whose mind was determinedly closed to any thought of failure... [W]hen William invaded, few were prepared to resist him. In less than four years James had destroyed the strongest political position that any Stuart ever enjoyed. He had turned the Tories from vociferous loyalty to sullen apathy. And he had achieved this by concentrating single-mindedly on the line of action that the Tories could not stomach – the promotion of Popery."

"In 1685 and 1686, James II struck several more blows to the Whig network in an attempt to silence the radical voice. Early in the first year of his reign, James moved to put the press under stricter supervision. His government was also quick to move against persons accused of distributing seditious papers or telling seditious tales. Bookstores were raided. Benjamin Harris's stocks were seized, wherein books were found with such titles as English Liberties (Henry Care's book) and A Scheme of Popish Cruelties. In December 1685, warrants to arrest anyone dispersing "seditious, scandalous, and unlicensed books, pamphlets, pictures, and papers" were issued. James's crackdown seems to have successfully hindered the production of radical books and pamphlets in England. The number of books printed in 1686 is the lowest of the entire decade. But the king could not eradicate the dissemination of oppositional propaganda completely or control his subjects' minds, many of which were already influenced by Whig revolution culture. Throughout his reign, persons were still arrested, charged with voicing seditious opinions or distributing seditious libels. Books promoting the Protestant cause were still smuggled in from Holland."

"He loved and aimed at absolute power, and believed that nothing could introduce and support it but the catholic religion, as the Romanists call theirs; and this increased his zeal for it, and that zeal increased his disposition to arbitrary power: so that in truth, his religion and his politics were partly the cause of each other, and indeed they cannot easily be separated."

"James the Second, who was a very good King, but unhappily believed that it was necessary for the salvation of his subjects that they should be Roman Catholicks."

"In retrospect the Revolution justified the policy of Exclusion. The events of the reign of James II fulfilled Whig predictions, proving that Popery was incompatible with the liberties as well as the religion of the nation. His conduct demonstrated to all that the Crown could not be allowed to retain those prerogative powers which had brought about the defeat of the Whigs, but which James had then turned against the Tories and the Church of England. Later generations disowned Shaftesbury, but they did not repudiate the principles on which the case for Exclusion, as well as the Revolution, rested—that political power should reside with those who possessed the greatest weight in society, and that in the last resort sovereignty rests with the people, the interests of the nation taking precedence over those of the Crown."

"For James the free exercise of Catholicism was the essential thing which, he believed, would lead inevitably to its re-establishment in England without any need for coercion. He thought once Englishmen could see how Catholicism had been misrepresented they would willingly turn to the true faith, especially if that had the weight of royal approval behind it. So long as Catholic worship were freely allowed, other details of the toleration were of secondary importance, merely a matter of tactics. Whether James wanted toleration for Dissenters as well as for Catholics varied according to circumstances. He was not a tolerationist in the sense that he believed that honest differences of opinion could be or should be permitted within a state or that no one church had a monopoly of truth: in fact he believed the opposite. His advocacy of toleration was the product of the self-confidence of his bigotry: if Catholicism were tolerated, it would triumph completely and inevitably and then the question of toleration would lose all meaning."

"As Charles defaulted to his father’s autocratic habits, his throne returned to the vulnerability of the 1640s. On his deathbed in 1685, he showed more concern for his mistresses than his monarchy, and predicted that his brother’s reign would be short. So it proved. Louis’s revocation the same year of the Edict of Nantes (which had guaranteed freedom of worship for Protestants) flooded England with Protestant refugees, and every pulpit resounded to tales of Catholic atrocities. James II's Catholicism was toxic. He had to suppress a rebellion by the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, and began appointing Catholics to senior positions in the army, the church and Oxford University. He used his patronage to pack Parliament with loyal Tories. Even so, with the succession securely Protestant, all might have survived but for a final crisis. In June 1688, James’s wife gave birth to a son, thus removing Mary and William from the succession and substituting a Catholic infant. The battered Restoration compromise was in tatters."

"That this view was extremely naive goes without saying. But James never believed that anyone could honestly and sincerely hold opinions different from his own. He explained opposition in terms of personalities, faction, self-interest, misrepresentation or conspiracy but never in terms of principle... He did not understand that after a century and a quarter of continuous Protestantism Englishmen could not be (and did not wish to be) disabused of their misconceptions about Catholicism by a missionary effort as puny as the one that he mounted. He failed to appreciate that Protestants could be sincerely attached to their beliefs. His schemes were doomed to eventual failure because the vast majority of Englishmen would not willingly turn Papist."

"That King James the Second, having endeayour'd to subvert the Constitution of the Kingdom, by breaking the Original Contract between King and People; and by the Advice of Jesuits, and other wicked Persons, having violated the Fundamental Laws; and withdrawn himself out of the Kingdom, hath Abdicated the Government, and that the Throne is thereby become Vacant."

