Name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen. God, our Father, You will, ament to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. Send workers into your great harvest that the gospel may be preached every creature and your church gathered together by the word of life and strengthened by the power of the sacraments. May advance in the way of salvation and love, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, when God forever, and ever.
Amen. Name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Amen. Yeah, how the structure will go. I used to give out syllabi, but then the dates would always get screwed up within a week or two because of flukes, no storm or something.
Then I would always say, well, that was always the time. So instead, what I can give out if you want, like a list of general topics that we're going to cover, but basically, the question of whether these will all build upon each other, and the answer is more or less no. And actually, I'd say that today's probably the, in the next couple, they're probably the ones that build upon each other. But then a lot of them, because we're going to talk about the counter-reformation, which people over here, the word Reformation, they always think of the Protestant Reformation, which we did in the fall, Martin Luther, which was 500 years ago.
And one of the things that we talked about in the fall was how it wasn't actually a Reformation, it was a rebellion. It was a revolution. It was, okay, here's the problems. Instead of addressing them, let's just throw it all overboard.
So, however, the church has a long history of, I always call it sort of the ups and downs. It's kind of like if you read through the Bible and you get to the history of the Hebrews, and especially read through the book of Judges, and you just see this sort of cyclical nature where the Israelites will turn away from God and things will be terrible, and then people will conquer them, and then God sends them heroes that rescue them, and things get turned back to God, and things are great for awhile, and then they do the same thing and goes up and down, up and down. And the church is the same way, that you have times that are low, and then God sends a bunch of saints, and that's what a Reformation is, the saints that fix the problems until things get great again, and then it goes back down, and it goes like this. So, prior to 1517, that's the date when Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation, you had legitimately one of those low points in many aspects in the Catholic church.
And so the true Reformation is going to be the Catholic Reformation when the church actually reforms itself and goes and addresses these problems, and God sends countless saints. So how to the structure of the class, well it's going to have a bunch of different elements to it, because the church has a bunch of different elements to it, so the Reformation of the church has a bunch of different parts. So there's going to be sort of two main parts, I guess, that you have to perform at the same time, doctrine or teaching, and then it's a terrible marker, does it work better? Oh, that was better.
And practice. So doctrine and practice. No, there's a new trash can over there. Throw it over there.
That it's not that the church's teaching had ever gone astray, but when the practice goes astray, because that's always how it happens, that the practice, how people live out the faith goes astray, people don't follow the teachings of the church. And when this happens pre-4 Martin Luther in 1517, that Martin Luther's solution is going to be, well, if this is going wrong, then it's obviously the fault of the doctrine of the teachings. And so they're going to go back and attack those at the same time. So the Reformation, the Catholic Reformation is going to have to struggle with two things.
Unwering the false doctrines of the Protestant Reformation while simultaneously trying to fix its own practices that had gotten messed up. So for the structure of the class, we're going to have multiple things. We're going to have some that are talking about the practices, meaning there's all sorts of different things to that, like how priests are educated, how the masses celebrated, music, architecture, like all those are part of the practice. But then the doctrine part will have parts, too, focusing on the great ecumenical council of the period, the council of Trent, that's going to be the main spearhead of the movement.
And then there's going to be, like I said, whenever there's a downtime in the church, God sends countless saints to help fix things. So one of the best things, too, is also just to go through the various saints that God says at this time. So you're going to have, it's amazing how you're going to go from one of the lowest points in the church, one of the highest points in the church within 100 years, which also is great for bringing great hope whenever you get down about the period that you live in. You're like, oh man, there's things that are frustrating me, et cetera.
You're like, God can turn things around pretty quickly, so you never get too set. All right. Any questions before I start talking more and more and more? No.
What I wanted to talk about today was kind of give the little bit of the background necessary, because you always start with the background. And so during, like I said, counter-reformation, it's the Catholic reformation of the starts in the 1500s and goes through the 1600s. So that was usually the period, 1500s through 1600s. You don't have to memorize lots of dates or anything like that.
If you just remember one date for the counter-reformation, like I said, Martin Luther, for the reformation, if you just remember 1517, you're like, okay, reformation 500 years ago. Counter-reformation, the important date is 1545 through 63. You don't have to remember both. Like I said, 1645, that's the Council of Trent.
And you can know, so that's the time of the Catholic reformation. And everything happens around there. So late 1500s, 1600s. I think what else?
Yeah. So this is a... Yeah. Now, all right.
