As in the regions surveyed above, everyelse in Europe, the Catholic Church prevailed in much of the lives of the people. It has to be remembered, however, that the term "Roman Catholic" Church (which it in fact was, since they owe their spiritual allegiance to the pope in Rome), makes sense only in the context of the aftermath of the Reformation. Before then it was simply the Catholic Church or the Church (or 'Mother Church' even).
The Roman faith was already facing challenges everywhere in the pre-Reformation days, and not for a short while. In the early 14th Cent a French cardinal was elected the pope, Pope Clement V. Feeling he would be unsafe—as a Frenchman—in Rome, he moved his administration to Avignon, located in Provence, then a very much independent state. Administratively the move made a great deal of sense; it was much closer to the people the Church was meant to serve. But Clement V wa seen as subsevient to the French king. Worse happened: the papacy split when, first two, then three contending popes were elected and allegiance broke down between the popes and the feudal lords, and between the popes and the cardinals.
Further to the east, in Bohemia (today part of the Czech Republic) but long under German domination, the Catholic Church had already experience a breaking away which it could not control. Jan Hus, a professor in the University of Prague and rector of the Bethlehem Chapel in the City, and greatly influenced by the writings of the earlier English reformer, John Wycliffe, had led a "reformation" in that country before the Reformation. With the support of the majority of nobility, the Bohemian Church (though still retaining the Mass as part of their theology and worship) became independent of Rome, despite the attempts by the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to hunt down the Hussites and the burning of Hus at the stake.
In Rome the Renaissance was reaching its height of influence, and the popes were among the most important patrons, especially of the artists, with many of them, including Michelangelo (who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican) and Raphael, were often on commission to the popes. Politically powerful, and yearning to be more (though not for long), many of them cared far more for living an oppulent life than they cared about the flock. Corruption in the papal structure was at its worst, and everyone knew it. And under Pope Alexander VI (pope from 1492-1503), of the infamous Borgia family, "venality and corruption had assumed barogque proportions." He openly flaunting his his mistress, while prostituting his daughter from one nobel to another in his game of greed. It was well-known that the got elected because of his bribes. Even his greatest adminer, Machiavelli, admitted that he "never did anything else, nor thought about anything else, than to deceive men." His son, Cesare, was so notorious the father was afraid of him; Casare became the model for Machiavelli's The Prine. Pope Julius II, who followed Alexander, became known as the "warrior pope," and nothing needs to be said to explain why so. Calls for reforms in the Church were responded to—when they were responded to at all—more for show rather than substance; in fact, the Fifth Lateran Council, called to address many of the issues that had been raised, had ended just a few months before Luther nailed issued the 95-Theses. It came to nothing.
The only Catholic area that seemed to have made some progress towards any kind of spiritual renewal was in Spain, though it came with a dark side and at great human cost. In the century before the Reformation, many parts of the Iberian peninsula was still under Muslim control; their conquest of the Spanish peninsula had begun in the 8th Cent. But, Christians have been making slow but confident progress in regaining their territories. The final push came under the leadership of King Fernando of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia and his queen Isabella of Castile (they were married in 1574) when they recapture the last Islamic kingdom of Granada in 1492; the event was celebrated all over Europe. Jews, who had long established themselves there, and Muslims were then forced to either to convert to the Christian faith or to leave. Many left. Many more chose to convert and stay. A new problem then arose: to what extent were these converts (Jewish converso and Moorish moriscos) genuine believers? To what extent were they heretical? These qeustions were not really a matter of their religious orthodoxy. They simply provide an excuse for political gain, especially for Isabella, whose claim to the throne was challenged by other candidate. Under these circumstances, the royal couple got papal authority to institute what we now know as the Spanish Inquisition, a prolonged champaigne of torture and interrogations to root out dissidents notorious for its cruelty and injustice. Thousands died and more were were disenfrachised. Fear and terror ruled. Yet this dark side of the Spanish experience also produced a unique kind of spirituality that would produce men and women like Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), Teresa of Avila (1515-82)and St John of the Cross (1542-91), whose works continue to shape modern spirituality.
Almost never remembered today about Spain's contribution to the Reformation is the ambitious and potentially transformative project commissioned by Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo (1436-1517) to produce the first polyglot (multiligual) edition of the entire Bible that would grant users access to the original languages which had not seen the light of day since the Vulgate had been authorized for use in the Church in the 4th Cent (Latin had began to take over Greek in the Church by the middle of the 3rd Cent). With it, the Cardinal hoped—a very 'reformation' hope—that "the hitherto dormant study of Holy Scriptures may now at last begin to revive," and that students of the Bible may now "quench his thirst at the very fountainhead of the water that flow unto life everlasting and not have to content himself with rivulets alone." Known as the Complutensian Polyglot, it consisted of the Latin Vulgate in parallel columns with the Hebrew and Greek texts and another column of new Latin interpretations. This project is today 'almost never remembered today' because Erasmus published on 1 March 1516 his Greek NT, a year before the last volume of the work was completed (15 July 1517; the entire work was published 28 March, 1522), which gave him the steal for the credit for having published the first Greek NT. On the significance of the Greek Bible for the Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch says, "If there is any one explanation why the Latin West experienced a Reformation and the Greek-speaking lands to the east did not, it lies in this experience of listening to a new voice in the New Testament text."
If Spain could celebrate her victory over the Muslims, the eastern side of the continent faced an opposite fortunes. In 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottomans and ended a millenium of Byzantine Christian rule. As the Reformation unfolded in the north, the Ottomans would continue to threaten eastern Europe (Click here for a quick overview). We shall have course as we soiree through this timeline to look at specific events, but the "fear which this Islam aggression engendered in Europe was an essential background to the Reformation, convincing many on both sides that God's anger was poised to strike down the Christian world, and so making it all the more essential to please God by affirming the right form of Christian belief against other Christians. It is impossible to understand the mood of sixteenth-century Europe without bearing in mind the deep anxiety inspired by the Ottoman Empire" (Dermaid MacCulloch).
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