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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Faith conflict because of a 17th Century Ancestor!
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deano
princess
# 12063
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Posted
On another thread I mentioned that I was “currently struggling over a move towards a more Catholic theology from CofE just above the-middle-of-the-candle Protestantism. I think I am probably more Anglo-Catholic in temperament form what I know, but I have issues over that movement that are nothing to do with theology and which will probably be another thread”
This is that thread.
I have recently been thinking about my faith and I have come to the conclusion that I much prefer the High-Anglican/Anglo-Catholic liturgy and theology than anything lower down the candle.
I like the incense, the processing, the “tat” as it has been described, the Apostolic Succession, the Real Presence, the ceremony, the ritual, the whole “tone” for want of a better word.
I also prefer some of the theology at the more catholic end, as far as can understand it, such as some of it being based on traditions handed down and developed before the Bible was created.
However, someone in my family has been doing some genealogy through the male side and has found out that we are descended from Huguenot refugees.
The Huguenots were French Protestants, who were oppressed by the Catholic majority in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries, and who fled to other Protestant countries, one of which was England.
This has given me pause in my paddling in the shallows of the Tiber.
It seems my heritage is Protestant oppressed by Catholicism. That gives me a conflict. On the other hand it was three-hundred years ago and the French have apologised for it!
I don’t think it will stop my paddling but it now does seem to be lingering in the back of my mind. Anyone else had this sort of thing happen to them, when they found something out about their heritage that conflicted with their faith?
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"The moral high ground is slowly being bombed to oblivion. " - Supermatelot
Posts: 2118 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: Nov 2006
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
I think it depends whether you see your heritage solely in terms of the male line. The number of your ancestors doubles each generation - by the time I get back to the late C18th/ early C19th , I've reached my 5X gt grandparents, of which I have 128. I wouldn't regard the experience of just one or two of those 128 as "my heritage". You're going even further back.
That said there are some psalms I can't sing without feeling an "echo" down two centuries.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
Well, my heritage consists of both Catholics and rabid anti-Catholics, and a good deal closer in time than the 17th Century. About the only option that would successfully reflect my heritage would to be a Catholic filled with self-hatred.
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
Posts: 18173 | From: Under | Registered: Jul 2008
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
Deano
Do not read anything too much into that. A number of Hugeneots escaped to Ireland, then under British rule and they became Anglican.
Jengie
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
Posts: 20894 | From: city of steel, butterflies and rainbows | Registered: May 2001
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Bostonman
Shipmate
# 17108
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Posted
I have this problem all of the time! One set of my grandparents are Scottish Presbyterians, but it turns out one of them really comes from a long line of English border raiders. So now it turns out Papa's people have been oppressing Nana's all this time, how horrid. It made me wonder whether I shouldn't just become a Presbyterian out of sympathy for the oppressed masses, but then I realized they were all RC at the time anyway! What a bother.
Meanwhile, the other set were all German and their poor country had been occupied by our lot for a few years in the 1940s. Terrible business. But then—get this—it turns out they were all already Americans at that point! And one of them was even over there oppressing his own people! Madness! So then I debated become Lutheran to spite the Lutherans oppressing Lutherans, but I couldn't figure it out in my head. Maybe RC anyway?
But then I learned that before, that, on—believe it or not—BOTH SIDES, my ancestors were a bunch of Anglo-Saxon, Suebi, and Pictish pagans literally squatting in the mud and painting themselves blue, BEING CONVERTED BY THE (LITERALLY ROMAN) CATHOLICS.
Imagine my distress.
Unable to figure out which set of oppressed relatives' religion I should adopt—Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, mud-squatting pagan—I've settled down as an Episcopalian.
But I do try to avoid the liturgical tendencies of my ancestral oppressors. No psalms, no congregational singing, no daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly communion, and certainly no mud-squatting. I try to put as little an emphasis as possible on both Scripture and Tradition, with a healthy dose of irrationality—wouldn't you, if the use of human reason had led to the Blitz?
[...]
Maybe it's just that I'm American, but I don't really see this as much of a problem. We emphasize heritage quite a bit (two-thirds of Boston would claim to be Irish or Italian, having immigrated at least eight or nine generations back), but not to quite this degree. You're saying that you're struggling with your admiration for high Anglican worship because your ancestors were French Huguenots being oppressed by French Catholics? I just can't see the relevance; I think your conscience should be clean.
