'Non Angli, sed angeli!:
The Pope’s visit to Britain may be
the catalyst for revitalized faith
By Donal Anthony Foley
The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain, September 16-19, marked a very special moment, and one which may still have wider repercussions for the rest of the world. Its high point was the beatification of John Henry Newman (1801-90) at Cofton Park in Birmingham.
This was the first papal visit to Britain since John Paul II arrived back in 1982. The country has changed much since then and it is clear that
Pope Benedict’s reception was much more tenuous than that of his predecessor. [?????]
Prior to his arrival, more than 100,000 Brits asked for “certificates of de-baptism,” the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins called for Benedict’s arrest for his “crimes against humanity,” and the media was eager to pounce on any misstep.
Yet this papal visit raised a couple of very important questions. Where is the Church in Britain going? What does the Holy Father now pray to happen in that formerly Catholic-rich country?
Before the Reformation, England was a very Catholic country, with devotion to Our Lady being particularly marked, to such an extent that the country was known as Our Lady’s “dowry” or special portion.
There has also been a long (and loving) link between the papacy and Britain. The historian Bede (d. 735) reports that upon seeing some Anglo-Saxon boys being maltreated in a Roman slave market, Pope Gregory the Great (pope from 590-604) exclaimed: “Non Angli, sed angeli” — “Not Angles, but angels” — and promptly sent St. Augustine of Canterbury and forty other missionaries to evangelize Britain.
Just a bit later, England supplied Rome with its first annual Peter’s Pence, and popes helped restore and anoint English kings from the eighth century onwards.
Henry VIII’s revolution changed all that and the ancient faith, including devotion to Our Lady and loyalty to the papacy, was overthrown through a mixture of brutality, propaganda and adverse historical circumstances.
This defection of England from the Catholic faith was perhaps the most significant event of the Reformation in that without it, the revolt against the Church might well have been confined to mainland Europe and perhaps not beyond.
The historian Warren H. Carroll points out that if Henry had remained faithful, allied to Catherine of Aragon (the daughter of Isabel and Ferdinand), he could have worked with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to restore Christendom.
This failure was all the more tragic, given that the United States ultimately became a Protestant country because of England’s rejection of Catholicism. If Spain, France and England could have worked together in North and South America, a new vibrant “Catholic” hemisphere could have been created in the West.
Perhaps much of the rivalry and dissension between the various European countries might have been avoided, and Christendom saved. Is it not possible to argue that if this had happened, many of the evils besetting the modern world may never have occurred?
But it was not to be, and so very gradually and painfully, over the following centuries, Catholicism had to attempt to regain its former place in Britain, particularly in the period following Cardinal Newman’s conversion on October 9, 1845.
Newman preached his famous “Second Spring” sermon in 1852, and it was in the years immediately following this that some remarkable prophesies were made regarding Catholicism in England. These came from two individuals who would go on to become canonized saints.
The first of these was St. John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, who was visited in France by the first bishop of Birmingham, William Ullathorne, in May 1854. Ullathorne left this description of what happened as he was explaining to the Curé the need for prayers for tyrannized English Catholics:
“Suddenly he interrupted me by opening those eyes — cast into shadow by their depth, when listening or reflecting — and streaming their full light upon me in a manner I can never forget, he said, in a voice as firm and full of confidence as though he were making an act of faith. …‘I believe that the Church in England will recover her ancient splendor.’”
Similarly, one day toward the end of 1856, St. Dominic Savio heard that Don Bosco was planning a visit to Rome to see Pope Pius IX. Savio confided to Bosco that he wished he could speak with the Holy Father as well, as he had something very important to tell him.
Don Bosco agreed to try to pass on Dominic’s message, which was as follows: “Tell the Holy Father that in the midst of all the trials that await him, he should not lessen his special care for England. God is preparing a great triumph for the Church in that country.”
Don Bosco asked Dominic what made him say that, and he agreed to tell him, but asked that he keep it secret and tell no one but the Pope. Don Bosco said he would do that and then Dominic explained what had happened:
“I was making my thanksgiving after Holy Communion one day [when] I seemed to be in a wide plain. There was a great deal of mist, and people were groping about as though they had lost their way. I heard a voice say: ‘This is England.’ While I watched I saw another figure coming towards me. He wore robes just like those I have seen in the picture of the Pope, in our class room and in the refectory. He was holding a huge, flaming torch in his hand, and wherever he passed the mist disappeared. Soon it was as clear as mid-day. Then I heard the voice again. It said: ‘This torch is the Catholic faith which is to illumine England.’”
When Pius IX heard this story from Don Bosco he was greatly moved, and said to him: “What you have told me confirms me in my resolution to work with even greater energy for England, to which I already devote so much of my time and my prayers.”
So despite the presently critical situation of the Church in Britain, there is hope that there will be a return to the ancient faith. Both of those prophecies were made nearly 150 years ago, so obviously God’s plan for Britain is a long-term one.
Given the special relationship between the United States and Britain, a future revival of the faith in Britain could also have profound implications for the English-speaking world. Britain once had an empire, and was the world super-power, just as the United States now holds that position; Britain’s colonial legacy is the Commonwealth, which still has fifty-four member countries around the world.
Britain, despite its present deplorable spiritual and cultural state, is still very influential, with many countries continuing to look to her for inspiration and new ideas.
