{"id":3582,"date":"2007-01-08T10:59:43","date_gmt":"2007-01-08T10:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/vindictive-obsessive.html"},"modified":"2007-01-08T10:59:43","modified_gmt":"2007-01-08T10:59:43","slug":"vindictive-obsessive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/vindictive-obsessive.html","title":{"rendered":"Vindictive Obsessive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A reader writes in regard to this article in the (UK) Spectator:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

I’m not a historian, but this time I am sceptical of the Specky.  Is it really true that:<\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n

    \n
  • "<\/span>In 1510 England was an authoritarian outpost of the Catholic Church<\/span> \u2014<\/span> a country where, uniquely, it was illegal to read the Bible in the national language."<\/span> <\/span><\/li>\n
  • "…<\/span>the placid tolerance of the Anglican Church is at its most bizarre when afforded to Thomas More, the very man who attempted<\/span> \u2014<\/span> both literally and figuratively<\/span> \u2014<\/span> to strangle the Reformation at its birth. Here was a man who persecuted, with a peculiarly vindictive obsession, Protestant heretics such as Tyndale, and put a few hundred to their excruciating deaths. "<\/span> I was under the impression More was fairly lighthanded compared to some others.<\/span> <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    And would you describe Henry’s reformation as:<\/span><\/span>
    "<\/span>a movement which loathed and distrusted heavy-handed centralised authority; which felt that God\u2019s word was the property of the people rather than the Church, and was thus open to a multitude of divergent interpretations."?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A reader writes in regard to this article in the (UK) Spectator: I’m not a historian, but this time I am sceptical of the Specky.  Is it really true that: "In 1510 England was an authoritarian outpost of the Catholic Church \u2014 a country where, uniquely, it was illegal to read the Bible in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nVindictive Obsessive? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/vindictive-obsessive.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Vindictive Obsessive? 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}