Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Shouldn't Richard III be given a Catholic burial?


Al Pacino as Kind Richard III

UK researchers confirmed that the long-lost remains of King Richard II have been found and identified, after sitting under what is now a parking lot in Leicester, in the English Midlands, for more than half a millenium. ("Remains Confirmed as King Richard II's," Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2013)


Now there is passionate talk suggesting that the Prime Minister ought to take charge and demand a ceremony that shows British schoolchildren how the English can venerate their past in a truly grand, national context, with a burial of Richard III in Westminster Abbey. ("To bury Richard III in Westminster Abbey would finally give a proper national resting place to our most unfairly maligned monarch of all," Mail Online, February 5, 2013)


King Richard, however, who was the last of the royal Plantagenet line before it was supplanted by the Tudors who famously broke with Rome over Henry VIII's libido, was a Roman Catholic. Is it proper that the contemporary descendants of the historic usurpers of the authority of the See of Peter over the Church in England impose their own novel and alien religious rites upon the remains of King Richard III? His religion was not that of the Church of England.

5 comments:

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Dear Dr. Just wait until we Romans send some effete ecumenist to the funeral and he praises the Proddies and asks them to forgive us for being so mean - you know it will happen.

P.S. You have a bad attitude, How could you write such mean words about our separated brethren? They have every right to be wrong. No wonder the Vatican hasn't recruited you as a speech writer.

Confitebor said...

He should, of course, be given a Catholic burial. So should everyone, for that matter, in the sense that everyone should become and remain faithfully Catholic -- and since Richard III died a Catholic, he ought to be reinterred with Catholic rites.

Even so, it's good that his mortal remains are being shown some respect, and will be given a permanent place of repose where they may be readily shown even the minimal veneration that is due to the image of God -- even if the interment rites and the new tomb are those of heretics and schismatics.

Ralph Roister-Doister said...

Well PP, on the other hand, who is better positioned and more disposed to "impose their own novel and alien religious rites" upon the remains of the last Plantagenet king than the descendants of our separated Tudor brethren -- the brown toothed, guzzling, belching, trouser-loading, pus-dripping, cheese-cutting, fungus-efflorescing, crab louse hostelers, johnny's-out-of-jail Rangoon itchers, and "historic usurpers of the authority of the See of Peter over the Church in England ?" It seems not unexpected.

Flambeaux said...

A Nervous Disorder Mass Of Christian Burial would be no less alien. I think I rather trust My Gracious Lord Canterbury to handle such with more grace, dignity, and taste than the Arch of Westminster.

Sheldon said...

Flambeaux,

Sad-to-say, excellent point.