Some Catholic Apologists Think They are Doing a Better Job than Me

On FB, I just found a post by Catholics Online Class, third from top right now, which starts out:

DID THE CHURCH CHAIN THE BIBLE AND B-U-RN WILLIAM TYNDALE FOR TRANSLATING IT? 🤔😲

Now, there is good stuff in it, but take a look at this:

WHO EXECUTED WILLIAM TYNDALE?

Here’s the truth that almost no one tells you:

Tyndale was not killed by the Catholic Church.

He was executed by King Henry VIII, the Protestant King of England, in 1536.

Let that sink in.

By then, Henry had already broken away from Rome (in 1534) and founded the Anglican Church, the same church that later produced the King James Version of the Bible.

Tyndale was betrayed by his friend Henry Philips, arrested in Flanders, and condemned by civil authorities loyal to King Henry, not by the Pope, not by any Catholic bishop.

He was strangled and burned at the stake for political rebellion and heresy, not for “translating the Bible.”

So, the claim that “the Catholic Church K!-illed Tyndale” is not just false, it’s historical revisionism.

Now, it is certainly true that he was executed in 1536.

It is also true that by then Henry VIII was schismatic (but not Protestant, though he favoured some personnel who were).

It is also always technically true that a heretic is executed by civil authorities. A heretic burned in the Papal state, would have been judged as heretic by priests, loyal to the then Pope as bishop of all bishops and as first shepherd of the faithful on earth, but he would have been condemned to death by a civil servent, loyal to the same Pope as secular (though theocratic) ruler of the papal state.

However, he was not just arrested in Flanders, he was executed in Flanders. The civil authorities in Flanders were not loyal to Henry VIII, they were loyal to Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, in his quality of Duke of Brabant. You could say, he was loyal to his position and vengeful against rebellious Augsburg league. Or you can say he was loyal to Catholicism. But you cannot say he was disloyal to Catholicism.

Vilvoorde is in Belgium, not in the UK. It was in Brabant, not in England.

And while the process of burning a heretic belonged to secular authorities, the process of judging that he was a heretic belonged to Catholic priests. In this case to one James Latomus. Or "Masson" he was surnamed before joining priesthood.

The story isn't about an angry king who hated the Tyndale Bible. It's about a priest who took great pains to find out what Tyndale believed about justification and good works.

Both Latomus and Tyndale agreed, justification does not depend on previous good works. But Latomus insisted on justification meaning you sign up for good works in the future. Tyndale disagreed. Obviously, Ephesians 2:8—9 give the common ground between them and verse 10 decides for Latomus (they were discussing Romans 3 at this point).

Tyndale wasn't burned for the Bible, but for Free Grace theology. That's what Protestantism was back then. Some Evangelicals love Lordship salvation. Back then it's spelled Latomus and Roman Catholic, not Tyndale nor Lutheran.

Anyway, I tried to look at other sources if any one would say he was burned in England, apart from Catholics Online Class. I didn't find any. But before looking, I actually asked:

Excuse me, but can you substantiate that Tyndale was burned in England under Henry VIII?

Because the common story, accepted not just by fanatical Protestants, but also by secularists is, he died in Vilvoorde, under the Spanish Inquisition.

And not for the translation, but for how he interpreted a verse in Romans 3.

Perhaps these guys in Nigeria overrelied on the story he was executed for the Bible. Perhaps they confused him with someone else who was executed in England for Tyndale's Bible, but that was not Tyndale. But he was executed in Flanders, in a time when an English translation was highly irrelevant there, for his views on justification. By actual Catholics.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort
28.IV.2026

In pago sancti Laurentii ad Separim, dioecesis Lucionensis, sancti Ludovici Mariae Grignion a Montfort, Confessoris, Fundatoris Missionariorum Societatis Mariae et Filiarum a Sapientia, apostolicae vitae forma, praedicatione et devotione mariali insignis, quem Pius Papa Duodecimus Sanctorum catalogo adscripsit.

Imagine Keaton Halley had Told me "Dude, Become a Protestant, you Catholics Have CCC § 283"

He would have some kind of point, considering the shape in which Catholicism is today.

Pope Michael I* (who never endorsed CCC and considered Wojtyla a formal schismatic, on top of already a heretic, since July 16 1990, that is before Wojtyla endorsed CCC) considered on one of his youtubes a Catholic in the Vatican II Sect as usually a displaced soul.

