Crakanthorpe answered in his Defensio Ecclesiae, taking the retractation sentence by sentence, and pouring out a stream of invective. The first edition was full of errors; it was edited at Oxford in 1847. Several other works written by him of anti-Catholic controversy were published after his death.
|
|
Chadwick pp. 193–94. Some Newman disciples wrote about English saints, while Newman himself worked to complete an Essay on the development of doctrine. In February 1843, Newman published, as an advertisement in the Oxford Conservative Journal, an anonymous but otherwise formal retractation of all the hard things he had said against Roman Catholicism. Lockhart became the first in the group to convert formally to Catholicism.
|
|
In the following year he was elected deputy for Belley. In 1834 he was elected by two arrondissements, and sat for Joigny, which he represented until 1846. In this year he lost his seat in consequence of the popular prejudice aroused against him by his trenchant pamphlet Oui et non (1845) against attacks on religious liberty, and a second entitled Feul Feul (1845), written in reply to those who demanded a retractation of the former. Sixty thousand copies were rapidly sold.
|
|
The dramatic structure of the first and last scenes in particular drew his admiration: > The culmination of accumulating evidence by which the rascal hero is > ultimately overwhelmed and put to shame, driven from lie to lie and reduced > from retractation to retractation as witness after witness starts up against > him from every successive corner of the witch's dwelling, is as masterly in > management of stage effect as any contrivance of the kind in any later and > more famous comedy: nor can I remember a more spirited and vivid opening to > any play than the quarrelling scene among the gamblers with which this one > breaks out at once into life-like action, full of present interest and > promise of more to come.Swinburne (1908, 248). He was less convinced, though, by the way in which the end of the play allows "the triumphant escape of a villanous old impostor and baby-farmer from the condign punishments due to her misdeeds"; he regarded this failure to punish the Wise Woman as a violation of the sense of poetic justice, which had been perpetrated, he argued, for the sake of a satisfying conclusion.Swinburne (1908, 249).
|
|
The religious of Cervara, acting on the advice of some eminent personages, and of some influential members of the clergy who assured them that the pope had allowed the oath, took the oath of fidelity. Dom Augustin, who had received from Pope Pius VII, then prisoner at Savona, knowledge of the Bull of excommunication issued against the spoliator of the Papal States, commanded the Prior of Cervara to make immediate retractation. The emperor became furious. He caused Dom Augustin to be arrested at Bordeaux and thrown into prison.
|
|
The Defensio Ecclesiae Anglicanae, Crakanthorpe's best-known controversial work, was not published till after his death, when it was given to the world (1625) by his friend John Barkham, who also preached his funeral sermon. Marcantonio de Dominis, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Spalatro, came to England as a convert to the Church of England, having published his reasons in a book called Consilium Profectionis (Heidelberg and London 1616). After about six years' residence in England he returned to Rome, and published a retractation (Consilium Reditus). A perfect storm of vituperation broke out against him.
|
|
Bail was offered by Sir Henry Knevett and Sir William Bowes, but was rejected by the authorities. On 22 May, Johnson and Bainbrigg addressed a letter to Lord Burghley, the chancellor; but the vice-chancellor laid the case before the court of high commission, which directed the vice-chancellor and heads to proceed at discretion. A form of recantation was given to Johnson on 19 October and he was required to read it in the pulpit of Great St. Mary's. He made an unconvincing retractation and on 30 October he was expelled from the university.
|
|
Dupin answered him and Bossuet appealed to the civil authority, denouncing Dupin to the Chancellor of France, Louis Boucherat and to Archbishop de Harlay of Paris. Bossuet simply enumerated the points in the Bibliothèque of which he disapproved. These concerned original sin, purgatory, the canonicity of the Sacred Scriptures, the eternity of hell's torments, the veneration of saints and of their relics, the adoration of the Cross, grace, the pope and the bishops, Lent, divorce, the celibacy of the clergy, tradition, the Eucharist, the theology of the Trinity, and the Council of Nicæa. He demanded a censure and a retractation.
|
|
He had been led to this position by his antagonism (1707) to the arguments on which Henry Dodwell the elder based his rejection of the natural immortality of the soul. He made further use of it in criticisms directed (1718) against Bull and (1720–1) Waterland. The extent of his departure from conventional opinion was not revealed till the posthumous publication in April 1727 of his Last Thoughts, which he calls his 'retractation,' and which 'clearly shows his unitarianism'.Letter of 17 July 1727 by Samuel Crellius, in 'Thesaurus Epistolicus La-Crozianus,' quoted in Robert Wallace's Anti-trinitarian Biography, 1850, iii. 471.
|
|
In contemporary pamphlets Whitby, nicknamed Whigby, was unfavourably contrasted with Titus Oates; ironical letters of thanks were addressed to him, purporting to come from Anabaptists and others. The University of Oxford in convocation (21 July 1683) condemned the proposition 'that the duty of not offending a weak brother is inconsistent with all human authority of making laws concerning indifferent things,' and ordered Whitby's book to be burned by the university marshal in the schools quadrangle. Seth Ward extorted from Whitby a retractation (9 October 1683); and he issued a second part of the Protestant Reconciler, urging dissenters to conformity. In 1689 Whitby wrote in favour of taking the oaths to William and Mary.