Posts: 424 | From: USA | Registered: May 2012
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Honest Ron Bacardi
Shipmate
# 38
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Posted
many innocent Huguenots certainly suffered grievously in the French wars of religion. But if you are going back 400 years, you won't just have a Huguenot ancestor, but many other protestant and catholic forebears too, as well as immigrants from other countries. They would all have their own stories to tell. And whilst it excuses nothing, the misdeeds of the past were carried out by other generations who saw and did things differently.
If it has seized your imagination, why not use it as an excuse to become well-informed on the period? There must be accessible historical works awaiting purchase, though I am no expert so can't recommend anything myself.
But the fate of the Huguenots - especially the St. Bartholomew's day massacre - was intimately tied up with their relationship with the house of Guise, following their attempted coup at Amboise. Insofar as anything at all can be said to involve a single starting point of course.
But it all might help put your thoughts into perspective, bearing in mind (as North East Quine has already pointed out) that this will be only one line of hundreds.
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Anglo-Cthulhic
Posts: 4857 | From: the corridors of Pah! | Registered: May 2001
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Lothiriel
Shipmate
# 15561
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Posted
My geneaology takes in the settling of northeastern North America from the 1620s to the 1840s. It includes just about every group who left Britain and northern Europe for the New World in that time span, which includes many who were seeking religious freedom, as well as economic and political refugees, representing the entire spectrum of Protestantism of those times, including Huguenots. It also includes a Roman Catholic line of early settlers of Quebec.
If I tried to base my membership in a faith community on my heritage, I'd be a mess.
If you want to be Catholic, don't let your ancestry stop you -- think of it as a reconciliation.
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If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. St-Exupery
my blog
Posts: 538 | From: Toronto, Canada | Registered: Mar 2010
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
If our forebears in the faith had fretted over who their great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents were oppressed by, the Church might never have got off the ground. I got cut off by a whole (admittedly distant) branch of my family because I'm Anglican and not Presbyterian. Tough. I find a greater, deeper truth in the tradition I'm in, and that's what matters.
Deano, you said: quote:
I have recently been thinking about my faith and I have come to the conclusion that I much prefer the High-Anglican/Anglo-Catholic liturgy and theology than anything lower down the candle.
...
I also prefer some of the theology at the more catholic end, as far as can understand it, such as some of it being based on traditions handed down and developed before the Bible was created.
Forget your preferences. Do you find it true? Preferences are ephemeral, whimsical, unreliable. Truth matters.
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
Posts: 9779 | From: Manchester | Registered: Sep 2003
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Stetson
Shipmate
# 9597
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Posted
Deano:
Your dilemna seems to me a rather odd one. Surely you were aware, prior to your genealogical research, that the Catholic Church had done some nasty stuff to protestants.
But you make the discovery that one of your ancestors was among the persecuted, and suddenly it becomes an issue?
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I have the power...Lucifer is lord!
Posts: 6574 | From: back and forth between bible belts | Registered: Jun 2005
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
I think it depends whether you see your heritage solely in terms of the male line. The number of your ancestors doubles each generation - by the time I get back to the late C18th/ early C19th , I've reached my 5X gt grandparents, of which I have 128. I wouldn't regard the experience of just one or two of those 128 as "my heritage". You're going even further back.
128 5×great grandparents assuming no pedigree collapse. That's an assumption that's harder and harder to make the further back you go.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Large numbers of my family were/are atheists. Oh, bugger them.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Trisagion
Shipmate
# 5235
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Forget your preferences. Do you find it true? Preferences are ephemeral, whimsical, unreliable. Truth matters.
![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif)
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ceterum autem censeo tabula delenda esse
Posts: 3923 | Registered: Nov 2003
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CL
Shipmate
# 16145
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
Deano
Do not read anything too much into that. A number of Hugeneots escaped to Ireland, then under British rule and they became Anglican.
Jengie
Ironically many of the Huguenot families that came to Ireland eventually became Catholic. Ditto Palatinate Germans.
Posts: 647 | From: Ireland | Registered: Jan 2011
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deano
princess
# 12063
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Posted
Some interesting feedback there. I was surprised at how many people have such conflict in their hereditary.
