Breaking with the Past; Or, Catholic Principles Abandoned at the Reformation

Delivered as Advent sermons at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York in 1913, this is not a polemic but a scholar's mournful reckoning with history. Francis Aidan Gasquet, Abbot of the English Benedictines, examines what Catholic principles were deliberately discarded when England broke from Rome: the Pope's authority, the sacrificial nature of the Mass, the priesthood's sacramental role, and the Church's legal establishment. Yet what elevates these sermons beyond apologetics is their sorrowful tone. Gasquet does not rage against the Reformation; he mourns it, treating the rupture as a genuine loss rather than mere error. He traces how Lutheran and Calvinist influences seeped into English practice, arguing that the resulting fragmentation of Christian unity inflicted wounds that festered across centuries. The book matters because it captures a specific Catholic viewpoint from the height of the anti-Modernist era, written by a man who knew English church history intimately and saw the Reformation not as liberation but as abandonment. For readers interested in how the English Reformation actually felt to those who remained loyal to Rome, this offers an invaluable perspective.