THE
P RTAL
December 2011
Page 12
The Anglo-Saxon Saints:
Models of Sanctity
for the Ordinariate in the UK
by Harry Schnitker
During his visit to the UK in 2011, the Holy Father urged all to strive to be saints of the twenty-first
century. What does this mean, and, in particular, what does it mean for the Ordinariate here in the UK? One
could argue that there would not be an Ordinariate without a saint, Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman.
Blessed John Henry Newman
Fittingly, Blessed John Henry was beatified by the
Pope who also opened the doors to those Anglicans
who wished to follow Newman’s example, but who
also wished to stay loyal to the cultural and spiritual
treasures of their Anglican roots. We are called to be
saints by the Holy Father, who echoed the Second
Vatican Council. For the young Ordinariate, seeking
to establish its own identity, this can mean looking for
saints who shaped its Anglican roots.
Christian culture
great victory over the French armies at Agincourt
implemented a deliberate policy to create an English
national-Catholic identity. Shakespeare picked up on
this, his antennae sensitised by the nationalisation of
religion under his Tudor masters.
In Act III of his play, Henry V, written in 1598, the
bard has Henry proclaim:
And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England,
show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I
doubt not
… The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England,
and Saint George!’
Almost inevitably, this means the saints of the
Anglo-Saxon period. This is not to say that other
saints are not important. One could argue that some
of the so-called Celtic saints were crucial in creating
English Catholicism. Yet where these saints laboured
in Anglo-Saxon regions, they soon became part of
an easily identifiable Christian culture. St Chad in
Lichfield may have come from an ancient British – king, country and Faith
Welsh – family, but his work and influence were part
of Anglo-Saxon Christianity.
The link between king, country and Faith is explicit,
as it was in Henry’s own day. A year after his great
St Thomas Becket
victory, in 1416, he ordered the renewed inclusion on
Later saints, who were part of the post-1066 the English calendar of a host of Anglo-Saxon saints
Normanised English kingdom, rarely exercised the long forgotten.
same influence, although one would have to recall the
exceptional figure of St Thomas Becket as a salutary
He also ensured that the Use of Sarum, still central to
warning against over-simplification. Equally, the the liturgical tradition of Anglicanism, was extended
valiant men and women who clung to their Faith after to wherever the English Church held sway. Henry
the English Reformation and died as a result were VIII built upon this model, and stuck to it after the
important, but not as essential to an Anglican identity break with Rome. Here are the origins of the Anglican
as their Anglo-Saxon precursors.
tradition, constructed in the later Middle Ages as
England found its national identity, but with its roots
Henry V
amongst the very people that propagated the Faith in
The centrality of the Anglo-Saxon saints to an England. St Bede, that great Anglo-Saxon saint and
Anglican identity rests largely on the man who did scholar, could not conceive of the English and their
more to shape English national awareness than anyone Church as anything but inseparable, and would have
prior to the Tudors: Henry V. The protagonist of the approved of Henry V’s policy.