Godwinnian Catholic Church

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The English refugees who originally settled Godwinnia had previously been Roman Catholic, but the combination of their anger at papal support for the Norman Conquest with the isolated location of their new home soon led to the formation of a new "national" church which rejected papal authority. They included two men, by the names of AElfward and Dunstan, who had been consecrated as bishops in England shortly before the fleet sailed and whom King Godwin I Haroldsson appointed to the new kingdom's first two dioceses (at Lunden and Bosham, which are now the seats of two of its three Archbishops). Their consecrations had been "correct" in all ways except that the Pope's approval for their promotion (and for the establishment of their new dioceses) was never sought, so that they and the additional bishops subsequently consecrated within Godwinnia have - although the Roman Catholic Church has generally refused to acept this - been continuously in the line of Apostolic Succession right through up to the present day. The system developed for ecclesiastical appointments was that new bishops would be consecrated after being chosen by the King, on the advice of the Witan, from short-lists drawn up either by the relevant diocesan synods or (in the case of new dioceses) by the national synod.
This new church's leaders soon decided that its rites should all be conducted in English rather than in Latin, as another way of emphasising the break with Rome. A complete translation of the Bible into Anglish was finished in 1125AD, and this edition - which has since been replaced by others, which are in more modern forms of the language, for most purposes - was formally accepted by the church's hierarchy at the 'Council of Bosham' in the following year. That conference also saw the newly-defined "Godwinnian Catholic Church" reject the orthodox Augustinian doctrine of predestination, in favour of a creed that was much closer to the [then supposedly extinct] 'Pelagian' heresy: They declared that Christ's sacrifice had freed mankind from the burden of Original Sin, so that - although obviously God still could intervene in individuals' lives & fates if he chose to do so - personal salvation actually depended primarily on good behaviour rather than just on faith & hoping for divine grace... This emphasis on "Salvation through works" helped to promote a strong charitable ethos amongst the Godwinnians that still persists in modern times. Another consequence of this belief's adoption was a gradual abandonment of infant baptism, which was no longer seen as necessary in order to ensure children's entry into heaven if they died young, and its replacement by baptism at an age when the people involved were old enough to make an informed choice for themselves. The initial migration to Godwinnia occurred before the Roman Catholic church had fully adopted a requirement of celibacy for all of its non-monastic clergy, and that restriction never became a part of the Godwinnian Catholic rules.
The original settlers did not include any monks, but a small group from the Benedictine Order emigrated from England to join them a few years later on: It was from that Order alone - rather than from any of the various other Rules and Orders which originated at later dates within the Roman Catholic Church too - that the subsequent expansion of monasticism within the Godwinnian church evolved.
This church initially acknowledged all of the Saints who had already been canonised by the Roman Catholic Church or its precursors before the Godwinnian rejection of papal authority, although few except those who had belonged to the "early" Church and those later ones whose lives had affected England continued to receive much attention. The patron saint chosen for Godwinnia was 'St Alphage', an Archbishop of Canterbury who had been martyred by the Vikings as recently as 1012AD. The national synod developed a system for recognising new Saints too, and in some cases this was applied to individuals who were also canonised by the Roman Catholic Church. It is sometimes suggested that their decisions in certain of these cases may have involved a political element: The half-Norman 'Edward the Confessor' wasn't accepted as a saint by the Godwinnians until quite late in the 16th century (after they had formed a political alliance with [Elizabethan] England), for example, but they recognised the sainthood of 'Thomas a Becket' in 1174AD which was only a year after Rome had done so and this may have been because the manner of his death had embarrassed the [Angevin-French] Plantagenets who controlled England in those days...
The Godwinninan Catholic Church is still the dominant sect within Godwinnia itself today, with slightly over 90% of the kingdom's inhabitants belonging to it on at least a nominal basis, and is also an important faith within most of its former colonies such as the 'Kingdom of St Edmund'.