Dear Perry,
When Henry VIII demanded in 1535 that all the English bishops
reject the Church of Rome and sign the Oath of Supremacy,
alleging that the King was the supreme temporal and spiritual
head of the Church of England, only one English bishop refused to
sign the oath. He was St. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. For
his refusal he was summarily beheaded.
Contemplating the Reformation in England and on the Continent,
the historian John C. Dwyer writes: "The final tragedy of the
Reformation is that the Catholic Church reacted to it initially
with something very like paralysis .... By the time the Catholic
Church began to pull itself together and begun to give a
genuinely religious and theological response to the questions
which Luther raised, the split between Protestants and Catholics
was already so wide and so deep that the Council of Trent became,
inevitably, an inner-Catholic affair" (i.e., not a healing of the
rupture).
I would hope, in the event of a schism involving bishops or
bishops' conferences, that charitable and diplomatic efforts
would be made to heal the breach. However, I am convinced that
schisms happen because the schismatics want them to happen. The
Church cannot modify her doctrines to accommodate dissidents.
A correspondent asks the meaning of NCCB. This is the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops here in the U.S.
Sincerely in Christ,
Father Mateo
-- Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit --
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