"The King, finding resistance impossible, assembled such peers and Privy Counsellors as were still in London, and on their advice entered into negotiations with the Prince of Orange. Meanwhile the invading army moved steadily forward towards London. James sent his wife and son out of the kingdom, and on the night of December 11 stole from the palace at Whitehall, crossed the river, and road to the coast. He endeavoured to plunge his realm into anarchy. He threw the Great Seal into the Thames, and sent orders to Feversham to disband the Army, and to Dartmouth to sail to Ireland with what ships he could. The London mob sacked the foreign embassies, and a panic and terror, known as the "Irish Night," swept the capital. Undoubtedly a complete collapse of order would have occurred but for the resolute action of the Council, which was still sitting in London. With some difficulty they suppressed the storm, and, acknowledging William's authority, besought him to hasten his marches to London. James in his flight had actually got on board a ship, but, missing the tide, was caught and dragged ashore by the fishermen and townsfolk. He was brought back to London, and after some days of painful suspense was allowed to escape again. This time he succeeded and left English soil for ever. But though the downfall and flight of this impolitic monarch were at the time ignominious, his dignity has been restored to him by history. His sacrifice for religion gained for him the lasting respect of the Catholic Church, and he carried with him into lifelong exile an air of royalty and honour."

"King James the Second; who was a sour, cruel, and tyrannical disposition, and a zealous Papist. He resolved at once to be above the laws, make himself absolute, and establish popery; upon which the nation, very wisely and justly, turned him out, before he had reigned quite four years; and called the Prince of Orange from Holland, who had married King James's eldest daughter, Mary."

"James ascended the throne with all the ease of Richard Cromwell. He took every measure which forethought could enjoin to grasp the royal power, and his earliest declarations carried comfort to an anxious land. He tried to dispel the belief that he was vindictive or inclined to arbitrary rule. "I have often heretofore ventured my life in defence of this nation, and I shall go as far as any man in preserving it in all its just rights and liberties." He declared himself resolved to maintain in both State and Church a system of government established by law. "The laws of England," he said, "are sufficient to make the King a great monarch." He would maintain the rights and prerogative of the Crown, and would not invade any man's property. He is even reported to have said that "as regards his private religious opinions, no one should perceive that he entertained them." Nevertheless, from the moment he felt himself effectively King, on the second Sunday after his accession, he went publicly to Mass in his chapel. The Duke of Norfolk, who carried the sword of state before him, stopped at the door. "My lord," said the King, "your father would have gone farther." "Your Majesty's father would not have gone so far," rejoined the Duke."

"During the whole of 1686 and 1687 James held Parliament in abeyance, and used his dispensing power to introduce Roman Catholics into key positions. Whigs and Tories drew closer together. James was uniting the party that had challenged his brother with the party that had rallied so ardently his brother's defence. He now embarked on a political maneoevre at once audacious, crafty, and miscalculated. Hitherto he had striven only to relieve his Catholic subjects. If Whigs and Tories were combined he would match them by a coalition of Papists and Nonconformists under the armed power of the Crown. In William Penn, the Quaker courtier and founder of the state of Pennsylvania across the seas, influential in both this and the former reign, he found a powerful and skilled agent. Thus did the King break down the national barriers of his throne and try to shore it up with novel, ill-assorted, and inadequate props."

"A great king, with strong armies and mighty fleets, a vast treasure and powerful allies, fell all at once: and his whole strength, like a spider's web, was so irrecoverably broken with a touch, that he was never able to retrieve, what for want both of judgment and heart he threw up in a day."

"Finally realizing the seriousness of William's preparations, in late September James tried to back-pedal, abolishing the Ecclesiastical Commission, restoring the old city charters and their Anglican Tory oligarchies, and promising to call a free parliament. This did nothing to placate the Tory clergy or gentry or attack Whig townspeople; instead it demoralized Catholics and threw the local government of the nation into confusion. Soon after hearing that William had landed, James developed a massive nosebleed- probably a psychological reaction. At first glance, the king's panic makes no sense. He had at his immediate disposal 25,000 troops encamped on Salisbury Plain, squarely between William, at Exeter, and London. His coffers were full. He had "home-field" advantage. And there had not been a successful invasion of England since the Wars of the Roses. James should have been able to throw William into the sea in a matter of weeks, if not days. But he must have realized that his forces were largely untested and divided in religion and loyalty. Nor could he have been encouraged by his own obvious personal unpopularity. Perhaps his father's fate haunted him."