|
|
A list of the Constitutional Bishops and their resignations is given in Boulay de la Meurthe, V, pp. 639-642. Bonaparte wanted them to be reappointed to their dioceses, or at least to other dioceses. This presented grave spiritual and canonical problems for Pius VII, since the bishops were heretics and schismatics, and it would be impossible to appoint them to diocesan posts without a full confession of guilt, as well as retractation of their oaths to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and submission to the judgment of the Pope. Caprara was to try to get Bonaparte to refrain from nominating (a right guaranteed in the new Concordat) any of the Constitutional bishops.
|
|
The assembly, indignant at the terms of the protest, required a retractation, and failing to obtain it, the standing commission suspended Wilson and his three associates on 9 August 1733, refused to hear a representation offered by Wilson and Moncrieff justifying their conduct, and on 12 November declared them no longer ministers of the Scottish church. On 16 November the four ministers put their names to a formal act of secession, and on 6 December they constituted themselves an Associate Presbytery. On 14 May 1734, however, the assembly, repenting their action, empowered the synods to reinstate the four ministers. Wilson was anxious for reconciliation, but further differences had arisen, especially through the support afforded by the assembly to patrons against the congregational veto.
|
|
Wood, however in his Athenae Oxonienses, says that he was always a puritan at heart, and it appears that in 1639 he was convened by Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, for preaching that the Church of England did not hold episcopacy to be jure divino, but according to Thomas Brooks made "a handsome retractation". Although a puritan and an enemy to episcopacy, Cox in his earlier days may have upheld the sacramental system as warmly as many other presbyterians did. After the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, he ventured to express opinions that he had thought it prudent to conceal up to that time. He later became a minister at Bedford, and openly preached the invalidity of infant baptism.
|
|
It is said that he wrote a formal Palinodia or retractation of his book De vera obedientia; but the reference is probably to his sermon at the start of Advent, 1554, after Cardinal (later Archbishop of Canterbury) Reginald Pole had absolved the kingdom from schism. As chancellor he had the onerous task of negotiating the Queen's marriage treaty with Philip II of Spain, for which he shared a general repugnance. In executing it, he took care to make the terms as advantageous for England as possible, with express provision that the Spaniards should in nowise be allowed to interfere in the government of the country. After the appointment of Cardinal Pole, and the reconciliation of the realm to the see of Rome, he still remained in high favour.
|
|
Not long before the execution of Charles I, which occurred on 30 January 1649, a tract began to circulate, datelined "London, printed in the year 1649," and bearing the title Mr. William Prynn His Defence of Stage Plays in a Retractation of a former Book of his called Histrio- Mastix. Written in Prynne’s style and under his name, the text purported to be a retraction of the sentiments expressed in Histriomastix. Prynne responded with a “posting-bill,” or flyer, of his own under the title “Vindication,” which bore the date January 10, 1648, oddly a full year before the publication of the alleged retraction. In 1825, the antiquarian E. W. Brayley undertook to expose the “retraction” as a hoax in a slim volume entitled An Enquiry into the Genuineness of Prynne’s “Defense of Stage Plays,” and his argument addresses, in part, the anomaly of the dates by explaining the slow acceptance of the calendar reforms of 1582.
|
|
Bernier, the ecclesiastical diplomat who negotiated the rehabilitation of the jurors, thought it best, in order to avoid delay, not to make a clear mention of the manner of retractation required by Pope Pius VII; as a consequence, Le Coz denied ever having retracted, and the awkwardness of the situation was ended only by a personal interview between Le Coz and Pius VII, in which both were seen weeping but of which neither ever spoke. As schismatic Bishop of Ille-et-Vilaine, Le Coz failed in his endeavour to organize the new province of which he was the metropolitan; otherwise he proved a zealous administrator and a charitable pastor. The strange mixture in Le Coz's life, is partly explained by his intensely Gallican education, which caused him to adopt and to maintain with obstinacy schismatic views. His Gallicanism, which made him so haughty toward the pope, found him almost cringing before the various political regimes which succeeded one another during his episcopate.
|
|
The disturbances which arose from the teachings of Italus attracted the emperor's attention apparently soon after his accession; and by his order, Italus, after a preliminary examination by Isaac Comnenus, the brother of Alexios, was cited before an ecclesiastical court. Though protected by the patriarch Eustratius, whose favour he had won, he narrowly escaped death from the violence of the mob of Constantinople, and he was forced publicly and bareheaded to retract and anathematize eleven propositions, embodying the sentiments which he was charged with holding. He was charged with teaching the transmigration of souls, with holding some erroneous opinions about ideas, and with ridiculing the use of images in worship; and he is said to have succeeded in diffusing his heresies among many of the nobles and officers of the palace, to the great grief of the orthodox emperor. Notwithstanding his enforced retractation, he still continued to inculcate his sentiments, until, after a vain attempt by the emperor to restrain him, he was himself sentenced to be anathematized and banished to the Monastery Zoödochos Pege;Janin (1953), p.
|
|