1535), who refused to surrender to Henry VIII when he demanded the surrender of the clergy in order to establish an autonomous English church under the direct authority of the crown. Hilaire Belloc writes of Becket: “His heroic resistance prevented the assault of the temporal power against the eternal from being fatal at the moment when, precisely, it might have been fatal.”Īnother man of similar courage was St. 1170), resisted the overreach of his onetime friend Henry II when the king encroached upon the power and wealth of the English church for the sake of his tyrannical ambitions. Perhaps one of the best examples of this English influence are the many Catholics who fought to preserve the independent authority of the Church from an imperious secular state who regularly sought to limit if not supplant the role of Catholicism in public life. Joseph Pearce’s Faith of our Fathers: A History of True England helps us better understand the remarkable contributions of English Catholicism. Though we are often not aware of it, the English have had an outsized impact upon American Catholicism, especially what is most vibrant in it in 2022. And much of what we know of the ancient - but also very contemporary - heresy of Pelagianism (of British origin) is because of Bede’s writings.īede, in a sense, is emblematic of the English influence over Catholicism across the English-speaking world, and especially in the United States. Not only is he the father of English history, but also the popularizer of the use of “A.D.” (“in the year of our Lord”), and perhaps an incomparable influence over the trajectory of early medieval learning, having influenced either directly or indirectly many other saints and scholars. His greatest accomplishment is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a book few Catholics have read (I’m only familiar with it because it was assigned in an English history course I took in college).Īnd yet, Bede truly is foundational. A seventh- and eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monk who spent practically the entirety of his life at the monasteries of St. Gregory of Narek, would likely win the award for “least known doctor of the church,” of which there are a total of 37.

Bede english history