Questions on the Reformation

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Persecutions of Catholics by Protestants, Reformation Era · Φιλολoγικά/Philologica: Questions on the Reformation

I answered one on quora, was prompted to answer another one, for both I looked at "related questions" ...

What do Catholics think about Protestants?

The Catholic Church teaches that Protestantism is wrong, in each case when they actively oppose some of the anathemas of the council of Trent, and some other later or earlier definitions.

The Catholic Church also teaches that the Protestant communities born from the Reformation, or later on from this first generation of Protestant communities are lacking in Church structure, generally lack valid bishops, priests, confirmations, eucharists, absolutions and extreme unctions.

There are Catholics who agree on this Church teaching, and I do. There are Catholics who go beyond it and accuse every Protestant irrespectively of community of every error any Protestant embraced, I do not. And there are Catholics who disagree, which I also do not.

One more thing. Some of the Church teachings on my view would be targetting mainly Mainstream European Liberal Protestantism, for instance Gregory XVI saying they are not Christian. Partly because US was geographically marginal, while in any European country, Revivalism was marginal, and on top of that the Revivalism there was, Pietism, had an ugly Anti-Intellectual slant. On my view it has some significance that this was before both Asuza Street and John C Whitcomb & Henry M Morris.

What books were discarded by Catholics during the reformation process and why did Protestants not include them in their own Bible(s)?

Catholics didn't discard books, it was Protestants who discarded books, and book parts. Some discarded them from full canonicity, but included them in Bibles, some even banned them from the Bibles.

Why didn't the Catholic and Protestant churches reunite after the Protestant Reformation?

Because the Protestant Reformation was how the Protestant Churches split from the Catholic Church. In visible assymetry.

Let me clarify the last point. In 1054, Michael Caerularius and the legate of Pope St. Leo IX excommunicated each other. Both parties said they were just staying in the Church they had previously been in, and that the other party was guilty of leaving it. The symmetry is not true, one of the parties is wrong, but the assymetry was not as visible and as obvious.

In 1522, Martin Luther was excommunicated by the Pope. He did not pretend to pronounce an excommunication back. He pretended to consider the Pope as Antichrist, and this not simply for the then Pope, Leo X, but for all recent Popes, way back, as long as there were indulgences, as long as there were monastic vows, and so on.

He also pretended he had been previously wrong, by being Roman Catholic, and had "woken up" ... so Leo X, like both parties in 1054, said he was continuing the faith and Church he had been born into, and Luther did not say that. Visible assymetry. Or if he said so in a subtle way, it was by pretending there were factions agreeing with himself (on each issue? on all issues? he wasn't clear) in times where official Church teaching was "wrong" ...

Lutherans sometimes believe that Luther was pretty wrong on some, but because of this or that detail, one should still hold to Lutheranism. A more common opinion among Lutherans is wanting to stay clear of Catholic dogmatism ... avoiding a Church which doesn't encourage a totally free enquiry.

Some other types of Protestant will be more likely to shout out "unbiblical" about this or that Marian doctrine or this or that practise. That's their rationale for not becoming Catholic.*

The Catholics' rationale for not becoming Protestant (except some in the Vatican II connexion seem to have subreptitiously or not so subreptitiously embarked on that road**) is, as above, the result of the Reformation was, in the countries that went through that evil process and in the communities in other countries that resulted from it, a maimed Church with an adulterated or in some cases at best just very incomplete doctrine.

What led to the split between Protestants and Catholics? Why do some Protestants still identify as Catholics?

I would say that lots of the reasons for the split was Protestants being more woke about how to re-read things in the light of recent discoveries about Ancient Roman society.

And the reason why many Protestants at the time tried to claim the title Catholic and pretend that the actual Catholics were "Papists" was, they hoped back in the 1520's and 1530's that their discoveries would hold sway over all of the Catholic Church. They were wrong.

Was Protestantism more secular or fundamental during the time of its conception than the Catholic Church was at that time?

In the Reformation period, Protestantism prefigured modern Secularism in many ways, while the Catholic Church were more like Fundamentalists at least in so far as they believed more miraculous things and followed more rules.

Was protestantism [a] more secular movement during the time of it's conception?

Arguably, yes. As said, the Reformation was inspired by the discoveries about Ancient Rome, parts of which were about secularist views. In 1527 Gustav Wasa supported it because he wanted to secularise Church property, and in 1534, while Henry VIII didn't quite want to secularise marriage like Luther had done, in defiance of Mark 10:6, he found the Fundamentalist views on Christian marriage by Pope Clement VII a bit too irksome.

