The Reformation

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jmcrae said:
Definitely. I can’t think of a single Protestant who ever actually received a legal death penalty from either the Church or any faithfully Catholic monarch. Tynedale was murdered by a lynch mob - members of his own congregation who were simply fed up with his heresies. And he’s the only one I can think of who didn’t die of old age. 🤷
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Murdered by a lynch mob who were tired of his heresies?

Actually, Tyndale was sentenced to death by King Henry VIII. He was killed under the charge of heresy, yes. However, his “heresy” was his opposition to Henry’s divorce from Catherine (oddly enough, Sir Thomas More was his chief opponent in that debate, in 1532, before More’s “change of heart.” Tangled web, politics), and of course, his English Bible.
 
po18guy said:
I would suggest focusing solely on the catechism if you want to learn what Catholicism both believes and teaches.
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True, the OP would do good to open threads where he’ll request sources from the CCC and/or other Catholic literacy in relation to what he wants to research in them.
Ugliness abounds in all of human history.
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Often, religion can be twisted into an excuse to carry it out.
 
I think the greatest tragedy of the Reformation was Christianity itself.
 
KathleenGee said:
I think the greatest tragedy of the Reformation was Christianity itself.
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A Muslim colleague once used the reformation as a way of denouncing Christianities stability. A point he made to express how unreliable our scriptures are.
 
jmcrae said:
Definitely. I can’t think of a single Protestant who ever actually received a legal death penalty from either the Church or any faithfully Catholic monarch. Tynedale was murdered by a lynch mob - members of his own congregation who were simply fed up with his heresies. And he’s the only one I can think of who didn’t die of old age. 🤷
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Exactly, what happened to Jan Hus? He had a safe conduct, but burned at the stake.
 
The breakdown of Christianity started with our fellow baptized Christians no longer with us at one table…the families split apart…in God’s name no longer dining and praying together and praising God, and seeking holy lives.

The breakdown of Christianity in some ways led to the eventual secularization of this world.

Humanitarianism without God.

Now we are living the inverted man trinity of Marx, Hegel, and Freud…modern psychologists who are secular atheists are the ones promoting guilt free sex and the family no longer the basis of society.

I pray for the restoration of Christian faith and unity. We have the greatest block in society against evil but we have little sway because our house is either tepid and lukewarm or simply divided and holding on to erroneous beliefs and denying the Eucharist and confession.

We have no concept of faith like the Christians had 1,000 years ago when there was only one body and one bread…think about it…we must pray and work for restoration of Christian unity in Christ.
 
I am astonished at some of the responses. Thanks to those who are sorrowful for their forebears’ sins. I know I look back at mine with horror. Like the reformers’ persecution of Anabaptists and Southern Christians against blacks. But I can’t believe some of the ways that some of you are making excuses for this, or using special rhetorical devices to get around the question. Or maybe you just don’t really know history because you’ve been so insulated by Catholic history. It really appears that a lot of you do not know the full history of the reformation. It is sad that the Church split,yes, but at that time with all of the abuse happening, can you really blame them? How can you support a system that is systematically persecuting and killing people who want to translate the Bible into the common tongue of a certain people group. For crying out loud, under John Wycliff’s ministry there were parents burned at the stake for teaching their children the Lord’s prayer in English! Just pick up a copy of Fox’s book of Martyr’s and you’ll get a better idea (albeit being from a protestant viewpoint).

Nonetheless, we should all be horrified by these persecutions. I think mormonism is one of the biggest heresies to come out of the reformation, but I do not agree that mormons should have been or should be persecuted by Christians. We all need to value human life in all its forms.
 
Christ_Bearer said:
I am astonished at some of the responses.
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CB, it is obvious that, in this, you have touched on a tricky subject. The Catholic Church recognizes the common thread in ALL schisms as being sin on both sides. This is clearly expressed in the Catechism:
814…The great richness of such diversity is not opposed to the Church’s unity. Yet sin and the burden of its consequences constantly threaten the gift of unity. And so the Apostle has to exhort Christians to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

817 In fact, “in this one and only Church of God from its very beginnings there arose certain rifts, which the Apostle strongly censures as damnable. But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions appeared and large communities became separated from full communion with the Catholic Church - for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame.…”

