Thomas More and the Early Church Fathers

Traditio ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 379-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Marius
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Pope Gregory I ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

Thomas More, humanist, statesman, and martyr, was one of the most prolific apologists for the Catholic Church in the early years of the Reformation. In numerous polemical and apologetic works he ranged widely over the issues raised by the controversy. But if his scope was large, he possessed one sure foundation to which all his arguments inevitably returned. This was the faith of the early Church Fathers, those men who interpreted the life and faith of the Church from the time of the Apostles to the end of the pontificate of Pope Gregory I in 604.

Saint or Schemer? The 1527 Heresy Trial of Thomas Bilney Reconsidered

1989 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Walker
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Ambiguous Figure ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Significant Figure ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

On 8 December 1527 two scholars, Thomas Bilney and Thomas Arthur, carried penitential faggots at St Paul's Cross as a token of abjuration of heresy. With this act both men formally cleansed their souls and brought about their reconciliation with the Church. Far from being the end of a story, however, this ceremony proved to be the beginning of a controversy which has survived until the present day. For Thomas Bilney subsequently renounced his abjuration and became a significant figure in the early Reformation in England, eventually dying at the stake as a relapsed heretic in 1531. And yet, despite the importance attributed to him as a reformer, Bilney is now, as he was then, an ambiguous figure whose relationship with the Catholic Church and precise beliefs have never been conclusively determined. Many writers have claimed Bilney as a champion of their particular causes or have sought to identify his place in the wider movements of the Reformation. For the Protestant John Foxe he was a martyr, albeit a flawed one, for the reformed faith, who refused to the last to be intimidated into a second abjuration. For Sir Thomas More, in somewhat mischievous mood, he was a Catholic saint brought to realise the error of his ways at the stake and reconciled to the Church with almost his last breath.

Lamennais

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Waldemar Gurian
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The Third ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Papal Infallibility ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

The history of the Catholic Church includes men who, after brilliant services to the Church, died outside her fold. Best known among them is Tertullian, the apologetic writer of the Early Church; less known is Ochino, the third vicar-general of the Capuchins, whose flight to Calvin's Geneva almost destroyed his order. In the nineteenth century there were two famous representatives of this group. Johann von Doellinger refused, when more than seventy years old, to accept the decision of the Vatican Council about papal infallibility. He passed away in 1890 unreconciled, though he had been distinguished for years as the outstanding German Catholic theologian. Félicité de la Mennais was celebrated as the new Pascal and Bossuet of his time before he became the modern Tertullian by breaking with the Church because Pope Gregory XVI rejected his views on the relations between the Church and die world. As he lay deathly ill, his niece, “Madame de Kertanguy asked him: ‘Féli, do you want a priest? Surely, you want a priest?’ Lamennais answered: ‘No.’ The niece repeated: ‘I beg of you.’ But he said with a stronger voice: ‘No, no, no.

Roman Catholicism and Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 436-457
Author(s):  
Petr Kratochvíl
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
The Church ◽  
Hostile Attitude ◽  
The Catholic Church

This chapter explores the complex relationship between the Catholic Church and Europe over many centuries. It argues that the Catholic Church and Europe played a mutually constitutive role in the early Middle Ages and one would not be conceivable without the other. However, the Church gradually disassociated itself from Europe and vice versa. Since the Reformation, but even more strongly in the last two centuries, the Church’s attitude to Europe has become markedly more ambivalent, due to the rise of the European state, the hostile attitude of the Church to modern European social and political thought, Europe’s ongoing secularization, and the increasingly global nature of the Catholic Church. While the tension between the Church and Europe persists, the process of European unification marked a watershed in the Church’s relationship to Europe, given that integration is a key area in which the Church strongly supports the political developments of the continent.

scholarly journals A Protestant Purgatory? Visions of an Intermediate State in Eighteenth-century Scotland

2018 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha McGill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intermediate State ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Standard Element ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
The Church

The protestant afterlife is generally presented in binary terms, with departed souls going directly to either heaven or hell. However, the possible existence of an intermediate state for the dead was discussed by protestant theologians from the reformation onwards. This article traces the evolution of these debates in Scotland, with particular focus on the eighteenth century. The bishops Archibald Campbell, Thomas Rattray and George Innes produced tracts in support of the intermediate state. By the end of the century it had become a standard element of doctrine among the episcopalians, reflecting the formation of a more distinctive theological and liturgical identity, based on the teachings of the early church fathers. Presbyterians generally dismissed the idea as a papish conceit, but there were exceptions. Most notably, in the 1720s the minister William Ogilvie described a series of meetings with the ghost of Thomas Maxwell, Laird of Cool. His account framed the intermediate state as a sympathetic alternative to calvinist predestination, and spread to a wide audience when it was printed as a chapbook. As the episcopalian church declined and the Church of Scotland fragmented, there was greater scope for individuals to formulate their own theologies, potentially challenging traditional notions of what it meant to be a protestant.

