The Sixteenth Century Idea of National Churches

Extract

Heresy and schism are not a novelty of the sixteenth century, they exist from the beginning,, and always in the East. The national Church, selfgoverning, refusing all obedience to Rome, abiding in its own decrees of faith and morals, and owning na allegiance to any power without its borders, can still be seen and studied in Armenia and in the Mono-physite Coptic Church of Egypt. Plainly they are not Catholic, but national or racial these separated brethren. So too the Donatists in Africa sought to set up a national non-Catholic Church. And political nationalism, it would seem, was chiefly responsible for the schism that rent the Orthodox Church of the East from the Catholic communion of Rome; as it is responsible in our own times for the independent national Churches of the Balkans.

Before the Reformation Western Christendom, with all its troubles, was free from these things. Only with the great revolt of the sixteenth century (’ not a revolt, a revolution!’ ) does the national and territorial Church, with its disdain of the doctrine of unity, its hatred of obedience to Rome, its refusal to admit any authority in the See of Peter, come into being; to remain till our own times a witness of man’s capacity for losing the Catholic faith.

Nationality has its place subordinate to Catholicity. Nationality in opposition to Catholicity ceases, ipso facto, to be Catholic. The doctrine and discipline of the various non-Catholic Churches of the West born at the Reformation may, to-day, present a remarkable unlikeness to the forms of sixteenth century Protestantism.