Bolding mine
Try to hold fast to this fact and not be swayed or diverted in your studies by the particular opinions, slants, or perspectives of individuals, whether they be Catholic or Protestant.
Thanks to those who are sorrowful for their forebears’ sins. I know I look back at mine with horror. Like the reformers’ persecution of Anabaptists and Southern Christians against blacks.
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Contained within this is perhaps the seed of the matter here. You say - “I look back on mine with horror…” Yet, in truth, what have you done? Yes - our forebears have committed sin, but how does that effect us? Are we not troubled enough with our own personal sin? Why should we dig up and be horrified by the sins of the past?
Yes - it is good to examine these things in the light of history so that we may learn from them. This we have done, as referenced in the Catechism and also in other documents.
Now is the time to put these things behind and to begin again to seek unity in faith - not looking over our shoulders in horror.
But I can’t believe some of the ways that some of you are making excuses for this, or using special rhetorical devices to get around the question. Or maybe you just don’t really know history because you’ve been so insulated by Catholic history. It really appears that a lot of you do not know the full history of the reformation.
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No one, Catholic or Protestant living today can know the “full history” of that time, whether that be “reformation history”, “Catholic history” or history built around any other theme. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the fact that life then and now are so different that often times we cannot get our heads around the historical contexts of the time.
It is sad that the Church split,yes, but at that time with all of the abuse happening, can you really blame them? How can you support a system that is systematically persecuting and killing people who want to translate the Bible into the common tongue of a certain people group.
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This right here - Bible Translation - is an over simplification of the matter. For Vernacular translations of the Bible predate The Reformation. A quick look HERE gives a brief indication of this fact just in the German language area. The problem that was occurring was not that some sought to have the Bible translated into a vernacular tongue. The problem was more one of trying to see that the translations being properly done. the famous example of Martin Luther inserting the word “alone” at the end of “…we are saved by faith…” demonstrates the subtlety of this problem. Likewise, Martin Luther’s rejection of entire books of the canon - books that had been accepted Scripture for 1000 years, is another.
This problem even persists today - have you ever read the opening verses of John in the Watchtower printing of the “Holy Bible”?
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was a God…” :eek:
Now - with the insertion of a single word - the meaning of the text is changed, and this is no longer the Holy Word of God - no matter WHAT the title is printed on the cover.

So - As I pointed out earlier…We might All be guilty on not knowing ALL of reformation history…
Nonetheless, we should all be horrified by these persecutions. I think mormonism is one of the biggest heresies to come out of the reformation, but I do not agree that mormons should have been or should be persecuted by Christians. We all need to value human life in all its forms.
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I agree that we all need to value human life in all it’s forms. And I likewise agree with the review and understanding of history for the purpose of improving and avoiding these mistakes in the future. I prefer not to assign emotion (such as horror) to the matter. I am saddened that it happened - but I cannot change them, nor am I guilty of them.
So - I suggest that we all move on to more productive matters…and perhaps we can build off of this into something more productive…

Perhaps your next question could be about why there are differing canons of the Holy and Unchangeable Word of God (the Bible). I find this question to be highly significant both from the perspective of Reformation history AND from the perspective of teh Protestant mindset of “Sola Scriptura”…
I think that you will find that examining the history of the Bible canon to be most interesting (if you haven’t already done this).

Peace
James
 
Christ_Bearer said:
I am astonished at some of the responses. Thanks to those who are sorrowful for their forebears’ sins. I know I look back at mine with horror. Like the reformers’ persecution of Anabaptists and Southern Christians against blacks. But I can’t believe some of the ways that some of you are making excuses for this, or using special rhetorical devices to get around the question. Or maybe you just don’t really know history because you’ve been so insulated by Catholic history. It really appears that a lot of you do not know the full history of the reformation. It is sad that the Church split,yes, but at that time with all of the abuse happening, can you really blame them? How can you support a system that is systematically persecuting and killing people who want to translate the Bible into the common tongue of a certain people group. For crying out loud, under John Wycliff’s ministry there were parents burned at the stake for teaching their children the Lord’s prayer in English! Just pick up a copy of Fox’s book of Martyr’s and you’ll get a better idea (albeit being from a protestant viewpoint).

