What if ....

The 'what ifs' of history are a perennial source of fascination, a realm in which we can allow our imaginations to roam free and imagine only the best of possible outcomes.

The Catholic Herald is the latest to have a stab at this with Dominic Selwood's nostalgic  article, 'What Catholic England would look like today.' [here] 
It's a beguiling picture for many of us and, undoubtedly, the artistic, cultural, architectural and ecclesiastical   heritage of England and Wales would have been greatly enriched had the tragic iconoclasm and theological negation of the sixteenth century not taken place. 
Of course, one might also, with the Anglo-Catholic romantics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, speculate about the possibility of Henry VIII's outliving his son, Edward, and frustrating the influence of those 'continental' reformers who were to have such a destructive influence over our culture and our Church. 
What if Queen Mary Tudor and Cardinal Pole had lived longer and had listened to wiser counsels?
We could continue our flight of fancy by imagining the successful result of the putative re-union between Rome and Canterbury under King Charles I, in which certain 'reformation' insights were left intact whilst restoring the fractured link with the Apostolic See of Rome.
And, much closer to our own time, we could even consider a successful conclusion to the 'ARCIC' dialogue - but let's not go there, the wounds are far too recent.

And yet .... France, the eldest daughter of the Church, was scarred by its own religious wars in the same period, and both France herself in the late eighteenth century, and Spain, the home of the Catholic Monarchs,  in the twentieth, experienced bloody atheistic revolutions and civil war which the absence of  a triumphant religious reformation did nothing to prevent. Who can calculate the human consequences of what is, compared to what might have been?

History above all is a done deal, who can say what could have happened? What if Byzantium had never fallen to the Ottoman Turks? Now there's a thought ....