The Reformation

1. The Reformation

2. Roman Numerals • I = 1 • V = 5 • X = 10 • L = 50 • C = 100 • M = 1,000

3. Corruption of the Catholic Church • As the Humanist movement grew, new thinking emerged that led reformers from both within and outside the Church to question the validity of the Church’s teachings and practices. • A major rift began to grow between the Church and monarchies in Europe because they were both vying for power in society. As monarchs tried to secure their power in the decline of feudalism, the Church wanted to make sure that its power was not reduced by the monarchies. Several popes used excommunication from the Church as a way to force monarchs to follow their rules and wishes.

4. Corruption, continued • The most dramatic and damaging struggle for power occurred between the French monarchy and the Catholic Church. In 1296, Philip The Fair (IV), King of France, attempted to tax the French clergy (the Catholic Church was not supposed to be taxed by any country). The Pope, Boniface VIII, responded by threatening to excommunicate Philip. Philip sent troops to kidnap the Pope. He was quickly released, but the stress likely led to his death, which occurred within a month of his kidnapping and release. • Phillip used his power to have a Frenchman, Clement V, elected Pope, and instead of moving to Rome, Clement set up his court in Avignon, France. From 1305 – 1375, 7 popes ruled from Avignon. • This is called the Babylonian Captivity. Many Christians lost respect for the position of pope because they thought the popes had become puppets of the French Crown.

6. Corruption, continued • The end of the Babylonian Captivity resulted in even more trouble for the papacy. In 1376, Pope Gregory XI moved the papal court back to Rome, ending the Captivity. He died in 1378, and an Italian, Urban VI was hastily elected pope for fear that angry Roman mobs would storm the papal residence because they feared French cardinals would try to move the papacy back to Avignon. • Urban VI immediately upset many cardinals by denying them the usual benefits of their positions, and his behavior became so unusual that many feared that he had gone crazy. • Out of concern (or so they said) cardinals set up another election and chose Clement VII, a Frenchman, to be pope. Clement set up a rival papacy in Avignon, beginning what is known as the Great Schism. This really confused faithful Christians: how could they be expected to consider the pope a supreme source of religious dogma when there were 2 popes?

7. Corruption, continued • Moral laxity, common in all levels of the Church’s hierarchy, became an obvious source of criticism of the Church. Clergy members were supposed to be an educated elite, but many parish priests were illiterate and hardly knew how to perform ordinary religious services. Many priests and nuns publicly flaunted their vows of chastity by taking lovers. • Illegitimate children could be made legitimate by buying a document from the Church. • Some areas had bishops that chose not to enforce rules because it would take away too much income the Church brought in from the purchase of indulgences. • Numerous bishops and abbots used their positions to live lives of luxury and leisure, living more like princes than clergymen.

8. Corruption, continued • The Church came up with ways to pay for such extravagant lifestyles: Indulgences and Pilgrimages • Pilgrimages to sites of relics or holy places had always been acceptable forms of penance, but some clergy began to take advantage of this practice and created an industry built on bringing relics to the people and charging them to see them. They also began to sell such relics. Many of these relics were not actually holy, but were passed off as such to bring in more money.

9. Corruption, continued • Indulgences: • Instead of being required to perform an act of penance for sins, Christians were allowed to simply buy their way out of Purgatory by paying for specific sins. Some priests began to offer indulgences for other family members as well as the purchaser him/herself. You could get forgiveness for your father who had died so that he didn’t have to spend so much time in Purgatory. • What happened to poor Christians – how could they get forgiveness if they couldn’t afford to pay for indulgences?

10. Early Calls for Reform • John Wycliff, a scholar at Oxford University in England, began to question the authority of the Church’s teachings in the late 1300s. • He believed that Church corruption limited the clergies’ ability to properly lead Christians toward salvation. • He also questioned basic Church teachings and eventually proclaimed that a person did not need the Church and its sacraments to attain salvation. He said that Christians should regard the Bible, not the Church, as the supreme source of religious authority. • In order to allow common English people to read the Bible, Wycliffe and his followers, called Lollards, completed the first translation of the Bible into English. • Wycliffe was expelled from Oxford in 1382, but his ideas spread across Europe and influenced other reformers.

11. Early Reform, continued • Jan Huss was influenced by the ideas of John Wycliffe and began a reform movement in Bohemia, where the Czech Republic is located today. Huss was the in charge of his local Catholic church and he used that position to question the Pope’s authority and criticized the wealth of the Church. • Huss supported the use of vernacular languages in religious practices. • He spoke out against he selling of indulgences and important Church offices, which he felt were practices used only to raise money.

12. Early Reform, continued • Huss was summoned to appear before the Council of Constance, which was a group of Church officials who met in 1415 to solve the Great Schism and other religious questions. • The Council defended the Church’s position as the unquestioned authority by silencing reformers. Huss was charged with heresy. He claimed that Christians should seek God not in sacraments and rituals, but in Scripture. • The Council sentenced Huss to be burned at the stake. In spite of this, his teachings remained strong and spread throughout Bohemia.