Why didn't protestants split from the Catholic church around 350 A.D. instead of 1523?

If Protestantism is what Protestants sometimes claim, a very good question.

If the original Christians were Protestants, as Protestants claim, at the time when they claim the Catholic Church departed from original Christianity, there should have been not just a verbal protest, but dissent from that apostasy, as they presume it was.

Some Protestants have pretended this actually happened, and have identified any degree of dissent from and marginality within the Catholic Church over the centuries as a continuing Protestant Church, under different names. Obviously, such a Protestantism, if it had been one, would have been more like modern Evangelicals than like the daughters of the Reformation in terms of structure, namely lacking a firm organisation and a visible undisputable continuity.

What changes in the Catholic Church prompted the Protestant Reformation?

Let's see ... excommunicating Luther? Wait, Luther was already involved.

Some Protestants have pretended to make a list of "changes" that the Catholic Church implemented over several different centuries, and at the Reformation it was time (somehow than rather than 100 years earlier or later) for faithful Christians to jump ship from this ever changing ... well, the problem is, they have a problem proving the Catholic doctrines they attack were actually changes. Their methodology is faulty. They will take "we don't think we can find it in the Bible and we don't think very early Church fathers mentioned this" (a sometimes very subjective impression) as a guarantee of "therefore, this is a new thing, a change, on part of the Catholics" ... I have lampooned their methodology in my story about the Mexican in Edinburgh. The letters the Mexican had received hadn't mentioned kilts or whisky or haggis, so, the Mexican when arriving in Edinburgh imagines his host is gradually going mad.***

When did the Catholic Church finally accept the split between Catholicism and Protestantism?

What do you mean by "finally accept the split"? If you mean accept that there are people who are outside the Catholic Church and are baptised and are heretics, and those heresies are heresies of Protestantism, as soon as the heresies were there and She excommunictated heretics or anathematised heresies.

If you mean accept the split is final, well, we haven't. We still pray for the conversion of heretics.

If you mean accept that people in some countries have a civil right to be Protestant, we consider that a question of politics, and in some countries it would very quickly have become impossible to enforce the Inquisition, chief and first of them Holy Roman Empire, also known as Germany.°

Has the Catholic Church doctrine changed over time?

Doctrines have become formal dogmas.

The Catholic Church is older than Protestantism and the oldest form of Christianity in Europe. When did the first Protestant sects start appearing like lockust?

That depends on what you count as Protestantism. Are Medieval Waldensians Protestant? Or aren't they?

Some would count them as a very different heresy (and they are closer to Evangelicals than to the Reformation, but the Evangelicals are also closer to Catholics than the Reformation is). Lewis XI of France refused to count them as heretics, contrary to the Pope finding they were so.

In the Reformation period, however, Waldensians came to join cause with Calvinists, and Hussites with Lutherans.

Hussites are closer to an actual precursor of the Reformation. Even so, not all agree on that either:

In contrast to the popular perception that Hus was a proto-Protestant, some Eastern Orthodox Christians have argued that his theology was far closer to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Jan Hus is considered a martyr saint in some jurisdictions of the Orthodox Church.[65] The Czechoslovak Hussite Church claims to trace its origin to Hus, to be "neo-Hussite", and contains mixed Eastern Orthodox and Protestant elements. Nowadays, he is considered a saint by the orthodox churches of Greece, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, and several others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hus

Either way, he was, like the Reformers, closer to Catholicism than early Waldensians were.

What were the causes of the Protestant Reformation?

The devil, the world and the flesh. It is possible that witches managed curses to make Germany less Catholic, it is certain that the Devil is anyway prone to promote religious errors. As men are not quite as eager to take them directly from him, his helps are the world (general society in Protestant countries from Reformation on) and the flesh (Protestantism pandering to evil lusts in different key promoters of Protestantism, greed and revenge for Gustav Wasa, lust after Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII, a dissatisfaction with fasting in many (including Luther) as well as with monasteries (including Luther).

What was the Catholic Counter Reformation?

• a Catholic revival, just as Fundies have had Fundie revivals against Darwinism and Rock'n'Roll
• reforms in Church administration
• efforts on the missionary and military side to bring back populations and territories to Catholicism.

When did the Protestant Reformation end?

One could say, when the last group of people leaving the Catholic Church had become some sort of Protestants. This would be the Mennonites.

