Protestants Persecuting Catholics?

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DeusExMachina

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Now I know my Church has historically been anything but kind to our brothers united with Rome, and that Puritan Oliver Cromwell butchered Ireland’s catholic population, but can anyone think of any other examples of Protestant persecution of Catholics? Specifically, would you say the Sack of Rome ounts, seeing as the soldiers were mostly Lutheran mercenaries?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Pax
 
DeusExMachina said:
Now I know my Church has historically been anything but kind to our brothers united with Rome, and that Puritan Oliver Cromwell butchered Ireland’s catholic population, but can anyone think of any other examples of Protestant persecution of Catholics? Specifically, would you say the Sack of Rome ounts, seeing as the soldiers were mostly Lutheran mercenaries?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Pax
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If you consider Elizabeth I (Good Queen Bess) as Protestant (this is debatable), have a look at this:

muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/logos/v007/7.1tarrago.html
The 1559 bills made English Catholics guilty of high treason—a crime English law punished by hanging, drawing, and quartering offending men, and by burning offending women. The bills made a political offense out of a matter of conscience—belief in a universal church under God. As in the Roman Empire in which early Christians who refused to burn incense before statues of the emperor were condemned to death for sedition, in Elizabethan England, Catholics were killed because they did not believe an act of Parliament changed what a fifteen-century-old Christian tradition told them: that the Church was a universal institution and the Bishop of Rome was its spiritual leader. To say or attend the Catholic Mass became a criminal act punishable by fines and imprisonment. All parishioners had to attend church on Sundays and holy days under penalty of a shilling for each absence.
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Historia Particular de la Persecución en Inglaterra by Diego de Yepes contains a long list of English Catholics martyred between 1570 and 1599.
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Mind you, this shouldn’t make you think that Protestants didn’t ever suffer at the hands of Catholic authorities – Elizabeth I’s sister, Blood Mary, was known as such for her role in the persecution of Protestants. So while these things are unfortunate parts of history and looking it up to study how the history of the world works is fine, they shouldn’t be used in and of themselves to see who is right or who is wrong by seeing who persecuted who in a specific time or a specific location for whatever political or ideological purpose.
 
Thank you, and yes, I consider her the epitome of protestant, so this was very helpful.
 
DeusExMachina said:
Now I know my Church has historically been anything but kind to our brothers united with Rome, and that Puritan Oliver Cromwell butchered Ireland’s catholic population, but can anyone think of any other examples of Protestant persecution of Catholics? Specifically, would you say the Sack of Rome ounts, seeing as the soldiers were mostly Lutheran mercenaries?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Pax
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First, four English Protestant persecutors come to mind: first was Henry VIII, who martyred St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher while also dissolving the monasteries, and second there was the trio of Edward VI, Elizabeth, and Cromwell. Wikipedia has a list of the Catholics they had martyred.

On the continent, when I think of Protestant persecution the first thing I think of is the Iconoclastic Fury. It is my understanding that Catholics were attacked and killed during these raids on Catholic churches. I also think of the German Peasants War, the skirmishes between Catholic and Protestant princes in Germany up until the Peace of Augsburg, the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, and, yes, the Sack of Rome.

In America, most of the colonies banned Catholicism, and in Maryland in particular Puritans took it over and persecuted the Catholic population.
 
There were some in NYC that attempted to destroy St. Pat’s Cathedral. You can read about the details under the heading “St. John Neumann” in this article.

oldcathedral.org/history/
 
dmar198 said:
Here are some martyrs from lands of German princes in the 1500s and early 1600s:
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This article from Dave Armstrong documents persecutions of the Catholics in the following areas:
  • Sweden by Gustavus Vasa
  • England by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I
  • Scotland by John Knox
  • Zurich by Zwingli
  • Geneva by William Farel
  • Basle, Switzerland, persecutor not named in that article
The article cites Martin Bucer as a Protestant reformer who instituted persecutions in the following cities of Germany:
  • Augsburg
  • Ulm
  • Strassburg
And the following cities are named as persecuting German towns without a specific persecutor being named:
  • Constance
  • Frankfurt-am-Main
  • Hamburg
  • Lubeck
  • Bremen
  • Luneburg
  • Stralsund
  • Rostock
  • Rotenburg
  • Saxony
  • Wismar
  • Wittenberg
Note: although Armstrong’s article doesn’t cite Andreas Karlstadt, he was very active in the early Reformation, especially in Wittenberg, and since he pillaged Catholic Churches I would imagine the persecution in Wittenberg could be traced to him.

