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How did Henry VIII carry out the conversion of England?

If we are talking about a religious ,'conversion,' the answer is not very well!

In fact England was not converted at all, the country on the whole remained what it had been for some 1500 yrs, a Catholic Country! The trouble was that during the middle ages many abuses had taken root in the Church, not only in England but throughout Catholic Christendom. All through the past centuries there had been upheavals attempting to reign in and control the powers of the Bishop of Rome. The question was who ruled the Church, the Bishops through the College of Bishops or the Pope? All Henry and his family did was to steal everything that the Church owned that was not nailed down tight! Also, to limit the power of the papacy to interfere in Churches other than its own, 'Suburbicarian Church,' of Italy. This prevented papal interference in the Church in England. Henry became ,'Supreme Head,' this was limited by the addition by the English Church in 1531 of the phrase, 'as far as the Law of God allows.' [Rough Trans.] The former phrase really changed nothing except giving the monarch a legal base for what was recognised, not only in England but throughout Europe and had been since time immemorial, this was the fact that the Church was under the law and that Henry was indeed First Magistrate in England.

The only break in relations between the Church in England and the Continental Church's occured in 1570, when the Bishop of Rome attempted a fatwa against against Elizabeth 1st.

At no time did the Church break with the traditions of the Catholic Church of the first thousand years!

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15y ago

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