So the background, when I say that doctrine and practice, so where were things like the practice within the church? Like what was the situation going on that needed to be reformed? That the two main places we can kind of look to start with are the papacy, like the head of the church and the structure of the church, but then also after that, I want to look at sort of the Catholicism as everybody actually experiences it, because there's the two parts. Like the on the ground Catholicism, like in a parish, and then there's the main part.
And back then, they didn't have the internet. So the average Catholic, does it know anything that's going on in Rome? They don't know what's going on with the Pope. So if there's some scandal going on with the Pope in Rome, they don't have any idea about it, that they're just concerned about going on in their parish.
And you might have a saint as a Pope, a lousy priest in their parish, and they would think things are terrible. So those of you who have to sort of look at the two parts. But start with the Pope and the papacy, that there's a sort of series of things that happen, and I'll just say the dates and what they are. You don't have to be able to read them.
That sort of lead up to what the situation is like in the beginning of the 1500s. That, during the Middle Ages, when you got into the 1200s, the 1200s were a really good period for the Catholic church. Not that there wasn't problems. There were great heresies going on.
There's always heresies. And actually, the perpetual heresies, that's important to come back to for understanding any of this, is what we can call dualism, which is dualism is the idea that there's two parts to the universe, there's the material, the physical side, and there's the spiritual side. And that the spiritual side is good while the physical side is bad. That this was actually the very first heresy, it was called Gnosticism at that time.
Then it became known as Manachism by the time you get to Saint Augustine, and it actually was one for a little bit before it became a Christian. So it perpetually teaches that rather than the both and that the physical and spiritual are both good, but one is simply at service of the other, they teach that the physical world is bad, the spiritual world is good. Now this keeps coming, this is a heresy that comes back over and over and over and over and over again. And so anyway, back like I said, the 1200s is pretty good, but once again that heresy came back very famously in Southern France in what was called the Alba Gencian heresy.
And actually, this is when the Dominican order was founded, Saint Dominic, because they were founded to basically preaching against that heresy, that the physical world is evil. I mean, these guys were terrible, the Alba Gencians. They were doing things like, since the physical world is bad, obviously the best thing you can do is commit suicide, the worst thing you can ever do is have a baby, anything like that. So they were bad, and anyway, they were an example of this dualism.
But I want to come back to this dualism idea, because it doesn't go away. So anyway, in general, despite all of that, the 1200s weren't that bad. Not that there weren't problems, not that there weren't sinners, because the church has always told people and people like to sin and cause problems, but it wasn't that bad. Now the 1300s, however, are going to be a little bit of a rough time for the church.
And I would say that there are sort of two main things that happened in the 1300s that cause a rough time for the church. The one is the rise of the nation's state, that you have, for the first time, kings that are really starting to assert themselves as actually being the most powerful person in their kingdom. Because going all the way back to when these kings started taking over, like becoming the head of their kingdoms and they started to be united as kingdoms after the Viking. So things like England, if you've ever even seen the show Vikings on History Channel, etc.
That England was divided up in the 1800s into a bunch of different kingdoms. And when it finally gets pulled together as a kingdom, it takes several hundred years before the king really starts to assert himself as even the most powerful person. And actually France was even more so. But the king of France during the Middle Ages wasn't even the most powerful person in the country.
There was like three dukes who had more power than he had. He was just sort of a figurehead. But during the 1300s, the king started to really assert themselves, to organize better. And so what they immediately ran up against was people, what's the Lord Acton said, the power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But the more authority they got, the more they began to butt heads with the church. Because it's kind of like China today, when the government wants to exert authority over every aspect of life, that includes the church. So who gets to appoint bishops? The church or the government, etc.
And they start to really butt heads. And what made it worse at the time was there's a pope named Boniface VIII, who in many ways it all starts with. Boniface VIII. And it all sort of goes back to this dualism idea.
That Boniface VIII was butting heads with kings left and right, with the Holy Roman Emperor, with up in Germany, with the king of France. He was butting heads with them left and right. Part of it, because Boniface VIII, while not being a bad man, he lacked intact. He was not a very politic political man, in that he was a bit of a sledgehammer when sometimes that's not necessarily the best idea.
But one of the things, examples that happened, that made it worse, was also during the 1200s when the Dominicans were founded, there was a second great medieval order that was founded of the Franciscans. So Saint Francis founded the Franciscans. Now Saint Francis, he preached poverty. Now an important thing about Saint Francis is he said, hey, blessed are the poor.