Just as the United States and Britain worked together to defeat Nazism in World War II, so in the future there is the possibility of a new common fight against the culture of death, as the influence of the Church steadily grows in the new evangelization, which has been so much encouraged by recent popes. Such a resurgence of the Church in such influential countries would be bound to have world-wide repercussions.
There is a real battle going on at the moment for the soul of Britain, a battle which the Church and those on the side of truth are losing, so the visit of Pope Benedict is undoubtedly an important spiritual moment that should be seized and not frittered away.
Pope Benedict’s courage and the prophecies of St. John Vianney and St. Dominic mean that the Catholic future of the United Kingdom is a lot brighter than might seem to be the case.
There are very good reasons for celebrating Pope Benedict’s visit, particularly since St. Dominic Savio’s vision clearly indicates that the papacy will be very bound up with the future re-evangelization of Britain, and by implication, the world.
Joseph Ratzinger took the name of Benedict, patron of Europe and founder of monastic life, so as to re-evangelize Europe, and that is no doubt underway.
So, what did our Holy Father want to teach the world by visiting the land of Thomas More, Edmund Campion, Margaret Ward and Cardinal John Henry Newman? Never tire of living and proclaiming the faith, never waver in discipleship, and do pray for this country, these people, that they may be both Angli et angeli!
Donal Anthony Foley has degrees in humanities and theology, and has had books and booklets on Marian apparitions published, including Understanding Medjugorje: Heavenly Visions or Religious Illusion? He has also had articles published in a number of magazines and newspapers, and runs Theotokos Books and a related website,
www.theotokos.org.uk. This article appears in the October 2010 issue of HPR.
The Battle of Britain:
Will Catholicism or atheism prevail?
By George Neumayr
Editorial
Issue of October 2010
In World War II, Great Britain survived an atheistic assault from outside the country. Today’s “Battle of Britain” comes from an atheistic assault inside it. British culture is crumpling under the growing weight of a fervent secularism that appears religious and an exhausted state religion that appears secular.
The once-claimed sturdy Anglican bridge between Christianity and the modern world has largely collapsed, leaving those thrashing around down below it to swim from the Thames to the Tiber or drown.
The Catholic Church in the United Kingdom, to be sure, has her own problems, but, as Pope Benedict’s historic September visit to Britain suggested, the country’s future could end up looking like its distant Catholic past. Pope Benedict stepped into the battle for that future not as a triumphant warrior but as a humble witness to the truth and grace contained in Christ’s Church.
The tone of Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain was set even before he got there. Asked by a reporter on the flight over what he could do to make Catholicism appear more “attractive” and “credible” to secularists and atheists in Britain, the Pope responded by challenging the premise of the question.
He noted that a Catholicism which thought in those superficial terms would become just one more dangerous ideology and power grab in a world that needs fidelity to Christ:
One might say that a church which seeks above all to be attractive would already be on the wrong path, because the Church does not work for itself, does not work to increase its numbers so as to have more power.
The Church is at the service of Another; it does not serve itself, seeking to be a strong body, but it strives to make the Gospel of Jesus Christ accessible, the great truths, the great powers of love and of reconciliation that appeared in this figure and that come always from the presence of Jesus Christ.
In this sense, the Church does not seek to be attractive, but rather to make herself transparent for Jesus Christ. And in the measure in which the Church is not for herself, as a strong and powerful body in the world, that wishes to have power, but simply is herself the voice of Another, she becomes truly transparent to the great figure of Jesus Christ and the great truths that he has brought to humanity…
It is for this reason, he continued, that the Church’s outreach to Anglicans and non-Catholics is not the competitive poaching of a man-made organization but the apostolic work of a divine one:
If Anglicans and Catholics see that both are not there for themselves, but are rather instruments of Christ, “friends of the Bridegroom,” as Saint John says; if both follow together the priority of Christ and not themselves, they draw closer together, because the priority of Christ brings them together, they are no longer in competition, each one seeking greater numbers, but are united in commitment to the truth of Christ who comes into this world, and so they find themselves also placed reciprocally in a true and fruitful ecumenism.
Ironically, the direct but civil Pope Benedict appeared to win over many non-Catholics in Britain while the self-consciously irenic Cardinal Walter Kasper proved too divisive to some.
The former head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity stayed behind after saying that flying into increasingly ethnic Britain makes him feel like he is entering a “Third World country.” Yet in a way Kasper’s “gaffe” was
accidentally prophetic: British police arrested, though later released, six men of North African descent thought to be planning an attack on the Holy Father — a sobering reminder during the papal visit that the confusion of modern British life is due not just to wan and corrupted Christianity but also to the creeping Islamization aided by atheism that could take its place.
[The comment about the arrested North Africans is inappropriate considering that they were released and that it seemed to have been a case of police over-zealousness.]
At a reception hosted by Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Benedict recalled “how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.”
Benedict added that as “we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion, and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny.’”
The Holy Father returned to this theme of the battle of Britain several times over the course of his visit, gently impressing upon the British elite that the moral relativism and de facto atheism which they invoke in the name of democracy only imperils it.
Standing not far from the spot in Westminster Hall where Thomas More was condemned to death, Pope Benedict made the unpopular point that democracy can turn tyrannical too, unless it rests on truths not subject to democratic vote, truths which reason apprehends and revelation reinforces.
Whether the English can win that battle against the 21st-century tyranny of the “dictatorship of relativism” remains in doubt, but the Holy Father through his speeches has certainly left behind in Britain a powerful light with which to dispel atheism’s darkness.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/10/2010 12:19]