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The Reformation, also known as the Protestant Reformation and the European Reformation, was a major theological movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the papacy and the authority of the Catholic Church.
- Diet of Worms
Luther at the Diet of Worms, an 1877 portrait depicting...
- Talk
We would like to show you a description here but the site...
- Protestant Reformers
Protestant Reformers were theologians whose careers, works...
- Frederick III
Frederick III (17 January 1463 – 5 May 1525), also known as...
- History
Matthew Stanley Quay (/ k w eɪ /; September 30, 1833 – May...
- Huldrych Zwingli
Huldrych or Ulrich Zwingli (1 January 1484 – 11 October...
- Papal
Popes instituted a Catholic Reformation (1560–1648), which...
- Counter-Reformation
The Counter-Reformation (Latin: Contrareformatio), also...
- Diet of Worms
The history of the Catholic Church is the formation, events, and historical development of the Catholic Church through time. The tradition of the Catholic Church claims it began with Jesus Christ and his teachings; the Catholic tradition considers that the Church is a continuation of the early Christian community established by the Disciples of ...
- Overview
- The age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation
- Roman Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation
The most traumatic era in the entire history of Roman Catholicism, some have argued, was the period from the middle of the 14th century to the middle of the 16th. This was the time when Protestantism, through its definitive break with Roman Catholicism, arose to take its place on the Christian map. It was also the period during which the Roman Catholic Church, as an entity distinct from other “branches” of Christendom, even of Western Christendom, came into being.
The spectre of many national churches supplanting a unitary Catholic church became a grim reality during the age of the Reformation. What neither heresy nor schism had been able to do before—divide Western Christendom permanently and irreversibly—was done by a movement that confessed a loyalty to the orthodox creeds of Christendom and professed an abhorrence for schism. By the time the Reformation was over, a number of new Christian churches had emerged and the Roman Catholic Church had come to define its place in the new order.
The most traumatic era in the entire history of Roman Catholicism, some have argued, was the period from the middle of the 14th century to the middle of the 16th. This was the time when Protestantism, through its definitive break with Roman Catholicism, arose to take its place on the Christian map. It was also the period during which the Roman Catholic Church, as an entity distinct from other “branches” of Christendom, even of Western Christendom, came into being.
The spectre of many national churches supplanting a unitary Catholic church became a grim reality during the age of the Reformation. What neither heresy nor schism had been able to do before—divide Western Christendom permanently and irreversibly—was done by a movement that confessed a loyalty to the orthodox creeds of Christendom and professed an abhorrence for schism. By the time the Reformation was over, a number of new Christian churches had emerged and the Roman Catholic Church had come to define its place in the new order.
Whatever its nonreligious causes may have been, the Protestant Reformation arose within Roman Catholicism; there both its positive accomplishments and its negative effects had their roots. The standing of the church within the political order and the class structure of western Europe was irrevocably altered in the course of the later Middle Ages. Although Boniface VIII’s extravagant claims for the political authority of the church and the papacy were undermined by the Babylonian Captivity and the subsequent schism, by the mid-15th century the papacy had recovered and triumphed over the conciliar movement. By the time Protestantism arose to challenge the spiritual authority of Rome, however, the papacy had squandered some of its recovered prestige in its attempts to establish its preeminence in Italian politics. Indeed, the popes were so involved in Italian cultural and political affairs that they had little appreciation of the seriousness of the Protestant movement. The medieval political structure too had undergone change, and nationalism had become a more important force; it is not a coincidence that the Reformation first appeared in Germany, where animosity toward Rome had long existed and memories of the papal-imperial conflict lingered.
Accompanying these sociopolitical forces in the crisis of late medieval Roman Catholicism were spiritual and theological factors that also helped to bring about the Protestant Reformation. By the end of the 15th century there was a widely held impression that the papacy refused to reform itself, despite the relative success of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), which was called by Pope Julius II. The papacy’s reputation had been damaged by the political and military machinations of popes such as Julius, and the hierarchy’s greed and corruption were demonstrated by Pope Leo X’s agreement (1514) to allow the sale of indulgences in the diocese of Mainz. The church also was plagued by the perception that professional theologians were more interested in scholastic debates than in the practical matters of everyday Christian belief and practice.
Despite, or because of, the rampant abuses of the hierarchy, there were efforts to reform the church. The most notable reformers were the Christian humanists, including Erasmus and Thomas More, who advocated an evangelical piety and rejected many of the medieval superstitions that had crept into church teaching. In Spain, Cardinal Jiménez undertook the reform of the clergy, restoring the observance of celibacy and other clerical and monastic rules of behaviour. Although condemned for heresy, Girolamo Savonarola represented the ascetic reformist piety that existed in the late 15th century.
During the Protestant Reformation the church’s conflicting tendencies toward both corruption and reform coincided with the highly personal struggle of Martin Luther, who asked an essentially medieval question: “How do I obtain a God who is merciful to me?” Luther at first attempted a medieval answer to this question by becoming a monk and by subjecting himself to fasting and discipline—but to no avail. The answer that he eventually found, the conviction that God is merciful not because of anything that the sinner can do but because of a freely given grace that is received by faith alone (the doctrine of justification by faith), was not utterly without precedent in the Roman Catholic theological tradition, but, in the form in which Luther stated it, there appeared to be a fundamental threat to Catholic teaching and sacramental life. And in his treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, issued in 1520, Luther denounced the entire system of medieval Christendom as an unwarranted human invention foisted on the church.
Luther’s unsparing attacks upon the moral, financial, and administrative abuses of the church were initially prompted by the sale of indulgences in Germany by the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel. Luther insisted throughout his life, however, that the primary object of his critique was not the life but the doctrine of the church—not the corruption of the ecclesiastical structure but the distortion of the gospel. The late medieval mass was “a dragon’s tail,” not because it was liturgically unsound but because the medieval definition of the mass as a sacrifice offered by the church to God jeopardized the uniqueness of the unrepeatable sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. The cult of the Virgin Mary and of the saints, in Luther’s view, diminished the office of Christ as the sole mediator between God and the human race. Thus, the pope was the Antichrist because he represented and enforced a substitute religion in which the true church, the bride of Christ, had been replaced by—and identified with—an external juridical institution that laid claim to the obedience due to God himself. When, after repeated warnings, Luther refused such obedience, he was excommunicated by Pope Leo X in 1521.
Until his excommunication Luther had regarded himself as a loyal Roman Catholic and had appealed “from a poorly informed Pope to a Pope who ought to be better informed.” He had, moreover, retained a Roman Catholic-like perspective on most elements of Christian doctrine, including not only the Trinity and the two natures in the person of Christ but also baptismal regeneration and the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. (He did, however, reject the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation in favour of what has come to be called consubstantiation.)
The phrase Catholic Reformation generally refers to the efforts at reform that began in the late Middle Ages and continued throughout the Renaissance. Counter-Reformation means the steps the Catholic Church took to oppose the growth of Protestantism in the 1500s. CATHOLIC REFORMATION.
The Catholic Reformation or the Counter Reformation was a strong reaffirmation of the doctrine and structure of the Catholic Church, climaxing at the Council of Trent, partly in reaction to the growth of Protestantism.
Roman Catholicism - Reformation, Beliefs, Practices | Britannica. Home Philosophy & Religion Religious Beliefs. Summarize This Article. Roman Catholicism on the eve of the Reformation. The decline of Scholastic theology. The transition from the Middle Ages to the Reformation was gradual.
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