Not simply of having a literate and educated clergy, but also a laity-ordinary Christians who understood their faith and what it meant to them. Studying church history-studying the Reformation-is like being at a Bible study with a great company of people who thought about those questions that are bothering you. Whereas, by his own account, he had warned his superiors in 2006 to intervene in the McCarrick case, before the scandal had broken out in the press, he now proclaims publicly that [t]he faithful have every right to know who knew, and who covered up his grave misdeeds.. As Erasmus realized, such confidential encounters made fertile ground for improper relations. The Reformation (alternatively named the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation) was a major movement within Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church and in particular to papal authority, arising from what were perceived to be errors, abuses, and discrepancies by the Catholic Church. vol. Wanting their people to share in this. It is the language of an institution that calls for contrition and moral turnaround, but also offers mercy. As we seek to confront the future, thats a model we can rediscover. If word got out through the grapevine, a priest could gain the reputation of a predator and be avoided. I dont want you to gain the impression that we are dealing with a whole series of problems and that the Reformation simply came along as a solution to those problems. We want to know that our loved ones are safely in the arms of God. So the clergy began to discover a role, a role based on their understanding of what the Gospel was all about and their passionate concern to communicate this to their people. One of the great reasons for studying the Reformation is that you can bring answers-good answers-to questions people are really asking. Because God forgave your sins, you would express your gratitude to God by, for example, endowing a church or giving money to charity, or something like that. In Spain, Cardinal Jimnez undertook the reform of the clergy, restoring the observance of celibacy and other clerical and monastic rules of behaviour. But very often there was no real sense of personal commitment or personal appropriation of the Gospel. In earlier centuries, most lay people partook in this sacrament mainly during the annual cycle of Lenten reconciliations in preparation for Easter. 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. The Roman Catholic Church had lost the gospel in its wrongful adoration (literally) of the sacraments, and so the Reformers regained the gospel by sidelining the sacraments. So there is a real need to rediscover how helpful studying the past-studying the Reformation-can be. Solicitation cases formed an exception: convicted confessors were exposed, at most, only to a select group of fellow priests. Henry Charles Lea,A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols. You only have to look at the late Middle Ages to see how little the laity were valued. The Roman Catholic Church was a very powerful institution in the West that was involved in every aspect of people's lives from birth to death. It is about this glorious knowledge that our sins have been forgiven through the Gospel. ' I think there is a central them of the Reformation. And there is a real realization that there was a need to bring this into the sixteenth century, that the medieval church was lacking something. The Reformers were saying, No, go back to Scripture, read it for yourself and ask, Where did these ideas come from? They were there to open the Word of God for their people, to help their people to discover what they had already discovered. It is a resource that you and I can access as we try to face the tasks for todays church.. 74 likes, 8 comments - Mark Whitwell Heart Of Yoga (@markwhitwell) on Instagram: "The Heart of Yoga Podcast new episode. Protestant Preaching after the Age of Graham, The People's Pope and the Changing Face of Catholicism, Secrecy and Celibacy: The Catholic Church and Sexual Abuse, Migration and Mobility: Yesterday and Today, Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future, The Past and Future of the Global War on Drugs (Prologued, Season 2, Finale), Copernicus, Galileo, and the Catholic Church. Many saw little choice but to indulge such advances, at least for some time, or even to establish long-term relations. They brought home to people that Christianity made sense, that it could be trusted. Is this really biblical? As the reformers began to open Scripture for their people, they began to rediscover that a lot of things in the late medieval church could not be justified on the basis of Scripture at all. IV, chapter 6. The clergy had certain privileges. Pressing this point further, they denounced justification by faith alone and other cherished Protestant teachings as novelties without grounding in authentic church tradition. Some priests became critics themselves. Back in my hometown of Belfast, in Northern Ireland, is a house owned by my grandparents. Theres no need to ask those hard questions. Fears of the plague and the menace of an attack by armed Protestant forces induced Pope Paul III to accept the council's transfer to Bologna in February 1548. With the Reformation came a major change that I call the rediscovery of the laity. One of the great ideas of the Reformation is to unpack the enormous riches of Scripture and to savor them as we realize just how much it means. the main abuses in the church were: (i) Nepotism: Many relations of nobles, cardinals and bishops were appointed to church offices or positions. Churches That Abuse, first published in 1992, is a best-selling Christian apologetic book written by sociologist Ronald M. Enroth. So one of the reasons we look at the Reformation is to rediscover the answers to questions that are still being asked, and being able to rejoice in those answers. The sale of indulgences; 2. Despite, or because of, the rampant abuses of the hierarchy, there were efforts to reform the church. