And before that happened, Catholics never burned Protestants because.... [drumroll please...] there weren't any! There were only "heretics." Of course, those heretics believed what Protestants now believe, but hey, they didn't have the name "Protestant" and as everyone knows, marketing is everything. In any event, Protestants are still heretics, so what's the diff?
After all, it's not like the Protestants had any REASON to, how did you so colorfully put it, "massacre every priest, nun, and monk they could get their hands on, slaughtered countless children, seized the seminaries, destroyed every book, window and statue they could find and raze the churches."
No, there was no reason. The Catholics did nothing to enrage the people for, oh, hundreds of years. The way it happened was, well, the people who became Protestants were heretics. And heretics are, well, heretics. So if heretics just go crazy killing people, well, it makes sense, because they're heretics.
m'kay.
Sure... let’s look at those heretics, and you tell me the ones you want to lay claim to.
There was Jan Hus, who was going around proclaiming that it was a matter of Christian doctrine that Christians could not raise an army. He was doing this as the Islamic horde was sweeping across the Byzantine Empire towards his home land. He also taught that Communion in a single specie (i.e., only bread or only wine) was not efficacious, so if you lived among the countryfolk with a single priest, you were going straight to hell.
Oh, and yes, Wycliffe and his Lollards also preached pacificism at a time when it meant unilateral surrender to the Islamic horde. Yes, they preached a few of Luther’s beliefs, such as the notion that priests should marry and you shouldn’t pray for dead people. But they also believed women were biologically incapable of sexual abstinence. Being a single woman meant any man could presume you were having abortions willy-nilly, so immediate marriage was a moral necessity. And no, we’re not talking nuns; we’re talking widows. They also thought all arts and crafts were evil. (All of these are directly from “The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards.) Still, Wycliffe died of natural causes as a Catholic priest, and there was no great persecution of the Lollards, even though Wycliffe was seditious.
There were the Bulgars, from which we get the word, “bugger,” and the Albigensians. They taught that all procreation was evil, but sexual enjoyment, even outside of marriage, was fine. There’s no way of telling what portions of their members were actual sodomites, but I’d say the Catholic presumption that many were was pretty reasonable since they held to the notion that you go to hell if you have vaginal intercourse with anyone, including your wife, but you can go bugger anyone you want and that’s cool. Oh, and the favored ones kept dropping dead, because when you were really spiritual, even food itself polluted the body — but again, sodomy did not, according to them.
The Albigensians, Bulgars and related groups also believed that Satan was the true god, and the God of the Hebrews was the evil one, who spoiled the pristine universe by creating matter.
Then there’s Henry of Lausanne and Peter of Bruys. In many ways their moral doctrines are similar to Baptists. One little problem: to arrive at their doctrines, they declared the entirety of the bible worthless, except the gospels (and, depending on interpretation, the pentateuch.)
How about the Heresy of the Free Spirit? They were antinomian, and also believed that the “spiritually perfected” became gods while on Earth. (Meister Ekchart was accused of holding certain of their heresies, but not their opposition to papal authority, and was distinguished from them.)
I will, however, acknowledge that the Catholic Church’s response to Peter Waldo was unjust and gravely unfortunate. It was not because of his preaching of poverty; he was contemporary to St. Francis, who shared many of his views on poverty and the rejection of worldly power, and who was heralded as one of the greatest Catholic saints and reformers for that. It probably was because he was erroneously and unfairly associated with the Albigensians. Modern Waldensians have certainly absorbed many Protestant doctrines, but it’s hard to know how many were original to the movement.
The Church also opposed the Humiliati and the Ultra-Franciscans, but these were sort of Catholic extremists, not proto-Protestants. There’s also Arnold of Brescia, but he was a political radical, instigating a proto-communist insurrection the government of Rome; he was killed as an insurrectionist, not as a heretic.