Today’s schism pits belief against pure apathy
500 years after Luther divided the religious world, young people are more likely to worship an iphone
If any one place manifests the English imagination, it has to be Whitby in Yorkshire. Tonight is Hallowe’en and the graveyard of St Mary’s Church will be crawling with kids in plastic fangs, marking the spot where Dracula bit Lucy in Bram Stoker’s novel. And over the wall, by the edge of the sea, stands the even spookier skeleton of Whitby Abbey – a casualty of the Reformation begun by Martin Luther exactly 500 years ago. Call it “family history”.
The dissolution of the Catholic monasteries was perhaps the most traumatic effect of Protestantism in England. In 1539, the last abbot of Whitby handed the keys over to King Henry VIII’S commissioners, who gave it to the Cholmley family – who, over the next few decades, pulled parts of it down to build a house next door so ugly that it resembles a Hitlerian bunker. Today, no one comes to Whitby to look at the house. They come to admire the ruins it was carved from, and I regard that as a victory of sorts. Despite everything thrown at them, the Catholics endured.
As a Catholic myself, I’m bound to say that the Reformation was a tragedy. Once you establish that the Church is not the supreme authority in spiritual life, as Luther argued, innovation can quickly lead to revolution. Anarchy spread across Europe; the powerful flourished. Henry VIII discovered a theological excuse to dump his inconvenient wife, pronounce himself head of the Church of England and descend upon the abbeys like a vampire on a juicy neck. Protestant propaganda said the Catholic monastery was greedy and useless, but it actually provided schools, hospitals, alms for the poor and, most importantly of all, the comfort of sacraments that the reformers slowly whittled down or denied altogether.
The 16th century Reformation proved to be the Christian Church’s most painful schism. It tore apart a communion that, through the apostolic succession, once linked us all to the Last Supper. And yet as the anniversary comes and goes, you’ll find very little bitterness or debate. If anything, the mood among church leaders favours dialogue and reconciliation. Why?
Circumstances change; perspective shifts with them. In the 19th century, the theological differences between Catholics and, say, Lutherans looked laughably small compared with the disagreements they both shared with Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, who largely won the popular argument. Even in Catholic countries, the Catholic Church lost the temporal power it once enjoyed (which is a good thing) and found itself standing next to the religious movements it once frowned upon – on the outside of society, looking in. In the contemporary West, church attendance of any stripe is down to embarrassingly low levels. Young people worship iphones and Labour leaders instead.
In this new context, Luther isn’t so much a figure of hate as a model of radical dissent. At the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther told the Catholic elite that he was bound by the scriptures and by conscience: “Here I stand, I can do no other.” That sense of almost bursting with the truth as you see it – unable to keep the Good News to yourself – will be familiar to anyone with religious belief in modern Britain, where evangelism can cost you your job. And looking back on the history of Christian martyrs, what leaps off the page now isn’t so much what they died for but their willingness to die at all.
We Catholics have Thomas More, who could not, would not accept that Henry was the head of the church. Protestants have Thomas Cranmer, Henry’s archbishop of Canterbury, who was condemned to be burned when Catholicism was briefly restored under Mary Tudor. Cranmer tried to recant. Mary, an utter sadist, refused. When the hour of his execution came, Cranmer stuck his hand in the flames first – the hand that had signed his recantation.
The hand, too, that compiled the Book of Common Prayer, the single greatest achievement in English literature. At the same time as the Protestants tore down abbeys and shrines, they also constructed a new architecture of language that still illuminates the soul. Its sublimity transcends sectarian divides, just as the haunting ruins of Whitby belong now to the whole nation.
And from those ruins springs hope. I spend a lot of time visiting abbeys and am struck by how often one reads that every pre-reformation house had its good years and bad years, and years when it looked like it might shut. One century, the monks lived like sultans; the next, it was all about helping the poor. There was so much variation in style that we forget that the few walls that are still standing today reflect one moment in fashion and not the entire, turbulent history of Christianity in these islands, where the faith has faced horror after horror and persevered.
When I was at Whitby, I heard one school child say to another: “Who do you think would win in a fight? Dracula or Jesus?” For all their differences, Catholics and Protestants both have a stake in that question.