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari(Turin, 1996). Describe at least three effects of the Counter-Reformation. That person would have to be paid. In business terms, proper indulgence refers to genuine compensatory actions to right past wrongs and a real intent to prevent future wrongs. With the Reformation this changed in a very big way. One of the great themes of the Reformation is that you can go to Scripture directly, read it, and be nourished by the word of God. What Is the Most Widely Practiced Religion in the World. A leading figure of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the former cardinal and archbishop of Washington, Theodore E. McCarrick, had a long and widely rumored history of misconduct against priests, seminarians, and several minors. Juan Antonio Alejandre,El veneno de Dios. The papacys reputation had been damaged by the political and military machinations of popes such as Julius, and the hierarchys greed and corruption were demonstrated by Pope Leo Xs agreement (1514) to allow the sale of indulgences in the diocese of Mainz. Try to explain to others what it is about the Gospel that is so attractive to us in the full knowledge that it could be attractive to them as well. It was an important issue for them. Christianity was defined in terms of what you did. But the effective enforcement and outcomes of such punishments remain unclear. Resigned 6/98 when accused of molesting a boy who reported the abuse to a church official. Did intercourse involve the wrong vessel? Stories of predatory priests have emerged around the world. Not every Christian believer could read. This area of education was a great weakness in the late medieval church, which the Reformation was able to address, and one that we too need to rediscover. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, a different mode of confession gained ground among the devout, particularly among women. Wednesday, March 1, 1995 It was a real move towards rediscovering the importance of Scripture for the church. But they arent arrogant, theyre just trusting. In part, the reason was technological. The book documents cases of churches and other organizations said to be spiritually abusive and the effects these groups have had on their members. Stephen Haliczer,Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned(New York, 1996). Nor was this concern limited to churchmen: families and governments cared as much or more about the honor of wives and daughters. The same thing was happening elsewhere. 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. On this date in 1415, the Czech religious reformer Jan Hus (in English, John Hus or Huss), condemned as a heretic against the doctrines of the Catholic Church, was burned at the stake. Each side, both Catholics and Protestants, were often absolutely certain that they were in the right and that the other side was doing the devil's work. Violence. When Paul wrote that "the love of money is the root of all evil" ( 1 Timothy 6:10 ), he was making a profound observation that was as valid in his time as in ours. Very often Christians are told that they are arrogant for thinking that their sins really are forgiven. But deeper down was something much more worrisome: that all the clergy needed to do was tend to the pastoral needs of their flock and not worry about anything else. We dont have full answers to such questions. Despite, or because of, the rampant abuses of the hierarchy, there were efforts to reform the church. These bitter recriminations, while still couched in traditional rhetoric, signal better than anything else how the sexual abuse crisis has brought about a marked departure from ingrained institutional habits in the church hierarchy. 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 byand identified withan external juridical institution that laid claim to the obedience due to God himself. Its stated aim was only to put an end to the scandals of the petty and the insinuations of the vicious.. How often, for instance, did convicted priests return to pastoral care? By going back to Scripture and rediscovering apostolic preaching, by rediscovering the real dynamism of the early church, we bring our church back to life by giving it the same mission, the same sense of encouragement that we find in the early church. This admission, even as it confirms old habits, may also be read as a sign that cracks have appeared in an entrenched institutional culture. Echoing the Letter of James (2:26) that faith without works is also dead, they warned that the doctrine of faith alone, without works as taught by Luther would sever the moral nerve and remove all incentive for holy living. You and I still ask those questions, and we want good answers. Your father or your mother has died and you may be wondering if they made it to heaven. There was no real sense of mission or evangelism. That fundamental trait created the conditions in which solicitation could occur and which made it hard to address. He argues that the way the Church has responded to these outrages has its roots 500 years ago when the Catholic Church faced its first major crisis of sexual abuse. 