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Montalban
Guest
Anyway, better Turk than Roman!
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ChadS
Guest
Just as a minor quibble with you on one thing. You seem to indicate that among the first generation of reformers that greed and pride didn’t play as much of a role. Perhaps they weren’t greedy because as far as I know none of them got rich, but prideful – absolutely. Every reformer to one degree or another stepped away from the Church and proudly proclaimed: “I know better.” Perhaps Luther didn’t start off that way but once his initial objections were rebuffed at Worms he started to find other things he didn’t agree with and it quickly devolved from there. Even your example of Henry VIII showed this tendency. The initial rift started over one divorce then it turned into two divorces and the he asserted that the Church was subject to the Pope’s authority only the King’s. To a certain degree each and every reformer showed the same tendency.
ChadS
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mozart-250
Guest
So if the church did not respond “forcefully” enough, what should the church have done?
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Montalban
Guest
A Crusade!
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mozart-250
Guest
Seriously?
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Montalban
Guest
Not now. But back then, why didn’t they?
The King of Spain -didn’t he consider himself a Crusader against Elizabeth I?
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GregoryPalamas
Guest
Rather than keep repeating yourself please explain yourself.Anyway, better Turk than Roman!
CDL
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mozart-250
Guest
I didn’t think you were serious.
So back then we should have had Crusades 2.0 against the evils of Protestantism? (assuming Crusades 1 had many subreleases so to speak).
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Brian_C
Guest
Um, yes! See the Albigensian heresy…that’s exactly what happened. From the time of Constantine, the Church and the State had functioned in somewhat of a co-operative fashion. When heresy broke out, the Church used the State to help it enforce orthodoxy. This is what broke down in the time of the Reformation. The ruling class was fractured many supported the reformers either out of sincere belief or self-serving motives (independence, raiding the Church treasuries, diverting Church income to themselves, etc)…
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Brian_C
Guest
Sorry, I certainly didn’t mean to imply the Reformers were free of pride, greed or whatever-merely that the initial rumblings of the Reformation were seized upon by many proud and greedy men who amplified the effects exponentially. Yes, Henry’s motives were self-serving. However, most scholars agree even Henry could not contemplate English life without the Church and that he did not intend to send English Christianity spiraling off the way it did.
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ChadS
Guest
Brian, I agree with you 100%. I think some of what you said goes back to part of the thread on how the Church should’ve responded to the Reformation. The Reformation didn’t remain just a challenge to Church authority but quickly took on characteristics of temporal challenges. Luther gained a lot of his support from rebellious princes that saw in the Reformation a chance to cement their own power and a good opportunity to seize church lands and property.
To 16th century Europeans the idea of the Popes and various Kings using each other to back up their claims to power wouldn’t have been unheard of or even uncommon. After all they both saw the source of their power coming from one and the same place: God. How different would’ve history have been if Luther hadn’t gotten any further than nailing his theses on the door and had been seized by soldiers instead?
ChadS
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mozart-250
Guest
And you are saying this was a good thing??
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Brian_C
Guest
No. Just saying it already had happened. The Albigensians were a heretical sect in the South of France that was forcefully suppressed by the Church and the French Throne. It was considered a crusade. Let’s look at this pragmatically. What were the Reformers? In the Church’s eye, just one more group in a line that spread back to the Gnostics and Arians. Only, now they didn’t have a unified will in the form of European royalty to back them up in the suppression of this group. Rather, the nobles of Europe seized on it in order to expand their own power. I’m not condemning the Reformation as vile. Only saying it couldn’t have happened 3-400 years earlier when temporal monarchs were terrified of opposing the Church. Had the movement be purely spiritual and not political, we’d be reading about the Lutherans and the Calvinists as one more group of heretics.
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mozart-250
Guest
So now you have me thoroughly confused.
One person here says the church did not act forcefully enough to stamp out the great heresy of Protestantism.
Another says there should have been a crusade.
