Posted on 12/04/2005 10:44:32 AM PST by markomalley
Translated by Cecily Hastings
CANTERBURY BOOKS
SHEED AND WARD INC.
840 BROADWAY
NEW YORK 3
NIHIL OBSTAT: MICHAEL P. NOONAN, S.M., CENSOR DEPUTATUS
IMPRIMATUR: + RICHARD J. CUSHING, ARCHBISHOP OF BOSTON
BOSTON, MARCH 22, 1951
This book is a large part of "One and Holy," a translation of "Una Sancta in katholischer Sicht," published by Patmos-Verlag, Dusseldorf.
MODERN historians are agreed that the roots of the Reformation reach far back into the high Middle Ages. The former monk of Cluny, Gregory VII, in his zeal for the liberty and reform of the Church, so interpreted the papal claims formulated by Augustine, Gregory the Great and Nicholas I that right up into the late Middle Ages they excited repeated resistance from the secular powers, shook the prestige of the Papal See and so prepared the way for Luther's Reformation. Gregory's "Dictatus Papae," in which he claimed for the Pope a direct authority even over secular affairs, with the right to depose unworthy princes and release their subjects from their oath of allegiance, inspired papal policy all through the Middle Ages.
This certainly added a corrosive bitterness and a devastating violence--a violence which did not stop short of the Papal See itself--to the conflicts which in any event would have been bitter enough between Regnum and Sacerdotium, the struggle between the Emperor Henry IV and the Pope over investitures, the battles with the Hohenstaufen, Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II, the conflicts with Philip the Fair of France and Ludwig of Bavaria. In Frederick II's Manifesto of 1230 Gregory IX is already branded as "the great Dragon and Antichrist of the last days". In 1301 Philip the Fair had Boniface VIII's Bull "Ausculta" publicly burned, and in 1303 had the Pope himself taken into custody as a "heretic, blasphemer and simoniac". Ludwig of Bavaria, supported by the Franciscan Spirituals, declared Pope John XXII a "formal heretic" in the Reichstag at Nuremberg in 1323.
The counter-attack of the "spiritual sword" was a series of excommunications, extending to the fourth degree of kindred, and years of interdict over whole countries. Germany alone was under interdict for twenty years, which meant that no public religious service could be held, no sacrament could be publicly administered, no bell could sound. The more often these ecclesiastical penalties were imposed, the blunter grew the spiritual sword. Inevitably the religion and morality of the people suffered serious damage, their sense of the Church was weakened, their sympathies were alienated from Christ's vicar. In due course there arose theologians amongst the Franciscan Spirituals, particularly their General Michael of Cesena, and William of Ockham, who in numerous writings questioned the founding by Christ of the Papacy as the Church knows it. And Marsilius of Padua in 1324 drew up a revolutionary programme entitled "Defensor Pacis," with a theory of Church and State which broke completely with existing ecclesiastical constitutions--"a significant prelude to the Reformation".1
Anti-papal feeling in Germany gained ground when, in 1314, the See of Rome moved to Avignon and was thus brought completely under French influence, and again when the financial burdens arising out of the double establishment at Rome and Avignon compelled the Pope to build up a system of taxation which, when expanded, weighed heavily both on spiritual and on economic life. The Camera Apostolica covered the whole Church with a net of taxation called the Census. Besides the revenues of the Papal State, this included pallium-money (the tax paid by newly appointed archbishops, bishops and abbots), spolia (the total assets of deceased prelates), the numerous administrative taxes and procurations for papal visitations; above all, the taxes on the revenues of vacant benefices, and annates (payment of the first year's income, or at least half of it, from all ecclesiastical appointments made by the Pope). Since Clement IV had claimed for the Pope unlimited authority over all ecclesiastical appointments in Christendom, the number of benefices reserved to the Pope had risen beyond computation. This aroused general opposition, especially when John XXII, in the course of his conflict with Ludwig of Bavaria, tried to fill all the vacant sees and offices in Germany with his own supporters.