He's not great when you don't have material goods so that you can focus on spiritual goods. But the thing about Francis is he was not, despite all of his poverty, he was not a do list. Meaning he didn't say that the physical world was bad. He was just saying that we remember they're both good, but the spiritual world's better.
So the physical world is good. We need material things, but they're passing away while the spiritual world is eternal. So he wasn't saying that one's bad, but the other's good. Rather you're saying they're both good, and you give up the one good for the sake of the better good.
And that's always been the church teaching on this. Now however his followers were not quite as moderate during the 1300s, and so some of them started trying to teach, hey, the physical world is always bad. And that it is always bad to own property. And they started teaching that Jesus owned no property.
And the Vatican, led by Boniface VIII, stepped in and said no, you're wrong. And it's actually led to a split within the Franciscan order on the extent of the poverty, et cetera. Now what happened though was some of these Franciscans, in particular one named William of Occam, who I blame a lot of the world's evils on, ended up, and he was a little bit not, sort of like, well, if the Pope is saying this, he's obviously kind of a heretic, and therefore we need to look to other places for authority. So they started, one heresy that they started was called conciliarism, where in the Catholic Church we teach that true and foul with teaching comes from two places, or three places, scripture, ecumenical councils meeting all the bishops under the pope, and the pope himself.
And that they all are together, one isn't over another, they're all working together. Now so what they start teaching as well, if the pope obviously doesn't agree with them, therefore ecumenical councils could be higher than a pope. That's sort of their hope, that maybe that ecumenical council can trump what the pope is saying. And so that's one heresy they started, but another thing they started was looking to these new found kings that were having all this power, and saying, hey, you are anointed by God.
So think about King David in the Bible, the Bible says a lot of things about listening to earthly authorities, therefore should you be an equally sort of valid place to look for authority within the church as the pope. And you think that Henry VIII later on, that the king of the head of the church is going to pop out of nowhere, like no, like this was a thing that was going on for a while. Now, Boniface, like I said, not being a very political man, that he sort of made this problem a little bit further or worse by issuing a papable of 1302 called Unum Sanctum, where he went sort of, he's like, well, if you're going to question my authority in any way, shape and form, I'm going to beat you over the head with a sledgehammer, saying how much authority I have over you. And so this did a really bad job of increasing tensions between the other political leaders and the pope.
So rather than the, so the time of like the Middle Ages, where like innocent the third was the pope, and sort of everybody was doing what he said, we're over. And so you had even the king of France under Boniface VIII, because he sort of gets ratcheted it up. He puts together letters, basically accusing Boniface of every sin you could possibly think of, everything from even like keeping a pet demon in his chained up in his bedroom. You name it.
And actually interestingly, it's the same king of France, Philip the Fair, that you had the Templars suppressed so he could steal all their money because they were the richest group in all of Europe. And he infused them with all the exact same things, even the pet demons, they weren't overly creative. But that's also a key theme to remember that back then, if you didn't like somebody, you could just make up the most wild accusations against them because that's sort of how you do it. And to the point where the king of France even had Boniface VIII kidnapped and murdered.
All right. So you start to have, okay, this isn't great. And part of the problem that goes back is going all the way back to think of like the false Roman Empire, the pope was a political leader. And the reason why it wasn't that the church was grasping for power, but when there is nobody left to protect the people and to organize the society so that they don't starve to death, the pope started to Gregory the Great was forced to step in and say fine, like there's nobody else left in central Italy because of a massive war, nobody's going to take care of the people, I'm going to do it.
So the fact is at this time the pope is a political leader while the spiritual leader at the same time, which is part of this complication of this tension between the pope and these political leaders. So some of them, they were devout Catholics, some of them, they're like, well, I respect the pope as the head of the church quote unquote, but I'm going to try to kill him as the, I mean it's a little bit of this weird duelist thing creeping in even there. All right, so things aren't looking great. But then it got worse for papacy and people's respect for the papacy and what was going on at the top of the church, particularly France continuing this theme, they have Boniface the eighth killed and so what they do for the next pope is that, actually sorry, give a little bit of background.
It wasn't that he sent French troops to go and kill him. What he did was he used the mob families of Italy because Italy is since the time of the Roman Empire. You read history of the Roman Empire and it was run by a bunch of Italian mob families. Like that's how the Roman Empire was run.
They're always killing each other, just make one of themselves emperor, taking out vendettas against each other, think of the godfather, that's the history of Italy. It was the same back then too. So what they did was they used one of them, those families, in their attention to basically take out Boniface. Now, the problem is when you got rid of the pope, the all-out civil war within Roman Italy that they did not necessarily expect took off.
