The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The Church had its own law which intervened widely in people's lives; its own courts and judges;
its own massive administration. Tensions might exist between the institutional Church and the
church of believers, the community of the faithful. The religion of the Church and the religion of
the people might diverge and, in the cases of the definition of purgatory or the creation of new saints
or new feasts, the Church might follow the people as well as the people the Church. Yet none of the
faithful could challenge the Church or repudiate its practices without cutting themselves off from
the sources of salvation and risking damnation. Priests lived among their congregation, their
'ghostly' children, in the world and of it. Yet they were set apart from the lay society into which they
were born by their sacred vocation, by their ordination. Through the sacrament of holy orders they
were empowered, by the working of grace, to celebrate all the other sacraments; in the sacrament of
penance they could bind and loose from sin; in the sacrament of the Mass they celebrated a sacred
mystery. Mediators to God for men, given secret knowledge denied to the laity, they had died to
the world in order to imitate Christ and His Apostles. In the Mass there was a resemblance between
Christ and the celebrant. Such was the high view of the priesthood, and it had consequences for the
laity. The clergy, so Dean Colet reminded them in 1511, were the light of the world, and if their light
darkened, so much darker was the rest of the world. By 1530 recruitment to the priesthood in England
had reached high levels not seen since the Black Death of the mid fourteenth century. In More's
Utopia the priests were of an extraordinary sanctity; it followed that they were very few. In England,
they seemed countless. More's moral was clear. Perhaps 4 per cent of the total male population was
'priested'; the only other occupation which employed so many was agriculture (the employment
which many joined the priesthood to escape). Whether quite so many had truly died to the world
may be doubted. Priests, with the cure of souls, as guides of moral and spiritual life, preachers,
confessors and celebrants, were supposed to be educated, chaste and charitable themselves.
Yet although the Church had a divine mission, as an institution it was profoundly human. Priests
were sworn to celibacy, never to have families of their own, but the flesh is weak. The laity revered
the vow of celibacy and were shocked when it was broken, especially when the breaking of it
involved the deflowering of a daughter or the adultery of a wife. Since he taught the idea of Christian
life as community, and warned of the sins that would fracture it, a priest's own fall from grace was
likely to break the peace of his parish.