Nonetheless, we should all be horrified by these persecutions. I think mormonism is one of the biggest heresies to come out of the reformation, but I do not agree that mormons should have been or should be persecuted by Christians. We all need to value human life in all its forms.
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Catholics are not ‘insulated’ with ‘Catholic history’. History is not something you can twist or revise to your POV. I spent twenty years as a Baptist and more than a few of those years as a Baptist pastor. I have studied the history of the Reformation thoroughly.
What I personally am not into is ‘revisionist’ history which forces historical incidents to fit our prejudicial opinions. History must be neutral.
Now as to your post:
According to secular historians many of the ‘heroic’ tales of Protestants of the past were ‘embellished‘, if not outright fabricated.
I also used to treasure “Foxes Martyrs of the World”. Many Christians would never dare question its authenticity any more than they would question the Bible itself. Discovering that John Foxe was safely abroad, writing his propaganda in Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Basle, during Mary Tudor’s reign was an eye-opener for me. He falsified and twisted the course of events and outright fabricated others. His book is not considered ‘history’ by most standard historians.
 
In simplicity, an angel appeared to Martin Luther and to not go forward in this growing rage.

He was the first one to call the papacy the anti-Christ and he was a propagandist…one being ‘Captivity in Babylon’, he wrote the worst of any anti-Semitic discourses of any Christian, and prior was known to be a highly scrupulous person obsessed with being unworthy.

As noted here, adding one word to Sacred Scripture had devastating consequences on Christianity…the first being the vow or profession of faith no longer carried weight…the apostolic succession void. So interpretation was all up for grabs.
 
Christ_Bearer said:
I will be the first to recognize the horror and dismay at what my protestant forebears committed against Catholics and other races of people in return (i.e. Ireland, Southern Baptists with racist elements in the American south, etc…).
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Christ_Bearer said:
II know I look back at mine with horror. Like the reformers’ persecution of Anabaptists and Southern Christians against blacks.
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I dont want to sidetrack this topic but I have to defend my South. Racist attitudes are not and have not been limited to the South. There were racial laws in Northern, Midwestern and Western states. The US Army, not just the South’s army, was segregated in WWII. The Negro League and sports segregation existed until just after WWII. These weren’t southern teams. Boston schools were forcibly desegregated by busing and people marched against that. Racism in America has and does exist in Christians from all areas of the country.
 
Concerning the Bible in the vernacular:

“Before the Albigensians, the Church had happily translated the Bible into every vernacular tongue. But now the Church saw the authority of the Bible abused by cult leaders who preyed on the ignorance, or the latent extremism, of the people. In 1229, at the Council of Narbonne, in direct response to the abuses of the Albigensians and related heresies, the Bible was forbidden to all save priests, bishops, and others in religious vocations. The people would hear the Bible in Church. But mad-eyed fanatics would not be allowed to wave the Bible over their heads and claim some new reveleation, some special reading—to common people who were mostly illiterate—that denied the Trinity or endorsed fornication, abortion, and suicide as positive deeds.” (H. W. Crocker III. Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church—a 2,000 year history (Three Rivers Press, 2001), p. 175.

Also, in Karl Keating’s Catholicism And Fundamentalism: The Attack on “Romanism” by “Bible Christians” (Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 45-46, it says:
In order to promulgate their views, the Albigensians used vernacular versions of the Bible to “substantiate” their theories. The Church had no complaint about mere translations of the Bible; vernacular versions had been appearing for centuries. But the Albigensians were twisting the Bible to support an immoral moral system [which promoted fornication and suicide]. So the bishops at Toulouse restricted the use of the Bible until the heresy was ended. They were trying to stop the heresy’s spread because it was the cause of civil unrest and considerable suffering. Their action was a local one, and when the Albigensian problem disappeared, so did the force of their order, which never affected more than southern France. This is hardly the across-the-board prohibition of the Bible that Boettner, for debating purposes, would like to see but that never existed.

