The Babylonian captivity
From 1295 there was a faceoff between the Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface. At the death of Boniface in 1305, a French puppet of Philip became the Pope. He moved the papacy to France by settling in Avignon.
The long residence of the Pope at Avignon from 1309-1377 was called the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy. This face off went a long way to demystify the papacy.
The papal schism
The papal schism also called the great schism took place from1378-1417.
This is the period during which each of two or three Popes simultaneously contended, to the great scandal of Christendom, that he was the only legitimate pontiff. Although the Great Schism was finally ended by the
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Council of Constance (1414-1418) the papacy had lost prestige, and for the next hundred years it lived in apprehension of attacks on its authority from radical conciliar theory, such as that which erupted at the Council of Basel.
Soon after this schism was healed, the attention of many was shifted to the appreciation of renaissance and humanism.
Renaissance and humanism
Renaissance is a French word meaning rebirth, re-awakening or rediscovery of something ancient. Perhaps one of the earlier factors that instigated the birth of Reformation was this re-awakening. It prepared the minds of people to come to the realisation that it is possible to break away from the yoke of illiteracy and serfdom. In some respects Renaissance gave birth to Humanism which was for all purposes a protest movement.
Humanists followed two paths: First, their recovery of classical, patristic, and biblical texts made them pioneers of philology and textual criticism.
Second, with their imaginative renewals of traditional forms such as historical writing, neo-Latin poetry and the dramatic dialogue Christian humanism prepared the climate and even set some agendas for the major reform movements. The motto of the Christian humanists was “back to the sources and recover the faith of the apostles”. By following these paths, the critical work of the humanists supplied criteria for the evaluation of the religious situation, and their recourse to scriptures and to the early church indicated alternatives to the state of affairs that they criticised. Targets of humanist included ecclesiastical corruption and immorality. One of the heroes of the renaissance era was Erasmus Rotterdam, popularly known as the prince of Humanists.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69–1536), the most famous and important of the Christian humanists, used his vast learning and his satiric pen to question the practices of the church. He stressed a focus on the Bible and rejected much medieval superstition. Erasmus sought to show how humanism and the new philology, aided by the new printing press, could be used as forces for Christian renewal within the church. Erasmus made his impact doubly felt by his editing the printed Greek New Testament in the year 1516. He made his translation directly from the Greek instead of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. He revealed many mis-translations. For example, he revealed that where John the Baptist had said “repent” the Vulgate had “do penance”. He argued that the words were not the same. Erasmus also taught that salvation was by grace and not by works. He has been described as “laying the egg that hatched Luther”.
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Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) in Italy used philology and historical inquiry to expose a number of forgeries, including the Donation of Constantine, which purportedly granted control over the Western Roman Empire to the pope. In Germany, Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) studied Greek and Hebrew, the biblical languages, and was involved in an international controversy that pitted intellectual freedom against ecclesiastical authority.
Printing press
The invention of the movable print in the second half of the 1400s helped immeasurably to transform the religious, academic and social world.
Earlier on the Bible was neither easy to acquire or get one hands on especially by common people because of the high cost of production and its scarceness. The invention however made it possible to produce the Bible and other literature circulated by the humanists and the reformers. The press also helped in the translation of these literatures into various European languages. Some of the reformers, Luther in particular, made judicious use of the movable type printing press which gave his writings an extensive audience.
Corruption and immorality
This decadence led to Anticlericalism and polemics against the church.
Criticisms were directed against abuses by the papacy, the clergy, monks and nuns. The pious, for example, were repulsed by: (i) Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), who performed marriage ceremonies for his own illegitimate children in the Vatican, and (ii) Rodrigo Borgia who took Christendom into the century of reformation as Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503). He bribed his way to the throne of St. Peter. At 61 he had a 19 year old girl friend and had fathered eight children by three women by the time he became Pope.
The public was also increasingly aware of and angered by extravagant papal projects — patronage of art and architecture, wars of conquest — for which funds were exacted from the faithful. Much top-level clergy were guilty of absenteeism, pluralism and simony (the practice of buying and selling ecclesiastical positions). The reformers also regarded the Catholicism of ordinary people as needing reform. Such practices as pilgrims visiting shrines and purchasing of indulgences led to the exploitation of simple people by a church that was, in effect, offering salvation for sale.
Church councils
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The Council were not all accorded legitimacy by the papacy, which feared that its own authority would be called into question by them. As expected, Ecclesiastical reforms “in head and members” was discussed at a succession of Church councils from the Council of Constance to the 5th Lateran Council in Rome. They advertised the abuses of pluralism, simony, non-residence, and concubinage within the Church, abuses that the Protestant reformers would later exaggerate. These were failings that Europe had lived with for over a century before the Reformation.
Incidentally, the church councils failed in some areas. Some of the bishops who sat in the council were found not to be above board after all, because some of them profited in ecclesiastical corruption.
Nationalism
The world of the late medieval Catholic Church from which the 16th-century reformers emerged was a complex one. Over the centuries, the church, particularly the office of the papacy, had become deeply involved in the political life of Western Europe. Eventually, the Popes, who had long intervened in European political affairs, faced setbacks when European monarchs acquired new power and asserted it against both the papacy and the local clergy. With time, some princes began to challenge the papacy’s claims to tax and judge their subjects as well as its rights to appoint senior ecclesiastical posts in their domains. In some countries, like England, these rights were unilaterally restricted by legislation. The statutes of Mortmain (1279), Provisors (1351), and Praemunire (1393) significantly reduced the potential of the Church as a landowner, its rights to appoint to ecclesiastical offices, and its rights to exercise judicial authority without appeal in its courts. Elsewhere, however, the papacy recognised the danger and negotiated a concordat, typified by the agreement between Pope Leo X and Francis I of France at Bologna in 1516.
4.0 CONCLUSION
As you would have realised in this unit long before the fire of reformation was lit by Luther, it was evident the church was in need of reformation.
Many longed for it but for some reasons strong movement which could stand against the papacy had to wait till the sixteenth century. However it was clear that some people were beginning to be more interested in the results of the renaissance and humanism than in the homilies on penance, pilgrimages and indulgences. The reformation had to wait for Luther who is widely considered to the initiator of the revolution in the Roman Catholic Church.
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5.0 SUMMARY
The following are the major points you have learnt in this unit:
Some people like John Huss lived before the Reformation and were critical of the church.
Some of these pre-reformers were killed by the Catholic Church for their beliefs.
The factors leading to the Reformation include the Babylonian Captivity, the Great Schism, Renaissance and Humanisim and the invention of the Printing Press among others.
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
1. Evaluate the role of the pre-reformers in the Reformation.
2. Explain the factors that led to the Reformation.
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READING
Bowker, J. (Ed.). (1997). The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cameron, E. (1991). The European Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chaunu, P. ( Ed.). (1989). The Reformation. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, Dowley, T. (Ed.) (1996). Lion handbook, The History of Christianity
Singapore. Lion Publishing Plc.
Gonzalez, J. L. (1985). The Story of the Church, The Reformation to the Present. New York: HarperCollins.
Greengrass, M. (1998). The Longman Companion to the European Reformation. c.1500–1618 London: Longman.
Hillerbrand, H. J. (Ed.). (1996). The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Reformation. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Houghton, S.M. Sketches from Church History. (2001). Great Britain. The Barth Press.
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McGrath, A. E. (2003). Christian Theology: An Introduction, Malden &
Berlin: Blackwell.
Pettergree, A. (Ed.). (1992). The Early Reformation in Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Scribner, R. W. (1981). For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stephen, T. (2005). A Short History of Christianity. Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans.
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