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. The only way we can do this is by paying money to this priest to say certain prayers. So again there was this deep unease in the late medieval church about the quality of its ministers and the integrity of the church. It was some of these same abuses that prompted German reformist Martin Luther to write his 95 Theses. The Catholic Church's measures to counteract the spread of Protestantism (the Counterreformation and Catholic Reformation) were embodied by the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which issued new statements of Catholic orthodoxy on issues such as salvation, scripture and the sacraments, and laid foundations for new institutions like the Office of . Yet in the late Middle Ages, people werent certain how to answer that question at all. At one point in another writing he says, It is not reading and understanding and speculating that makes a theologian, but living and dying and being damned. He means that the Gospel is about forgiveness. What proportion of sexual offenses by the clergy led to denunciations? And rather than promoting privacy (as is sometimes thought), the confessional was originally designed to be open on all sides and installed in a public place to facilitate social control by watchful eyes. They werent sure why they believed it, either. The Reformation gives us some bearings, some landmarks, some ideas about how to address todays issues, using the resources, the methods, and above all, the inspiration that comes from the past. Sometimes they appealed to their honor to get the confessor to back down; at other times, they reduced the frequency of their confessions. Well, theyll say, its about my experience of Godand it is. The octopus has long been used in anti-Catholic cartoons to depict the Roman Catholic Church, such as in this 1913 depiction of the church and pope as a malevolent octopus. View Reformation.docx from HIST 12 at North Allegheny Shs. What to do with this information? All this may seem ancient history now. You can see this working at two different levels. The external forum was the legal sphere that handled offenses under the jurisdiction of church courts, including papal and episcopal courts and the Inquisition. Its direct origin lies in Spain in 1558, when a female penitent of Granada disclosed to a Jesuit that her confessor was harassing her. Heim makes the point that the Reformation brought with it a rediscovery of the truths of the Christian faith. One of those ways was financial. What neither heresy nor schism had been able to do beforedivide Western Christendom permanently and irreversiblywas done by a movement that confessed a loyalty to the orthodox creeds of Christendom and professed an abhorrence for schism. If you read Luther, you will discover that for him, reading the New Testament is like getting an insight into the days when faith came to life, insights to days when the church seems to have died. 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. The result is that the church of the period really lacked any sense of certainty about what they believed and why they believed it. An August 2018 grand jury report on clerical sex abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses gave a detailed, often graphic account of decades of criminal offenses against minors by Catholic priests. Last but not least, what happened to priests found guilty? Established in 1999, Catholic Truth is a lay-led apostolate, launched for the purpose of alerting Catholics to the deepening crisis in the Church, primarily as it affects Scotland. Last updated 2011-02-17. So there was financial corruption that made many people wonder if the church and their pastors really could be trusted. 2019 Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective Luther refused to recant his beliefs. An 1891 political cartoon of a Roman Catholic priest yelling at a woman, "Erin," representing Ireland. It is an important question. They knew very little about the Gospel. The late Middle Ages saw the church going through a period of real doctrinal confusion. Ordinary Christians came to have greater expectations of what the church ought to be doing. The Catholic Church had spoken out against a perceived abuse of music used in the mass before . While numerous cases are known, many questions remain. Here is one of the first areas I want to look at. Priests found guilty were typically condemned to moral censure, a life of prayer and penance, psychological treatment, or reassignment rather than criminal prosecution. An open air confessional from the Netherlands in 1740 (right). (ii) Simony: this was the buying and selling of church positions. There is a need for us to think through what we can do about those problems. In February 2019, Pope Francis spoke out against what he described as the sexual slavery that nuns all-too-frequently suffered at the hands of Catholic priests. I think the rediscovery of the laity is a vital aspect of the Reformation heritage. To be sure, the church fathers expressed concern about priests who dared tempt the chastity of women even during confession. But the subject required a cautious approach, in order not to reveal our shame. A draft proposal from the Councilthough never approvedrequired that all confessions of women take place in open, visible places.
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