So what the pope was forced to do, the next pope, was he actually went and lived in France because it was too dangerous to even live in Italy. So it worked out well for the French that the pope lives in Avignon in southern France for the next 60 years. You can imagine that, I mean, it's for safety's sake, there's problems with this, in that if you're trying to, as the pope, to maintain your people's view of you as the spiritual head of the church, not just trying to kill you on the head of a political state, and being in a different country, that remember there's all sorts of political tensions going on, that the English obviously, they're going to start thinking of the pope, well, he's that French thing. The Germans will start thinking of, well, he's just a creature of the French government.
So it reduces that respect of the pope yet again. So you imagine things are going worse than worse than worse than the pope. You have a pope getting killed, pope getting accused of things, and you have then the pope living in France because it's not safe to be in Italy and people start looking at the papacy or in different parts of the world as just a French thing. And then it gets worse.
And that when the pope finally goes back to Italy, that they made a mistake, the French had a lot of cardinals, that they elected a pope that they didn't like. They elected a pope, they legitimately elected a pope, and then they regretted their choice afterwards. The guy started reforming and trying to put the kai-wash on the stuff that the French were doing interfering. And so all the French cardinals tried to take a mole again and say, hey, can we take it back?
We don't like this guy. So what they ended up doing in what's called the Great Western Schism was they fled the French cardinals fled back to Avignon and said, all right, that didn't count. Can we take it over and elect a new pope? So they elected a second pope.
We call an anti-pope in France. So you had this large period of time where you had the real pope living in Rome and then the fake pope living in Avignon. And people were confused that the average person couldn't look up on Google and say, hey, which is the real pope? So if you're living in France, you've got your priest saying, well, I think this guy, because my cardinal told me he was the real pope, this guy in Avignon is the real pope, and so you have even saints who thought that the anti-pope was the real pope.
Saint Vincent Ferrer, famous Dominican, he thought that he was the real pope because that's what he had been told. So you can imagine the mess of this. I mean, at one point, the Germans even decided that they wanted their own pope, but nobody really listened to him or who cared. So I mean, this is just like, I mean, mess of the highest degree at the top.
I mean, but the beauty of it for the history of the Catholic Church is actually seeing how the Western schism comes from and if you ever want a great example of seeing the Holy Spirit watching over the church, this is it. And that when all this is going on, this goes on actually for several generations of popes, meaning you get a second actual pope and then a second in the order of anti-popes. The second anti-pope is John the 23rd, which is why we don't get the real John the 23rd until the 20th century. That what ends up happening, though, was that at the Council of Constance in 1417, you don't have to know this ecumenical council, both the anti-pope and the real pope showed up, and they both resigned and let them elect a new pope ending the schism like that.
So it's like, it's a huge mess. There's fighting over all this, but then it just comes to him like that. You're like, wow, once again, the Holy Spirit figures the out-arm-s for us. But this had another problem.
Do you have a question? Okay. Another problem with this was when you have two popes, the question is when the papacy, which it was a big deal to fund the papacy back then because you have to have a bunch of employees, all of even army for protection, palaces, all this stuff, takes a lot of money. Now the question is, every country they give sort of a tithe to the pope called Peter's Pence.
Now the question is, which country, which pope do you send it to? The real pope or the fake pope? And so the real pope, obviously, when he's not getting money from France, he's not getting money from, I don't know what you're going to be saying, et cetera, that he's not going to have enough money. And money problems are never good.
And especially later on, because usually they lead to abuses. So anyway, things aren't great going on for the pope. Now a cool thing, though, at the same time, that all this bad stuff's going on, is that you still had, this is the period we call the Renaissance, an intellectual flourishing going on in Europe, that's a result of all of the education of the Middle Ages. Because the Middle Ages had built the, invented the university, and you had all this great scholarship going on, you had great art going on, and that didn't just stop because of the fact that there's a bunch of squabbles going on between nation states and pope's.
And it's not even going to stop when there's problems going on, on the ground level in parishes and in society either. And that continues, and we like to think of the Renaissance as a new period, but it's just the logical result of the Middle Ages and the eventual sort of the true flowering of it. So you have great beauty, great works of art, and everything being created while all this is going on at the same time. Now on the ground level, you have several different problems.
But the simplest one is, if you're just in a regular parish, the Unum Sankum, Avignon papacy, the Western schism, they don't matter that much to you. What's going to happen that matters to them is the bubonic plague, but actually more importantly, the pssss, what's the word? The new monic plague. The people always remember the bubonic plague where you get the fleas that actually killed a very limited number of people.