I like the idea of it being a reconcilliation.
I must admit to knowing very little about the Huguenots and will be trying to find out more about them. Thank you all for your contributions.
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"The moral high ground is slowly being bombed to oblivion. " - Supermatelot
Posts: 2118 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: Nov 2006
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Zach82
Shipmate
# 3208
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Posted
If you go back a little further, you probably have ancestors that painted themselves blue and sacrificed their fellows to idols. If your 17th century ancestors get a vote, why shouldn't they?
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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice
Posts: 9148 | From: Boston, MA | Registered: Aug 2002
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venbede
Shipmate
# 16669
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Posted
I have a Hugenot surname.
It's never stopped me once I realised the shortcomings of Middle of the Road Anglicanism (which good Calvinists such as my French ancestors would rightly have regarded as an unconvincing and socially conformist compromise.)
The point about the catholic view of Anglicanism, it seems to me, is nothing to do with incense and vestments (ordinary good things though they are) but that through episcopal ordination, AND NOTHING ELSE, its priest are priests of the Catholic Church, whatever they might think they are.
Holy Communion at All Souls Langham Place is a catholic mass, however inadequately expressed, just as much as a papal mass.
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Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.
Posts: 3201 | From: An historic market town nestling in the folds of Surrey's rolling North Downs, | Registered: Sep 2011
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Horseman Bree
Shipmate
# 5290
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Posted
My Polish ancestors (my mother's mother's line) became Germanised in the 1700's, enough to be able to buy a "manor" near Swiecie, but part of the manoeuvering involved them becoming Lutheran rather than RC. I don't know much more than that about them.
My mother's father's line was Serbian, from the Banat. The men of that line tended to join the Austrian army as that empire expanded southwards. He became Colonel, until there was basically no army to belong to in 1918.
Grandmother converted to Orthodox to marry him. After WW1, he became police chief in Sarajevo, where the religious tension was quite noticeable, although much worse in later years. He died of a heart attack in 1927.
Through various accidents of history, my mother eventually married an Englishman, very Anglican in background, and they remained observant Anglicans until their deaths. I don't know if she formally took on Anglicanism, or just didn't say much about it.
About all I got from that was a significant scepticism about religious tags. I certainly never found any reason to pay much attention to anything beyond one's actual attitude to and practise of religion, rather than the formal ideological statements that all too often led to aggression and actual fighting/warfare.
And I still have little patience with religious doctrine that discourages loving attitudes, from any denom, sect or religion. Makes for an itneresting time at deanery or Synod meetings!
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It's Not That Simple
Posts: 5372 | From: more herring choker than bluenose | Registered: Dec 2003
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Jahlove
Tied to the mast
# 10290
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Posted
It's nice that the French have apologized. (Though, as an aside, I understand the French state is jealously secular these days - so quite who has apologized to whom for what should perhaps remain a mystery.) Such apologies don't make a jot of difference to those who actually inflicted/suffered terrors and tortures. They might satisfy some contemporary folk who have a particularly sensitive (or a more control-freaky, right-onner than thou) disposition. As well as some non-shouty people who derive true comfort from such gestures.
Back to reality: Adeodatus has it - do you find it TRUE - is it (despite the problems) TRUE?
<I imagine all of us, were we able to trace accurately, had ancestors, friends and relations who were bad ole robbers, murderers, rapers, genociders, racists, sexists, homophobes, supremacists, gun-owners etc. Somehow we manage not to top ourselves from the sheer shame and horror of it all.>
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“Sing like no one's listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching, and live like its heaven on earth.” - Mark Twain
Posts: 6477 | From: Alice's Restaurant (UK Franchise) | Registered: Sep 2005
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QLib
Bad Example
# 43
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Trisagion:
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Forget your preferences. Do you find it true? Preferences are ephemeral, whimsical, unreliable. Truth matters.
Yes, I agree. My ancestral matters are less faith-related and more politics-related (though I am still reflecting on the recent almost-confirmation that one of my great-grandmothers was from a family of baptised Jews). The way I see it, the family stuff adds an edge to my need to work this stuff out, and sometimes it gives extra insight, but in the end, what matters is what you find to be true. I refer you to my sig.
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Tradition is the handing down of the flame, not the worship of the ashes Gustav Mahler.
