The friars, who lived with the people, preached to them, confessed them, and directed the daily devotions of the pious were much more central to religious life. But because the friars were so visible, they were obvious targets of criticism. They could be blamed for the rather mechanistic piety and, as officially sanctioned beggars, the clerical obsession with money that contemporaries disliked.
At the same time the organizational independence of the church was less than it had been in centuries. We have seen that the crown and the estates in parliament had put much pressure on the papacy's ability to direct the English church during the fourteenth century. At the beginning of the 15th century, the papal court lost the battle.
The Great Schism that began in 1378 and continued until 1417 was the main cause. In this period competing popes fought to be recognized as head of the church, and they could not afford to fight secular rulers whose support they needed. When the Schism was over, the popes found it impossible to regain the ground they had lost. The papacy remained the main clearing house for dispensations from church law and high clerical appointments, and it retained some of its taxing rights, but in most parts of Europe, the pope could exercise such powers only at the sufferance of the appropriate kings and princes.
In England, the king was effectively supreme in the church a century before Henry VIII. For instance, when Edward IV told parliament that he would "live of his own" and not ask them for grants of money, this promise did not apply to the clergy. He continued to call convocations of the English clergy and get grants of taxes from them. And nobody protested. The church by this point was part of the king's "own" -- just as it had been in the time of Edgar or William the Conqueror.
In the fifteenth century, we are coming to the end of a cycle. The pre-Reformation English church cannot be fairly presented as a scandalously corrupt institution. Most clergy did their jobs reasonably well if in an uninspired fashion. But the clergy had lost its leadership position in society. English clergy were no longer part of an international class. They had lost their dominant position in the economy, and no longer had a monopoly of learning or piety. The only thing left to lose was the privileged legal separation from the rest of society. One can see, if very dimly, the shape of the national Church of England that will soon come into being.
In the 1500s England was a catholic country and just about everybody was a catholic. When you were born your parents would have you baptised as soon as possible. This cleaned you of sin and within and few years you were confirmed and accepted as a member of the church. if you got married the wedding was carried out by the local priest and when you were dying the priest gave you the last rites, which released you from your sins. Even after you died the church still had a role to play. After death some people were doomed to stay In Hell forever and even those who were going to heaven had to pass through Purgatory first. You were punished to clean you from your sins but the church provided help for you to get out of Purgatory more quickly. You could pay ‘indulgences’ from a Bishop during your life
the If you got the middle Ages, the Roman Catholic church reached every corner all over Europe and affected everyone’s life. Its organisation was so powerful from the Pope down to the most humble parish priest. A coherent group was formed by its personnel through the ceremony of Ordination and the laying on of the hands on priests. The law of the church influenced everyone and was applied every where. Its landed wealth which was obtained through centuries of gifts was legendary.
We have seen that in the Late Middle Ages many Christian sectarians and theologians criticized the Catholic for its "worldliness" and "corruption," and that some critics had claimed that Church dogma itself contained errors and falsehoods. The Church had withstood such challenges and had defined its most dangerous critics as heretics. But in the 1500s a new wave of theological (and political) assaults on the authority of the Church resulted in a complete rupture in western Christianity, which would have great social and political as well as cultural and theological consequences.
They saw the Church as divine as well as human, as a community united with Christ and the grace of God. They saw their Church as following the authority that Christ had given to the Bishop of Rome, the Church as built upon the tomb of Peter, and as such they believed there could be only one Christian Church.
The Roman Catholic Church had troubled itself to maintain an identity in belief, purging from its ranks those it had deemed mistaken in their opinions about the nature of Christ, the nature of property and the authority of the Church, among other views, such as those of the Gnostics, Donatists and the Pelagians. But within the Church remained a diversity of opinion and dissatisfactions. For centuries, Catholics had been calling for a return to the more simple religion of earlier Christianity, for the laity having more influence within the Church and for appointment to the higher clergy being more of a matter wisdom and morality than class and wealth. Some in the Church still believed that good Christians should live simply, as they believed Jesus and his disciples had lived. Also of concern was the low standard of ordination into the priesthood. People found fault with priests for drinking, gambling and living with concubines. Some complained also about priests and monks being exempt from taxation and civil responsibilities.
