Back in early European history, there were often many disagreements between people, especially when it came to religion. These disagreements can lead to a wide variety of things, whether it be war, compromise, or just flat out tension. In one of the bigger disputes of religion in European history, Martin Luther and John Calvin vs. the Catholic Church, there was no clear winner or loser towards the beginning, once the two men proposed their ideas of why the Catholic Church wasn’t to be followed blindly. Their unique ideas opened the eyes of the people of Europe, and the Catholic Church was not happy about that. They knew they had to do something to stop the claims that were coming from both these branches of Christianity, and they felt as if drastic measures were needed to ensure that they would be the only church that these people would be listening to. They responded with aggression, formed the Council of Trent, and attempted to disregard the negative accusations being thrown their way.
To know what the Catholic church was refuting, you had to know what claims were being made against them. To start, you should know about Martin Luther and his ideas. Martin Luther started the Protestant Revolution. He was taught by Bartholomaeus Arnoldivon Usingen and Jodocus Trutfetter, who expressed Luther to be suspicious of even the most well known thinker, which got him thinking about the Catholic church. He was originally studying the law, but he abandoned all that to join the Augustinian Order, where he really began to realize what the Catholic church was, and why he had to do something about it. He started by devoting himself to deep spiritual despair, where he would fast and meditate, trying to truly find himself, until finally, “Luther found peace inside himself when he became convinced that sinners were saved only through faith and that faith was a gift freely given by God.” While Luther was a college professor at Wittenberg, a priest came to his town and started selling indulgences. Indulgences were sold to grant people into heaven, they helped wash away people’s sins. So if you did anything bad, you could just buy a bunch of these and be pardoned, and people even bought indulgences for their deceased friends and family members, in order to shorten their time in purgatory. However, this was very unappealing to Luther, and he voiced his opinion very blatantly in his piece, the 95 Theses. This piece of writing had quite a big impact on this revolution, it “began as a theological debate in a provincial university soon engulfed the Holy Roman Empire. Luther’s earliest supporters included younger Christian humanists and clerics who shared his critical attitude toward the church establishment. None of these Evangelicals, as they called themselves, came from the upper echelons of the church; many were from urban middle-class backgrounds, and most were university trained.” (Hunt, 450) Luther believed that the amount of money each person had should have no impact on their ability to get into heaven. He had his own idea of how people got into heaven, saying “that faith, not good works, saved sinners from damnation” (Hunt 450) Now, Luther’s ideas may have just circled around his college and his town if it hadn’t been for an invention that had come out not 50 years before his movement began. The printing press played an invaluable role in spreading Luther’s ideas all around the country, making his 95 Theses and other writing pieces so easy to reproduce and spread in large numbers. Once his ideas began spreading like wildfire, he began to really go after the church with his next to pieces of writing. “In his second treatise, To the Nobility of the German Nation, Luther denounced the corrupt Italians in Rome and called on the German princes to defend their nation and reform the church. Luther’s third treatise, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, condemned the papacy as the embodiment of the Antichrist.” (Hunt 450) So in summary, Luther was accusing the Catholic church of being unjust, so much so that he accused them to be to be the embodiment of the Antichrist, which is when the Catholic church decided that they had to deal with this Luther Affair (which is what they called it at the time). At first they sent him a decree telling him to be silent and to respect his superiors, which he tore up shortly after receiving.
Now that Luther’s ideas are all out in the open, it’s time to move onto the second man whose words rang loud and clear to the ears of the Roman church. John Calvin didn’t share a lot of the same beliefs that Martin Luther did, but they both agreed that the Catholic church was in the wrong. Calvin believed in this thing called “predestination”. Basically predestination meant that God had already decided whether you would go to heaven or not, regardless of what you did. So in that sense he was much different from Luther, since Luther believed in faith playing a large role in where you ended up, and here Calvin is, saying that you could do anything you wanted, and you would either go to heaven or hell, since it has been decided from birth where you would be going. To relay this idea to all those who wish to follow him, he wrote the “Articles Concerning Predestination”, where in summary he says “Before the first man was created, God in his eternal counsel had determined what he willed to be done with the whole human race.” (Calvin). He then wrote another piece of writing, in which he declares the need for reforming the church, which he simply named “The Necessity of Reforming the Church” In these, he speaks upon many different ways in which the church has begun to grow from all its unnecessary wealth, for example, he states “They adorn their idols now with flowers and chaplets, now with robes, vests, girdles, purses, and frivolities of every kind. They light tapers and burn incense before them, and carry them on their shoulders in solemn state. They assemble from long distances to one statue, though they have similar things at home.” (Calvin, Reforming the Church) He also accuses them of being untruthful, saying that they all create their own idea of where they came from “Some they pretend to have spoken, others to have extinguished a fire in the church by trampling on it, others to have moved of their own accord to a new abode, others to have dropped from heaven.” (Calvin) The title of his piece says it all. He believes that reformation is necessary, and the church will absolutely not stand for this.
Due to vast spreading of the thoughts and beliefs of these two men, thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, it wasn’t very long until the Catholic Church caught wind of this Reformation that had been spreading around Europe. The first thing the church did was go to a town on the border of Italy and the Holy Roman Empire, a town called Troy. Here, they created a council that would set the course of Catholicism for the next 400 years. This council was referred to as the “Council of Trent”. Their first course of action was to give some power to the Inquisition, in which they censored certain books, such as the 95 Theses, which in a way kept people from reading their teachings. This law lasted from 1557 to 1966. “According to the council, salvation depended on faith and good works, not faith alone. On the sacrament of the Eucharist, the council reaffirmed that the bread of communion “really, truly” becomes Christ’s body.” (Hunt 459) They insisted that their word was final, and those who opposed would be subject to punishment. The creation of the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, as they were called, who were led by Ignatius, an injured soldier from the Spanish army. With Ignatius leading the Jesuits, they went out and spread the word of the Catholic church, both to those who had converted to this new branch of Christianity known as Protestantism, and to those who had never ever heard of Christianity, such as those in Asia or Africa. However, “Catholic missionary zeal brought conflicting messages to indigenous peoples: for some, the message of a repressive and coercive alien religion; for others, a sweet sign of reason and faith. Frustrated in his efforts to convert Brazilian Indians, a Jesuit missionary wrote to his superior in Rome in 1563, ‘For this kind of people it is better to be preaching with the sword and rod of iron.’” (Hunt 459) So they weren’t finding as much success as they had hoped to find, which frustrated the church. Eventually, after a few years of little progress, drastic measures had to be taken. Ferdinand II, the newly appointed Holy Roman Emperor, decided that he had to force Roman Catholicism on everyone, which really made the people who had converted to Protestantism very mad. This eventually led to the 30 Year’s War, which was the Protestants finally saying that they had enough, and that they could worship whichever branch of Catholicism that they saw fit. Although this wasn’t a direct consequence of Calvin and Luther, it was still a huge war that in the end came from the dispute that they came up with.
This was a long way coming for the church. They had been telling everyone what to believe without receiving even the slightest of opposition. Their followers had been listening to them blindly for years, feeding them money through donations and indulgences, and Luther and Calvin had seen through their lies, noticing that the lifestyles of those higher up in the religious chain began to improve and become more lavish, while the lives of the less fortunate became worse. This alternative given to the peasants was so much more attractive to them, and had views that they could back, which is why they so quickly abandoned the beliefs that they had followed for their entire life.