A Lost Cause? The Cause for the Canonization of King James II

hen we venerate St. Edward [the Confessor] we venerate a failure." 1 Ronald Knox's assessment of this last English king of his dynasty is a reminder that the Christian cult of the saints is more concerned about things eternal than it is with things temporal.Nevertheless, for that very reason, it has important consequences for this present world.Examination must be made into the manner of life and (more important) death of the candidate for sainthood, if he or she is to be (as saints are) held up as an exemplar of Christian living.Once declared a saint, the gravity of immortality attracts future generations of devotees to petition this once frail human being, now a courtier of heaven, a powerful intercessor before the throne of the Almighty.While Edward the Confessor has been successfully "raised to the altars," two other English kings have been acclaimed as saints at one time but, despite having begun the required legal process, have not had their cult authenticated by the Catholic Church, and their "cause" appears to be dormant.The first of these, Henry VI, was promoted in Henry VII's reign but fell by the wayside during Henry VIII's, after the king disowned papal authority.There was an attempt to revive the cause in the late 1950s, as a result of correspondence in the Catholic press; the cause was even the subject of a leader article as well as several letters in The Times in 1972. 2 More recently, the Catholic press has taken notice of that other English (and Scottish and Irish) king who was at one time acclaimed a saint, and whose cause appears not only lost but long forgotten-James II. 3 James was educated in the faith of the Church of England, for adherence to which (he understood) his father had been martyred.His early life was overshadowed by civil war, confinement, and exile.The experience of exile had, however, exposed him to a breadth of European Catholic culture.He recounted that while in Flanders he was advised by a nun to pray each day that if "he was not in the right way, [God] would bring him to it."Not least among the Catholic influences upon James was his mother, Henrietta Maria, whose own Catholic faith was very strong.The exact date of James's conversion to the Catholic faith is uncertain, though it probably dates from between 1669 and 1672 (from which time he refused to attend any services of the Church of England).It was prompted (with that of his wife, Anne Hyde) by reading Peter Heylyn's history of the English Reformation-written, ironically, as a defense of the Church of England, though critical of the desecration that characterized the Reformation and sympathetic to the medieval Catholicism that it supplanted.4 James's conversion to the Catholic faith fiercely divided each of his three kingdoms, threatening to rekindle the embers of the Civil War.