The Protestant Reformation (1517-1555)

A Church asking to be reformed

At the end of the 15th century, the Latin Church was not a moribund institution: parishes were numerous, popular piety intense, charitable foundations lively, the mendicant orders still active. But it suffered from structural abuses that everyone could see. The papacy, traumatised by the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), had rebuilt itself politically in Rome at the price of considerable worldliness. The Renaissance popes — Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI Borgia, Julius II, Leo X — were at once prodigious patrons and Italian princes engaged in diplomacy and war.^[4]

Below them, bishoprics and abbeys were often treated as benefices to be handed out: given to younger sons of families, accumulated several at a time, their revenues collected without residence. The discipline of the lower clergy remained very uneven; clerical concubinage, without being universal, persisted in several regions; the theological formation of parish priests was weak. Earlier councils — Lateran V (1512-1517) in particular — had promulgated decrees of reform^[5]; but seven months after the council closed (16 March 1517), the abuses denounced by the 95 Theses (October 1517) show that these decrees had not changed practice.^[6]

Humanism, printing and criticism of abuses

Three elements gave the end of the 15th century a new critical force.

First, Christian humanism. Men such as Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), Lefèvre d'Étaples and Reuchlin rediscovered the ancient languages, edited the Greek Fathers, criticised late scholasticism and called for a more evangelical philosophia Christi. Erasmus's Enchiridion militis christiani (1503) or his critical edition of the Greek New Testament (Novum Instrumentum, 1516) were laboratories in which Christian thought drew afresh on the primary texts.^[7]

Second, printing. Invented around 1454 by Gutenberg, it multiplied the circulation of texts. In the 16th century, a reforming pamphlet printed in several thousand copies could cross Germany in a few weeks. Without printing, the Reformation could probably never have spread as it did.^[8]

Finally, a popular expectation of reform. The Gravamina nationis germanicae (grievances of the German nation) had long compiled complaints against Roman fiscal charges, the venality of dispensations and the draining of German money towards Rome. The ground was inflammable: only a spark was missing.^[9]

The forerunners: Wycliffe and Hus

Before Luther, two figures had already challenged Roman authority in depth.

John Wycliffe († 1384), at Oxford, contested transubstantiation (the conversion of the whole substance of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ), defended the absolute primacy of Scripture, proposed an English translation of the Bible and denied traditional magisterial authority. He was condemned by the Council of Constance (1415), which ordered his bones to be exhumed.^[10]

Jan Hus († 1415), a Bohemian priest, preached in Prague the moral reform of the clergy, denounced simony and took up several of Wycliffe's theses. Summoned to Constance under an imperial safe-conduct that would be violated, he was condemned as a heretic and burned alive on 6 July 1415. His death triggered the Hussite wars in Bohemia and left, a century before Luther, a dramatic precedent: Rome could be challenged on the basis of Scripture, and a national movement could support the challenger.^[11] Luther would explicitly acknowledge his debt to Hus, writing after Leipzig that he had hitherto upheld several of his theses without knowing it — hence the commonly repeated paraphrase: "we are all Hussites without knowing it".^[12]

The St Peter's indulgence

In 1515, Pope Leo X published a plenary indulgence linked to financing the new St Peter's Basilica in Rome, under construction since Julius II. The mechanism was complex: to preach it in Germany, Rome came to an arrangement with Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg, who already held several sees and had to repay the Fugger bank the sums advanced for the dispensation of plurality. The proceeds of the indulgence would be shared: half for Rome, half for the repayment.^[13] The transaction was ecclesiastically defensible according to the practice of the time, but it exposed the preaching of indulgences to an obvious commercial risk.

