Religious & Political Revolution: Protestant & Counter-Reformation in Europe, Appunti di Storia

Scarica Religious & Political Revolution: Protestant & Counter-Reformation in Europe e più Appunti in PDF di Storia solo su Docsity! Reformation and counter reformation Among the great events that marked the transition from the Middle Ages to a new era, great importance is attached to the Protestant Reformation, a movement of religious renewal that marked the whole of the 1500s and led to an irreversible rupture of Christian unity, taking away from the religious authority of the Church of Rome most of central-northern Europe. The reform had its symbolic beginning in 1517, the year in which the German monk Martin Luther made public his "95 theses" at the castle of Wittemberg, controversies against the Church of Rome. The triggering factor was the sale of indulgences (the remission of temporal punishment for sins) commissioned by Pope Leo X in order to raise money for the reconstruction of the church of St. Peter. The idea of reforming the Church, however, had long since consolidated roots. For over a century before Luther, voices had been raised that condemned the prevalence of worldly aspects over pastoral ones and preached a return to the ideals of poverty and purity that were the basis of the Gospel message. The English theologian John Wycliff and the Bohemian Jan Hus had been precursors in this, condemning every form of temporal power of the pope and condemning the wealth of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The preaching of Gerolamo Savonarola can also be inscribed in the same reforming will. The first cause was therefore dictated by purely religious reasons and can be summarized as follows: criticism of the enormous wealth and privileges of the Roman Church. Moral decadence of the Church due to: nepotism; luxury of the Roman curia; corruption of the clergy, which has been influenced by the emerging bourgeois lifestyle throughout Europe, worldliness. The political and social situation also favored the spread of Protestantism. The political social motive is recognizable in the claim of a German nationalistic spirit opposed to the Roman dominance: in other words the German peoples, not yet constituting a single national state, saw in Luther's thesis a way to affirm their own national, cultural and political identity, identity that involved the refusal to submit to the Church of Rome. Moreover, given that the church owned more than a fifth of German soil, this gave rise to the desire of the German princes and states to take possession of the huge assets belonging to the Catholic Church and to affirm their total autonomy from the emperor, considered the pope's representative. The Lutheran reform was inserted as a useful pretext in the struggle of the great feudalism against the central power of Charles V, who was profoundly Catholic and linked to the Pope. The reform in Germany assumed among the people the appearance of a rebellion of the oppressed classes against the privileged ones. The revolt of the peasants (1524-25), led by Thomas Münzer, was enormous, but was repressed by the great feudal princes with the support of Luther himself. The same defeat was suffered by the small nobles who rebelled against the great feudal lords. The empire of Charles V, in agreement with the papacy, opposed the reform, but without success. The hostilities between German empires and princes ended with the Peace of Augusta (1555) which affirmed the principle of "religious tolerance", albeit within the limits of the "cuius regio eius religio" (the religion of a nation's subjects must be that of their king). Church assets confiscated by princes or kings were no longer returned to the Roman church. The Reformation undoubtedly weakened the medieval empire and universalism, but did not favor the national monarchy in Germany (as in England and Holland). It was rather the feudal princes who benefited most. The Council of Trent was a decisive event in the history of the modern Catholic Church: through it Catholicism organically redefined its dogmatic at the same time condemned all the theories considered heretical, including in particular the Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anglicanism. This rigorous work of doctrinal arrangement and of revision was so profound and so far-reaching as to impress on the Catholic Church those permanent characteristics which they will accompany her for three centuries, at least until the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, convened from Pope John XXIII. The Council of Trent opened that historic era called the age of the Counter-Reformation, a period that went roughly from the second half of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. There the Counter-Reformation constituted the Catholic reaction to the Protestant Reformation. After the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church was no longer what it was before, as some of those negative phenomena that had marked the medieval Church disappeared or were reduced to a minimum. To deal with corruption and moral degradation of priests and bishops, seminars were established, schools that had to be compulsorily attended for becoming priests, so as to reduce the practice of nepotism. The Church gradually lost its character worldly and increasingly became a predominantly moral and spiritual power. Result of the Counter- Reformation the heretical phenomena were reduced to a minimum or disappeared and, in the countries characterized by a strong and profound Catholic tradition such as Italy or Spain, the repressive and controlling action was so effective and widespread that it prevented the spread of any form of Protestantism. The Counter Reformation coincided with a policy of cultural closure and of repression of all forms of dissent or free thought. All that did not respect the official directives were condemned and censored: Index of prohibited books was famous were the trials brought by the