13. Early Reform, continued • Mysticism was another challenge to the Church’s power. Mystics believed that any Christian could experience God directly through intense, personal meditation. They believed that they could experience God without Church officials, sacraments, or rules. • The Church could not censor mystics easily because many of the most important figures in the history of the Church had been mystics. • St. Paul became a Christian through mystical experiences. • St. Jerome (the man responsible for the Latin Bible) was a self-declared mystic.

14. Early Reform, continued • Mysticism, continued: • St. Catherine of Siena was an Italian mystic who called for reform in the Church. She reported that at the age of 7 she saw her first vision of Jesus, which caused her to choose a life of prayer, fasting, and chastity. • Catherine gained a huge following of people who believed her visions were caused by her intense devotion to Jesus. Catherine became a nun and dedicated her life to prayer and solitude. • In 1370, Catherine experienced her most celebrated vision, in which Jesus instructed her to become a messenger of peace and righteousness among people. She believed she was also instructed to right a great scandal in the Church, which she interpreted to mean the Great Schism. • In 1376, she traveled to Avignon and tried to persuade Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome.

15. Early Reform, continued • A monk named Girolano Savonarola clashed with the Church in the 15th century when he called for reform. In 1490 he was assigned by the Catholic Church to live in Florence, where he launched a crusade against immoral society and abuses within the Church. His prophetic sermons made a great impression; he predicted the deaths of Lorenzo de Medici, Pope Innocent VIII, and the King of Naples, all of whom he said were struck down for living impure lives. • By 1494, Savonarola had become the most powerful man in Florence, and Florentine society reflected his harsh views. Book burnings were popular and citizens who flaunted their wealth and openly broke Church laws were banished from the city. • Pope Alexander VI excommunicated Savonarola and the citizens of Florence arrested and executed him.

16. Martin Luther and the Beginning of the Reformation • Martin Luther was a Northern German monk who was unable to reconcile his own beliefs and practices with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. His struggle led to the Protestant Reformation. • Luther was born in Eisleben in 1483 to hard-working, middle class parents. He was a dedicated student and was especially concerned with his faith. Luther struggled with what he perceived to be his own innate sinfulness, and he was afraid that he was unworthy of God’s acceptance. • In 1505, just after receiving a law degree, Luther was traveling when he encountered a violent thunderstorm. Scared by the lightning, Luther threw himself to the ground and made a vow to St. Anne (the mother of Mary) that we would become a monk if she allowed him to survive the storm. He survived and 2 weeks later joined a monastery in Erfurt.

17. Luther, continued • Luther was a devout monk who could not accept the corrupt state of the Church. He became a priest in 1507 and received his doctorate in theology only 5 years later. • Luther had many questions about Catholic rituals and doctrine. While teaching and studying at the University of Wittenberg, he was troubled by the Church teaching that salvation was attainable through good acts. While studying St’ Paul’s letter to the Romans, Luther came across the passage, “By faith you are saved.” He interpreted that to mean that a person is saved by faith alone, and this insight changed his entire understanding of the relationship between God and humans.

18. Luther, continued • Luther no longer saw God as a judge with whom one could barter for eternal life (indulgences). Instead, he believed that the key to salvation was in the acceptance that humans are inherently sinful and therefore incapable of the good works necessary to attain salvation. • He argued that no matter how many good works people perform, they aren’t guaranteed salvation, which can only be gained through sincere faith and God’s grace, or compassion for the repentant sinner. • This was called “justification by faith.”

19. Luther, continued • This new understanding, justification by faith, opened Luther’s eyes to the many abuses of the Church, which he saw not only as corruption, but as insults to God. • The worst abuse, in Luther’s eyes, was the selling of indulgences. • In response to the many indulgences offered by the church, Luther wrote a document called Ninety-Five Thesesthat he hoped would lead to debate on the issue of Church abuses. • These questions brought about the a revolution that split the western Christian world.

20. Luther, continued • Luther wanted simply to start discussions, but the basis of his argument was that Christians did not need the Church to attain salvation because faith alone mattered. • Many Germans who resented Italian control of the Church hierarchy, the pope’s meddling in political affairs, and the sacrilegious nature of some Church practices and teachings followed Luther’s dissent and saw the reforms as a way to escape from papal control. • The Church called Luther to a hearing. Pope Leo X issued a formal document of excommunication that gave Luther 60 days to take back what he wrote in the Theses. Luther burned the Papal order and was excommunicated.

21. Luther, continued • After he was excommunicated, Luther expanded his arguments against the Church. He published 24 books and pamphlets, where he claimed that all Christian men were as good as priests, and that the Church and Pope held no special power. • He claimed the worship of saints and holy days was sacrilegious. • He said that only baptism and the Eucharist were sacraments (as opposed to 7 sacraments in the Catholic Church). • He translated the Bible into German, and claimed that clergy should be allowed to marry.

