15 August 2022

“True England” and the Faith of Our Fathers

Mr Pearce has released a new book on English history in which he presents a picture of a Catholic England that never completely disappeared. Here he discusses it in an interview.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Luisella Scrosati interviews Joseph Pearce.

LS: Your book, Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, is focused on the key idea of a true England, in contrast with a secular Britain. Could you explain what you mean by this?

JP: In essence, “true England” is the England which has been true to the truth itself or, more correctly, the England which has been true to the Truth Himself.

Jesus Christ proclaimed that he is the way, the truth and the life. True England is, therefore, Christian England. Such an England has a continuous history of almost two thousand years. The first Christian missionaries arrived in England in the first century, shortly after the Roman Conquest, probably in 63AD, only thirty years after the Crucifixion. There has been a continual Catholic presence in England ever since, in good times and bad, in times of prosperity and in times of persecution.

This true England is very different from secular Britain. True England is small and beautiful; Britain is “great” and imperialistic. True England lays down its national life in faithful service to Christ and His Church; secular Britain has crushed the freedom of weaker nations in its quest for materialistic empowerment. True England and secular Britain are as different as Christ and anti-Christ.

LS: Could we say that the heart of “true England” is Marian, as shown in the history of the little chapel of St. Mary of Glastonbury and the Shrine of Walsingham?

JP: True England is as inseparable from the Mother of God as is God from the Mother of God. She is the Mother of True England as truly as she is the Mother of Christ and Mother of the Church. The shrine to the Virgin at Glastonbury dates back to the first century, to the very dawn of Christianity; the shrine at Walsingham dates from a Marian apparition a thousand years later (1061). The latter became one of the major pilgrimage sites of the whole of Christendom in the Middle Ages. The love of the people of England for the Blessed Virgin can be seen, even to this day, by the hundreds of ancient churches across the country dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin. In 1381, King Richard II dedicated England as “Our Lady’s Dowry”, offering the nation to her as England’s “protectress”. This moment is depicted with great beauty in the famous medieval painting, the Wilton Diptych, which shows Richard II kneeling before the Virgin and Child, who are surrounded by angels, one of whom holds aloft the St. George’s Cross flag.

LS: Of all historical explanations, it remains a mystery to explain what happened with Henry VIII; not only his “turning point”, but above all the fact that only one bishop, St. John Fisher, was able to oppose the spirit of the world breaking into the Church. You wrote that Henry VIII was a precursor of modern totalitarian secularism: can you explain why?

JP: I’d like to quote the great Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as a means of answering this question. Solzhenitsyn said that the battle between good and evil takes place in each human heart. If this is true of the life-story of every individual human, it is equally true of the history of humanity as a whole. It is the perennial battle between the spirit of homo viator (pilgrim man who serves God and neighbour on the quest to get to heaven) and homo superbus (proud man who refuses to serve God and neighbour and lays down the lives of others on the altar he’s erected to himself). What happened in England at the time of Henry VIII has happened throughout history. It was epitomized in Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, in which the king (Creon) proclaimed that the rights of the state superseded the rights of religion. Henry VIII was a real-life King Creon who proclaimed that the rights of the king superseded religious liberty. He effectively established a state religion which put the secular government in charge of religious practice, making it an offence punishable by death to continue to practice the Catholic faith which the people of England had practised for centuries. In increasing the power of the state and punishing religious and political dissidents, he was establishing a template that secularist totalitarianism would follow, whether it was the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution or similar reigns of terror under the Soviets or the Nazis.

LS: With the Catholic Relief Act for English Catholics in 1829 a new era began, but there were dangers that came with it, including dangers from within. The modernism of the Cisalpine Catholics is the precursor of the current modernism, which is undermining – with your own words – “the Church’s timeless teaching and desecrating the beauty and mystery of her liturgy”. What was the attractive power of the “Second Spring” (Newman) of English Catholicism, with its three pillars, Newman, Chesterton and Tolkien?

JP: It is ironic that periods of persecution are times of purification for the Church, whereas times of comfort are periods of moral and theological decadence, known as modernism. When Christians become too comfortable in the world, they become worldly. They want the Church to become worldly. They want it to be seduced by the secular fads and fashions and to succumb to them. The best answer to such decadence was given by Chesterton who said that we don’t want a Church that will move with the world, we want a Church that will move the world. The three pillars of the Catholic cultural revival whom you mention (Newman, Chesterton and Tolkien) were men of great faith who moved the world. Newman’s conversion and his subsequent example and teaching heralded the Catholic revival. Following his death, G. K. Chesterton emerged as a great defender of the faith, whose writing and witness were catalytic to the conversions of thousands of people, including major literary figures. Finally, J. R. R. Tolkien, a lifelong practising Catholic, wrote one of the greatest and most popular works of literature of all time. He wrote that the “The Lord of the Rings is, of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”. These men didn’t move with the world, they moved the world. Today’s Catholics should aim to follow their example and to emulate their impact on contemporary culture.

This interview was first published in the July/August issue of the Italian magazine Il Timone. This is its first publication in English. Joseph Pearce’s book, Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, is available from Ignatius Press.

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