So what exactly should the church have done to stamp out the great heresy of Protestantism.
Maybe this is another thread.
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Montalban
Guest
Why not? The Pope asked for English people to rise up and kill Elizabeth I and Philip of Spain thought he was on a mission from God.
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rr1213
Guest
The Pope encouraged his flock to commit a mortal sin by breaking one of the Ten Commandments? To commit murder, let alone armed revolt against the government? Wow. With a Pope like that, you don’t need the adversary…
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Brian_C
Guest
Yes but this was also a time when it was thought an acceptable form of punishment to cut people open and remove their entrails.
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Ahimsa
Guest
OK, point blank question:
Should the Catholic Church and secular authorities have waged an anti-Protestant Crusade, similar to the one waged against the Cathars?
Should the Catholic Church and secular authorities have waged an anti-Protestant Crusade, similar to the one waged against the Cathars?
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Ridgerunner
Guest
Interesting question, and a very difficult one to approach from Western perspectives in the 21st Century.
It might be easier to think about it when one thinks of, say, Al Qaeda, which intends to impose a Caliphate, having certain propensities that most of the world would find unacceptable. Most would say it should be opposed by force of arms, though, certainly, some would not. Many, though fewer, would say Israel, the world’s only Jewish state (though reasonably tolerant of others) should be allowed to protect itself from the annihilation it would otherwise face. So most moderns would say, then, that “religious wars” can be justified if they serve sufficiently important, universal (particularly secular) purposes, and particularly if they are defensive.
But when it comes to the application of those notions to Reformation times, it gets pretty murky. One could argue (rightly, in my opinion) that a unified Church served important social purposes. Not the least of those was its centuries-long efforts to discourage and disperse European tribalism. That was the reason why Church marriage laws concerning consanguinity and affinity were so far-reaching then. You almost couldn’t marry anyone within your own tribe, and had to go to a neighboring tribe to find a spouse. The effort to create “Christendom” was not always successful, but it was not always unsuccessful either. The calendar of holidays for workers, the “Truce of God”, the “Peace of God” and so forth, all served beneficial social purposes, as did the encouragement to free travel and trade. The late Middle Ages were astoundingly mobile, in almost every way. People have fought for worse causes.
It is debateable whether resurgent European tribalism caused the Reformation or whether the Reformation caused resurgent European tribalism (nationalism=tribalism, writ large), but the two certainly did coincide; reaching its climax in WWII. (The last Saxon/Frankish war, as it were; one of many.) One could argue, but could not likely persuade Protestants, that the Reformation was both a product and an exacerbation of tribalism. (Interesting that Catholic Bavaria and the Rhineland wanted no part of the Protestant Prussian-dominated Reich…I’m not talking about the 3rd Reich, don’t get upset) If the Reformation was an exacerbation then, from that perspective, it was socially destructive, both in the short (e.g., the 30 years war) and long terms and ought to have been opposed by force of arms.
Protestants would say that the Reformation’s freedom of conscience (though often honored in the breach) gave rise to the development of new social theories and fathered, e.g., the United States and representative democracy. Even if the 30 years war and the Saxon/Frankish wars right up to WWII were the price to be paid, they would say it was worth it.
For myself, I think I would rather have seen “European Union” come as the result of Catholic religious unity than the unity of the religion of Secularism. One could argue that militant secularism is an outgrowth of the very “freedom of conscience” that Protestants hold dear, and I am inclined to think it’s so.
Having said all that, God works in mysterious ways. It is my firm belief that someday (likely not in my lifetime, though) there will be a reconciliation and reunion between most Protestant groups and Catholicism. I am always intrigued, for example, by Flannery O’Connor’s belief that the Fundamentalists in the American South had more in common with Catholicism than with classic Protestantism and would be the most likely to merge, given time. If a rapprochement is within Providential design, then perhaps God is telling all of us that the religious wars were a futile attempt to impose our notions of Time on Him.
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Brian_C
Guest
They tried. But there was no united political will.
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