In a similar spirit, but contrary to prevailing ecclesiastical law, the Papal Chancellery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries encouraged cumulus beneficiorum, i.e., the holding of many benefices by one person, and commendation, by which a benefice could be conferred simply for the income derived from it, without the holder's having any spiritual obligations to fulfil. Moreover, the Pope could promise to provide a person to a benefice even before its present occupant had actually died. The spirit of mammon had won such an ascendancy in the Curia that Pope Clement VII, for example, at the very height of the Reformation storm, was trying to make money from the sale of Cardinals' hats. It is against this background that we must understand the denunciation of the great Catholic preacher Geiler von Kaisersberg: "It is no longer the Holy Ghost who appoints the rulers of the Church, but the devil, and for money, for favour and by bribery of the Cardinals."2
It is easily understandable that the Curia's irresponsible policies in matters of taxation and appointments, together with the arbitrary occupation of ecclesiastical offices in Germany by foreigners, gravely limited orderly diocesan government, and that they aroused on all sides uncertainty in regard to the law and consequent discontent amounting to unrest and resistance. There were expensive lawsuits that had to be taken to the highest papal court, the Roman Rota. The German nation had its public grievances (gravamina nationis Germanicae). They were raised for the first time in 1456 by Archbishop Dietrich of Mainz at the Furstentag at Frankfurt. From then on they came up again and again in the Reichstag in the form in which the humanist Jakob Wimpfeling had consolidated them. But the abuses, so far from being removed, mounted from year to year as the papal requirements increased. The Pope's yearly income was greater than that of any German Emperor. John XXII, for instance, died leaving three-quarters of a million gold coins in his treasury: a figure so high, considering the values and conditions of the time, that it was bound to have a catastrophic effect on the believer when he pictured against this background the poor tent-maker Paul, or the still poorer fisherman Peter, coming with dusty sandals to Rome and bringing nothing with them but a deep and noble desire to preach Christ and to die for Christ.
If the fiscal policy of Avignon, where the Popes had their court for sixty-five years, seriously damaged the political and economic interests of German Christianity and so at least indirectly undermined the religious authority of the Pope, the great Schism of the West, from 1378 to 1417, threatened the prestige of the Papacy with final extinction.
In opposition to Urban VI, elected under pressure from the Roman people and disliked for various reasons, the French Cardinals in Avignon, the so-called "ultramontani", declaring the election unfree and invalid, raised a cousin of the French King to the papal chair as Clement VII, and Christendom was split into two camps. The division went right through the Christian body. Whole Orders, such as the Cistercians, Carthusians, Franciscans, Dominicans and Carmelites, fell into two halves. And since both Popes excommunicated each other and each other's supporters, the whole of Christendom was at least nominally excommunicated. The split did not come to an end with the deaths of the two Popes, for the Cardinals in Rome and Avignon all obstinately held their own papal elections. Matters grew worse when the Council of Pisa, in 1409, deposed both the Rome and the Avignon Popes as "notorious schismatics and heretics" and elected a third, Alexander V, who soon died, and was followed by John XXIII. Since both the deposed Popes obstinately maintained the validity of their elections this led, not to unity, but "from wicked duality to accursed triplicity". It was only in 1417, with the election of Martin V at the Council of Constance, that the Church could acknowledge one single head again in place of the three previously elected claimants.
It was inevitable that this schism of nearly forty years should shake the Church to her foundation; that radicals of the type of William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua should formulate a democratic theory of the Church, taking the plenitude of ecclesiastical authority to rest in the body of the faithful, not in a single head; that thoughtful theologians such as Peter d'Ailly and the distinguished John Gerson should construct the so-called conciliar theory, making the Pope subordinate to a General Council and giving the Church a parliamentary instead of a monarchical constitution. The idea of the Church received from the Fathers--in which there was but one Rock, one Keeper of the Keys, one Shepherd--began to weaken. Trust in the Father of Christendom was gone. In this sense, the experience of the Great Schism had impressed its decisive stamp on the minds of the faithful (Lortz).