"In particular, the ruling elite seems to have taken a wait-and-see attitude to William's invasion. But as James hesitated to act, his support began to evaporate. The first to go over to William was Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury (1661-1723), the king's own nephew. By mid-November, the lords lieutenant who had been asked to raise the militia did so- and then marched it over to the prince of Orange: Lord Delamere (1652-94) gave his Cheshire tenants a choice, "whether [to] be a slave and a Papist, or a Protestant and a Freeman." Thus, at the moment of crisis James II turned out to be vulnerable on the last long-term issue that had cost his father the crown, that of local control. Ultimately, that control still rested with the landed aristocracy who held estates in the localities. In the course of two successive mornings between November 23 and 25, James awakened to find that his other son-in-law, Prince George, his dearest friend, Lord Churchill, and the head of the most staunchly Royalist family in England, James Butler, second duke of Ormond (1665-1745), had gone over to William. On the 26th he learned that Princess Anne had also fled the court, leading James to lament, "God help me... my own children have forsaken me.""

"In England during the autumn of 1688 everything pointed, as in 1642, to the outbreak of civil war. But now the grouping of the forces was far different from the days when Charles I unfurled his standard at Nottingham. The King had a large, well-equipped regular Army, with a powerful artillery. He believed himself master of the best, if not at the moment the largest, Navy afloat. He could call for powerful armed aid from Ireland and from France. He assumed that the Church of England was paralysed by its doctrine of nonresistance, and he had been careful not to allow any Parliament to assemble for the collective action. Ranged against him on the other hand were not only the Whigs, but almost all the old friends of the Crown. The men who had made the Restoration, the sons of the men who had fought and died for his father at Marston Moor and at Naseby, the Church whose bishops and ministers had so long faced prosecution for the principle of Divine Right, the universities which had melted their plate for Charles I's coffers and sent their young scholars to his armies, the nobility and landed gentry whose interests had seemed so bound up with the monarchy- all, with bet heads and burning hearts, must now prepare themselves to outface their King in arms. Never did the aristocracy or the Established Church face a sterner test or serve the nation better than in 1688. They never flinched; they never doubted."

"At this point the king decided that the game was up. He abandoned his army and hurried back to London by coach. Once there, he put Queen Mary Beatrice and Prince James into a boat for France. On the night of December 11 he threw the Great Seal (required for registering statutes) into the Thames and attempted to make his own escape. He botched even this when he was discovered, disguised, while attempting to board a boat bound for the continent. The king returned briefly to London but, despite the urging of a number of Tory peers, he had no intention of staying. By the same token, William had no desire to see his inconveniently returned father-in-law. So, when James requested to go to Rochester, on the extreme east of Kent, there were no objections. The unfortunate monarch took advantage of this location and made his second, successful escape attempt on December 23. The Restoration Settlement was at an end. Put another way, the Great Chain of Being had been broken once again within a generation."

"...above all, I must recommend to you the Care of the Navy, the Strength and Glory of this Nation, that you will put it into such a Condition, as may make us considered and respected Abroad. I cannot express My Concern upon this Occasion more suitable to My own Thoughts of it, than by assuring you I have a true English Heart, as jealous of the Honour of the Nation as you can be. And I please Myself with the Hopes, that, by God's Blessing and your Assistance, I may carry the Reputation of it yet higher in the World, than ever it has been in the Time of any of My Ancestors."

"[T]he King sayd he...hoped we would join with him in making a magna Carta for Conscience as well as properties and other liberties, he was sure no man should be debarr[e]d of either while he lived, suppose said he there should be a law made that all black men should be imprisoned, twould be unreasonable and we had as little reason to quarrell with other men for being of different opinions as for being of different Complexions...and he was sure no Englishman could desire to see others persecuted for differences of opinion."

"James II was neither so clever, nor so subtle as his brother. As we have seen, he was incapable of dissembling the Catholicism that so alarmed his subjects. Instead, from the moment he became king he worshipped openly and ostentatiously, asking Sir Christopher Wren to design an elaborate Catholic chapel at Whitehall. As his piety might seem to imply, James II was not as fun-loving as Charles II. At the beginning of his reign he banished from Whitehall all the men and women of pleasure, including (albeit temporarily) his own mistress, Catherine Sedley, countess of Dorchester (1657-1717). In some ways, this sobriety was not such a bad thing after the scandalous behavior of the "Merry Monarch." The Crown needed to restore its dignity and it needed to save money. The new king was not afraid of attacking entrenched interests and his orderly mind caused him to launch a major "downsizing" of the court, eliminating sinecure offices and much of the fee-taking system. The result was a smaller, more efficient, and thriftier court- but also one which was much less exciting and lucrative than his brother's had been."

"I fully declare my Opinion concerning the Principles of the Church of England, whose Members have shewed themselves so eminently Loyal in the worst of times, in Defence of my Father, and Support of my Brother, of Blessed Memory; that I will always take care to defend and support it. I will make it my Endeavour to preserve this Government both in Church and State, as it is now by Law Established; and as I will never depart from the just Rights and Prerogatives of the Crown, so I will never invade any Man's Property; and you may be sure, that having heretofore ventur'd my Life in the Defence of this Nation, I will still go as far as any Man in preserving it, in all its just Rights and Liberties."