Tetzel and the scandalous preaching

The Dominican Johann Tetzel, charged with preaching this indulgence, offered a simplistic and effective discourse, whose formula remembered by posterity sums up its spirit: "Sobald das Geld im Kasten klingt, die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt" — "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs". The formula is probably more condensed than what Tetzel actually preached, but it faithfully conveys the tone that scandalised Luther.^[14]

The scandal is not the indulgence itself. Catholic doctrine distinguishes the forgiveness of the fault — received in the sacrament of penance, with contrition — from the remission of the temporal punishment that remains due after that forgiveness: the indulgence is this remission, granted by the Church, which draws on the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints by virtue of the communion of saints, to the living who perform the prescribed work; it can also be applied to the departed by way of suffrage.^[15] The indulgence is therefore neither absolution, which forgives the fault, nor salvation itself. Trent would reaffirm this doctrine while ordering that all profit and abuse be removed from it.^[16]

The scandal lies in the preaching: to suggest that a coin paid freed a soul from purgatory without contrition or penance was to imply a monetisation of salvation. Luther targets precisely this confusion: "they preach human doctrine who say that, as soon as the coin clinks in the chest, the soul flies out [of purgatory]" (thesis 27, translated from the Latin); "the suffrage of the Church depends on the sole decision of God" (thesis 28, translated from the Latin).^[17]

The 95 Theses: an academic document turned manifesto

On 31 October 1517, Luther sent to his archbishop, Albert of Brandenburg, a letter accompanied by a Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum — the famous list of 95 theses on indulgences. Tradition holds that he also posted them on the door of Wittenberg's Schlosskirche, the usual place for university announcements. The historical reality of the posting has been debated among historians since Erwin Iserloh's research in the 1960s, but the letter to Albert is documented.^[18]

The theses themselves are cautious. Luther does not frontally attack the pope: he distinguishes interior penance (vera contritio) from the mere sacramental act, denounces commercial confusion, rejects the idea that a soul can be bought out of purgatory, and calls for honest academic discussion. But a few formulations are already explosive:

"The whole life of the Christian must be penance." — Martin Luther, 95 Theses, thesis 1^[19]

"Those who believe they can be assured of their salvation by means of letters of indulgence will be eternally damned along with their teachers." — Martin Luther, 95 Theses, thesis 32^[20]

Translated into German and printed as a placard, the theses circulated within weeks throughout Germany: the spark had become a fire.

The Roman trial and the bull Exsurge Domine

The affair escalated quickly. Rome did not at first approach Luther as an arch-heretic, but as an undisciplined religious. Cardinal Cajetan, legate at Augsburg, received him in October 1518 and asked him to retract; Luther refused. The public disputation of Leipzig (1519), with Johann Eck, pushed Luther to ever more radical positions: he ended up admitting that councils can err and that Hus, condemned at Constance, had said things that were right. There, he crossed a line.^[21]

On 15 June 1520, Leo X published the bull Exsurge Domine, which condemned 41 propositions drawn from Luther's writings and gave him sixty days to retract, under pain of excommunication.^[22] Luther, in December 1520, publicly burned the bull and canon law at Wittenberg. Excommunication followed with Decet Romanum Pontificem, on 3 January 1521.

The three great writings of 1520

Even before excommunication, Luther had published in quick succession, in 1520, three texts that laid the doctrinal and political foundations of the German Reformation.

• To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (August 1520) calls on the lay princes to reform the Church themselves, in the absence of a Roman response — the foundation of a reform by civil power.
• On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (October 1520) reduces the sacraments to two or three (baptism, Eucharist, penance), denies transubstantiation, rejects the idea of the sacrifice of the Mass, contests sacramental ordination, marriage as a sacrament and extreme unction. It is the most radical doctrinal attack.^[23]
• On the Freedom of a Christian (November 1520) expounds the central idea of justification by faith alone (justification: the way in which the sinner is made righteous before God and saved) through a paradox: the Christian is both "a perfectly free lord of all" and "a perfectly dutiful servant of all" — free before God by faith, servant of his neighbour by charity.^[24] This paradox must not be confused with the formula simul iustus et peccator ("at once righteous and sinner"), forged earlier, in the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans (1515-1516), to say that the justified person remains a sinner while being declared righteous by God.^[25]

These three texts together are the programme of the Reformation: mobilised political authority, reduced sacramental system, justification by faith alone, universal priesthood of the baptised.

