I agree with you. My point was that, having been the faith of their
families for generations, it was not a matter of giving it up and
becoming Anglican, like turning off a light switch. There must have
been many who still, to some degree or in some small way, kept a
toehold on Catholicism. But so many people seem to think it was more
like "today I'm Catholic, tomorrow I'll be Anglican." I'm sure there
were a lot of shades of grey in there.

Nancy

-------
I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.

--Daniel Boone



On Jan 16, 2007, at 2:17 AM, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> "Sunshine49" [log in to unmask] writes
>
> <<I just finished reading William Kelso's newest book on the recent
> James
> Fort discoveries, and he said that with one exception, every
> religious relic they
> there found was Catholic. So while these first colonists may have been
> Anglican, they plainly still harbored Catholic feelings as well.
> They were not
> Puritanical religious zealots. Obviously, their religion was rather
> ambiguous. Or
> flexible.>>
>
> It's worth pointing out that the Church of England in 1607 was only
> 75 years
> old and Henry, had not initially sought to establish a Protestant
> church per
> se but rather, an autonomous Anglo-Catholic church independent of the
> jurisdiction of the Church of Rome. It was more of a political than
> a theological break
> initially and it took several decades for the church to evolve into
> a more
> "Protestant" / Reformation inspired form.  Even then, the "Reforms"
> were more
> focused on forms of worship / the prayer book / macro-theological
> issues and
> organizational structure rather than the ritual and accoutrements
> of the Mass or
> articles of personal devotion.
>
> Even Elizabeth I, as the restorer of English Protestantism after
> the brief
> reign of her Catholic older sister, had a crucifix on her altar, as
> is pointed
> out in this ca. 1997 APVA report on the James Fort excavations,
> which reports
> on some of the Catholic artifacts found
> http://www.apva.org/pubs/97report.pdf
>
> This article also notes that three  German glassmakers who came to
> Jamestown
> in 1608 may have come from a Catholic area of Germany and there was
> an Irish
> Catholic there for one year in the early days.
>
> So, it's hard to extrapolate from these artifacts that the majority
> of the
> Anglican colonists of Jamestown may have harbored "Catholic"
> feelings in the
> sense of loyalities to the Roman Catholic church. These artifacts
> might indeed
> have been owned by the handful of actual Roman Catholics in the
> colony.
>
> However, if they were owned by members of the Church of England,
> neither a
> crucifix nor a rosary would have been a personal possession
> inconsistent with
> mainstream Anglican practice in those days, as the established
> Church was, and
> remains to this day, a great deal more "catholic" (with a small
> "c") than the
> various sects of dissenters, including the Puritans who dominated
> the colony at
> Plymouth.
>
> My 2 cents,
>
> Kathryn Coombs
> a "whiskey-palian" from King George, VA
>
>
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