It was the second version of the plague, the new monic plague that is respiratory and passes through air that was responsible for killing 95% of the people that die. And it's actually currently, they have an outbreak of it in Madagascar. So if you've been to Costco lately and wondered why vanilla cost $36, that is why. Because that's where majority of the world's vanilla beans come from.
Now, so anyway, when the plague hits Europe, the big result, there are those two big results to this. It's how when people are faced with dire things, that they usually end up going one or two directions. That this is kind of like if you read accounts of people in concentration camps, that one of two things usually happens. They either become more devout in their faith or less.
They either become atheists or saints. I mean usually they go sort of one direction or the other. And so you had this going on during Europe as a result of the Black Death killing of third of the population, that a large portion of people are turning back to the faith, they're becoming more devout. But you also have the rise of actual sort of atheism in the public sphere.
So that by the time you get into the 1400s, you're going to be able to have Machiavelli, who's going to be writing books like advocating, like just pure atheism within politics. Would you be able to get away with that before? And part, and we can say that part of that Black Death is you choose one or the other. But the other main problem, the practical problem, is that while third of the population died, two thirds of all the priest died.
Because remember the priest, he's giving less rights to all the people dying, and so they're dropping like flies. And so you end up with, when two thirds of the priest are dead, you have to replace them, because people need sacraments. Now the problem is before the way that you would become a priest was there was not a seminary system, it was an apprentice system. So the local parish priest would find, there would be approached by young men that want to be the next priest, and he would choose out of them who's going to be the next parish priest and he would train them up.
And so part of it was there was a whole sort of class of people in medieval society called clerics. He's not a priest. A cleric just means you can read and write. That there's a whole group of people that can read and write.
And if you can read and write, obviously you can read and write in Latin, because that's the language of the Middle Ages that the average person could speak and everyone could read and write. So if you can read and write, you were a very important person for jobs, so attorneys, accountants, all of them are considered, they're all clerics. So he would take from that group, someone that he would train up to be the next parish priest, a lot of times they would take sort of minor orders and not be ordained as priests, but they would be connected because it was the monasteries that had the schools that were teaching them, etc. Now the problem is, when it comes time to replace them, that the local priest dies, most the clerics are dead, and the town needs a new priest so they get Joe the blacksmith and they make him to be ordained as the new parish priest.
Now the problem is he doesn't know the Bible, he doesn't know theology, he barely even knows his Latin. And so the quality of the priest that you have by the time you get to 1400 is not good. So you want the stories of priests that having secret wives and illegitimate children and all that, that's this period when they really lowered the standards. And then, so you have a low standard of men in the church mixed with, remember the church having major money problems, partly because people dying left and right, but then also the schisms going on that caused the Vatican to have no money, that you get the natural sins that people fall into.
So what I was going to say was a rasmus that blamed the entire Reformation on money and sex. Well that's the same problem within the church. So you get both sins going on at the same time. And it's the same like any murder mystery you ever watched, it's usually the motive.
All right, one of the two. And so you have the rise of the perpetual money sins such as Simonis, selling of church offices so that you, if you get in one of those unqualified, greedy men as a bishop and he realizes, hey, I can sell this job as a priest and make money off it, it becomes pretty popular a thing. You get another practice of what's called multiple benefits where sometimes priests would say, hey, what if I bribed my way to be appointed as priest of two different parishes at the same time? I can get paid by both.
I can't be at both, but I can get paid by both. So the greedy bishop says, hey, that's why I think as long as you pay for it. Sure. And you even get bishops who are bishops of multiple diocese at the same time.
Sometimes even in different countries. So you can imagine living in a diocese where your bishop has never even visited or your parish where you haven't seen a priest in like 15 years. That's not good. Any questions so far?
All right. There's some serious problems going on. And great examples even of this problem that I want to come back to with the papacy of the Rehn's Popes during the Rehn's Seventh Bad reputation, but mostly because this political sort of attack versus them, that many of them ended up basically rather than just seeding ground politically thinking for the sake of spiritual good that they, as the head of the actual state of an actual political entity, they thought it was their solemn duty to defend the political rights of the church too. Partly to that this is something that the church has always been adamant about not necessarily seeding its political ground for the sake of independence.
