|
Although reformers had many complaints about the Catholic
Church of the 16th century, the practice of selling "indulgences"
raised the most opposition. An indulgence was a payment to the
Catholic Church that purchased an exemption from punishment
(penance) for some types of sins. You could not get an
indulgence to excuse a murder, but you could get one
to excuse many lesser sins, such as thinking lustful thoughts
about someone who was not your spouse. The customers for
indulgences were Catholic believers who feared that if one of
their sins went unnoticed or unconfessed, they would spend extra
time in purgatory before reaching heaven or worse, wind up in
hell for failing to repent.
The sale of indulgences was a byproduct of the Crusades in
the 12th and 13th centuries. Because they risked dying without
the benefit of a priest to perform the appropriate ceremonies,
Crusaders were promised immediate salvation if they died while
fighting to "liberate" the Christian holy city at Jerusalem.
Church leaders justified this by arguing that good works earned
salvation, and making Jerusalem accessible to Christians was an
example of a good work. Over time, Church leaders decided that
paying money to support good works was just as good as performing
good works, and it evened things up for people who were
physically incapable of fighting a Crusade. Over several
centuries, the practice expanded, and Church leaders justified it
by arguing that they had inherited an unlimited amount of good
works from Jesus, and the credit for these good works could be
sold to believers in the form of indulgences. In other words,
indulgences functioned like "confession insurance" against
eternal damnation because, if you purchased an indulgence, then
you wouldn't go to hell if you died suddenly or forgot to confess
something.
In later years, the sale of indulgences spread to include
forgiveness for the sins of people who were already dead. That
is evident in this passage from a sermon by John Tetzel,
the monk who sold indulgences in Germany and inspired Martin
Luther's protest in 1517.
Don't you hear the voices of your dead parents and other
relatives crying out, "Have mercy on us, for we suffer great
punishment and pain. From this, you could release us with a
few alms . . . We have created you, fed you, cared for you
and left you our temporal goods. Why do you treat us so
cruelly and leave us to suffer in the flames, when it takes
only a little to save us? [Source: Die Reformation in
Augenzeugen Berichten, edited by Helmar Junghaus
(Dusseldorf: Karl Rauch Verlag, 1967), 44.]
Martin Luther was a monk who taught at a Catholic university
in the German town of Wittenburg (located southwest of Berlin).
Like many others, he feared that the Roman Catholic Church had
become too corrupt to provide people with the guidance they
needed to obtain salvation. Luther thought that individuals
could seek salvation on their own, without relying on priests.
On October 31, 1517, he attempted to provoke a debate on reform
by nailing a list of 95 questions to the door of the Wittenburg
university cathedral. The debate became public when some unknown
person reprinted his ideas in a pamphlet which was eventually
distributed throughout Germany.
Luther's challenge to papal authority received support
from German nobles who had their own grievances. In particular,
German nobles resented how the Church spent revenue collected
from German Catholics, and the fact that they had less rights
than other nobles (particularly in France) to influence the
appointment of local Church officials. Thanks to the support of
a noble named Frederick "the Wise," who allowed Luther to hide at
his castle named Wartburg, Luther survived his excommunication
for heresy by the Diet of Worms in January 1521. He hid out for
about a year and used the time to translate the New Testament
into German. Meanwhile, as other nobles joined the protest,
Lutheranism became more secure and more groups began to propose
their own religious reforms. By 1535, nobles in a large area of
Germany, plus the kings of Denmark and Sweden, had declared
themselves followers of Luther.
Luther and his supporters were not the only ones to break
away from the Catholic Church. In 1527, King Henry VIII of
England asked to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon
annulled because, after nearly twenty years, they had not yet
produced a male heir to the throne. The pope refused to grant
the annulment thanks to pressure from Catherine's nephew, the
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. So Henry declared his independence
from the Pope in 1534 by creating the Church of England and
naming himself as its spiritual and political leader.
Elsewhere, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, Menno Simons and
others launched their own religious reform movements. As a
result, by the end of the 16th century, perhaps as much as one
third of western Europe's population no longer believed in the
supremacy of the pope. One consequence was the Catholic
Counter-Reformation, a systematic attempt to reform the Catholic
Church, which eliminated many of the practices that provoked the
original reformation.
Questions
- Why was the Reformation more likely to succeed in Germany
than in France?
- What limit to the pope's power is suggested by theses #5-8
and 13?
- What alternative did Luther propose to the purchase of an
indulgence?
- Why did popes support the sale of indulgences?
|
