I’m assuming you wanted me to focus on the first answer on Quora, correct? I think it’s a pretty good answer at generally explaining the grievances that the Protestant princes had with Rome, but it doesn’t explain why those grievances were had by the Germanic/Northern countries and not by the kingdoms of the Mediterranean. At first glance every single one of those grievances could equally be shared by the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, etc. so why didn’t they jump ship too? Granted that Quora thread was more broad in scope than this thread here on CAF. I also think he overstates the Holy Roman emperor’s benefiting from the Reformation. If it weren’t for the Peace of Westphalia I honestly think the empire would’ve imploded from all the infighting. An emperor (and king, prince, duke, etc.) needs his subjects to be on the same religious page in the 16th-17th centuries. Having some German states go Lutheran, some (very very few) go Reformed, and others remain Catholic, all the while there are radical reformers like the Anabaptists popping up being a real thorn in the sides of all parties isn’t going to make for a stable empire. The emperor really needed the unity of the Catholic Church to keep his empire united. Not to mention, the whole idea of a Holy Roman Empire is that these German imposters were successors to the original Roman Empire, and they can claim so despite being of an entirely different ethnicity due to their shared faith with the original. The Holy Roman Empire makes no sense without Catholicism. Indeed, all of the emperors until the dissolution of the empire were Catholic.
The second answer seems to mirror much of what I said in my second post here, about the uncanny congruence between the borders of the old Roman Empire and the religious border of the Catholic-Protestant realms. I think this makes a lot of intuitive sense. Let’s liken it to today’s world: imagine if some “reformer” arose in a nascent Catholic community in a part of the world where Catholicism/Christianity is relatively new. The Philippines might be a good example since they’ve been Catholic for about as long as the Germans were Catholic at the time of the Reformation. As many of us know the Filipinos are some of the most faithful Catholics in the whole world, and the Catholicism they practice is very much by the book and it’s very much informed by the Spanish colonial powers that enforced uniformity on them. This “reformer” would have a much easier time convincing these Filipinos to cast aside the yolk of Rome for the sake of their own liturgical, cultural, scriptural, and jurisdictional autonomy than, say, the actual Spaniards from whom they inherited Catholicism to begin with. This is precisely because the cultural link between Madrid and Rome is stronger than Manila and Rome despite the fact that Manila is more orthodox and more faithful to Catholicism.
As an aside I’d really like to ask, how the heck did Poland (1) become Catholic instead of Orthodox unlike her sister Slavic nations, and (2) remain Catholic after the 16th century!? That’s the real mystery.