Posts: 8913 | From: Page 28 | Registered: May 2001
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by deano:
I was surprised at how many people have such conflict in their hereditary.
Really? I'm not. Because to believe in homogenous origins, you'd have to believe that marriages across different cultural groups are super rare. And they're not. Not rare enough, at any rate, to exclude them across that many ancestors.
Especially not once immigration is thrown into the mix. There are only a certain number of generations of your ancestors that having become Huguenots in England, would have insisted on their Huguenot-ness to the exclusion of their English-ness. That kind of thing changes from being a badge of identity for the first arrivals into a source of heritage in a generation or two, and from that into an interesting anecdote.
[ 23. January 2013, 20:49: Message edited by: orfeo ]
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
Posts: 18173 | From: Under | Registered: Jul 2008
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Jay-Emm
Shipmate
# 11411
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Posted
And indeed it is reckoned that a number of people from around King David's time appear in everyone's family tree*. That's to cross every controversial gap (or get round it). So in 500 it's not surprising you cut a local one.
*In different places, there's a man from 60,000BC who appears on one side of every tree and a woman from 200,000BC on the other side.
And from around 5000BC all out family trees will have the same names but shuffled about.
wikipedia
Posts: 1643 | Registered: May 2006
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Pomona
Shipmate
# 17175
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Posted
Pretty much everyone was oppressed for religious reasons in the 17th C at some point, I don't think many with European ancestors could escape it! As someone whose family is mostly not blood-related to me, my heritage is not as important to me as my future is. (said as a lover of history)
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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]
Posts: 5319 | From: UK | Registered: Jun 2012
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Grammatica
Shipmate
# 13248
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by deano:
Some interesting feedback there. I was surprised at how many people have such conflict in their hereditary.
I like the idea of it being a reconcilliation.
I must admit to knowing very little about the Huguenots and will be trying to find out more about them. Thank you all for your contributions.
The Huguenot colonies in early Florida are very interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Florida
Prof. Maurice O'Sullivan of Rollins College has been working on this history recently. A recent radio program featuring his research should be available shortly on the Florida Historical Society's radio program page. Unfortunately it isn't available just yet, but it will be worth the wait.
Posts: 1058 | From: where the lemon trees blosson | Registered: Dec 2007
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
Going back to the late C18th, I have identified 58 of my 64 4xgt grandparents. All of them were Scottish and, I think, all Presbyterian. I don't know anything about their personal beliefs or opinions, but a wide cross-section of them appear in the church records being condemned for "ante-nuptial fornication" or even "ante-nuptial fornication and acts of great uncleanness," and a smaller number were censured for fornication, without a wedding on the horizon. One was suspected of having concealed a pregnancy and was summoned to have an examination by a midwife (in private!) which confirmed her innocence. Another was censured for selling whisky on the Sabbath. My personal favourite was the rebuke of one forebear who, while watching his house burn to the ground with nothing saved except the clothes on his back, was guilty of "gross swearing and cursing and profaning the name of God."
I am not sure how this should impact on my life today. My life has been sadly devoid of scandal, especially scandal involving fornication and acts of great uncleanness. Hence my experience of the church bears little resemblance to that of my forebears.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Sighthound
Shipmate
# 15185
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Posted
I have an ancestor who fought for Parliament in the Civil War. Does this mean I should go around smashing stained glass and religious images?
Surely we should be guided by our own consciences, not those of selected ancestors. Because we all have ancestors of many faiths and traditions, including worshippers of Odin, Jove and so on.
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Posts: 168 | From: England | Registered: Sep 2009
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Frankenstein
Shipmate
# 16198
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Posted
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Jahlove:
I understand the French state is jealously secular these days - so quite who has apologized to whom for what should perhaps remain a mystery.)
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It is better to travel in hope than to arrive?
Posts: 267 | From: Scotland | Registered: Jan 2011
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The Rogue
Shipmate
# 2275
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Posted
I don't know much about my ancestors but going forward I do not expect the Roguelings to automatically take on any of my religious beliefs - I would much prefer them to make up their own minds. To be in a particular church just because someone up the family tree was seems quite lazy to me.
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If everyone starts thinking outside the box does outside the box come back inside?
Posts: 2507 | From: Toton | Registered: Feb 2002
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