Dear Jake,<\/p>\n
I find it distressing that your faith is getting colder as the weather gets warmer.\u00a0 I understand it, however.\u00a0 When spring comes, and summer peeks over the horizon, we start to feel that familiar sense of exuberant self-sufficiency.\u00a0 As if we no longer need God. And in that state of soul, we are vulnerable to false doctrines like the one you have been flirting with.<\/p>\n
My bold young nephew, you cannot call yourself a Christian and at the same time put yourself in judgment of the Pope.\u00a0 The Pope is Christ\u2019s Vicar on earth.\u00a0 He is the visible head of the Church.\u00a0 We are to follow him as we would follow Christ, not arrogantly relegate him to the tribunal of our own wits.\u00a0 Take a lesson from today\u2019s saint.<\/p>\n
John Houghton was a Cambridge man.\u00a0 He graduated from that venerable university and went to serve God as a humble parish priest.\u00a0 There he discovered a vocation to an even greater spiritual dedication, and he became a Carthusian monk.\u00a0 Eventually he was made prior of two Carthusian communities (called \u201ccharterhouses\u201d, named after the place where the order was founded, the Chartreuse in France), in Northampton and then in London.\u00a0 He served them well.<\/p>\n
But things got complicated in 1534, when King Henry VIII published his Act of Supremacy, claiming supreme authority over the Church in England (which was his way of authorizing a divorce from his wife Catherine so that he could then respectably \u2013 in his mind, anyway \u2013 marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn).\u00a0 St John Houghton recognized immediately that this Act was specious.\u00a0 There is only one supreme authority of the Church on earth, and that is the one appointed by Christ himself, the successor of St Peter, the Pope.\u00a0 So Houghton denounced the Act of Supremacy, and was promptly imprisoned.\u00a0 He was the first to resist the King\u2019s audacity.<\/p>\n
When the Act was modified to limit the King\u2019s authority by including the phrase \u201cin so far as the law of God permits\u201d, St John felt that he could agree to it, and so he was released from prison.\u00a0 But a few months later the King resurrected the original version, and demanded that all subjects take an Oath of Supremacy.\u00a0 Houghton immediately retired into three days of prayer and reflection.\u00a0 Afterwards, he and two companions went to the Chancellor of England (Thomas Cromwell) to petition exemption from the Oath.\u00a0 Cromwell had them all arrested.\u00a0 They were thrown into prison in the Tower of London.<\/p>\n
Houghton refused to defend himself in court (because of his Carthusian vow of silence).\u00a0 But his innocence and holiness were so evident that he was only condemned because the prosecutors were threatened with punishment if they didn\u2019t condemn him.\u00a0 So he and his companions were tortured, humiliated, dragged through the streets of London, hanged, drawn and quartered.\u00a0 The first martyrs of a 150-year wave of persecution against the Catholic Church in merry old England\u2026<\/p>\n
And in the long wake of such heroic fidelity to this crucial Christian doctrine, there you go questioning the Pope\u2019s role as Supreme Pastor!\u00a0 You ought to be ashamed.\u00a0 I recommend a prompt repentance and a return to your senses.\u00a0 And by the way, you may want to start reading what the Pope is actually saying, not what his deluded critics are saying he\u2019s saying.<\/p>\n
Your concerned uncle,<\/p>\n
Eddy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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