Hard upon the dogmatic attack on papal authority inevitably conjured up by the Great Western Schism, there followed its moral collapse; the Renaissance Popes seem to have carried out in their own lives that cult of idolatrous humanism, demonic ambition and unrestrained sensuality which was in many ways bound up with the reawakening of the ancient ideal of manhood. The most sober ecclesiastical historians agree that the reigns of the Popes from Sixtus IV to Leo X "represent, from the religious and ecclesiastical point of view, the lowest level of the Papacy since the tenth and eleventh centuries" (Bihlmeyer, vol. ii, p. 477). The unbridled nepotism of Sixtus IV, which threatened to degrade the Papacy to "a dynastic heritage and the Patrimonium Petri to a petty Italian state" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 75), was followed by the fateful Bull against witches issued by Innocent VIII, a man of scandalous life. Worse still was the conduct of Alexander VI, stained with murder and impurity, and the demonic lust for blood and power of his son Cesare Borgia. Then came the burning of the Dominican Savonarola at Alexander's orders, the sheer political jugglery of Julius II, whose pontificate was dissipated in campaigns and wars, and finally the pleasure-loving worldliness of Leo X, who found the chase and the theatre more important than Martin Luther and his religious aspirations. The reputation of the Papacy was dragged not merely in the dust but in the mud. It is especially significant of the mentality of Leo X and of the Renaissance Popes in general, that in the solemn procession at his enthronement in the papal chair, the Most Blessed Sacrament was accompanied by statues of naked pagan gods, with the inscription "First Venus reigned [the age of Alexander VI], then Mars [in the time of Julius II], and now [under Leo X] Pallas Athene holds the sceptre" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 86).
The news of these scandalous doings, of course, soon crossed the Alps and stripped the last vestige of credit from the Mother of Christendom. The humanist circles at Erfurt and Florence took care of that, and so later did Ulrich von Hutten and the Dunkelmanner letters. Nor was Luther himself far behind them. Even when he was translating the Bible in 1522, before he had reached the hey-day of his hatred for Rome, he depicted the great Harlot of the Apocalypse as wearing the triple papal crown.
Let us turn now from the crying scandals surrounding the highest ecclesiastical authority to the abuses which marred the German Church and her spiritual life before Luther's advent.
It is certainly not true to say that the German Church which witnessed these scandals in the Roman government was herself ripe for destruction. The constant urge for reform and the tremendous response when Luther raised the alarm would be incomprehensible if Christian life had died out completely. We can even assert that German Christianity in the last phase of the Middle Ages was, in spite of all, more devout than it is to-day. For to-day a denunciation of abuses by a Martin Luther would cause no revolution. It was the age of the three Catherines, of Siena, Bologna and Genoa; the age when St. Bridget scourged the abuses of the Avignon Curia with the flames of her wrath. when Thomas a Kempis wrote his immortal "Imitation of Christ", when an unknown priest wrote the "Theologia Germanica" first published by Luther. It was the age in which German mysticism flowered in Eckhardt, Tauler and Suso, and the devotio moderna of the "Brothers of the Common Life" was aspiring to revivify, spiritualize and personalize benumbed Christianity.
The evidence grows greater and greater that even the common people of the Church, so long as they had not fallen a prey to sectarianism or been touched by radical humanism, were genuinely devoted to their Catholic faith despite all the abuses, and that daily life remained embedded in religious usage right up to the end of the Middle Ages. Even the simple people then knew how to distinguish between the office and the person's own piety and to apply our Lord's words to the gloomy contemporary scene: "All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do; but according to their works do ye not" (Matt. xxiii. 3).
During this same second half of the fifteenth century, there was an abundance of pious works ad remedium animae (for the welfare of souls): new churches were built, new parishes opened, new appointments of preachers made and charitable institutions set up. New religious and charitable brotherhoods were formed, and even new devotions introduced, such as the Angelus and the Way of the Cross. There was more catechetical and devotional literature than ever. Booklets and examinations of conscience for Confession, catechism tables, Bible story-books, rhymed Bibles, poor men's Bibles, appeared in the service of religious instruction. Before 1518 a translation of the Bible into High German had run into fourteen editions and one in Low German into four editions. All in all one can fairly speak of an increase of piety in this period. Yet it was seriously lacking in the inner spirit, in the living penetration of pious practices with the spirit of the Gospel. There was too much externalism, too much mere automatism and superficiality, and also far too much unhealthy emotionalism in this piety.
The shepherds and teachers who might have directed and deepened the stream of faith were lacking. The higher clergy were mostly noblemen who had entered the priesthood from material rather than spiritual motives. Bishoprics, prelacies and abbacies had for long been the preserve of the nobility. At the outbreak of the Reformation eighteen bishoprics and archbishoprics in Germany were occupied by the sons of princes. Proof of proficiency in the tourney was an absolutely requisite qualification for most canonries. It is evident that prelates so immersed in worldliness and pleasure had neither the ability nor the desire to break the Bread of Life to the people.
