The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In Gaelic Ireland, expectations were different. The Church there had developed in virtual isolation
and had never succeeded in transforming marriage and family life to the Catholic pattern of the rest
of Europe. In Gaelic society the major professions were hereditary castes, and that included the clergy.
Ireland had been resistant to the ethic of clerical celibacy, and here sons followed fathers into the
clerical profession. Seeking titles to beneficies, the sons needed papal dispensation for their illegitimacy, and were granted it. Between 1449 and 1522 twenty-two sons of bishops were recorded
in the lists of dispensation. And Welsh priests had long taken 'wives' in defiance of canon law.
Everywhere the relationship between parishioners and priests was likely to be ambivalent, for the
relationship was personal and, like other personal relationships, subject to the vagaries of personality,
the strains of proximity and complications of financial obligation. The laity were obliged to provide
for their priests, and might object where they thought their pastor unworthy. Yet the unworthiness
of the priest could never affect the validity of the sacraments, since the true minister was Christ.
Because of the sacrament of ordination even the best and wisest layman must always yield place to
the most ignorant and venal priest, and clergy had powerful sanctions. In confession, the priest sat
in judgement and enjoined penance; at Mass he could exclude those he thought unworthy.
The Church might be criticized, its clergy found wanting, but for the faithful there was no salvation
outside it, and without the priesthood admitting the laity to the sacraments, immortal souls were lost.
Christian rites and sacraments were central to people's lives. They created and validated relationships,
made new affinities, and sanctioned the passage from one stage of life to another. The sacraments
of baptism, death. Confirmation marked the end of one stage of childhood. The sacrament of ordination allowed the priesthood to celebrate the others. All these sacraments were celebrated only
once in a lifetime, but two others - penance and the Mass - regularly brought the sinning Christian
closer to God. Baptism and marriage were celebrations, accompanied by feasting, to which kin,
friends and neighbours came as witnesses as well as worshippers. Sacraments were a unifying bond
of the community. Or once they were. At the Reformation, the nature and the number of the sacraments changed. Only baptism and the Eucharist stayed as sacraments which were a means to
grace, and even their significance was more cautiously defined. Yet the human need for sacraments
remained.