AP European History

AP Achiever by Chris Freiler

The Reformation

Causes of the Protestant Reformation

We have already hinted at several causes of the Protestant Reformation – Christian humanism, late medieval spirituality, and the state of the Catholic Church – but now it is time to focus on the last of these. Simply put, the Catholic Church in 1500 confronted a crisis. Desperate to recapture its former glory and influence, the papacy focused more on artistic patronage and Machiavellian politics than the spiritual state of its flock. Abuses that began during the Babylonian Captivity festered and produced a general cry for reform, a cry ignored by corrupt popes fearful of limits on their power by church councils. These abuses were:

Simony The buying and selling of high church offices, which often produced a revenue (annates) for the holder.
Nepotism The granting of offices to relatives (e.g., Pope Alexander VI conferred a cardinal’s hat upon his 16-year-old son).
Pluralism The holding of multiple church offices.
Absenteeism Not residing in one’s spiritual domain because one held multiple positions.
Indulgences The most controversial, the belief that a believer could draw on Jesus’ and the saints’ previous stock of grace to reduce the sinner’s or a relative’s time in purgatory (that region between heaven and hell reserved for the final “purging” of sinful souls). It was this last abuse that sparked the Reformation, but prior to this spark, recall that a goodly pile of tinder had been accumulating for generations.