But he would not have as much of a point if we discussed Protestants and Catholics back in 1860. In Cologne, that year, a local Council reaffirmed Biblical creation of Adam and Eve in a formal resolution. But in Church of England, Bishop Wilberforce cannot get a condemnation of Darwinism, he can just polemise against it. As if he were just a writer, not a pastor. If you know 1260's and 70's some, you will know that St. Thomas Aquinas polemised against Averroism, as a writer, but Bishop Tempier condemned Averroism.

From the 1860's to 1880's French Catholicism was gliding from a preference for Six Literal Days to a preference for Day Age ... but never accepted an evolutionary origin of Adam, that only came way later, because of Teilhard de Chardin and his friends. Meanwhile, in the South of the US, it was not uncommon to hold that Adam was created way later than the first men on day VI, and that Adam wasn't ancestor to Black people. Perhaps not the Baptist thing, but I presume it was mostly Episcopalians there who held this.

So, historically, as a Young Earth Creationist, I do have a home in the Catholic Church.

Keaton Halley, however, knows this too well to make the kind of remarks I imagined in the title. Well, perhaps not the part of my adhering to Pope Michael I and now Michael II, rather than to Wojtyla, Ratzinger, Bergoglio and Prevost.

Now, Allie Beth Stuckey made a similar remark, but on the Abortion question. Here is a caption from** Politico:

White evangelicals in the 1970s didn’t initially care about abortion. They organized to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions — and only seized on banning abortion because it was more palatable than their real goal.

I disagree with the last part. Since then, banning abortion has become a real goal, I know there have been real celebrations, and racial segregation doesn't seem to be a real goal any more. But the first part is not fake news, it's not false history. Precisely as in 1830, it was easier to deny Six Recent Days and no Gap before that in the Church of England than in the Church of Rome.

Meeting in St. Louis in 1971, the messengers (delegates) to the Southern Baptist Convention, hardly a redoubt of liberalism, passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, a position they reaffirmed in 1974 — a year after Roe — and again in 1976.

My mother was Evangelical at this time. But when we visited the US next year, like partly for me to start learning English, partly for mother to get me a few months out of European social services, especially Swedish ones, but also Austrian, which is where we were living at this time, she didn't go to Southern Baptists. We spent so much of my initial time as a Christian believer in one particular environment, the sect or if you prefer denomination "The Walk" ... unlike much of White Evangelicals at the time, my mother was already pro-life, and at the very least The Walk was not openly promoting this kind of position.

How were the Catholics at this point?

The history of that movement, however, is more complicated. White evangelicals in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade, which they considered a Catholic issue.

By 1973, not every Catholic was actually Catholic. If you rehearsed the tambourine to take it to a guitar mass, where everyone present pronounced the words of consecration, that's what some did to Catholic liturgy, when the actual text of the new liturgy wasn't enough. The family of one David Bawden (born in 1959, on Hobbit Day) was among those preferring to stay home and to find out where there was a Catholic priest disgraced for actually being faithful to the liturgy, and then get them to say the Mass in Latin.

Those who were actually Catholics, not always as radical as David Bawden's youth, sometimes even coinciding with the kind of "devoutly Protestant Catholics" I described, were the ones the Evangelicals back then considered as the main opponents of Roe v. Wade.

When I was 15, I was offered the opoportunity to join a "secret society" and given that Freemasonry is for adult men (except Zonta lodges), that would not have been a Lodge, it would probably have been sth like the De Molay's. I didn't feel it sat quite right, so, I decided to phone my mother about it.

Her words are worth noting.

No, Franco banned secret societies, and abortion was forbidden in Franco Spain.

Knowing her, and knowing the faith which I owed partly to her, I didn't need to ask if banning abortion was a good or a bad thing. If there is a downside to Dobbs, it's that it only allows states and doesn't oblige the union to ban abortion, and in Franco's Spain, abortion was banned all over Spain.

I did not become a De Molay. I did not become a Freemason. I do not intend to become a Freemason. I did become a Catholic, and the kind of Catholic who has, with or without reservations, a deepfelt admiration for Francisco Franco Bahamonde, por Gracias de Dios Caudillo de España.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Zita of Lucca
27.IV.2026

Lucae, in Tuscia, beatae Zitae*** Virginis, virtutum et miraculorum fama conspicuae.

* Own site: Welcome to the Vatican In Exile Website. POV of a non-adherent: Morn is Approaching

** The article is here:

The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth
By Randall Balmer | 05/10/2022 03:24 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/10/abortion-history-right-white-evangelical-1970s-00031480

*** I could obviously have taken St. Peter Canisius SJ as saint of the day, a Geocentric and YEC by the way, like St. Zita of Lucca, but I'm also very pro-Habsburg and she is patron saint of the last Emperor's widow.