The Protestant Reformation

In the sixteenth century, the Christian unity of the West, built over a thousand years, was shattered. From a quarrel over indulgences grew a movement, the Reformation, which separated a great part of Europe from the Church of Rome and gave birth to Protestantism.

A Church That Called for Reform

The Church of the late Middle Ages carried real and grave disorders. Many clergy lived in ignorance or laxity, bishops as princes more than as pastors, and the papacy itself let itself be caught by politics and luxury. Church offices were bought and sold, an abuse called simony. Above all, to finance its works, the sale of indulgences was preached in a deceptive way: an indulgence is the remission, by the Church, of the temporal penalties due to sin already forgiven, but it was presented as if money could buy forgiveness itself or draw souls out of purgatory. For a long time, holy voices had called for reform; it was slow to come. For want of a reform undertaken in time, revolt became possible.

This abuse took on a precise face in 1517. To finance the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Dominican Johann Tetzel travelled through Germany preaching an indulgence that could, he assured, be applied to the dead; his patter tied the coin laid down directly to the release of a soul.

Luther

Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and German professor, was tormented by the question of his own salvation, searching how a sinner can stand before a just God. He believed he found peace in the conviction that man is justified by faith alone, and not by his works. In 1517, he posted ninety-five theses against the abuse of indulgences. Ordered to recant, at Rome and then before the emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521, he refused; and his protest, at first directed against an abuse, widened into a rupture with the whole structure of the Church.

Pope Leo X condemned forty-one of his propositions in the bull Exsurge Domine, in 1520; Luther burned it publicly and was excommunicated the following year.

The Principles of the Reformation

Luther’s doctrine rested on a few principles that touched the heart of the Catholic faith. First, justification by faith alone: man would be saved by faith alone, his works adding nothing to it. Then Scripture alone: the Bible, and not the Tradition of the Church nor the pope, would be the sole authority in matters of faith. From these two principles followed the rejection of the authority of the pope, of most of the seven sacraments, of purgatory, of prayer to the saints and to the Virgin, of the religious life. The Church answered that these were not reforms, but a rupture with the faith received from the apostles.

Europe Torn Apart

The movement spread with surprising speed, carried by the recent printing press, by German princes who seized the goods of the Church and welcomed a religion freed from Rome, and by national feeling. It divided at once into branches: the Lutherans; the Reformed of John Calvin, at Geneva, more radical still; the Church of England, born when king Henry VIII broke with the pope. Within a generation, half of Europe had left the Catholic Church, and the continent was torn by long wars of religion, which the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, then that of Westphalia in 1648, at last brought to an end by letting each prince fix the religion of his subjects.

There, the rupture began not from doctrine but from authority: the pope having refused to annul the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the Act of Supremacy of 1534 made Henry VIII the head of the Church of England, which at first kept the essentials of Catholic worship and only later drifted toward Reformed doctrine.

It is from these princes that the movement takes its name: at the Diet of Speyer, in 1529, those who had embraced the Reformation solemnly protested against the decision that took from them the liberty to follow it, and from this protest they were called Protestants.

A Broken Unity

The Reformation was born of real disorders, which cried out for reform, and the Church would soon answer them. But it took the way of rupture rather than that of inner renewal: it rejected essential points of faith and shattered the unity that Christ willed for his Church. From one single Church, the West passed to a multitude of separated confessions. The Catholic Church holds this division, like the schism with the East, to be a wound; she acknowledges the faults that provoked it, honors what remains of Christian faith and life among Protestants, and prays for the unity of all. Her own answer was about to come, with the Council of Trent.

On the eve of his death, he had prayed for them: “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you; that they also may be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me” John 17:21.