Today the Church remembers the
life and ministry of a leader of the Reformation in England, Thomas Cranmer,
the Archbishop of Canterbury and martyr, who was born on 2 July 1489 and died
on this day in March of 1556 when he was burned at the stake under the orders
of the Roman Catholic Queen of England, Mary I, as a heretic.
Cranmer was 14 when he went to
Jesus College, Cambridge obtaining is Bachelor of Arts after studying logic,
classical literature and philosophy. For his master’s degree, he took a
different course of study, concentrating on the humanists, and after receiving
his Master of Arts degree in 1515, he was elected to a Fellowship of Jesus
College.
After he obtained his MA,
Cranmer married Joan, and he was forced to forfeit his fellowship which
resulted in the loss of his residence at Jesus College. He took a job as a reader
at another college. Joan died during her first childbirth, and Cranmer began
studying theology and by 1520 he was ordained.
Cambridge had named Cranmer as one of their preachers. He received his
doctorate of divinity in 1526.
Cranmer first began meeting
with the Reformers on the Continent in 1531, specifically, Simon Grynaeus, Huldrych
Zwingli and Johannes Oecolampadius. In
January 1532, Cranmer passed through the Lutheran city of Nuremberg and saw for
the first time the effects of the Reformation. When the Imperial Diet was moved
to Nuremberg in the summer, he met the leading architect of the Nuremberg
reforms, Andreas Osiander. Cranmer had moved, however moderately at this stage,
into identifying with certain Lutheran principles.
As a Reformer, Cranmer believed
that the prayer of the Church should be understood by its people, and he was
foremost in translating the worship of the Church into English and securing their
use (the Book of Common Prayer).
James Kiefer writes that:
When
Mary came to the throne, Cranmer was in a quandary. He had believed, with a
fervor that many people today will find hard to understand, that it is the duty
of every Christian to obey the monarch, and that "the powers that be are
ordained of God" (Romans 13). As long as the monarch was ordering things
that Cranmer thought good, it was easy for Cranmer to believe that the king was
sent by God's providence to guide the people in the path of true religion, and
that disobedience to the king was disobedience to God. Now Mary was Queen, and
commanding him to return to the Roman obedience. Cranmer five times wrote a
letter of submission to the Pope and to Roman Catholic doctrines, and four
times he tore it up. In the end, he submitted. However, Mary was unwilling to
believe that the submission was sincere, and he was ordered to be burned at
Oxford on 21 March 1556. At the very end, he repudiated his final letter of
submission, and announced that he died a Protestant. He said, "I have
sinned, in that I signed with my hand what I did not believe with my heart.
When the flames are lit, this hand shall be the first to burn." And when
the fire was lit around his feet, he leaned forward and held his right hand in
the fire until it was charred to a stump. Aside from this, he did not speak or
move, except that once he raised his left hand to wipe the sweat from his
forehead.
There is an excellent biography
of Thomas Cranmer by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas
Cranmer: A Life (1996). It is a bit
lengthy at 692 pages; however, it is a very scholarly work on Cranmer’s life
and the Reformation.
Let us pray: Merciful God,
through the work of Thomas Cranmer you renewed the worship of your Church by
restoring the language of the people, and through his death you revealed your
power in human weakness: Grant that by your grace we may always worship you in
spirit and in truth; through Jesus Christ, our only Mediator and Advocate, who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
CALENDAR REMINDERS
Nick @ Night on
Wednesday, 26 March at Trinity at 6 PM.
The Rev. Canon Glenice Robinson-Como from Christ Church Cathedral will be
our speaker. She is a native Virginian
and received her B.S. from Virginia Commonwealth University, her M.Div. from
Perkins School of Theology at SMU and a Diploma of Theological Studies from the
Seminary of the Southwest. She has worked as a Staff Ombudsman with the
Houston-Galveston Area Agency on Aging for ten years, and in Contract
Administration with the Department of Defense and with the Metropolitan Transit
Authority in Southern California. She serves as Chaplain for the John Epps
Chapter of United Black Episcopalians (UBE), is a member of the Commission on
Black Ministry and a mentor for Kids Hope USA. Glenice is the author of a
meditation in the book Yes!, Jesus Loves
Me—31 Love Stories, by Kathy H. Culmer, and a prayer entitled, “The Least of These” in the book Lifting Women’s Voices, Prayers to Change the
World, which addresses the themes of the United Nations’ Millennium
Development Goals. Glenice is married to Paul L. Como and they have two
children, Paulie and Dominique.
Jared Jackson
will be made an Eagle Scout on Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 3 PM at Wortham
Auditorium in Rosenberg Library.
Please remember
everyone on our Prayer List, especially, Pat, Karen, Patricia, Evelyn and Lee.
Your servant in Christ,
Fr. Chester J. Makowski+
St. Augustine of Hippo
Episcopal Church
Galveston, Texas 77550
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