Présentation de l'éditeur
Magna Charta the Work of Catholics IV hen an Englishman thinks of lity lie naturally thinks about the gna Charta, says the Catholic Bulletin of St. Paul. That great charter was the fountain of his liberty. That charter was not the work of a Protestant, or an atheist or a free-thinker. It won in Catholic days when England was a Catholic nation. The first meeting held by the barons to decide upon a plan to secure liberty from gjohn was held in a Catholic Church St. Paul s Cathedral in London, England. There was no Anglican Church in those days. All over England there were Catholic Churches, and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was a fact in the life of every Englishman. It was the Catholic A rchbishop, Stephen Langton, who addressed the barons at that meeting and produced before them the charter of Henry I. It was this same Catholic Archbishop who threatened King John with excommunication if he assailed his subjects by any but due process of law This is all true, comments The Indiana Catholic, but there is a little more true than the Bulletin migh have mentioned. All the barons were Normans and spoke French, the language of the English court (N orman) was French, and the Magna Charta was written in French. So there wasnt a thing English about it, much as our English Cousins praise it anc claim it as their own. The fact is that only for the Norman French in1 vasion of England by William th Conqueror, who defeated the Anglo Saxons, there would have been no barons there to demand their rights. The Magna Charta was, as our con temporary says, Catholic in origin, but some of the main planks were in force in I reland long before the Normans came to England, as recorded in the Annals of the ,F our Masters. The first laws based upon ideals of popular rights for the English were promulgated by Alfred the Great in 896 and had been prepared by Duns Scotus Erigena, the famo
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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