Erras nimis. Vere haec aetas barbarissima est; nos etiam qui latinitatem preservare volumus sape paucissimum sapimus et multos solecismos facimus. Ecclesia tamen non vita huius saeculi vivit, et non solam linguam haec aetatis loquitur.
Handel’s Messiah was from a Lutheran.
It is my understanding that the Magesterium conducts councils in Latin.
As much as the effort was made to silence Hus and dispatch his followers, the movement continued.
CompSciGuy;8304258:
The Catholic Church Western Rite uses latin. They are more numerous thatn the veterans of the civil war. This is the first sign of humor you have shown.
… it just amazes me how people go off, on cue, about Luther … and at the same time figure out a way to dismiss Leo X & Co … the reason for the outrage… Leo and his entourage were like Nero’s court.
socrates58.blogspot.com/2008/05/martin-luthers-regrets-as-to-relative.html
All of this proves that Luther hated corruption … and that your response fits the pattern I describe …socrates58.blogspot.com/2008/05/martin-luthers-regrets-as-to-relative.html
Have you seen what Luther says about his work?
. . . ]
- Luther says: “As soon as our Gospel began . . . decency . . . and modesty were done away with, and everybody wished to be perfectly free to do whatever he liked.” [Walch. V. 114]
- “We deserve that our Evangelicals (the followers of the new Gospel) should now be seven times worse than they were before. Because after having learnt the Gospel, we steal, tell lies, deceive, eat and drink (to excess), and practice all manner of vices.” [Walch. III. 2727]
- “After one Devil (Popery) has been driven out of us, seven worse ones have come down upon us, as is the case with Princes, Lords, Nobles, Citizens and Peasants.” [Walch. III. 2727]
[p. 55]
- “I think it must needs be the case, that those who follow the Gospel . . . should be worse after (receiving) the Gospel than they had been before, not on account of the Gospel, but on account of the people who so abuse the Gospel.” [Walch. XIII. 2193]
- “The more and the longer we preach, the worse matters grow.” [Walch. XII. 2120]
- “People are now possessed with seven Devils, whereas formerly they were possessed with one Devil; the Devil now enters into the people in crowds, so that men are now more avaricious, unmerciful, impure, insolent . . . than formerly under the Pope.” [Walch. XIII. 19]
- "After the dominion and power of the Pope has ceased . . . the people, while despising the true doctrine, are now changed into mere irrational animals and beasts;
the number of holy and pious teachers becomes constantly less." [Walch. I. 615]
. . . ]
Luther is going off on Luther.
- . . . about seven months before his death, Luther wrote to his wife, “Away from this Sodom (Wittenberg) . . . I will wander about, and sooner beg my bread than allow my poor old last days to be martyred and upset with the disorder of Wittenberg.” [July 1545. de Wette. V. 753]
- . . . “See how foolishly the people everywhere behave towards the Gospel, so that I scarcely know whether I ought to continue preaching or not.” [Walch. XI, 3052]
- . . . “If God had not closed my eyes, and if I had foreseen these scandals, I would never have begun to teach the Gospel.” [Walch. VI. 920]
- In 1538, . . . Luther dwells on the same thought: “Who would have begun to preach, if we had known beforehand that so much unhappiness, tumult, scandal, blasphemy, ingratitude, and wickedness would have been the result?” [Walch. VIII. 564]
- . . . “I confess, that I am much more negligent, than I was under the Pope, and there is now nowhere such an amount of earnestness under the Gospel, as was formerly seen among Monks and Priests.” [Walch. IX. 1311]
Funny, I never did say there was anything wrong with the vernacular. Isn’t it interesting how one can read more into things than there are, or think they are reading things that aren’t actually there? (I may be guilty of this myself at times.) First when you said you wouldn’t be able to “understand the words,” I thought you were a lapse or lazy Catholic (one that doesn’t attend Mass enough to know it by heart), but then I see your profile says you just converted, so I’ll give you some slack. I can tell you one thing, having to follow along in a missal will make you memorize it faster! I know, I’m speaking from experience!
