Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is presented as both a spiritual home and a powerful institution through which rulers define lawful marriage, legitimate sovereignty, and the boundaries of religious belonging. Its authority sustains Catalina of Aragon’s devotion and political identity, but the story also traces her disillusionment with a church that, in the name of orthodoxy, can silence prayer, restrict knowledge, and leave women’s needs unattended.

Faith, worship, and royal identity

For Catalina, religious practice is a daily discipline as well as a political inheritance. In a letter to her father, Ferdinand II of Aragon, she reports reading the Bible or other holy books for two hours each day, attending Mass three times daily, and receiving Communion every Sunday. She describes her spiritual adviser as continuing to guide her in England, and presents obedience to Doña Elvira’s household discipline alongside obedience to her father. These details show devotion organized through repeated acts, trusted counsel, and the habits of a royal household.

Her faith is also bound to her sense of purpose. Before Arthur, Prince of Wales, dies, Catalina prays that he will recover and imagines the work they might accomplish together: founding a holy kingdom, defending it against the Moors and the Scots, and raising children who would continue the dynasty. The prayer brings dynastic hope, Christian mission, and private love into one appeal. After Arthur’s death, however, her prayers bring no felt answer. She wonders why the God who seemed to direct her mother remains silent to her in grief. The crisis is not a simple rejection of belief; it begins as anguish within a faith that had once seemed to give her life a clear direction.

The Church also lends sacred force to royal office. At her coronation, after Henry VIII is crowned, Catalina receives the holy oil, scepter, and ivory wand. She understands the anointing as confirmation that she is queen by divine appointment and under God’s protection. The scene makes her body and title signs of a political order as well as personal fulfillment: queenship is not merely an honor, but a role she believes she was born to occupy.

Religious uniformity and the broken promise of coexistence

The book sets Christian rule in Spain against the remembered diversity of al-Andalus. Following the conquest, Muslim palace servants are expected to profess the faith of the One True Church; the mosque’s call to prayer is silenced in Isabella of Castile’s hearing. Those who resist are threatened with expulsion, forced conversion, or the Inquisition. The narrative presents these measures as part of a deliberate attempt to make one nation through one faith, rather than as isolated acts of private devotion.

This programme is especially stark beside the promise made to Boabdil that Muslims would be safe under Christian rule, just as Christians had been safe under his. The assurance of convivencia had encouraged the belief that Moors, Christians, and Jews—the People of the Book—could live with security and self-respect. The promise is then betrayed: Jews are expelled, Muslims are threatened, and conversion becomes compulsory. The Inquisition stands behind a further test of those whose faith is suspected. In this account, religious institutions and royal policy work together to turn belief into a criterion of political belonging.

The transformation is rendered through a change in a place of judgment. Isabella builds a chapel in the council chamber where Arabic writing had once declared that anyone could enter to seek justice. The prayer space replaces that public assurance, and the narrative associates the new religious order with a sterner authority and the disappearance of those seeking redress. The contrast does not treat the church as merely a site of worship: its presence in the seat of government marks the subordination of a plural ideal of justice to a more exclusive religious settlement.

Marriage law and the limits of authority

Catholic authority also shapes the dynastic marriage negotiations surrounding Catalina. When marriage to her dead husband’s brother is considered, the obstacle is described as affinity: the relationship requires a dispensation from the Pope. A proposed union cannot proceed simply because the parties or the English court desire it. The Spanish royal parents’ consent matters because, if they refuse, they will not seek the dispensation; without it, the marriage cannot take place. Religious law therefore gives Catalina’s parents leverage in a negotiation that is also about her future and the succession.

The question of whether her marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales, was consummated becomes crucial to the argument over whether she may marry Henry VII. The proposed case distinguishes the affinity objection from the claimed absence of consummation: if the marriage was not consummated, one speaker argues, there is no real objection. The Church’s authority is invoked both to constrain a new marriage and to make one possible through papal permission. Private experience is translated into a public legal question, with consequences for a royal match.

Years later, the same entanglement of marital history and ecclesiastical judgment returns in the dispute over Henry VIII’s marriage. At court, Katherine of Aragon has no lawyers waiting to defend her and has prepared no formal defence; she has made clear that she does not recognize the proceedings. She nevertheless enters, staking her case on Henry’s reluctance to deny that she had been Arthur’s wife and lover before becoming his. Her confidence rests on the history of her first marriage and on the expectation that Henry will not publicly disavow it. The court’s authority turns that history into a question with consequences for the queen’s marriage and status.

Education, medical knowledge, and women’s needs

The Church is imagined not only as a legal and devotional authority but also as a possible provider of education. Catalina proposes that parish churches teach reading and writing, taking inspiration from the schools attached to mosques in al-Andalus. In her vision, local instruction could lead to new colleges at the universities and train clerks whom the crown could trust. This is a proposal, not a reform shown to have been implemented. Its importance lies in Catalina’s belief that the Church’s reach could serve learning as well as worship.

That hope becomes harder to sustain as she confronts illness and the need for medical care. She worries that obedience to her mother and the Church requires her to accept ignorance if medical knowledge is condemned as sinful, even when that ignorance may cost England a son and heir. Later, she speaks more openly against a church whose male authorities, in her view, do not need physicians or knowledge of how sons are conceived, because they are not themselves troubled by women’s illnesses and difficulties. Her criticism is grounded in the gap between abstract religious authority and the bodily problems women must endure.

The contrast is sharpened by her secret consultation with a Moorish physician. Remembering his kindness, Katherine of Aragon revises her judgment of the Moors: even if she considers him a heretic, she can no longer call him a barbarian or savage. She connects her need to seek a doctor in hiding with the suppression of Jewish skills and Moorish scholarship, which she attributes to policies that treated their wisdom as sinful. In this reversal, the Church’s rejection of knowledge no longer appears to her as an uncomplicated defence of truth; it has helped make competent care inaccessible.

Devotion and dissent

Katherine’s developing position is neither a sudden abandonment of faith nor continued submission to her mother’s religious convictions. After Isabella of Castile’s death, Katherine recognizes that her mother, who had admired learning and fought for justice, also helped drive away people and knowledge that might have served the realm. She no longer believes that her mother and God necessarily think as one. She still loves Isabella, but no longer worships her, and rejects a crusade against the Moors or persecution based on belief or skin colour.

This change gives the Church a complex role in the novel. Its rituals can make queenship feel divinely sanctioned; its law can determine whether a royal marriage is permissible; and its parish network might, in Catalina’s imagined reform, spread literacy. Yet religious uniformity and suspicion of medical learning also become sources of exclusion and harm. Katherine’s lasting distinction is between faith itself and the claim that religious authority is infallible. Her maturation does not erase her devotion; it makes room for conscience to judge the uses of power made in its name.