That there's a reason why, for instance, the church has always taught that the greatest defense of religious freedom is private property because if you're dependent upon another, they can tell you what to do. And so that's why one of the, so it's not all for greedy reasons that the Popes are getting overly invested in these political squabbles. Part of it is because they don't want to be, they're afraid of being forced to be dependent upon these political entities in that they won't be able to, as the chair of St. Peter, defend the church properly and the teachings of the church properly, which there's a legitimate side to that.
But you had, during the beginning, in the 1400s to the beginning of the 1500s, a series of kind of blow-up popes which didn't help them out. So you think things are pretty bad. So the average parish things aren't necessarily going great. You've got a lot of bad bishops, a lot of bad priests.
The Vatican has lost all sorts of money, actually I shouldn't say the Vatican because the Vatican wouldn't exist. It was Rome, that because the Pope controlled it all. It has lost lots of money, it has major money problems, it has lost a lot of respect from different people. Things are objectively not great within the church.
And what you needed at this time was some really great saintly popes to sort of put things back together, that Humpty Dumpty had fallen off the wall, need to be put back together again. But the problem is, is not that they actually even had that bad of popes, they just had sort of blah popes. And none of them were up to the task of fixing the problem. So it's a great myth that the popes of the Renaissance were these wicked evil men, they weren't.
People love to make, like I said back then, the king of France didn't like the popes, so as you do he makes up all of these spurious allegations against them. And the Italians have loved to always do this. That if you accuse your enemies of the most outrageous things. And the amazing thing is, this is why Calum, yeah, Calum, to really pronounce things properly, is such a terrible sin.
Is that when you tell a lie long enough, people actually start to believe it. And it gets passed on and you truly destroy your reputations. And when the Reformation happens later on, the Protestants are going to love to do this and to latch on to any of these allegations. And then eventually they become the printed history.
It's like the old phrase that history is written by the winners. So a lot of our understanding of the popes of the Renaissance is all made up by their Italian enemies and then the English and then passed on in history books. So it's not that they were terribly wicked men, but they were just sort of blah. So for instance, Alexander the Six.
He's the one that gets the most heat and is almost entirely made up. So Alexander the Six Borgia is famous. They even make many series about his alleged terribleness. But the amazing thing is, he was actually a very spiritual man.
He had one major problem though in that he was Spanish in Italy. And so they made up all sorts of allegations against him. His Italian enemies, they accused him of having illegitimate children, which he never did. That actually is the great thing.
Like you even look up Wikipedia and have the children of Alexander the Six. But they were all his nieces and nephews. They were all born in Spain while he lived in Italy. But he did practice nepotism.
That was his big thing. He gave jobs to his nieces and nephews that he probably shouldn't have. That weren't necessarily good people. So they made up all sorts of stuff about him that got passed down through history.
But did he do a lot to help fix the church in reform? No. Like I said, he was just sort of blah and not up for the task. The other one that's sort of famous, the period Julius II, the warrior pope, that he's a great patron of the arts.
He was really helped beautify Rome. But he focused so much on all of the political, literally the defense of the Vatican that he did nothing to try to reform and fix it. He was literally out supervising his armies instead. And if you ever seen the movie, The Agony and the Ecstasy, there's a great scene where the pope is wearing armor overseeing the bombarding of a castle and Michelangelo shows up.
Gold Charlton has to end with designs for the Sistine Chapel. Then you have Leo the 10th, the Medici that he's just not that interested in fixing the church's problems. But like I said, they weren't terribly wicked, sinful men. So the grand stories that have been made up, they're not true.
But they're blah. They don't do anything to fix the problems that are going on. So they're just sort of fester and fester and fester. So by the time you get to 1517, that there hasn't been a great movement towards reform within the church is just, like I said, been just sort of festering.
Then that's when you get Martin Luther, who's going to say, well, there's no reform coming from the top, that if this things are this bad, obviously the problem is with the doctrine. And so that's when you have him beginning not just his attack on the practice of the church, with the doctrine and the authority of the church. And so he's the one that he actually started by attacking the authority of the pope, because like, well, the popes aren't doing anything there. And he started blaming them.
Because at first he wasn't a full blown heretic. So he was a conciliarist, like I said before, that he thought ecumenical councils could trump the pope. And so actually at first, he made his argument that, I mean, this is actually one of the great things in history that most Protestants don't realize. So that Martin Luther's first teach, his first heretical teaching that he was teaching of man being saved by faith alone.