By the 1500s, discontent within the Church had turned much of Christendom into an arena of debate, and much of the debate was bitter and with name calling, while influencing the debate was the rise of humanism. Europe was entering a new age of vanishing tales of chivalry replaced by memoirs and essays. It was the time of the famous Roman Catholic named Desiderius Erasmus, from . Erasmus denounced what he called absurd superstitions, and he declared almost all Christians enslaved by blindness and ignorance. But Popes consulted with him, and he was offered bishoprics. Erasmus believed that many common people had the capacity to understand Christianity as well as did priests. He doubted the need of the intercession of priests, and he hoped for more education for common people. He advocated making the scriptures available to people outside the clergy by translations from Latin into local languages. He saw the Roman Catholic Church as a necessary source of idealism and as an educational institution that stood above secular government and politics.
Dutch scholar named Erasmus, who wasn't even a Protestant. This monk-turned-writer focused his sarcastic gaze on the corrupt excesses of the late Medieval church. He challenged Christians to get back to the first-century faith. He produced new versions of the New Testament in the hopes that everyone would be able to read it. Erasmus never left the Roman Catholic Church, but the Reformation might never have happened without him.
Erasmus (c. 1469-1536)
New ideas swirled through Europe in the early 1500s. The intrepid wit of Erasmus paved the way for many, like Luther, to attack church practices. But Luther himself didn't escape the scholar's critique. When monks accused him of "laying the egg that Luther hatched," Erasmus replied that he had expected "quite another kind of bird." A man of moderation, Erasmus, hoping to see change from within, stayed with the church that had nurtured him.
Born Geert Geertsen in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Erasmus studied with a loosely structured group of church scholars known as the Brethren of the Common Life. He joined the Augustinian order and was ordained a priest at age 23. But monastic life didn't suit him, and after three years he left the monastery to study in Paris. Later he traveled extensively through France, Belgium, and England. Erasmus spent profitable time at both Cambridge and Oxford, staying in the home of the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More (the subject of the classic film A Man for All Seasons), who became a great friend. "It was he [More] who pushed me to write The Praise of Folly," Erasmus said of his best-known literary work.
The Praise of Folly comically critiqued various abuses in the world and in the church. It found an enthusiastic audience among those who were similarly concerned about church excesses. Some of these became Reformers; others sought to influence the Church from within. Erasmus made some enemies with his writing, but the satire painted with such a broad brush, and with such clever wit, that the effect was not mean-spirited. Many were led to laugh at themselves.
Eventually settling in Basel, Switzerland, Erasmus continued his scholarship and social commentary. While he advocated the study of ancient pre-Christian writers, he disapproved of those who studied only those classics and ignored Christian traditions. He regularly cited the New Testament in his writings. If only Christians could get back to that level of simplicity, he felt, the church would be better off. Though he read Luther and admired his early works, he could not go along with Luther on doctrinal changes. But Erasmus could be bitterly satirical about the monastic life of his times and longed to see the correction of abuses in church discipline, the removal of popular forms of devotion that bordered on superstition, and a more open approach to intellectual studies. But that was as far as he would go.
An especially sensitive issue was the doctrine of the Eucharist. He wrote; "I agree . . . that it would be simpler to say that Christ is present in the Sacrament and leave the matter to God," but he added, "The Christian, lest he fall into a labyrinth, should not depart from the authority of the councils and the consensus of all the churches throughout the ages."
In Other Words
Another major contribution of this multi-faceted churchman was his translation of the New Testament. The church had been using Jerome's Latin translation, the Vulgate, for a millennium. Though he was quite a fan of Jerome, Erasmus felt there was room for improvement. In the interest of recovering the spirit of the first-century church, he sought the best Greek manuscripts available to produce a state-of-the-art Greek text and then translated this into Latin.
This was typical of the moderation of this thinker. It was still a Latin translation, and so it would be read mostly by scholars and priests, but it was a clear improvement on the creaky Jerome text, stylistically elegant and truer to the original Greek.
The new translation was published in 1516 by printer John Froben, and Erasmus shrewdly dedicated the work to Pope Leo X. The pope's approval appeared in 1518.
Luther loved the new version, as did other Reformers. In it, some found the inspiration to work on other translations into their own languages. And Erasmus' work on the Greek text became the basis of the great textus receptus, used for the King James Bible of 1611.
