By Father Dwight Longenecker, EWTN - The English Reformation was a cultural revolution on the scale of Mao’s revolution in China. A 1,000-year-old culture was destroyed in a few short decades. The Catholic religion in England before Henry VIII’s reign was, for the most part, vital and strong. It was broken and bereft not out of a will to cleanse and reform, but out of royal greed, vanity and lust.