Ernesto Cozzi (1870–1926)

2020 ◽  
pp. 274-311
Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
World War ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

The Italian priest Ernesto Cozzi is an important figure for two reasons: he wrote valuable ethnographic studies of life in the ‘Malësi’ (northern highlands) of Albania in the early years of the twentieth century, and after the First World War he was the ‘Apostolic Delegate’ who revitalized the Catholic Church in that country. Both aspects of his life and work were ignored under Communism, and remain little known today. This essay tells the story of his life, using his published writings, his personal diary for 1912–13, the manuscript notebooks of his friend Edith Durham and the reports he submitted to his superiors in Rome. What emerges is a portrait of a resourceful and principled man, a conscientious parish priest, fluent in Albanian, and devoted both to the Albanian anti-Ottoman cause and to the good of the Church. His ethnographic writings are discussed: what survives is a series of articles, chapters of an intended book, on illnesses, death and funerals, the life of Albanian women (including the ‘sworn virgins’), blood-feuds, superstitions, agriculture, and social organization and customary law. His personal diary is of particular interest, as it describes the dramatic events of the First Balkan War: Cozzi began by supporting the Montenegrin attack on Ottoman Albania, but became rapidly disillusioned by Montenegro’s policies. The last part of the essay discusses Cozzi’s energetic work to improve the state of the Catholic Church in Albania in the six years before his death in 1926.

LABOUR IS HOLY BUT BUSINESS IS DANGEROUS: ENTERPRISE VALUES FROM THE CHURCH FATHERS TO THE REFORMATION

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 133-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH DRAKOPOULOU DODD ◽  
GEORGE GOTSIS
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Work Motivation ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Religious Thinking ◽  
The Church ◽  
Religious Worldviews

This paper seeks to explore the religious valuation of entrepreneurship during a long period of Western cultural history that covers transformations of religious thinking from the early Church Fathers to the Reformation. The paper focuses on theological contributions to conceptualizations of labour, property and wealth, that serves as a basis for assessing entrepreneurial motives and enterprise activities. In doing so, this approach highlights the interactions between work motivation and entrepreneurship in distinct cultural and historical contexts. Particular attention is devoted to understanding the religious sanctification of labour. The emergence and formation of secular enterprise values are discussed and interpreted as integral parts of these religious worldviews in which they were deeply embedded.

The Biblical Question and the English Liberal Catholics

1969 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-120
Author(s):  
James Tunstead Burtchaell
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Immigrants ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

Looking backward from the early nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in England had disappointingly little scholarly achievement of which to boast since the Reformation. Henry Holden, Charles Butler, John Lingard—all were men to be proud of, but Catholics of such intellectual bent were so few. And understandably so. The penal laws had effectively deprived the recusants of any access to higher education, and would perdure until the latter nineteenth century. Squires whose sons were barred for their faith from most schools and from the two universities had to be content to enroll them quietly at one or another of the exile schools across the channel. The Irish immigrants who later came to fill and overspill the churches in the nineteenth century had even less exposure to—and perhaps appetite for—scholarship. And the clergy who shepherded this extraordinary flock of secluded gentry and boisterous working folk pursued a highly sacramental and understandably unsophisticated pastorate. The Church naturally felt itself somewhat put upon, and fell into rather defensive postures. Scholarship would appear as a luxury at best, and at worst as a weapon that the Establishment seemed always more adept and smooth at handling.

Church Organization in Brandenburg–Prussia from the Reformation to 1740

1938 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-290
Author(s):  
Reinhold A. Dorwart
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Local Church ◽  
Church Organization ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

For obvious reasons, a study of the organization of the Church in Brandenburg-Prussia must begin with the formal acceptance of the Reformation in those territories. The Reformation was not accepted officially in Brandenburg until after the death of Joachim I in 1535. His son and heir, Margrave and Elector Joachim II joined the Protestant ranks in 1539. Prior to this time the Church in Brandenburg had been an integral part of the Catholic Church of Rome; and local church organization and the supervision thereof had been in the hands of the episcopal consistory. This latter body attended to all the business of reviewing and supervising the administration of its diocese, of issuing the reports of the bishop or administrator, of appointment of apostolic visitors, and of the government, temporal administration, and discipline of seminaries.

Thomas More’s Humor in his Religious Polemics

Moreana ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (Number 203- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-50
Author(s):  
Elliott M. Simon
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Physical Punishment ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Religious Polemics ◽  
The Catholic Church ◽  
New Comedy

Thomas More’s humor was influenced by his studies of Greek Old and New Comedy and Lucian’s Dialogues. He was fascinated by the multiple ways human follies could be exposed to provoke laughter. Although aware of the “anti-laughter” tradition of the Early Church Fathers, he asserted that the intellectual, moral, and spiritual superiority of “the man who laughed” justified using humor to provoke “critical laughter” as an effective rhetorical strategy to ridicule the comic incongruities and corruption of “the inferior man who was laughed at.” In his religious polemics: Responsio ad Lutherum, Supplication of Souls, Dialogue Concerning Heresies, and Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, More enjoyed using invectives, lampoons, and scholastic parody to denigrate Lutherans and their heretical doctrines. He considered laughter an appropriate response to heresy, and his vituperative humor provided a rhetorical punishment of derision as an alternative to the horrifying physical punishment of execution proscribed for heretics. More’s humor was intended to discourage his readers from accepting Lutheran doctrines, but it also invited them to share his joyful superior affirmation of faith in the tenets of the Catholic Church that will lead them to “the eternal merriment of heaven.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document