Protestant Reformation

Catholic Church

• The Catholic church had built a near-governmental bureaucratic system

  • It dominated so many aspects of life

  • Garnered resistance

Martin Luther

• German Lawyer → Monk

• He believed the heretic notion that indulgences were corrupt and abusive

  • It used manipulative tactics to turn grief into profit

    • Pope used profit from indulgences to build the Basilica

    • Church also used tithing to profit which essentially taxed the laity

  • Serving the papacy/buying salvation was not true faith

• Purgatory

  • Indulgences were based on the idea that the living can support the dead in purgatory to allow them to be freed and enter heaven

• Luther believed that salvation could not be bought

• He posted 95 theses which attempted to explain the corruption of the church

  • They were posted for local debate, but were printed, published, and rapidly disseminated across Europe

  • This became known as the Reformation

• Luther believed that all humans were corrupt/sinners, including the papacy and clergy, and emphasized the importance of reading the word of God to achieve salvation

Diet of Worms

• Charles V ruler of Spain and the Habsburg Empire

• Charles V was seen to threaten world domination, so everyone expected Martin Luther would fold when threatened by Charles V.

  • He most definitely did not

• Martin Luther was excommunicated and condemned to eternal damnation in hell

• Luther started by trying to reform the Church, but found that he outright rejected it causing the fracture of the Church

  • Luther’s followers, Lutheranists, formed the first sect of Protestantism

• Frederick the Wise protected Luther’s followers (his brothers took over when Frederick died)

Reformation

• Gutenberg Bible published by printing press was written in German, the vernacular, rather than Latin, a dead language which was unintelligible to many, facilitating the common people to investigate the word of God as Martin Luther said, rather than following the papacy’s orders

• Eucharist

  • Luther argued for consubstantiation in which bread & wine was seen as both actual bread & wine and the body and blood of Jesus, whereas some argued that communion should solely be seen as bread & wine, and is purely symbolic

• Luther got married despite being part of the clergy, which was not taken lightly

  • Argued men and women only differed in sex

    • Seen as the utmost heresy

    • Motivated Charles V to try to take down the Schmalkaldic League, which protected Protestantism, by force in attempt to suppress reformation, but failed

      • Especially after failing to achieve religious unity of his subjects at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530

    • Led to the Peace of Augsburg (Germany, 1555), which outlined the coexistence of Catholicism and Protestantism

• Anabaptists (disagreed with Eucharist) were more radical

  • Argued that baptism should only be available to adults as to not indoctrinate young children who were truly able to make their own decisions on issues like religion

  • Innately logical reform

• Principal Protestant sects include Lutheranism and Calvinism

  • Lutheranism dominated the Northern Holy Roman Empire, Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, etc. (Northern and Eastern Europe)

  • Catholicism was still dominant in Western and Southern Europe (Spain and Italy, specifically), and Southwestern European nations were primarily Eastern Orthodox

  • Calvinist Huguenots rebelled in France, leading to civil wars and their dispersal in France

Migrated to other parts of Europe, namely England, which saw a turn to Protestantism under Henry VIII in the 1500’s