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Hi Zina,
That's a somewhat broad question, but I'll try to answer it somewhat
briefly.
The chief indicator that England ceased to be Catholic was when
Henry VIII renounced his ties with the Pope and made himself head
of the Church of England. This happened in April of 1534 with Parliament
passing an act which invalidated Henry's marriage to Catherine (and
making Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn's daughter, legitimate and heir to
the throne). Refusal to take an oath in support of this constituted
high treason, and this was why St. Thomas More was executed. But
even one year prior, April 1533, parliament passed an act which implicitly
repudiated papal primacy by saying that the king was the supreme
head of the empire in both the temporal and spiritual spheres. By
1535, the schism was well-established.
Protestantism started to creep in earnest under Edward VI (1547-53).
The chief indicator that England became Protestant (which is a different
question) were the radical changes made under the leadership of Archbishop
Thomas Cranmer. Prior to Cranmer, the Church of England more or less
maintained most of its Catholic heritage; indeed, Henry VIII was
named a Defender of the Faith by the Pope. All he wanted was a divorce,
not a doctrinal revolution; so in a sense he initiated a schism rather
than introducing a heresy. Introducing heresy was Cromwell's job.
In particular, he introduced a Protestant notion of the Priesthood,
one that excluded the sense of the priest offering sacrifice to God,
a crucial distinction which later would cause the Catholic Church
to declare that the priestly orders of the Church of England were "absolutely
null and utterly void" because he had fundamentally changed
the concept of the priesthood. This happened with the publication
of a new order for ordaining and consecrating bishops and priests
in 1550 and
revised in 1552. The intent behind this new order was to eliminate
the concept of the priesthood having a sacrificial character. That
prompted more and more protestantizations to be introduced into the
Church of England.
As for effects of the Reformation on the Catholic Church, obviously,
the Catholic Church will be forever changed by the effects of the
Reformation. Probably the most visible effect is that for all its
wrong headedness, the Reformation *did* motivate the Catholic Church
to reform itself in what we call the Counter-Reformation. There were
real abuses that were going on in the Catholic Church, too many,
and she had been too lazy to purge herself of the evil. The Reformation
provided that motivation, and the purification took form in the Council
of Trent (1545-1564). The Church did more than condemn various errors
of Protestantism; she also spent a lot of effort condemning abuses,
cleaning up the mess, and issuing decrees that would prevent them
from occurring again.
But the bigger effect of the Reformation is that it severed the
unity of the Church in a major way that obviously she has yet to
recover from.
I hope this helps -- let me know if you have any further questions.
Eric Ewanco
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