Catholic Church & the Reformation

The Age of Reformation was marked by the Protestant revolt against the tyrannies and corruption of the Catholic Church. The revolt was primarily against practices of the Church which mixed the secular and the religious and led to an emphasis on an abuse of power by church officials and a favoring of materialistic and worldly over spiritual matters. For example,

Bishops worked for their respective states as well as for the church, and they were paid by the church for their services to the state. It is astonishing that so many conscientiously tried to carry out their religious duties on top of their public burdens (McKay 442).

Calls for reform from within the church were ineffectual, which led to the Protestant movement from outside the church (McKay 443).

One of the worst wrongs of the church leading to the Reformation was the selling of indulgences. An indulgence was originally comprised of penance for sins, but church officials perverted its original intent and sold indulgences for money, declaring that "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs" (McKay 444). In other words, eternal salvation could be bought for money.

Martin Luther's protests against the purchase of indulgences and other church perversions led to his break with the church. In general, Luther and John Calvin sought to return Christianity and Christians to a concern with God and the Bible rather than with the church and the pope. The term "Protestant" came to refer to

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his fellows of the post-medieval era of the 14th Century were superior in their concern with human beings, artistic enterprises, philosophy, and so forth. This humanism put human beings at the center of their concerns, rather than church issues (McKay 408-409). Erasmus's humanism, a century after Petrarch, turned human concerns back to religious matters, specifically the Bible and the "philosophy of Christ" (McKay 425). What made Erasmus's efforts truly humanistic rather than simply a return to church-dictated thought was the emphasis which he placed on the role which the individual human being was seen as playing in the religious life and the interpretation of the Bible: "Christianity is an inner attitude of the heart or spirit . . . not what theologians have written" (McKay 424-425). Calvin's "Geneva" was the reformer's effort to bring Protestantism to life in the real world of a real city. In the city of Geneva, which Calvin called "a city that was a Church," he set up a government of civil leaders who were meant to rule over the city in the name of God and Christ. The effort was largely successful, through strict governance, and it established itself as a standard for other Protestant reformers of the 16th century. The

Category: History - C