Portal:Anglicanism/Selected article/1
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The English Reformation refers to the series of events in sixteenth-century England by which the church in England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. These events were part of a wider process, the European Protestant Reformation, a religious and political movement which affected the practice of Christianity across the whole of Europe during this period. The English Reformation began as another chapter in the long running dispute with the Roman Catholic Church over the latter's claimed jurisdiction over the English people, though ostensibly based on Henry VIII's desire for an annulment. It was, at the outset, more of a political than a theological dispute, but the reality of political differences between Rome and England nonetheless allowed growing theological disputes to come to the fore. The split from Rome made the English monarch head of the English church by "Royal Supremacy", thereby establishing the Church of England, but the structure and theology of that church was a matter of fierce dispute for generations. It led eventually to civil war, from which the emergent church policy at the end was that of an established church and a number of non-conformist churches whose members at first suffered various civil disabilities, which were removed only over time. Catholicism emerged from its underground existence only in the nineteenth century.
