Question

Why did king Henry VIII of England break with the Roman Catholic Church? Make sure to also list and explain the legislations that were approved under Henry VIII by the English Parliament that officially split the Church of England from the Catholic Church. Under Henry, was the Church of England dramatically different from the Roman Catholic Church?

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Five-paragraph specific and thoughtful response to prompt.

Answer 1

Henry VIII decided to rid himself of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, after she had failed to produce a male heir to the throne. He had already decided who his next wife would be – Anne Boleyn.
However, a divorce was not a simple issue. In fact, it was a very complicated one. Henry VIII was a Roman Catholic and the head of this church was the pope based in Rome. The Roman Catholic faith believed in marriage for life. It did not recognise, let alone support, divorce. Husbands could not simply decide that their marriage was not working, divorce their wife and re-marry. The Roman Catholic Church simply did not allow it.

This put Henry VIII in a difficult position. Henry made special appeal to the pope so that he might get a special “Papal Dispensation”. This meant that the pope would agree to Henry’s request for a divorce purely because Henry was king of England but that it would not affect the way the Catholic Church banned divorce for others. The pope refused to grant Henry this and by 1533 his anger was such that he ordered the Archbishop of Canterbury to grant him a divorce so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. The Archbishop granted Henry his divorce – against the wishes of the pope.

This event effectively lead to England breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church based in Rome. The break with Rome was effected by a series of acts of Parliament passed between 1532 and 1534, among them the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which declared that Henry was the "Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England

As head of the Church, Henry was effectively in charge of the Archbishops, Bishops and all the clergy that the English Church still retained. In fact, in many ways, the new English Church was very similar to the old Catholic Church. Henry was arguably a Catholic at heart, and changed the beliefs of the Church very little.

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