Origins of church of england.

[styley]

Was the church of england's main reason of inception because some person wanted to get divorced but couldn't do it so he invented the church of england to facilitate his needs?

[pug100]

Henry VIII

[shaneystar2]

Henry didn't invent it ..he just set himself as the head of it because he couldn't get an annulment from the pope so that he could marry Anne Bolyen.The Cof E was under papal authority for a good many years before Henrys antics and the reformation..

[Lil O'lady]

The split between catholicism and the various protestant groups of europe is more complex than these replies suggest. It is true that Henry's desire to get a divorce led him to override the pope's authority in england but there had been at least a century of intellectual debate across Europe about the catholic church's 'political' role. The CofE did not emerge as such in Henry's reign.

[Octavius]

The roots of the Church of England go back to the time of the Roman Empire when a Christian church came into existence in what was then the Roman province of Britain. The early Christian writers Tertullian and Origen mention the existence of a British church in the third century AD and in the fourth century British bishops attended a number of the great councils of the Church such as the Council of Arles in 314 and the Council of Rimini in 359. The first member of the British church whom we know by name is St Alban, who, tradition tells us, was martyred for his faith on the spot where St Albans Abbey now stands.

In 597 a mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great and led by St Augustine of Canterbury landed in Kent to begin the work of converting these pagan peoples. What eventually became known as the Church of England (the Ecclesia Anglicana - or the English Church) was the result of a combination of three streams of Christianity, the Roman tradition of St Augustine and his successors, the remnants of the old Romano-British church and the Celtic tradition coming down from Scotland and associated with people like St Aidan and St Cuthbert.

At the Reformation the Western Church became divided between those who continued to accept Papal authority and the various Protestant churches that repudiated it. The Church of England was among the churches that broke with Rome. The catalyst for this decision was the refusal of the Pope to annul the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, but underlying this was a Tudor nationalist belief that authority over the English Church properly belonged to the English monarchy.