Over against these prelates, "God's Junkers", we see the lower clergy. They seldom had benefices of their own and were compelled either to carry out the duties of a benefice for a pittance from some member of the higher clergy, or earn their living by helping to serve Mass and doing odd jobs about the church. Their economic position was therefore extremely precarious. Their theological training was no better. Excepting the handful of the clergy who were educated at the universities, most of them contented themselves with a modest smattering of religion, Latin and liturgy. Their morals were not much better than their theological knowledge. One could hardly expect a higher moral standard from them than the example set by their superiors. Documentary evidence indicates that there was amongst them much brutality, drunkenness, gambling, avarice, simony and superstition. To secure a living for themselves they exacted almost insupportable fees for the slightest exercise of their priesthood, even from the poor and destitute. The charge for the administration of the Last Sacraments was so high that Extreme Unction was called "the Sacrament of the rich". Concubinage was so general that at the Councils of Constance and Basel the Emperor Sigismund proposed the abolition of the law of celibacy.
Amidst the general decline there were still of course plenty of morally upright priests. The humanist Jakob Wimpfeling, a severely critical observer of the life of the Church, vouched "before God" to knowing in the six dioceses of the Rhine "many, nay innumerable, chaste and learned prelates and clergy, of unblemished reputation, full of piety, liberality and care for the poor" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 90). We need only call to mind the illustrious figure of the saintly Nicholas of Cusa, the herald of the modern age and tireless reformer, who sought over and over again by visitations, by word of mouth, and in his writings, to communicate his own spirit of piety to the German Church. But to most of the clergy we must apply the words of Pope Adrian VI in his first consistorial address, quoting from St. Bernard: "Vice has grown so much a matter of course that those who are stained with it are no longer aware of the stink of sin."
The regular clergy were no better than the seculars. Here too we must, of course, beware of false generalizations. It was precisely in this second half of the fifteenth century that almost all the older Orders made an effort to reform. In the case of the Benedictines there were, for example, the reforms of Kastl, Melk and Bursfeld. All the Mendicant Orders still had houses in which the original lofty spirit of the love of God and neighbour was alive. And again and again a saint would arise somewhere in the Church, like Bernardino of Siena, John Capistran the lover of souls, and the noble Caritas Pirkheimer, who were shining examples of Christian piety. Luther's account of his own experiences in the Augustinian Priory at Erfurt gives the lie to the statement that monastic discipline was in a universal decline. It is also significant that later on it was ex-monks in particular who were among Luther's best co-operators--who were among the most impatient, in fact, of current abuses.
Nevertheless, we have from within the Church enough official and unofficial testimony to give us a gloomy picture of life in the Orders. Amongst the more ancient Orders only the Carthusians and in part the Cistercians really maintained their original standard. In the other monasteries there was a tragic decline in discipline. The great Benedictine abbeys had become a mere convenience of the nobility. But in the Mendicant Orders, too, the foundations of the religious life had begun to totter--not least on account of the irresponsible caprice with which the officials of the Curia at Avignon dispensed religious from the existing rules of the Order or abolished them altogether. Monks and nuns outside the cloister were already a familiar sight in the fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth the begging friars obtained general permission from Rome to live outside their priories. Community life, and especially community prayer, fell into disuse. So did voluntary poverty. Many of the monks retained their inherited estates and bought or inherited their own cells in the monastery. Erasmus of Rotterdam in his "Enchiridion" singles out for blame their lovelessness and their avarice. Other moral transgressions must be added. The Beguines, for instance, had won for themselves the nickname of "the Friars' cellaresses". The sister of Duke Magnus was known among the rich Clares of Ribnitz as impudicissima abbatissa.
It is not to be wondered at that the "Shavenheads", as the monks were called, were despised and hated by the people, all the more because they were patently increasing in numbers. Together with the lower clergy and the wandering scholars, the "stormy petrels of the revolution", they formed a clerical proletariat. Johannes Agricola estimated the total number of clergy and religious in Germany at the time--in a small total population--at one million four hundred thousand (Lortz, vol. i, p. 86). It cannot be doubted that the majority of this clerical proletariat had neither the intellectual nor the moral capacity to so much as guess the profundity of the questions raised by Luther, let alone fully to realize the gravity of the challenge and to counter it with an adequate response.