About the dangers of private interpretation of Sacred Scripture, 2 Peter 3:15-16 says, "So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, beware lest you be carried away with the error of lawless men and lose your own stability. "
 
Concerning the persecutions:

There are a few things you can say about the common charges about “Church” atrocities:
  1. The usual topics are the Galileo affair, the Crusades, and the Inquisition. The most recent of these happened almost 500 years ago. If the worst things you can say about the Church was perpetrated by people dead and gone that long ago, I’d say the Church has done pretty good.
  2. People who throw out these topics as conversation stoppers usually have no clue as to the real history of these things, but are merely repeating what other uninformed people (including teachers and film-makers) have told them. Without a proper context of political, cultural and societal conditions of the time, it is impossible to pass judgement on people hundreds of years and several cultures removed from us. In our more “enlightened” times we may have the luxury of hindsight, but you can’t judge those in the past on criteria they knew nothing about.
  3. Take the time to educate yourself on the full story and don’t rely on one-sided biased historical accounts. Modern scholarship is finding that a lot of what has long been accepted as “facts” about these events, has actually been colored by centuries of anti-Catholic bias.
You might start by visiting the links below.

catholiceducation.org/links/search.cgi?query=inquisition&submit.x=24&submit.y=11

catholiceducation.org/links/search.cgi?query=crusade
 
Christ_Bearer said:
Hey everyone. Thanks for all of your (name removed by moderator)ut in the area of the mass. In my former thread…
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=647040
I asked about the mass. Very helpful indeed were some of the responses.

Here’s my next question…

Whether or not Catholics like or dislike the protestant reformation, are most if not all Catholics horrified at the atrocities that were committed against many of the protestant reformers? For instance, the burning of John Wycliff, burning of William Tyndale, persecution of Martin Luther, slaughter after slaughter of protestant reformers… I will be the first to recognize the horror and dismay at what my protestant forebears committed against Catholics and other races of people in return (i.e. Ireland, Southern Baptists with racist elements in the American south, etc…). But my question isn’t about what Protestants did, I will own up to that. My question is about what Catholics did. Please don’t try to just point out what protestants did wrong. Again, I acknowledge the wrong of protestants. Thoughts?
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Hello again:) Glad you’re getting answers to all your questions.

In answer to this question, I would say that I think that most people today are kind of horrified by medieval and early modern punishment, in general. Most of us would cringe at the idea of burning people at the stake, beheading people, drawing and quartering them, or just lobbing off or burning limbs as punishment for crimes like theft. From our twenty-first century perspective, we see those punishments as unfair, brutal, and utterly out of portion in relation to the crime committed.

I do understand why both Catholics and Protestants were motivated to kill and persecute one another, but I do regret that so many had to suffer and die for their faith at the hands of other Christians, and that there have been so many rifts created by what both sides have done. Sometimes, new divisions were created between peoples and regions because of the rise of Protestantism, and other times the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants exacerbated cultural tensions that already existed (i.e. in Ireland).

I do understand that people in the medieval and early modern era had considerably different worldviews than we do, though, and so I always keep that in mind when studying history. It’s not always fair to judge people of the past by our values and standards, anymore than it would be just for future generations to judge us by their standards. (I mean, future people could see animals as the equal of humans, and be horrified that I thought I could own a dog, even though, from the modern perspective, there is nothing wrong with me owning a pet as long as I look after it properly.) Today, we put a premium on tolerance, respect for different beliefs and perspectives, and separation between church and state. Overall, these traits are needed to sustain our culturally and religiously diverse societies. In the medieval era, people valued religious unity, cultural unity, and a strong link between church and state. People in a region were all expected to follow the religion of their leader(s) because that religion was the truth. That truth had to be enforced, or the medieval society would crumble. That was the mindset that people whether Protestant or Catholic had in the medieval and early modern era, and so the people who persecuted and killed beings of other faiths were motivated not only by religious convictions but by social ideals.

The people, both Catholic and Protestant, who were involved in the persecutions and executions, by and large, probably saw themselves as justified for political, religious, and moral reasons, but I think most people today, Catholic and Protestant alike, would be horrified at the thought of the gruesome punishments both sides inflicted upon the other.

Personally, I understand why medieval and early modern religious leaders acted in the manner in which they did, but I do regret how divided Christianity became as a result of the injuries both sides inflicted upon the other. I think both Protestants and Catholics needed time to heal (and some people from both sides of the divide still need time to heal) but I am glad that both sides are finally starting to really reach out to one another and some nice steps toward reunification are happening. Hopefully, we can all try to be respectful of different perspectives, not seek to assign blame, and instead seek the truth. I think that would combine the best attributes of the medieval and twenty-first century value systems quite nicely. We can learn from our history and do it better:thumbsup:
 
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