Salaam
Some Brothers and sisters were asking a while back about the the Christain Reformation in Europe. I managed to dig this article out. Its old (written in the 1960s) but its interesting nevertheless. Amadeus85 mate, is this still considered the Catholic view?
Part 1
Why do Catholics regard the Protestant Reformation as deterimental to the best interests of religion?
'Did not the great reform inaugurates by Luther in the 16th Century improve the spiritual and religious life of the people? Why then dont Catholics acclaim the work of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and the other
reformers?'
It is now generally agreed that the name Reformation is a misnomer. The International Encyclopedia declares that the upheaval should be more properly designated a revolution. In similar vein the
Encyclopedia Britannica explains that the name, Reformation, is not of the modern historians framing and defines it as
'the relgious and politcal revolution of the 16th C, of which the immediate result was the partial disruption of the Western Catholic Church and the establishment of various national and terrirorial churches' (Vol. 23, p. 4)
This view, now so common among modern scholars, was expressed long ago by the Protestant historian, Cobbet, who declared that the religious change in England was not a
reformation but a
deformation.
True, a reformation occurred but it was effected from within and not by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and their associates. They split the seamless garment of Christendom into a welter of warring sects and factions, whose progeny is converting much of the world into a bedlam of confuion and strife.
The shift in opinion, which is reflected in the general agreement of modern scholars as to the unsuitablness of the term, Reformation, to mirror the true nature of the movement we are considering, is traceable in large part to the increasing recogintion of the large roles played by secular politcs, ecoomic interests and the passions of newly awakened nationalism in the mighty drama enacted on the stages of many lands in the 16th century.
'That the relgious elements in the Refomration,' observes Professor James Harvey Robinson of Columbia University, 'have been greatly overestimated from a modern point of view can be hardly questioned' (Ibid).
Similar is the testimony of the Protestant historian, Charles H Lea:
'The motives, both remote and proximate, which led to the Lutheran revolt were largely secular rather than spiritual. We meany dismiss the relgious changes incdient to the Reformation with the remark that they were not the object sought' (Cambridge Modern History Vol 1.)
To verify the conclusion of these scholars one has only to read Luthers first important appeal in his Address to the German Nobility. Scarcely adverting at all to relgious matters, the Wittenberg monk deals almost exclusively with the social, finaincal, educational, industrial and general moral problems of the day. His contemporary, Ulrich Von Hutten, regards the issues involved as purely secular.