Omne malum a clero--every evil comes from the clergy. As early as 1245 at the Council of Lyons, Pope Innocent IV had called the sins of the higher and lower clergy one of the five wounds in the Body of the Church, and at the second Council of Lyons in 1274 Gregory X declared that the wickedness of many prelates was the cause of the ruin of the whole world (cf. Bihlmeyer, vol. ii, p. 336). Machiavelli, again, speaks volumes in the sarcastic remark that "We Italians may thank the Church and our priests that we have become irreligious and wicked" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 119).
In this waste of clerical corruption it was impossible for the spirit of our Lord to penetrate into the people, take root there and bring true religion to flower. Since there was at this time no catechism of infants, the sermons on Sundays and feast-days were the chief sources from which the laity drew their religious education. And these sources were often choked up. Since at this time, moreover, as during the whole of the Middle Ages, Communion was very infrequent outside the ranks of the mystics, there was no sacramental impulse towards an interiorizing and deepening of religion. So the attention of the faithful was directed towards externals. Religion was materialized. Pious interest was focused more on the "holy things"--relics--than on the sacraments, more on pilgrimages and flagellations than on attending the services of the Church, and most of all on indulgences.
The cult of relics and indulgences had grown to gigantic proportions since Leo X had attached indulgences of a thousand, ten thousand and a hundred thousand years to the veneration of relics. Erasmus criticized this kind of piety in the bitter words: "We kiss the shoes of the saints and their dirty kerchiefs while we leave their writings, their holiest and truest relics, to lie unread" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 108). Frederick the Wise, the famous protector of Luther, had built up his treasury of relics in the Castle Church at Wittenburg to 18,885 fragments. Anyone who believed in and venerated them could gain indulgences amounting to two million years. When Boniface IX made of ecclesiastical indulgences what looked like a commercial traffic, even secular princes and cities became eager to take part in the distribution of them, so as to assure for themselves a generous share of the inflowing money.3
From the middle of the fifteenth century the Popes began to distribute indulgences for the dead. The Legate Peraudi, in connection with an indulgence granted by Pope Sixtus IV to Louis XI for the whole of France, announces that the indulgence could be made certainly effective for any soul in purgatory, even if the person gaining it were in a state of mortal sin, so long as the indulgenced work (i.e., money payment) were performed. Pope Sixtus IV did indeed correct his legate's declaration to the extent of saying that the application of the indulgence to the dead could only be a matter of petition, not of certainty. But Peraudi's other statement--that the indulgence could be gained for the dead by people living in mortal sin--was never censured. In the prevailing low state of clerical education, preachers of the indulgence (such as the Dominican Tetzel for instance) eagerly seized on Peraudi's pronouncement, so that many preachers really did adopt as their favourite tag: "Your cash no sooner clinks in the bowl than out of purgatory jumps the soul." Some of the papal decrees themselves were in great measure responsible for this crude interpretation of indulgences. They employed a misleading formula current from the thirteenth century onwards which spoke of a remissio a poena et culpa (remission of pain and guilt) or even of a remissio peccatorum (remission of sins),4 whereas an indulgence is not concerned with the forgiveness of the guilt of sin, nor with the remission of eternal punishment, but only with the remission of temporal punishment, that is, a mitigation or shortening of that penitential suffering which the sinner must undergo either here or in purgatory.
It is unnecessary to emphasize how much this hideous simoniacal abuse of indulgences corrupted true piety, and how indulgences were perverted to a blasphemous haggling with God. Night fell on the German Church, a night that grew ever deeper and darker as other abuses attached themselves to the excessive cult of relics and the practice of indulgences. The latter was encouraged by the current mass-pilgrimages which were positively epidemic. Associated with them, especially at the time of the Great Schism, was the movement of the flagellants, in which pilgrimage was combined with public self-scourging. Though condemned alike by Pope Clement VI and the Council of Constance they constantly reasserted themselves, uprooted the faithful from their proper situation in parochial and domestic life, and threw them into a state of hysterical excess and unhealthy mysticism.
