The Reformation began in the early 1500s due to a need for change in the Catholic Church. The movement split the Church and as such brought the Middle Ages to a close. The Reformers sought to create a new body of belief and practice while retaining many of the elements of the older Roman faith.
Martin Luther, 1483-1546, led the way in the Protestant movement. He first broke from the Church on October 31, 1517 when he posted his 95 Theses which spoke out against the sale of indulgences on three grounds. First he called them papal exploitation, second he questioned whether or not the papacy had any jurisdiction over purgatory, and finally he said the indulgences did not make the sinner truly penitent. These 95 Theses were translated, printed, and distributed throughout Germany very quickly, a testament to the importance of the printing press. This set the stage for later reformers.
The Church became alarmed when the sale of indulgences tapered off and called for a debate in Leipzig in which Dr. John Eck skillfully maneuvered Luther into admitting the teachings of Hus and Wycliffe had some truth and into declaring that both popes and councils were corrupt. Because of this, the Pope issued a bull condemning Luther’s teachings but was promptly burned by the man, earning him popular support.
Luther’s teachings differed from the Catholic Church in four principle ways. First, he reduced the seven sacraments down to two, namely baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Second, he believed in a priesthood of all believes in which the true Church consisted of all faithful Christians. Third, Luther said the true source of authority was in the Bible and not in Church traditions or the pronouncements of popes and councils. Finally, he said that the good Christian life consisted of serving God in one’s calling since all were sacred, whether religious or not.
In 1522, the Wittenberg town council issued a municipal ordinance to abolish images and the Catholic mass and to conduct services in German and not Latin, the first of the Protestant Revolt. Finding widespread public acceptance it spread rapidly throughout the German provinces and cities. But in order to survive against a powerful enemy as Charles V, Luther had to seek the protection of the German princes and cities. This was put to the test in the Peasant’s War in 1524 to 1525. Upset by poverty and high taxes, the peasants rebelled against their landlords in an attempt to improve their condition. Luther, a conservative in social and economic matters, sided with the princes which turned the peasants against him, but brought him into closer alliance with the princes. The revolt was suppressed with unspeakable cruelty, and had Luther sided with the peasants, then the German Reformation probably would have ended.
In 1530 Luther went before the Diet of Augsburg where he presented a summary of his doctrines in a formal Confession. The Diet rejected it leading the Protestant princes to form a religious and military coalition, called the Schmalkaldic League, against the Catholic Hapsburgs. For 25 years the Catholics and Protestants fought each other with no results until 1547 when Emperor Charles V defeated the Protestants in the Schmalkaldic War. In 1555, a final settlement was struck which said each prince would decide which religion his region would be. The problem with it was that Lutherans in Catholic areas and vice versa were not granted religious toleration. Peace held despite this until the Thirty Years War in 1618.
Another significant figure at this time and leader of the Swiss Reformation was Ulrich Zwingli. He was an outspoken critic as Luther on the sale of indulgences and also attacked dietary regulations and clerical celibacy in both theory and practice. Unlike Luther though, Zwingli saw the Lord’s Supper as a memorial service rather than a supernatural sacrament.
Next were the Anabaptists who found their model in the persecuted church of the Book of Acts. They saw the true church as a voluntary association of baptized believers who maintained purity of conduct by admonition and expulsion. Most were against the taking of lives or making oaths as stated in the Articles of 1527, and were concerned with distribution of alms and Christian brotherhood. Anabaptists believed that only the baptism of an adult conferred membership in the Church. They saw no improvements being made during the Reformation and increased their numbers after the bloody suppression of the Peasant’s Revolt. Both Catholics and Protestants regarded them as a threat and began to persecute them.
The next major figure of the Reformation was John Calvin. His encounter with the new Lutheran doctrines stimulated him to create his own form of Protestantism. He believed, as Luther did, that the sole source of authority was the Bible and that the sacraments could be reduced to baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Calvin was adamant about emphasizing the absolute sovereignty of God which led to a belief in predestination. In his mode of thought, God has already selected those who will be saved, called the elect, and all the rest would be punished. He outlined his beliefs in the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536.
He established a strict theocracy with himself as dictator and the town council under the firm control of a consistory of Protestant clergyman and laymen in Geneva. Often, acts as having one’s fortune told, settling a bet on a Sunday, and making a noise in church, had severe repercussions.
Calvinism spread internationally unlike Lutheranism and actually replaced it in France by 1559. Scotland adopted it in 1560, England accepted it as the form of Puritanism, the Netherlands saw the first Protestant church rise in 1561, and it appeared in both Austria and Poland in eastern Europe. It made very little progress in Germany.
The final player in this Reformation was Henry VIII of England who rose to power in 1509. His queen at that time was Catherine of Aragon who could only produce a female heir to his thrown. Henry wanted a male heir and so sought an annulment to his marriage so he could remarry. Already he had selected Catherine’s successor, Anne Boleyn, daughter to a recently elevated peer, and desire to wed her. He ordered Cardinal Wosely to secure the annulment, but the petition filed in 1527 was denied by Pope Clement VII. An enraged Henry stripped Wosley of all his authority and pursued the annulment on his own.
In 1532 he persuaded Parliament to abolish all payments to Rome but it failed when they were restored after Henry became Head of the Anglican Church. He then proceeded to appoint Thomas Crammer archbishop of Canterbury who quickly and secretly annulled the marriage to Catherine. In 1534, England formalized its succession from Rome in the Act of Supremacy. From that time no authority outside England was recognized.
Henry’s intention was not to bring England into conformity with other continental Protestant doctrines. Simply, his break with Rome was done for self-serving goals all to try to have a male heir. In 1539 the Six Articles of Faith were passed in Parliament upholding private masses for the dead, clerical celibacy, transubstantiation, and auricular confession. Also, he sent Lutherans to the stake in the latter part of his reign.
His successor, Edward VI, was only ten at his assumption of command and so his regency was controlled by his uncle the Earl of Hereford. He allowed the English Reformation to veer more toward the continental Protestantism, permitted the clergy to marry, and relaxed the heresy and treason laws. A Catholic restoration was attempted by Mary (1553-1558) but failed due to stiffening Protestant resistance, despite more than 300 being sent to the stake. After her reign the Catholic cause died in England.
The Church went through its own reform program called the Catholic or Counter Reformation at the same time, partly as a reaction to the challenge of Protestantism but also just because of its own independent spiritual revival. It was soon realized within the Church itself that any possibilities of reconciliation with the Protestants were going to be fruitless and so it undertook its own administrative reforms and made an exhaustive redefinition of its doctrines. The Catholic Church made use of several instruments to orchestrate its reform movement, namely new religious orders as the Jesuits, the Council of Trent, the Inquisition, and the Index. Also, Catholic countries undertook a program of military action against Protestant opponents that was blessed by the papacy.
Founded by Ignatious of Loyola and sanctioned by Pope Paul III in 1540, the Jesuits became the prime tool of the Catholic Reformation. He stressed obedience, having been a soldier himself, and sought to educate, thereby influencing, Europe’s upper classes. Jesuit missionaries traveled into Canada and the American West in the seventeenth century justly earning them the title of shock troops of the Catholic Reformation.
The second tool of the Catholic Church was the Council of Trent called several times over a 18 year period from 1545-1563. It attempted to reform Catholic administration and redefine its doctrines. At the first session it declared that supreme religious authority lied with the Vulgate Bible. Also, it accepted the theology of Thomas Aquinas and asserted the necessity of human free will to achieve salvation through the sacraments. In administration, it directed the creation of seminaries to train the clergy and left specific guidelines for the content of their education, and it laid out rules for the qualification and conduct of bishops. The Council of Trent succeeded in making the Church stronger but an attempt to make the papacy separate of political interference stirred up a violent protest. The councils decrees were not universally accepted by the Catholic rulers although.
In 1542 the Roman Inquisition was revived and extended to fight Protestantism. The Inquisitor Generals were granted the power to overrule the jurisdiction of the local bishops and allowed to judge and hand the condemned over to secular authorities to be castigated. The Inquisition was successful in crushing heresy in Italian cities but created an atmosphere of intellectual stagnation.
To combat Protestant and anti-clerical propaganda, the fifth Lateran Council in 1515 forbade the printing of any book without a license from Church authorities. In 1557 and 1559 Pope Paul IV produced the first Index of books which Catholics were prohibited from reading. The Index was not just a phenomena of the Reformation but has endured until today, undergoing revisions over time that restricted its scope.
One last event to discuss is the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France in 1572. Catherine de Medici invited Protestant leaders to Paris to celebrate the marriage of Protestant leader Henry of Navarre and the king’s sister. During the wedding she convinced the king to order a massacre of them. In all, roughly 4,000 Protestants were killed in Paris alone, with a comparable number dying in the provinces.
So what did the Church achieve. It won back large sections of eastern Europe, southern and eastern Europe, and part of Switzerland, but elsewhere it achieved marginal success or failed miserably.
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