22. Holy Roman Empire

23. Luther, continued • Luther’s reforms started widespread revolt in the Holy Roman Empire (Germany). Luther supported the HRE seizing of Church land, the refusal to pay Church fees, and other changes that minimized the power of the Church. • However, in 1524 bands of peasants began to ransack monasteries and castles, and Luther was appalled. The Peasant’s Rebellion was inspired by Luther’s ideas, but he was not looking for class struggle.

24. Luther, continued • Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor during Luther’s time, was a devout Catholic who tried to contain Luther’s ideas. In 1521, he summoned Luther to the Diet of Worms (a meeting, not a diet and there were no worms). • Luther was asked to abandon the views he had expressed in his writings. Luther claimed he would not do that unless the Scripture proved him wrong. Charles V did his best to prove him wrong, but was instead forced to accept that many of Germany’s leaders were in favor of Luther’s views. • In 1529, Charles tried to force all German states to reinstitute Catholic practices; 6 princes and 14 cities refused. They became known as the Protesting Estates and the word Protestant was applied to anyone who left the Roman Catholic Church. • In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg allowed each German prince to choose which religion would be practiced in his respective state.

25. “The Reluctant Revolutionary” • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni1gupkGAW0

26. Protestantism at a Glance

27. The Reformation Spreads Throughout Europe • The Protestant Reformation started by Martin Luther in Northern Germany spread across Northern Europe. Many political leaders had looked for a way to escape the power of the Catholic Church and its officials. Many had grown tired of Church abuses and corruption, and accepted the Protestant reforms made in Germany as a logical alternative. • Luther’s Protestant ideas also benefitted from the development of the printing press. Revolutionary ideas about reform could be more easily produced and disseminated.

28. Reformation in Europe, continued • Huldreich Zwingli was a Swiss Protestant reformer who mixed religious and political goals in his struggle to create a perfect Christian Church. • Zwingli was a Catholic priest and was assigned to preach at the cathedral in Zurich, one of Switzerland’s most important commercial cities. Zwingli began corresponding with Luther and soon chose to become a Protestant. Zwingli developed a church service for Zurich that consisted of Scripture reading, followed by prayer, followed by a sermon. No music or singing was allowed because he felt that such pieces of ritual turned Christians away from the simple message of the Bible. • Zwingli was killed in a Swiss civil war, but Protestant ideas still flourished in Switzerland.

29. Reformation in Europe, continued • John Calvin was a French Protestant reformer who stern views became the most internationally influential movement of the Reformation. In the 1520s, Calvin attending the University of Paris, which was a hotspot of Protestant thinkers in predominantly Catholic France. • Calvin was forced to flee to Switzerland in 1534 because of Church persecution. In 1536, he published Institutes of the Christian Religion, which outlined his beliefs and how a Protestant community should be governed. • Calvin’s main religious belief was that God predetermined the few lucky souls who were granted salvation long before they were born. As a result, Calvin’s followers believed in living simple, serious lives in hopes this would prove they had been chosen by God, even though no sure way existed of proving whether or not one had been predestined to be granted God’s grace.

30. Reformation in Europe, continued • Not all Protestant ideas were welcomed by Luther, Calvin, or other early dissidents of the Catholic Church. Some Protestant splinter groups were persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike. • Case in point: the Anabaptists. • In Zurich in 1525, a group of Zwingli’s followers differed on the question of baptism, saying that a Christian should not be baptized until he or she was an adult. Zwingli argued that infant baptism was justifiable through Scriptural proof. Eventually, those who supported adult baptism broke away and became known as the Anabaptists. • Both Luther and Zwingli branded them heretics because they posed a threat to their own small Protestant groups. To Catholics, they were simply just another Protestant group. Anabaptists spread to Germany and France, were they were brutally massacred. Some fought back, ransacking Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist churches while others remained pacifists. Eventually, they found tolerance in Holland and England.

31. Reformation in Europe, continued • The Protestant Reformation in England was largely a political and personal reform movement. Henry VIII, Tudor King of England, was a devout Catholic. In 1521, he was awarded the title Defender of the Faith by Pope Leo X for his written attacks against Luther. With his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Henry had 6 children, only one of whom, a daughter Mary, survived through infancy. Henry believed this was a sign that the marriage was ill-fated • Because he desired a male heir, the king chose to get an annulment of the marriage from the Catholic Church. Pope Clement VII would not grant Henry an annulment. • Enraged, Henry refused to accept the pope’s decision and secretly married Anne Boleyn in 1533 – Anne was pregnant with their child. • As a result, Pope Clement excommunicated Henry. In response, Henry published The Act of Supremacy, which named him, NOT the pope, supreme head of the Church of England. This eventually led to the founding of the Anglican Church.