Worms 1521: "I cannot do otherwise"

The young Emperor Charles V, elected in 1519, summoned Luther to the Diet of Worms in spring 1521. The friar went there under safe-conduct. On 17 April, he was asked whether he acknowledged his books and whether he agreed to retract. On 18 April, after a night of prayer, he solemnly replied: his conscience, captive to the Word of God, could not disavow without scriptural proof what he had taught. The phrase that became famous — "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders, Gott helfe mir" ("Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God") — does not appear in the official records of the diet, but it faithfully sums up the position taken.^[26]

On 25 May 1521 (text backdated to 8 May), the Edict of Worms placed Luther under the ban of the Empire: he became an outlaw, his writings were forbidden, and anyone could kill him with impunity. Saved by his prince, Elector Frederick the Wise, he was seized on the way and hidden at the Wartburg, near Eisenach.

The Wartburg and the German Bible

Sheltering at the Wartburg under the identity of Junker Jörg, Luther translated in a few months the New Testament into German from Erasmus's Greek text. The September 1522 edition — the Septembertestament — was a major linguistic event: the German language unified around this translation, which became a cultural matrix as important as the English King James a century later. The complete Old Testament would follow in 1534.^[27]

This translation is a theological act as much as a linguistic one. By giving every literate Christian direct access to the sacred text, Luther gave concrete form to sola scriptura: it is Scripture, vernacular and printed, that becomes the primary norm. The Reformation is largely an urban^[28] and printed^[29] event — the urban thesis being that of Bernd Moeller, that of the role of printing that of Mark U. Edwards Jr.

But the stay at the Wartburg also coincided with the first excesses at Wittenberg: Karlstadt and the Zwickau prophets radicalised the movement, smashed images and abolished liturgical vestments. Luther returned in March 1522 and calmed the movement with eight sermons (Invocavit-Predigten), refusing iconoclastic violence. All his life he would oscillate between frank doctrinal rupture and relative liturgical conservatism.^[30]

Melanchthon and the Augsburg Confession (1530)

If Luther is the tribune of the Reformation, Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) is its systematic theologian. A humanist Hellenist, professor at Wittenberg from 1518, he wrote as early as 1521 the Loci communes, the first systematic exposition of Lutheran doctrine.^[31]

In June 1530, at the Diet of Augsburg convened by Charles V, Melanchthon drafted the Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana), which the Lutheran princes presented to the emperor. The text is of calculated moderation: it seeks to show that the evangelicals have not separated from the Catholic faith, but are its true conservators. It was nevertheless rejected by the Catholic Confutatio, and Melanchthon replied with the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531).

The Confessio Augustana remains the founding confessional text of Lutheranism, incorporated into the Book of Concord (1580). The whole subsequent Lutheran-Catholic doctrinal debate — including the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed at Augsburg — starts from this text.^[32]

The Peasants' War (1524-1525)

Religious radicalism also had social effects. From 1524 onwards, the peasants of south-western Germany rose up, invoking Scripture and evangelical freedom to contest statute labour, seigneurial charges and serfdom. The Twelve Articles of Memmingen (1525) demanded social reform founded on the Gospel.

Luther, after attempting to play mediator, published in May 1525 a pamphlet of unheard-of violence — Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants — calling on the princes to strike the insurgents without pity, "like one puts down a mad dog" (the formula remembered by posterity for this pamphlet).^[33] The battle of Frankenhausen (15 May 1525) crushed the revolt; the apocalyptic theologian Thomas Müntzer was captured and beheaded. Current estimates retain up to about 100,000 peasants killed in the repression of 1525.^[34]

This was a major break: the Lutheran Reformation became an affair of princes, and the disappointed peasants partly turned to Anabaptism. This alliance with political power would become the structural hallmark of German Lutheranism until the 19th century.