After the foundation of the Mennonites, all later Protestant groups have left only Protestant groups, and sometimes clearly for the better, like when Bertil Gärtner°° left the Swedish Church and joined the Augustana synod of Missouri, I think, which is, apart from agreeing with Catholicism on refusing female ordination, also has some Catholic and Liturgy friendly sides. It's High Church. Both I and Father Caesarius Cavallin OSB and lots of others either come from Gärtner's Free Synod or from sympathisers with it (I never personally accessed it).

After the Reformation, who burned more "heretics", the Catholics or the Protestants?

If you only count executions for the religious crime heresy and the execution method burning (often after strangulation, so it was only a dead body that was burned), there is no doubt that it's Catholics.

This doesn't by any stretch mean that Protestants didn't execute Catholics or burn heretics. Servetus was burned in Calvin's Geneva, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman were burned in the England where James I had issued the King James Bible the previous year. However, they preferred executing Catholics over executing heretics. And most Catholics were executed as traitors to the King. Or, in the case of Elisabeth I, traitors to the Queen.

Cardinal David Beaton was however murdered in a kind of execution ritual, probably as persecutor of George Wishart, since after the killing, he was hanged from the castle window.

The peasants that were hung by Coligny during the Religious Wars in France were probably hung for being "rebellious peasants" (they tried to defend their church and priest) and in the case of the Pilgrimage of Grace executions and Dacke executions, the charges of peasant rebellion and treason to the king were combined (in both cases, there were churches to defend).

This is only counting actual executions. Far more recently, in Ireland, the Catholic peasants cultivated sufficient wheat to not starve to death, but their landlords refused them the wheat for survival, they wanted it for "business as usual" and told them "as per contract, your food is potatoes" (the crops of which had just failed). Lots of Anglo-Irish landlords were more than happy to see Catholics starve to death and replace them with Ulster Scots.

What will it take to get Protestants and Catholics to come together as one?

It will happen two ways.

• Protestant conversions.
• Catholic apostasies.

As said, some count Vatican II in that latter league.

Who started the Protestant Reformation?

Luther, Zwingli and Oecolampadius, unless you want to go on to kings or back to Hus.

Did any Catholics convert to Protestantism during the Reformation?

I wouldn't call it "convert" but that's where the Protestant populations come from. Gustav Wasa and Henry VIII were raised Catholics, so were all of the one's and most of the other's subjects. When they died, the populations had been wedged away from Rome.

Have Protestants been executed by Catholics?

Yes, and vice versa.

What do Catholics and Protestants have in common?

When neither is Modernist, what Lita Cosner in 2009 called "generic Christianity" (she's married since, so now she's Lita Sanders). That would include Young Earth Creationism or at a minimum the special creation of Adam before there were any other human people and within reasonable time for Genesis 3 to be transmitted from Adam to Moses.

Two last questions, I think they go together:

What are some reasons why some Protestants may not like Catholics?

Why are Protestants not Catholic?

For some the latter question is not a question of dislike, but of historical habit. This was also my case before I became a Catholic. Or Caesarius Cavallins. In some of these cases, you add a few principled objections, that are often somewhat superficial, sometimes misinformed.

When there is actual dislike, I'd count things like these as probable:

• descending from Hussites
• descending from Huguenots
• descending from Waldensians
• descending from Ulster Scots
• cultivating theological prejudice against Catholic doctrines like they (more or less) are
• inventing histories like those of Hislop or of Ruckman.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris, Georges Pompidou
IX LD after Pentecost
21.VII.2024

* Some of my answers to such points:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Matthew 6:7 and the Rosary
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2022/01/matthew-67-and-rosary.html

Great Bishop of Geneva! Jeremias 7 and 44 and the Duchess of Dorchester
http://greatbishopofgeneva.blogspot.com/2023/06/jeremias-7-and-44-and-duchess-of.html

New blog on the kid: Refutation of Dr. Steven Nemes
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2024/07/refutation-of-dr-stephen-nemes.html

** The accusation is debated.

*** For the full story, see here:

Great Bishop of Geneva! The Mexican in Edinburgh and Church History
https://greatbishopofgeneva.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-mexican-in-edinburgh-and-church.html

The greater part is actually discussing some of the accused "changes" ...

° The Inquisition is, therefore, not a thing we regard as an outrage against human dignity, still less as a persecution of real Christians (except in miscarriages of justice, St. Joan, some would also say Savonarola), but also not as a duty, something we have a duty to bring back. Conditions vary. In Babylon, Jews couldn't stone idolaters.

°° I liked Bertil Gärtner before I heard of Archbishop Lefebvre.