Behind all these excesses was the driving power of rampant superstition. Allying itself with religion, it had taken possession of the broad mass of the people. It is probably true to say that this superstition had made itself even more at home in the German soul than elsewhere, and developed, even amongst educated people, a vast obsession with the devil. It was a lingering heritage from Germanic and Roman paganism. Since the Inquisition's campaign against the Catharists, who had acknowledged Evil as a first principle, this devil-obsession had begun to ruin daily living and social intercourse. In particular, there was a totally uncritical acceptance of every kind of improbable horror charged against witches. The witch-trials and witch-burnings went on--by inquisitors, secular governments, the reformers (Luther himself taught that witches must be destroyed): and the official Church did not shield the victims of these atrocities with the bulwark of clear Gospel teaching. On the contrary, Innocent VIII, in his Bull "Summis desiderantes" (1484), gave the Dominicans in Constance plenary powers in the matter of witch-burning, and threatened with ecclesiastical punishments anyone who opposed the prosecution of witches. He thus did all that the highest ecclesiastical authority could do to encourage and legalize the obsession. Christ had healed those possessed by devils, but now, in the name of the same Christ, they were to be burnt.
It was night indeed in a great part of Christendom. Such is the conclusion of our survey of the end of the fifteenth century: amongst the common people, a fearful decline of true piety into religious materialism and morbid hysteria; amongst the clergy, both lower and higher, widespread worldliness and neglect of duty, and amongst the very Shepherds of the Church, demonic ambition and sacrilegious perversion of holy things. Both clergy and people must cry mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
Yes, it was night. Had Martin Luther then arisen with his marvellous gifts of mind and heart, his warm penetration of the essence of Christianity, his passionate defiance of all unholiness and ungodliness, the elemental fury of his religious experience, his surging, soul-shattering power of speech, and not least that heroism in the face of death with which he defied the powers of this world--had he brought all these magnificent qualities to the removal of the abuses of the time and the cleansing of God's garden from weeds, had he remained a faithful member of his Church, humble and simple, sincere and pure, then indeed we should to-day be his grateful debtors. He would be forever our great Reformer, our true man of God, our teacher and leader, comparable to Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. He would have been the greatest saint of the German people, the refounder of the Church in Germany, a second Boniface . . .
But--and here lies the tragedy of the Reformation and of German Christianity--he let the warring spirits drive him to overthrow not merely the abuses in the Church, but the Church Herself, founded upon Peter, bearing through the centuries the successio apostolica; he let them drive him to commit what St. Augustine calls the greatest sin with which a Christian can burden himself: he set up altar against altar and tore in pieces the one Body of Christ.
How did this come about? And must we continue for ever to join in that lament of contemporary Christendom which St. Augustine sounded in his work against the Donatists, "Ego laceror valde" (cruelly am I torn)? These are questions which I shall seek to answer.
1Since Luther can only be understood against the background of the ecclesiastical abuses of the late Middle Ages, I could not avoid dealing with these abuses in detail. I have deliberately taken my evidence exclusively from Catholic sources, especially from Karl Bihlmeyer's history of the Church (the objectivity and thoroughness of which have made it the standard work on the subject), and Josef Lortz's brilliant and psychologically penetrating "Reformation in Deutschland".
In the light of recent researches it should hardly be necessary to emphasize that these abuses do not give the whole picture of the medieval Church. Its darker aspects are relieved by so many bright lights that it is not possible to take a pessimistic view of it as a whole.
The quotation is from the second volume of Bihlmeyer's work, p. 356.
2A less severe judgment on this matter is given by Barraclough, "Papal Provisions." (Trans.)
3The Jubilee Indulgence of 1390 was extended to various cities besides Rome. A condition for gaining it was a money payment, collected by hankers appointed in the different towns who retained half the sum collected as a commission. see Vansteenberghe, article "Boniface IX" in the "Dictionnaire d' histoire et de geographie ecclesiastique," vol. ix (1937) p. 919. (Trans.)
4These phrases were intended to refer, not only to the indulgence, but to the repentance and absolution that went before it as well. But from the jubilee of 1390 onwards confessors and preachers of indulgences often failed entirely to refer to the necessity of repentance. See Vansteenberghe, loc. cit. (Trans.)