The early Christians celebrated Mass around the table, imitating the Last Supper. The priest with his back to the community was, in its time, a modernisation. Even the taking of Communion after a vigil, was, in its time, a modernisation. Communion in the early Church was taken after supper. This was changed because some of the participants were drunk. To avoid the offence to God, a vigil was imposed.
This is a belief I wholeheartedly share, and I’d add Islam into the picture too. The Dalai Lama once said that any Faith which brings us closer to God is good, and who could disagree with that?
I don’t see anyone here “dismissing” the sins of Leo X and his courtiers. And you obviously don’t know much about Nero.
By cutting off one-third of the Church’s members and leaving them and their descendants to wander into ever more far-fetched heresies over the next 500 years?
Evidence for this? Leo was a worldly man who seems to have cared more about art than anything else. There were rumors that he was homosexual, but they are only rumors and there’s a lot of debate as to whether he was sexually immoral as Pope.
But that wasn’t Luther’s primary concern at all. Luther said nothing particularly remarkable about papal corruption (well, the line about building St. Peter’s with the fleece and bones of the sheep was pretty cool, though at that point Luther was at least officially holding back from blaming the Pope). Luther was upset primarily with scholastic theology and the way he thought it had gotten the doctrine of penance wrong. That was his starting point. That made his criticism of indulgences something different than the standard complaint against abuses. He was implicitly attacking some of the assumptions about penance that lay behind indulgences. That was what got him in trouble, and also what made him so important a figure in church history.
Let’s just be sure your idea of Luther’s job is the same as his (of course, you can argue that he had a holy task that wasn’t the one he thought he had, but in that case we need to be clear that that’s what you are saying). Luther thought that his job was to straighten out soteriology. And one of the principal pillars in Luther’s soteriology was the complete denial of human free will. Luther told Erasmus–the person who had actually been criticizing corruption in the Church for years before anyone heard a peep out of Luther–that Erasmus had correctly identified the key issue between Luther and the Catholic Church as free will. Since Erasmus believed that human beings have some degree (heavily qualified) of free will, from Luther’s perspective Erasmus (the great enemy of corruption in the Church) was on the wrong side. You can read this in Luther’s 1525 Bondage of the Will.
I have previously given my reasons for disagreeing with this. There were reform efforts before Luther, and the reaction to Luther made the RCC more defensive, more intolerant, more belligerently hierarchical than it had been before. In fact, Luther arguably created the RCC (by reaction). I wouldn’t call the medieval Catholic Church the “RCC,” though that’s a semantic choice with which I’m sure many would disagree.
Edwin, I know you are a learned man but this is nonsense. Not only the Preface of the original King James Bible which I mentioned, but 16th century writers such as Thomas More and the staunch protestants Foxe and Cranmer, all testify that the whole Bible was translated into English since shortly after the conversion of England in the seventh century, and translated anew in each century as Anglo-Saxon became Anglo-Norman then Middle English then Early Modern English. Not by heretics but by perfectly orthodox Catholics and the translations approved by the English bishops.
Totally absurd.
I don’t think so for that would be attributing evil to God.
Respectfully, I’m pretty sure you are mistaken here. The KJV preface refers to the Psalter and various other parts of Scripture being translated in Anglo-Saxon times, which is quite correct (the first six books of the OT were translated for sure, as were the Gospels). However, that was not the whole Bible, and at any rate would have been unreadable to most people (if not to everyone) by the later Middle Ages. I don’t think that so much of the Bible was ever translated into English again until the “Wyclif” Bible of the 14th century, though certainly parts (mostly the NT) were translated at times and far more was paraphrased. The KJV preface’s references to “Trevisa,” and to complete manuscript copies of the English Bible, are almost certainly talking about the Wyclif Bible. I have been told before on this forum (or a similar one) that St. Thomas More refers to an English Bible being translated for the use of a monastic community, but I have not seen documentation of this. Of course, the fact that sixteenth-century people claimed that something had happened does not necessarily mean that it did happen.
I think you’re making a bit of a leap when you assume that they would have destroyed Bibles. Yes, it’s possible that such a thing did happen because mobs or soldiers just thought a book looked “Papist.” But it’s a huge stretch to conclude from the theoretical possibility that copies of the Scriptures were sometimes destroyed that therefore whole Bibles must have existed in the Middle Ages!