That when the church sent a theologian, Johann, Echico, talk with him, that Ech, who was a or that Martin Luther started calling saying, well, can't we have an ecumenical council that he was just so confident with, show that he was right, and that the pope was wrong. And Johann, Echico pointed out that actually ecumenical council had already discussed the matter and already pointed out that he was wrong. And so that's when Martin Luther called for time out, famously went out and sort of received a new revelation that ecumenical councils could be wrong. Because it must be if it doesn't be with him, and he came up with his doctrine of sola scriptora.
So that's when he truly is like, all right, it's not just the doctrine, but even the entire authority structure of the church, like we've got to toss it all out. Now we don't have to go into the whole history of the Reformation, but this became really popular in these states when I said it all goes back to sex and money. It's true. But it states like Germany where if the authority structure of the church can get tossed out and Martin Luther was saying that the princes, the dukes, everything are equally valid reformers of the church as the pope, if you imagine, if you're the political leader, you like this.
Especially when he's preaching salvation by faith alone and that all of our works don't matter, because one of the logical consequences of that is things like nenacicism don't make any sense. So these kings and dukes and everyone, well if we become Protestant, we get to sack the monasteries and take all of their money, which is vast amounts of money. So it becomes popular for political reasons left and right. And so you have this mess going on that the Reformation, just like all of the problems before, is theological, but then it's also practical and has a huge practical mess.
So it's going to make it so that when the church finally has to try to address this, the reason why it takes so long to address it is there's so many levels to the Reformation that they the church doesn't even know where to start. You have the political side where you've got wars being fought for this, you've got the theological side, like answering questions like it's made in the state of faith alone, but you've got the practical side, what's mass supposed to look like, because people are doing all sorts of crazy things with the Reformation. I mean it's not long before they start smashing the stained glass windows, throwing tabernacles out in the street, that the church has to address all this at the same time. And so it takes, if you notice, a good 30 years before the church is really going to be able to address what's going on.
And there's, like I said, there's multiple reasons to that. One is trying to understand what's going on in order to attack it. You have a couple more kind of block hopes that don't really know what to do or that they see the things starting to burn down and they just sort of panic and they don't really have any idea how to address it. And then, yeah, and then you have this practical things that the church is still dealing with and that the plague never goes away.
That's another big thing to remember throughout all this. It's, so you've got to love history back this, it's just such a mess. But the plague never goes away, it would come back every 10 years. So that even when they finally decide, hey, we're going to try to hold an ecumenical council and deal with this, they're going to take 18 years because they're going to have to take breaks, one to avoid the plague, another to avoid an armed marauding army.
Like things were, I mean, it was a slow world. Disease, battles, I mean, everything going slowly, literally when you have to go by horseback or on foot, that anyway. So that's sort of the background more or less to get to where we're going to be, where the church is finally going to be in a position like, okay, how do we stop this sort of mess that has started in what was already a giant mess? So think of it as just sort of like a giant jumble falling apart and then it gets lit on fire over here.
But the church is going to be like, okay, how do we put out the fire and try to repair the jumble all at the same time? All right. You don't have questions or anything they want to add? Like I said, all I'm trying to do is set up the mess.
Next week we're actually going to get into Spain where it's never going to be a mess because they're going to be the one place where they have one really capable dude that before the reformation ever happens, they're going to fix just about all the problems. Question? Yeah. That was his premise.
Well, I mean, we get into Lauren and Luther for a long time, but it's basically he never felt truly forgiven and he struggled with us all the time and we'd go to confession. He felt we still felt guilty afterwards and he would try to do all these huge penances to earn his salvation and his his his his, uh, his, uh, his, uh, his, uh, uh, his, uh, confessor kept trying to remind him, no, it's just purely by God's mercy. Like you're not going to be able to earn this, but he was a man of extremes that was sort of swinging one way to another. And so fine.
Speak up, louder. Yeah, he was a, I think so, but I mean, he did have some definite mental problems. He got more so as he went on. He said he had a hard time reconciling is fat baptism, our sins are washed away and we are completely clean that the Catholic Church teaches that there is still a tendency to sin that's left over called concupisense.
He had a hard time wrecking that wreck or reconciling concupisense with your sins actually being washed away. So he came to basically the conclusion that the sins weren't really washed away, that the way God forgives is purely forensically, meaning he doesn't actually cleanse you and start to make you holier and change you. He just basically covers over your sinfulness with Christ and just calls you clean without making you clean. That's why the analogy is like the dung hill covered in snow.