From Speyer to Augsburg: the birth of "Protestants"

The very word "Protestant" comes from the Diet of Speyer of 1529: six princes and fourteen Lutheran imperial cities signed a protestatio against the Catholic majority's decision to enforce the Edict of Worms. The name became that of the whole movement.^[35]

War was henceforth political. The League of Schmalkalden united the Lutheran princes against Charles V. After the defeat of Schmalkalden (1547), a new military phase finally led to the Peace of Augsburg of 25 September 1555:

The Peace of Augsburg nevertheless recognised neither Calvinists nor Anabaptists. By its ambiguities and omissions, it prepared the outbreak, sixty-three years later, of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).^[36]

Zwingli in Zurich

Independently of Luther, Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531), pastor of Zurich's Grossmünster from 1519, preached from 1522 an evangelical reform more radical than Wittenberg's. Where Luther kept images, liturgical vestments and a real eucharistic presence (explaining it differently from Trent), Zwingli removed images, stripped the liturgy bare, and denied any real presence in the Eucharist: for him, "is" in "this is my body" means "signifies".^[37]

The disagreement became a drama in October 1529 at the Colloquy of Marburg, organised by Landgrave Philip of Hesse to reconcile Luther and Zwingli. On fourteen doctrinal articles they agreed; on the fifteenth — the Eucharist — they remained irreconcilable. Luther is said to have written in chalk on the table: "Hoc est corpus meum". The fracture between Lutherans and Reformed dates from that moment.^[38]

Zwingli died two years later, in 1531, on the battlefield of Kappel, as the armed chaplain of a Zurich army defeated by the Catholic cantons. His death sealed the confessional division of Switzerland.

Calvin and the Christian Republic of Geneva

The Frenchman John Calvin (1509-1564) — see the Ignispedia article on John Calvin — gave the Reformed movement its most systematic form. A jurist by training, converted around 1533, exiled from France, he published in 1536 the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion (in Latin, then in French in 1541), which he enriched until the definitive edition of 1559. It is the doctrinal manual of all international Calvinism.^[39]

Called to Geneva by Guillaume Farel, expelled in 1538, returned in 1541, he organised there until his death in 1564 a strict ecclesial theocracy: ecclesiastical ordinances, a consistory overseeing morals, continuous preaching, catechism, and the Academy (1559) which trained French-speaking and international pastors. Geneva became "the Rome of Protestantism" and the dispatch base for Reformed pastors to France, the Netherlands, Scotland, Poland and Hungary.

Calvinist specificity lies in several salient doctrinal traits: insistence on the absolute sovereignty of God, the doctrine of double predestination (see our article on Calvinist predestination), strong ecclesiastical discipline, radical hostility to images, and a purely spiritual (yet real) conception of eucharistic presence. Calvinism would produce, in subsequent generations, Scottish Presbyterianism, English and American Puritanism, and the Reformed Churches of Europe.

Henry VIII's England and the birth of Anglicanism

England followed a singular path — described in detail in Ignispedia's langlicanisme article. The trigger was political: Rome's refusal to annul the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon. The Act of Supremacy (1534) made the king the supreme head of the Church of England. The dissolution of the monasteries, doctrinal evolution under Cranmer, the ephemeral Catholic restoration of Mary Tudor (1553-1558), then the Elizabethan settlement of 1559 gave England a particular religious identity, halfway between Catholicism and Protestantism — the Anglican via media.^[40]

John Knox's Scotland

A disciple of Calvin, John Knox (c. 1514-1572) brought the Calvinism of Geneva back to Scotland in 1559. The Edinburgh Parliament, in 1560, adopted the Scots Confession and abolished the pope's jurisdiction.^[41] But Scotland did not become Presbyterian overnight: the First Book of Discipline (1560) still provided for regional superintendents, the Concordat of Leith (1572) reintroduced bishops appointed by the crown, and it was the Second Book of Discipline (1578), championed by Andrew Melville, that defined government by assemblies of elders (sessions, presbyteries, synods, general assembly); the Parliament of 1592 (the "Golden Act") gave it parliamentary sanction.^[42] This is the matrix of worldwide Presbyterianism, marked by liturgical austerity.

