THE MEANING OF ROMAN HETEROGENEITY

It was standard practice for Elizabethan and Jacobean Protestants to depict the Roman communion as a unified, centralized and autocratically governed community, in which all papists were simply mindless cogs in a great machine. This was not just a paranoid overestimation of the unity and coherence of papal forces ranged against Protestant England, as some historians have tended to suggest. It was also a view which served a number of important polemical purposes. A central plank of English Protestants' defence of the separation from Rome was the assertion that other churches had been forced to depart from Rome's communion because she now prescribed and imposed satanic doctrines, making dissent or tacit amendment impossible. The arguments which defended the Protestants' pre-Reformation forefathers, as expounded by Field and others, rested on the assumption that Rome had so decayed since Trent that dissent was no longer possible within her communion. The corrupt doctrines of a faction had now been established as necessary to be believed as articles of faith, whereas in the medieval church dissent had still been possible. The Court of Rome had now become the Church of Rome.

When Protestants studied how the Church of Rome perceived herself and defined her own membership, after establishing her doctrine of infallibility, they generally judged her to be no true church at all.Thus Crakanthorp stressed that Rome's only true members,since the Lateran decree had transferred supremacy and infallibility to the pope,werethose people who accepted this doctrine: ‘he who gainsayeth the popes sentence, in a cause of faith, is none of their Church’.