You're still wicked but Christ doesn't, God doesn't care because he just looks at Christ instead. So, yeah, so the idea though is that if that's true, if God doesn't start to make you actually holier, then anything you do on earth is never going to be any good. So he thought that his original sin was so bad and that baptism doesn't wash it away so you can't ever do good things on earth which means how you live your works like you're useless and entirely just dependent upon whether God says you can go to heaven or not. Which leads to being saved purely by that faithful.
He believed predestination too. Yeah. So, that's why ultimately the start of the Reformation argument over is ultimately over whether baptism washes away original sin or not. Because if it does, you can become holier here on earth and works are possible and merit is possible.
If it doesn't, then the logic conclusion is salvation by faithful. Any other questions? The French folks had to take on the German vote that the government was committed to submission for another retreat. Oh, the anti-poof?
Yeah. But the German one didn't really, nobody cared about him. Nobody remembers him. Nobody cared about him.
Nobody remembers him. No, I think there was another Italian one like Pisa. Because remember Italy wasn't, there was no Italy back then. It didn't exist as a country until 1870s.
That it was little city-states, little factions. So I think like Pisa for a little while had their own vote but nobody cared about him either. So they don't really do remember it's like Rome and Avignon. Like the French versus everybody else.
But the church was well aware that they had provinces and twirls here. They had tried to fix them. Oh yeah. But through the process of the roof.
They were well aware and they had actually had several ecumenical councils trying to fix it. But the problem is they didn't really know how to address it, where to start, what to do. And then you had sort of like reform is hard. It takes a lot of, I mean it's kind of like the US government.
Look at the US government. People always going to say, quote, drain the swamp. Yeah. But when it comes to this reason why no party in the US government ever decreases the budget.
Because doing things like cutting spending is really difficult to do. The kibosh on Simon E is really hard when your best friend Louie is doing so but he's still a really nice guy. So the reform is really hard because you make a lot of enemies and people are not going to like you very much. That's just, so even though they have ecumenical councils they never quite do enough.
That's the good, really interesting. We do have problems. No, that's a great point. And then also it takes, like I said, it takes saints.
It takes people that God gives this supernatural amount of courage and virtue to make it happen. I know that the Alexander the Six wasn't as people playing as they even heard him say on the call of the previous Dr. Anderson that the board of those were Dats and the folks. Well that's because everybody just assumes that.
There was actually a book that came out last year. I'll have to remember the title and remember next week by an Oxford historian who went and just did, I mean this is just last year redid all of the primary sources and everything. And he was trying to do this big study of Alexander the Six and he discovered looking at the primary sources like, wait, that doesn't make possible logical sense. Like Caesar Borgia can't be his son.
He was born in Spain when he hadn't even been there in five years at the same time. And so he started to look at that and found the original documents of basically playing all of these spurious things one after another at the feet of the different Italian families. They were so upset that there was Borgia family, which they had problems. They were greedy families looking out for themselves.
They're kind of like a Spanish mob family. But they were the Spanish mob family in the job that was traditionally reserved for the Italian mob families. So the Italians were not happy. So the Medi-Gees, they were one of the ones spreading the rumors of the Borgazis.
Like all of these ones that came out last year and it was, I mean the guy's not even Catholic. And I don't think he's a Christian. He's like, wow, this was completely wrong. But this is kind of like our quote unquote what we understand about the Spanish Inquisition.
That these rumors get started and then the English under Queen Elizabeth, they just start sprinting them left and right. And then they, before you know it, they get printed in history books. So like, I mean the stories that they would make up the English about the Spanish, how they would quote treat the Indians in the new world, not that they were treating them great. I mean they're still enslaving them.
But the English were just making up stuff left and right trying to basically undermine the Spanish. And so they made the stuff about the Inquisition and all of the stuff. And so now it's just become sort of, you understood. So even Catholics, like they're not that many Catholics that have read that book in the last like year and even know that like no, like he actually wasn't that bad.
So most Catholics just go well let's just diffuse it by saying yeah he was bad but it doesn't affect the doctrine. But the thing is he actually wasn't. No, yeah. I mean this is like propaganda is not a new thing.
I mean this is what the Romans had invented graffiti and I mean that's what they would do. They would go and like write things about their enemies on the walls like left and right. So any other class anything questions comments and I remarks nothing. All right.
When closing prayer. Even father son Holy Spirit. Amen. God our father you sent your son into the world to be its true light.
For out the Holy Spirit you promised us to sow the truth and men's hearts and awaken them the obedience of faith. May all men be born again to new life and baptism and so enter the fellowship of your one holy church. Though our Lord Jesus Christ your son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit one God forever and ever. Amen.
Father son Holy Spirit. Amen.