Netherlands, France, Poland, Scandinavia

• The Netherlands progressively Calvinised and combined political rebellion against Philip II of Spain with Calvinist allegiance: the Dutch Republic would be, from the end of the 16th century, one of the strongholds of international Calvinism.
• In France, Calvinism took the form of the Reformed Churches of France organised at the Synod of Paris (1559). The Wars of Religion (1562-1598) tore the kingdom apart until the Edict of Nantes (1598) of Henry IV, which established a precarious coexistence.
• In Poland-Lithuania, the Reformation was plural (Lutheran, Calvinist, anti-Trinitarian) and the Warsaw Confederation (1573) guaranteed exceptional interconfessional tolerance, followed by a powerful Catholic return through Jesuit action in the 17th century.
• In Scandinavia (Denmark-Norway, Sweden), the Lutheran Reformation was imposed by the kings (Denmark 1536, Sweden under Gustav Vasa) with partial episcopal continuity. Institutional situations later diverged: Sweden separated Church and State on 1 January 2000, Norway made its Church a legally distinct entity on 1 January 2017 (it remains the "People's Church" under the Constitution), while Denmark retains an established Church, established and supported by the State under its Constitution.^[43]

Protestant theologians later synthesised the doctrinal unity of the Reformation in the five solas — Latin formulas that condense what distinguishes the Reformation from Roman Catholicism. Each is the subject of a dedicated Ignispedia article.

The Catholic error would be to believe that the Reformation rejects whatever follows the "alone": Protestants do not deny grace, Christ or the glory of God. They deny what they perceive as an addition — Tradition, works, mediations — which Catholics see on the contrary as the normal historical form by which God transmits his grace. The debate is therefore not only about content (each side affirms grace, faith, Scripture), but about the exclusivity of the "alone".^[44]

On the veneration of the saints, the Catholic magisterium thus distinguishes adoration, due to God alone, from the veneration of the saints and Mary, honoured as friends of God and ordered to his glory.^[45]

For the systematic Catholic refutation of these theses, see the article Answers to Protestantism and the specialised articles on each of the five solas.

The Council of Trent (1545-1563)

The Roman response, long slowed by Franco-imperial rivalry, came with the Council of Trent convened by Paul III and held in three phases (1545-1547, 1551-1552, 1562-1563): no ecumenical council had met since Lateran V (1517). Trent was the first solemnly to define doctrine against Protestantism, and its pastoral programme would mark Catholicism until Vatican II. See the article The Council of Trent for the detail of the decrees.

Trent defined, in direct reaction to the Reformation:

• Scripture and Tradition: both are received pari pietatis affectu (with equal sentiment of piety); the deuterocanonical books were declared canonical against Luther.^[46]
• Justification: decree of 13 January 1547 (DS 1520-1583), which defines the nature of justification, the role of the sacraments and the necessity of free cooperation.^[47]
• Sacraments: seven sacraments defined as instituted by Christ, against the Protestant reduction to two or three.
• Eucharist: transubstantiation was defined (DS 1642), the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice (which appeases God and obtains pardon and graces, for the living as for the departed) (DS 1751-1759).
• Holy orders and celibacy: ordination is a sacrament, the priesthood instituted by Christ, clerical celibacy maintained.

To these dogmatic definitions were added considerable decrees of pastoral reform: obligatory residence of bishops, diocesan seminaries, the Roman Catechism, regular preaching, supervision of preachers. The council founded Tridentine pastoral care, which would last until Vatican II.

A spiritual and missionary Counter-Reformation

The word "Counter-Reformation" is misleading: it was not only a defensive reaction, but an immense Catholic spiritual renewal. See the article The Catholic Counter-Reformation for the detailed development.

A few landmarks:

• Foundation of the Society of Jesus (1540) by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, scholarly formation of Catholic leaders.
• Reform of Carmel by Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross.
• French spiritual school: Bérulle, Olier, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint John Eudes.
• Saint Charles Borromeo in Milan, model of a Tridentine bishop.
• Saint Francis de Sales and the spirituality of the "everyman Christian".
• Worldwide missionary impetus: Spanish and Portuguese America, the China missions, those of Japan, those of Paraguay.

This interior renewal is, from the Catholic point of view, the luminous part of a catastrophe: the rupture of Christian unity was a tragedy, but it forced the Roman Church to reform itself in depth.

The Christian unity of the West, lost

The most immediate effect of the Reformation is the definitive shattering of Latin Christendom. In 1500, the Latin Church covered — despite its scandals, and despite the Hussite and Wycliffite dissidences presented above — almost all of Western Europe. In 1600, Europe is confessionally fragmented: Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, Catholic, Anabaptist, anti-Trinitarian. This division was never healed. Modern ecumenical efforts — Unitatis Redintegratio at Vatican II, bilateral dialogues, the 1999 Joint Declaration on Justification — soften hostilities, but do not reconstitute visible unity.^[48]

The wars of religion and civil suffering

The human cost is immense. French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), Dutch Revolt (1568-1648), English wars (16th-17th c.), and finally the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) which ravaged Germany — a third of the population disappeared in some regions. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) recorded the political defeat of the idea of a united Christendom under a single religious authority.^[49]

A latent secularisation

The Reformation contributed, in the long term and indirectly, to several structural evolutions that go beyond its own intentions:

• Assertion of political power over religion: cuius regio, eius religio is a transfer of religious authority to the prince, which opens a path towards the modern sovereign State.
• Tolerated religious pluralism: faced with the impossibility of eliminating the other by force, European societies gradually invented tolerance, then secularism.
• Individualisation of the relation to faith: sola scriptura and the universal priesthood valorise personal reading and individual conscience.
• Economic rationalisation: Max Weber's thesis on "the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism" (1904-1905) attributes to a Protestant inner-worldly asceticism a role in the formation of the spirit of modern capitalism — an influential interpretation but still debated among sociologists and historians, which cannot be presented as an established fact.^[50]

From the Catholic point of view, the Reformation therefore did not only cut off a limb of the Church: it also shifted the religious centre of gravity of Europe towards politics, the State, and finally towards the individual without the Church. Many of these evolutions are today present within modern Catholicism itself.

What does Catholicism today think of the Reformation?

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), in the decree Unitatis Redintegratio, carefully distinguishes:

"Those who are born today into such communities and who live by faith in Christ cannot be accused of the sin of division, and the Catholic Church embraces them with fraternal respect and charity." — Unitatis Redintegratio, no. 3 (1964)^[51]

Today's Catholic can therefore honestly acknowledge several things: the abuses denounced by Luther were real and called for reform; and ecumenical dialogue made it possible to reach a broad consensus on justification, sealed by the Joint Declaration of Augsburg (1999) mentioned above. On the rupture itself, Vatican II does not speak of a "common fault of the Church and the reformers": it says that divisions arose "sometimes through the fault of persons on one side or the other" (Unitatis Redintegratio, no. 3) — personal responsibilities, to be established historically case by case, not a guilt of the Church herself as such.^[52] The way forward is therefore neither nostalgia for a pure and simple return, nor forgetting differences, but shared conversion towards the one Christ.

This does not, however, authorise relativism. The Catholic Church still holds that the definitions of Trent remain true, that apostolic Tradition is constitutive of Revelation just as Scripture is, that there are seven sacraments, that apostolic succession is necessary to the fullness of the Church, and that the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a doctrine of faith. The true ecumenical way is neither anathema nor erasure: it is truth in charity (veritatem facientes in caritate, Eph 4:15).

• Read Martin Luther: the spiritual and theological biography of the reformer.
• Read John Calvin: the second great face of the Reformation.
• Read The Council of Trent: the Catholic dogmatic and pastoral response.
• Read The Catholic Counter-Reformation: the spiritual renewal after Trent.
• Read Answers to Protestantism: the systematic Catholic refutation of Protestant theses.
• Read Sola scriptura, Sola fide, Sola gratia, Solus Christus, Soli Deo gloria: the five solas analysed one by one.
• Read Calvinist predestination: the harshest doctrine of Calvinism and the Thomist answer.
• Read The Real Eucharistic Presence: the heart of the sacramental debate between Trent and the Reformation.
• Read Anglicanism: the singular path of the Reformation in England.