So Jesus called Simon "rock" why again?
Jesus was the architect and Simon was the Rock.
Regards
Fault him for his doctines that were false, give him credit for genuine faith in Jesus Christ and love of Christ. He remained devoted to Mary to the end of his life, practiced private confession, resisted manfully the false Eucharistic doctrine of Zwingli though he explained real presence in a less than helpful way (consubsantiation).
Character assassination is not the appropriate way to refute Luther. Give him credit where credit is due, fault him where he deserves it but leave off this scurrilous and false character assassination stuff.
He probably should never have entered the Augustinian order. He probabaly did not have a genuine vocation and was ill-served by the discernment process. This set him up for a lot of misery. He certainly had some conflict with his father but he was not psychotic, merely had some neuroses, some "issues" as they say today. But who among us doesn't have some of those kinds of dysfunctional family systems problems? To go from that to slandering him as a drunkard or psychotic is wrong, simply wrong.
A very few of the popes and cardinals. Can the hyperbole, Harley. It does not make you credible. See my response to this slander against Luther. I admire Luther personally but I fault him theologically and critique some aspects of his personal life. I try to be fair and accurate. Why don't you try reading actual history of the popes and see how many were drunkards and schizophrenics?
Actually he called him a piece of a rock or a little rock. He followed that by saying that upon this big rock -- "Simon's statement that "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God" -- He will build his Church.
The foundation stone of the Church is not a mortal man, but Christ himself.
Mat 21:42 Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?
Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; (Eph 2:19-20 KJV)
So it is clear that the Cornerstone of the Church is not Simon Peter, the little rock, but Jesus Christ -- The Rock -- the Christ, the Son of the Living God. It is upon THIS Rock that the church was built.
We can argue this point till we are blue in the face. You seem content with the idea that your church is built upon Peter as the foundational cornerstone and I believe the true church is built upon Christ as the cornerstone. I would hope that you ane I are both members of the Church of which Christ is the cornerstone. I accept that you are. I have no doubt but that you are a member of "the Church". Do you accept that I am a member of "The Church"?
I'm not really any kind of disciple of Luther, and I don't consider him the only dissenting voice about terrible church abuses of that era. Nor do I consider him the most significant voice.
It is obvious from Scripture that metaphors are getting mixed here. God is called Rock, Jesus is called Rock, and Peter is called Rock. The Apostles are called the foundation of the Church (Eph, Rev) and so is Christ. Jesus is the architect, the builder of the Church. He built this community upon the Apostles and their subsequent teachings of Jesus Christ. Thus, we can say, in a sense, that the Church is built on Jesus Christ, but it is more correct to say that HE built the Church, HE was the man building upon rock (as Matthew points out, He is the wise man building on rock - not on Himself). This rock was Peter. It was on his confession, inspired by God, that Jesus was building upon. But He was also building on that man whom Christ gave the keys, the responsibility to feed HIS sheep, the Church.
I understand your point of view. We believe that Peter was given responsibility to be the visible unity of the Church in the absence of Christ. Christ gave Peter the "keys" - a similar analogy can be made if I give you the keys to MY house. You have authority until I return. I delegate to you responsibility. BUT. I didn't give you the title to my house! It is ultimately my house. When I return, you will owe me an accounting for what you did. There are several parables that talk about such an accounting from the "servant left in charge", directed at the Apostles and their successors. I believe this is what Jesus is talking about in the Scriptures.
I would hope that you ane I are both members of the Church of which Christ is the cornerstone. I accept that you are. I have no doubt but that you are a member of "the Church". Do you accept that I am a member of "The Church"?
I have labored to explain the Church's position on this subject. Yes, as a result of your Baptism, you are invisibly linked to the Catholic Church in some mysterious way. And as long as you do not knowingly reject Christ's Church, you are imperfectly sharing in those graces that God grants through His Church. You share many of our beliefs, you use our Scriptures (most of them, anyway), you may even share in some of our Liturgical actions and our Traditions (infant baptism) - some Protestants do, anyway. We do share many points, as being part of the Body of Christ. But we are not fully united. You do not share in the fullness of truth. This does not necessarily keep you out of heaven, so to speak. Christ said that sinners and prostitutes are entering heaven before the "people of God". Rather than be exclusive, I rejoice that God has opened the doors of heaven to whom He will, regardless of their religious affiliation. That doesn't mean that I don't believe that Catholicism is the fullness of Christ's revelation. It gives us the best "chance", so to speak, and the most responsibility, as well. "To whom God gives much, more will be expected". I wonder what will become of those Catholics who take this gift for granted. I also am happy for those Protestants who "fight" their way into the Kingdom, despite what they lack.
