For 500 years, England has denied its Catholic heritage. In our multicultural era, it is high time for the conventional wisdom to be questioned, says a leading historian.

Time to reform the Reformation

Eamon Duffy

• For five centuries England has been in denial about the role of Roman Catholicism in shaping it.
• The coin in your pocket declares the monarch to be Defender of the Faith.
• Since 1558 that has meant the Protestant faith, but Henry VIII actually got the title from the Pope for defending Catholicism against Luther.
• Henry eventually broke with Rome because the Pope refused him a divorce, and along with the papacy went saints, pilgrimage, the monastic life, eventually even the Mass itself – the pillars of medieval Christianity.
• To explain that revolution, the Protestant reformers told a story. Henry had rejected not the Catholic Church, but a corrupt pseudo-Christianity which had led the world astray.

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