The Reformation was also about independence from a distant bureaucracy and defending our freedoms, writes Giles Frazer
One of the joys for a priest on holiday is going to pray where no one knows who you are. So last Sunday I joyously pottered down to the spectacular monastery church at Alcobaca in central Portugal – still the largest church in the country – to sit quietly at the back and contemplate the meaning of life. I don’t speak a single word of Portuguese, but it mattered not. I understood when to kneel and when to stand, and I understood pretty much everything the priest was saying during the service. And that’s because we use almost the same service back home in south London. We say roughly the same prayers in roughly the same order.
Nearly 500 years after we broke with Rome and instituted the first Brexit, the Church of England and the Roman Catholic church have maintained a surprisingly high degree of regulatory alignment. The Church of England is independent – we can decide for ourselves if we want to have women priests, for instance – but we haven’t disappeared off into a totally different theological universe. And we can increasingly celebrate all that we have in common. This is surely a pretty good model for the current Brexit, too.
Every schoolboy will tell you that the English Reformation was initiated because Henry VIII wasn’t able to keep it in his codpiece. And there is, of course, much truth to that – Henry is the nearest thing to Donald Trump we have had in this country. But the Reformation was also about sovereignty, about not having to do what we were told by some bishop over in a southern European city.
The Continental Reformation was initially a protest about financial corruption in the Roman church. Our Reformation was more about the freedom-loving independent bloody mindedness of the English spirit. It was a protest against the imposition of distant authority. Whether against the Bishop of Rome or the Treaty of Rome, the protest has been remarkably similar.
Yet for all his many faults, Henry remained a committed Catholic throughout his life and insisted that the break with Rome was not a break with Catholicism per se. We were to be English Catholics, just not Roman Catholics. Catholic, of course, simply means universal. It is a word that invites us to imagine the church as a whole. Which is why the Church of England continues to maintain it is a part of the “one holy catholic and apostolic church”. To this day, the letters FD are stamped on all British coins after the name of the monarch. They stand for Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith, a title given by the Catholic church to Henry in 1521 for his robust defence of the catholic view of the sacraments. Henry may have broken with the Pope, but he still saw himself as defending Catholic order, FD.
In other words, the first Brexit was not a way of denying what Christians have in common. It was not an attack upon our Catholicity. Rather, it was a defence of a looser form of church unity, of a unity not imposed by some distant ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Likewise with today’s Brexit: we are leaving the EU not leaving Europe.
Of course, the Roman part of the Catholic church still understands the first Brexit story very differently. And officially at least, it still refuses to accept the legitimacy of my priestly orders. Strictly speaking, it thinks of me as a confused layman who likes wearing a dress on Sunday mornings. In theory at least, there is no full communion – open borders, as it were – between the Roman and Anglican churches.
But this attitude is increasingly rare in practice. I have never been refused communion in a Roman church even by those who know I’m an Anglican. And I have several Roman Catholics who regularly receive communion at my church. Indeed, when the present Pope and the Archbishop last met in 2016, the Pope presented Justin Welby with a Bishop’s staff, a symbol of his episcopal authority. On the ground and in practice, there is a high degree of mutual acknowledgement with both churches recognising a common baptism and shared faith.
Whatever his personal failings, Henry managed to pull the church out of a distant European bureaucracy without sending us spinning off into some completely alien Christian world. And without that first Brexit, the literature and constitution of this country would be unimaginable.
In 1834, the monastery and church of Alcobaca were stolen by the state in the Portuguese version of the dissolution of the monasteries. These days, the church is run as a secular state monument and the priest is allowed in on Sundays to perform the morning Mass, a bit like he is asking permission to use the building for a private event. The hotel we are staying in was once where novice monks trained. That was until religious orders were banned in Portugal.
It’s a reminder that, despite turbulent centuries, English independent mindedness has served us pretty well in defending our freedoms. And today’s Brexit is about precisely the same thing.
Giles Fraser is the priest-in-charge at St Mary, Newington
First published in The Daily Telegraph, August 14, 2018
Giles Fraser is on Twitter @giles_fraser; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion