catholics against protestants -- 12/19/23

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Today's selection -- from The Shortest History of Europe by John Hirst. With the Protestant Reformation, suddenly there were major rivals to the church of Rome:

“The Renaissance was the first great disruption of the medieval world; the second was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. This was a direct attack on the church. Its aim was to return the Christian church to what it was like before it became Roman. As we have seen, the church acquired its Roman features because it grew up within the Roman Empire; when the empire collapsed the church continued with its pope, who was like an emperor figure, and archbishops and bishops, who were like the administrators of the old Roman Empire, and beneath them in every locality the priests. This holy body had its laws, its punishments, its goals and its system of taxation. 

“The pope and the bishops ruled the church and determined its teaching. The church offered you salvation but only by means that it controlled. You needed priests and bishops in order to be saved. You had to take the communion, the mass, and you needed a priest to create the magic of turning the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Jesus. You needed a priest to hear your confession, to grant forgiveness and set the penance for your sins. The priest might instruct you to say so many Hail Marys or to go on a pilgrimage or, for a severe offence, to allow yourself to be whipped before the altar. If you were rich and dying, the priest might tell you very firmly that you would not go to heaven unless you left a good deal of your wealth to the church. 

“In the Middle Ages most priests, bishops and archbishops did not enter the church because they were particularly pious or religious; men joined the church because it was the largest and richest organisation of the day. You took holy orders for the same reasons as today you would go into the civil service or a large corporation or politics or to a university: to get a secure job, to get interesting work, to get a high salary, to live well, to exercise power. In the church there was plenty of opportunity for enriching yourself and giving jobs to friends and relatives. 

“Yet this rich, plundering, corrupt organisation was also the preserver of the teachings of Jesus and the accounts of the early Christians. Jesus and his followers had been humble people but now popes and bishops lived in palaces. Jesus had warned against the dangers of riches and the early Christians had simply met in each other's houses. All this is recorded in the Bible, so the church's holy document could be dynamite in the hands of its critics. How did the church manage to escape for so long from a devastating critique? 

“As the Bible was in Latin, very few people could read it. The church said it was the first and final authority for interpreting the Bible. If anyone used the Bible to criticise the teaching or the practice of the church and made a real nuisance of themselves, they were burnt as heretics; that is, as false believers, a danger to themselves and to Christendom. But then in the sixteenth century, with the Reformation, there was a heretic who got away. His name was Martin Luther. 

A 1529 portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder

“Luther was a monk who took his religion very seriously. He agonised over his own salvation: what could he do, he who was so sinful, to be saved? Then his mind was suddenly put at rest while reading in the Bible Paul's letter to the church in Rome. Here Paul says your faith in Christ will save you. From this Luther deduced that you didn't have to do anything to be saved, in particular you didn't have to put yourself in the hands of the priests and follow their instructions. All you had to do was to believe, to have faith; faith alone will save you is the central Lutheran message. Believe in Christ and you will be saved. Now as a believer, of course, you will want to do things to please God, to do, as the church says, good works, to act as Christ says we should act. But those works in themselves will not help you to be saved. This is where Protestant and Catholic teaching differed fundamentally. The Catholics emphasised good works as part of the process of salvation. Going on a pilgrimage, giving your money to the poor: that will help your cause with God. Luther said it will not—how could anything we do, we who are so sinful and corrupt, make us pleasing in God's eyes? The only thing we can do is to believe and if we believe, God has promised that we will be saved. 

“This is a sort of do-it-yourself religion; all that huge apparatus which the church had built up over the centuries, Luther said, was unnecessary. This view did not go down well in Rome. The pope rejected Luther's criticisms of the church and his new teaching about salvation. Luther replied with fierce denunciations of the pope. Who does this man think he is? He is the representative of Christ on earth, so we are told, yet he is really the enemy of Christ, the anti-Christ. He lives in pomp, wears a triple crown, when you come into his presence you have to kiss his toe, when he moves he is carried shoulder-high by his servants--and yet we know from the Bible that Christ went around on foot. The Bible: that was the key to Luther's criticism of the church. If something was not in the Bible, the church was not justified in insisting on it or practising it. The Bible was the sole authority. After his break with Rome, the first thing Luther did was to translate the Bible into German so everyone could read it and become the managers of their own salvation. 

“The Protestant Reformation was the movement to reform the church by basing teaching and practice on the Bible. It wanted to recover the life of the early church. The message of the Reformation was Christianity is not Roman. 

“How did Luther escape being burnt as a heretic? There are a number of reasons. One was the invention of printing. All Luther's criticisms and denunciations of the church were immediately put into print and circulated widely through Europe. Printing was a new invention, only fifty years old when Luther began his attack on the church. Before the pope could organise to defeat Luther, everyone knew of him, everyone was reading his criticisms. This was not a heretic with just a few followers in one country, as there had been many times before; this man very quickly had an international following. The other reason why Luther survived is that some of the German princes welcomed his attack on Rome. Germany was not one country; it was a collection of many states. Partly because of this the church exercised more influence in Germany than in the unified countries of France and England. It held an immense amount of land, almost half in some places, collected large sums of money from the people, and the pope appointed bishops without the princes having a say. By following Luther, the princes were able to seize the church lands, appoint their own bishops and stop the flow of money to Rome. The princes became the protectors of Luther and in their realms the Lutheran church began. The Lutheran church was established in about half of Germany and from Germany Lutheranism spread north into Sweden, Denmark and Norway. England adopted its own brand of Protestantism, the Church of England. 

“Quite quickly there was more than one rival to the church of Rome. The Protestant churches took a number of different forms, different in each country. They were self-sufficient within their countries, a series of national churches, whereas the Catholic church was an international organisation. Once people began to read the Bible for themselves, as Luther and the other reformers encouraged them to do, they soon found reasons in it to criticise Luther too. The Protestant movement kept spinning off new churches because there was no longer a central authority to interpret the Bible and police belief. 

“For over a hundred years Catholics and Protestants fought each other, literally fought each other, in wars. Each regarded the other as totally wrong, not as a different sort of Christian, not even as non-Christian, but rather as anti-Christian, as the enemy of the true church. The true church could only be preserved if the other side was eliminated, and that murderous doctrine led to slaughter. It was better that a Catholic or a Protestant be killed than that they preach a doctrine which was absolutely offensive to God and damaging to his church on earth. Yet after fighting each other for a hundred years and neither side winning, the two sides arrived at a sort of long truce and gradually the notion of toleration arose."

author:	John Hirst
title:	The Shortest History of Europe: How Conquest, Culture, and Religion Forged a Continent―A Retelling for Our Times (Shortest History Series)
publisher:	The Experiment
pages:	29-32