This wikipedia article cites iconoclastic riots (which I would imagine were linked to persecutions, because how could they not be? The priest is right there in the churches they were destroying, they are at least going to imprison him) in the following regions:
  • Zürich (1523)
  • Copenhagen (1530)
  • Münster (1534)
  • Geneva (1535)
  • Augsburg (1537)
  • Scotland (1559)
  • The Seventeen Provinces (now the Netherlands and Belgium and parts of northern France) (1566), including Steenvoorde.
The article also names Sebastiaan Matte and Jacob de Buysere as instigators.
 
DeusExMachina said:
Specifically, would you say the Sack of Rome [c]ounts, seeing as the soldiers were mostly Lutheran mercenaries?
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May I ask where on earth you are getting this idea from??? The Sack of Rome (1527) was carried out by mutinous soldiers of His Catholic Majesty, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles-5.

Martin Luther nailed his 95 Thesis just ten years before. Are you suggesting that His Catholic Majesty was able (or even willing) to muster a majority of Lutheran *mercenaries * to fight on his behalf just ten years later?

Can you actually cite any authoritative source that maintains that one single Lutheran participated in the Sack of Rome? I thought that only Catholic soldiers participated.
 
DavidFilmer said:
May I ask where on earth you are getting this idea from??? The Sack of Rome (1527) was carried out by mutinous soldiers of His Catholic Majesty, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles-5.

Martin Luther nailed his 95 Thesis just ten years before. Are you suggesting that His Catholic Majesty was able (or even willing) to muster a majority of Lutheran *mercenaries * to fight on his behalf just ten years later?

Can you actually cite any authoritative source that maintains that one single Lutheran participated in the Sack of Rome? I thought that only Catholic soldiers participated.
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Here is a reference from Brittanica: “[The king of France] headed a new anti-Spanish alliance, the Holy League of Cognac (May 1526), which united France with the papacy, Milan, Florence, and Venice. With no French forces in the field, some 12,000 of Charles’s imperial troops, largely unpaid Lutheran infantry, marched south to Rome. On May 6, 1527, they attacked and sacked the city, forcing the pope to take refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo.” source

It is my understanding that having Lutherans in the military was possible because of four reasons: first, many areas of Germany quickly became Lutheran after Luther’s Letter to the German Princes in 1521. Second, Charles V’s empire included the lands of these German princes, who still were under an allegiance with him. Third, Charles may have thought at the time that the Lutherans could soon be reconciled to the Church, so he had no reason to exclude them from his military if they were willing to fight. And fourth, Charles V and the Lutheran princes had some common enemies that helped them fight together.
 
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to remember one of the founders of the Jesuits commanding heretics were to be “gently corrected”, a tragic irony considering many of the victims mentioned above were Jesuit 😦
 
DeusExMachina said:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to remember one of the founders of the Jesuits commanding heretics were to be “gently corrected”, a tragic irony considering many of the victims mentioned above were Jesuit 😦
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Perhaps you are referring to St. Peter Faber, was one of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s companions and helped found the Jesuit order. He said:

“[It] is essential that whoever desires to be useful to heretics in our day should both nourish in himself a great affection for them and show it in action, removing from his own mind those unfavourable imaginations which make us think less well of them.” (Instructions How to Deal with Heretics, as it appears in The life of Blessed Peter Favre by Giuseppe Boero, Chapter 13)

“The next thing is, to win their goodwill and inclinations to such an extent that they may reciprocate our kind feelings and think well of us. This may easily be done by speaking to them affectionately, and dwelling in familiar conversations on those points only on which they agree with us, avoiding everything like a dispute, in which one side always assumes an air of superiority, and shows contempt of the other. Those subjects should be first chosen in which there is a sympathy and union of wills, rather than those which tend to disunite them by opposition of opinion.” (ibid.)

Is that the quotation you are referring to, or is there another? If there is, I would love to find it.
 
dmar198 said:
Perhaps you are referring to St. Peter Faber, was one of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s companions and helped found the Jesuit order. He said:

“[It] is essential that whoever desires to be useful to heretics in our day should both nourish in himself a great affection for them and show it in action, removing from his own mind those unfavourable imaginations which make us think less well of them.” (Instructions How to Deal with Heretics, as it appears in The life of Blessed Peter Favre by Giuseppe Boero, Chapter 13)

“The next thing is, to win their goodwill and inclinations to such an extent that they may reciprocate our kind feelings and think well of us. This may easily be done by speaking to them affectionately, and dwelling in familiar conversations on those points only on which they agree with us, avoiding everything like a dispute, in which one side always assumes an air of superiority, and shows contempt of the other. Those subjects should be first chosen in which there is a sympathy and union of wills, rather than those which tend to disunite them by opposition of opinion.” (ibid.)

Is that the quotation you are referring to, or is there another? If there is, I would love to find it.
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Thats it, thank you
 
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