Yes, you are a member of the Catholic Church, in some mysterious and imperfect manner, from what I can tell. This would change if you were fully aware of what the Catholic Church was and reject it - "He who rejects you (apostles and their successors) rejects Me and the One who sent Me".
Brother in Christ
The results of doctrinal corruption were formalized and institutionalized by Protestantism. Catholicism returned to the Thomistic and Augustinian theology that, along with the thoughts of the Greek Fathers, most closely expresses the orthodox Christian phronema.
Protestantism is permanently glued to the corrupt Ockhamist philosophical nominalism that polluted the mind of the young Luther.
Where is that in the scripture? Do you seriously think that "petros" (rock, masculine) is a small rock but "petra" (rock, feminine) is a big rock?
In that vein, it is also worth noting that the nailing of the Theses to the church door was not an act of defiance, but a standard way to invite a debate at the time.
In two thousand years, there have been not much more than a half-dozen truly bad popes, and another dozen who were pretty mediocre. That's not a bad ratio, and merely fulfills the whole concept of the parable of the wheat and the tares.
No one would argue with the concept that there may have been a few popes who had the tendencies listed here. But, unlike Luther, they were not the *founders* of a religion. One might expect that, just like with Peter, *if* Christ wanted to start anew in the 1500's, he would have picked a man to lead the movement who could at least *overcome* his excesses subsequent to such a great commission or calling. The tree called Catholicism has had its share of defective leaves, but at least the seed was good. One should expect no less in the beginnings of any Christ-decreed (for the sake of argument) "Reformation."
That is incorrect. The Church was founded BY Christ, UPON Peter.
Since "rock" is a metaphor ... unless I missed the part of the New Testament where Medusa showed up ... I don't see why it should be a surprise that it was used in more than one context. Jesus referred to Peter as "the rock"; Peter and Paul, in their letters both referred to Christ as "the rock."
What's the problem? Different context, different intention.
Is this the mark of a genuine movement or is this the mark of a movement that is defined as the "un-___ fill-in-the-blank ___" movement?
Please note the caveat, again, that I am not attempting to lump ALL protestants in this group...but there are a small but VERY noisy subset who, for some reason, must question their own salvation if they are not condemning others to hell each day.
This type of thing was foreshadowed by both St. Paul and St. Peter, as documented in scripture, e.g.: In them there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures.
So Peter was the Stone which the builders rejected?
No. Christ was. He is the Stone as you say. Yet Peter is His vicar. He was Christ's human substitute on earth after Jesus' ascension. He was left in charge with remarkably similar authority to what Christ Himself had, though, of course, it was delegated to him. Jesus had it by divine right as part of the Godhead, Peter merely had it by delegation. Let's be clear here.
Just the same, delegated though it may be, to emphasize and ratify what He knew He would do with Peter, Jesus attributed to him in Matthew 16 a name which is entirely evocative of the title Jesus Himself has eternally by divine right. If anything, there is much to ponder in the simple fact of what Christ did in choosing Kepha as Peter's new name. He highlights Peter's new authority as nearly identical with his own.
Rule by committee is never effective in a large organization, as anyone familiar with human nature would attest. Jesus is far more familiar with human nature than any of us will ever be ourselves, and He knew the limitations of committees. Peter's authority, like Abraham's, like Moses', like Joshua's, like David's and Solomon's, was invested in a sole personage. Unlike the others, though, Peter did not merely pass-on edicts and instructions from God, he ACTUALLY was Christ's vicar, who *commanded* in His stead. His successors have done the same, to this very day. The Spirit guides them in this, and safeguards their teaching.
Holy cow! and Bump for a more thorough reading. Still, based on cursory reading alone, current and recent papacies have been veritable shining stars.
I can't believe the bit about Leo X and the Blessed Sacrament. That is shocking! And the money tree stuff is bone-chillingly disgraceful.
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