The Catholic Church had many ingrained problems from about the year 1200 onwards - massacring Balts, scruples about others’ property (through the “Spiritual Franciscans”), probabilism, fatalism (from 1492).
The Black Death - which God allowed within 4 years of purgatory-related indulgences being linked to monetary donations - killed off over half the clergy in Europe especially the most learned ones.
Trent and its simultaneous Protestant equivalent codified some of the worse aspects of the “faith” on “both”/all sides - such as acedia.
In the context of this massive slow burn series of explosions, it was surely a bit premature to excommunicate Luther so soon before better addressing some of the issues he belatedly flagged up. This was a huge raft of issues, on some of which he was wrong, and on some right. A fair few of them were debatable. On almost all of them, many people had expressed themselves before.
It is refreshing to make oneself aware of the huge range of contributions to discussion from all sides - Catholic and Protestant - prior to about 1550. The pretend crucial date and personality are made out to be Luther and 1517 but what is set in stone as “Catholic” and “protestant” dates from 1550.
As was pointed out in another thread 1529 at Speyer is where the first “protestants” protested about civil interference in freedom of religious belief and practice, and we are all in agreement with them now.
I am so grateful for the people of all denominations who nurtured me. I contrast that with a country where some family members live, which has had a “limpieza de sangre” mentality about everybody else’s mentality for the last 525 years and which tends to spawn more or less heretical “movements” and whose clergy have been in messy semi-schism all that time.
If I hadn’t long thought my philatelic days behind me, I’d scramble to add this to my collection simply because it represents for me so much more and so many better (though difficult) things than it does for others.
