Research day for the Church and Sacraments paper.
As I’m writing about the three church polities, it matters to establish what all three were reacting against. I returned to Vernon Staley, a late Victorian Anglican priest and author of The Catholic Religion (which I originally read a few years back), a systematic introduction to Anglican faith and practice, and his chapter on the causes of the Reformation.
His argument is blunt: the English Reformation was the culmination of centuries of papal financial and political extraction. Peter’s Pence, Annates, and Provisions: all mechanisms that bled England while filling English parishes with absentee foreign clergy who never visited their benefices. The sale of Indulgences under Leo X reduced the forgiveness of sins to a commercial transaction.
Staley’s deeper point is ecclesiological: Rome had reduced bishops to mere papal curates. The Reformation was England’s reassertion of their God-given authority. Not innovation, but restoration.
Tomorrow: more writing.
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