In the preface to his new version of the Scriptures, Erasmus wrote, Would that these were translated into each and every language so that they might be read and understood not only by Scots and Irishmen but by Turks and Saracens. . . . Would that the farmer might sing snatches of Scripture at his plough and that the weaver might hum phrases of Scripture to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveler might lighten with stories from Scripture the weariness of his journey.
Erasmus made a huge splash with the 1509 publication of The Praise of Folly. Bold and biblical, this book satirized the world of that day. Erasmus presented it as an oration by Folly herself, praising the various humans that advanced the cause of foolishness on earth. But no one, you might say, ever made a sacrifice to Folly or built me a Temple. . . .Yet why would I need incense, wafers, a goat, or a sow when all people offer me worship everywhere. . . . They embrace me in their minds, express me in their manners, and represent me in their lives.
This work exposed the vanity of every facet of life, from art and philosophy to the church itself. Erasmus mocked the scholars who determined that "it's a lesser crime to kill a thousand men than to set a stitch on a poor man's shoe on the Sabbath day," adding that "these most subtle subtleties are rendered even more subtle by the various methods of so many Schoolmen, that one might sooner wind his way out of a labyrinth than out of their entanglements."
Erasmus didn't even let bishops and popes off the hook, but sarcastically called them back to the example of Christ. To work miracles, he wrote, is old and antiquated, and not in fashion now; to instruct the people, troublesome; to interpret the Scripture, pedantic; to pray, a sign that one has little else to do; to shed tears, silly and womanish; to be poor, base; to be vanquished, dishonorable and unbecoming to one who scarcely allows even kings to kiss his slipper; and lastly, to die, uncouth; and to be stretched on a cross, infamous.
The REFORMATION was a time of reform and division in the church. It was a complex phenomenon. The primary impulses behind it were religious, but religious matters became bound up with political and economic maters. As with all major cultural movements, it is difficult to say precisely when the Reformation began or when it ended or if, in fact, it has ever ended. And actually there were two reformations: the Protestant and the Roman Catholic. The former was carried out in defiance of papal authority and led to separate Christian denominations, each with its own organization and doctrines. The latter was was carried out with papal approval and was limited to correcting abuses and led to a reinvigoration of Catholic spiritual life. Both resulted in the Bible playing a role in lay people’s lives unanticipated during the Middle Ages.
Roman Catholics saw their Church as more than a collection of Christians. They saw the Church as divine as well as human, as a community united with Christ and the grace of God. They saw their Church as following the authority that Christ had given to the Bishop of Rome, the Church as built upon the tomb of Peter, and as such they believed there could be only one Christian Church.
The Roman Catholic Church had troubled itself to maintain an identity in belief, purging from its ranks those it had deemed mistaken in their opinions about the nature of Christ, the nature of property and the authority of the Church, among other views, such as those of the Gnostics, Donatists and the Pelagians. But within the Church remained a diversity of opinion and dissatisfactions. For centuries, Catholics had been calling for a return to the more simple religion of earlier Christianity, for the laity having more influence within the Church and for appointment to the higher clergy being more of a matter wisdom and morality than class and wealth. Some in the Church still believed that good Christians should live simply, as they believed Jesus and his disciples had lived. Also of concern was the low standard of ordination into the priesthood. People found fault with priests for drinking, gambling and living with concubines. Some complained also about priests and monks being exempt from taxation and civil responsibilities.
By the 1500s, discontent within the Church had turned much of Christendom into an arena of debate, and much of the debate was bitter and with name calling, while influencing the debate was the rise of humanism. Europe was entering a new age of vanishing tales of chivalry replaced by memoirs and essays. It was the time of the famous Roman Catholic named Desiderius Erasmus, from . Erasmus denounced what he called absurd superstitions, and he declared almost all Christians enslaved by blindness and ignorance. But Popes consulted with him, and he was offered bishoprics. Erasmus believed that many common people had the capacity to understand Christianity as well as did priests. He doubted the need of the intercession of priests, and he hoped for more education for common people. He advocated making the scriptures available to people outside the clergy by translations from Latin into local languages. He saw the Roman Catholic Church as a necessary source of idealism and as an educational institution that stood above secular government and politics.
