Why Was There a Reformation? Surprising Facts Rarely Said

all right so who knows what this upcoming October the 31st is 2017 what's special about October 31 2017 anybody know yes all right it's a Reformation day anything special about this particular Reformation day it's gonna be the 500th anniversary of the beginning the launching of the Protestant Reformation by Martin Luther and as such is going to be in the news a good bit and one of the things that prompted me to want to give this in similar talks in recent months is that I'm absolutely convinced and I've already seen that you're going to be inundated with a whole lot of nonsense about the Reformation all right stuff that I believe is is absolutely poppycock now that some of the form that that nonsense will take one of them is you're going to be hit with a lot of triumphalist polemics from both sides of the Reformation divided and so for instance I got a I had I was asked to respond to an article in a local paper local Alabama paper written by a Baptist pastor that was just a full-out assault on the Catholic Church and and glorifying Luther for the wonderful Reformation that he had brought about and in attacking the church with hackneyed stereotypes and I had to write a refutation of that but you're gonna hear the same thing from the Catholic side that you know Luther was a demon from Hell who had nothing constructive to offer and I've seen both sides and you know either Reformation era itself it was very common to swap accusations of being the Antichrist everybody knew the Pope was the Antichrist unless you were Catholic and then Luther was the Antichrist and and that's that's not very helpful I think I think it obscures understanding and I believe that we're at a period in history where it's important that we learn to appreciate other traditions and see where we can work together where we can help one another but you might know what Russell vault and Amy Barrett have in common those names mean anything to anybody here all right how about Jack Nelson knows all right no okay well Russell vault and Amy Barrett were both nominees very recently this year two offices in the federal government one in the executive branch and one in the judicial branch Russell vault is an evangelical Christian nevel Protestant Christian and Amy Barrett is a Roman Catholic who's a law professor at Notre Dame what they have in common other than being nominees to federal office is that both of them were assaulted by Senators United States senators in ruled unfit for for government office on the basis of their Christian faith Bernie Sanders attacked Russell vault publicly and said that because of his evan Jellicle Protestant beliefs he was unfit for unfit for public office and Dianne Feinstein coined a really wonderful phrase I think she said that we were all gonna own this one I think for the next hundred years she said to Amy Barrett dogma lives loudly within you and I thought you know I'm not seeing t-shirts that now say Dogma lives loudly within me okay but the long and the short of it is that this is something that has drawn or needs to draw I believe Protestants Catholics closer together because we're in confrontation with a public sphere that's increasingly hostile to any form of Christian faith and so sterile triumphalist polemics while they're going to continue to happen need to be need to be transcended to a certain extent so that's one form of the nonsense that you're going to be hit with the other one is a naive acumen ISM alright faced by a common enemy there's a temptation I think to say there are no differences between Protestant Catholics it's all been reconciled you know Luther was fundamentally right about you know some of these key issues and the Catholic Church needs to get on board and sometimes discussions of ecumenical dialogues like the Catholic Lutheran joint declaration on justification which did not intend to elaborate differences but only to settle on commonalities is misinterpreted as teaching the Catholics and Protestants now agree on fundamental questions and the Reformation is over I've actually asked for a review a book recently by a Catholic author whose name I won't repeat because I don't want you to go out and read the book whose premise of his book was that the Reformation is over and we're now all on the same page and the differences are you know relatively minor well I reject that thesis because as a convert to the Catholic Church if I really believed that the Reformation was over in Catholics and Protestants fundamentally agreed on the most important issues I never would have become a Catholic right that was my motive for coming into the Catholic Church so I think we need to avoid trifle as polemics we also needs a steer clear of a naive humanism so what do I want to accomplish today in this discussion of the Reformation I would like you to walk away confident in your Catholic faith but not naive not naive either you know when I became a Catholic I went to my parents and told them I was going to become a Catholic and that was a difficult conversation as it is for many converts and they mistakenly fault that I was becoming Catholic to thumb my nose at my Presbyterian tradition that they thought that I had been hurt or wounded by a Presbyterian Church and that I was rejecting the tradition I was raised in rather than positively embracing Catholicism it was kind of a rebellious act on my part to thumb my nose at the tradition that I grew up in and my dad pulled me aside and he said he said to me he said you know David just because the church has something wrong with it you don't have to leave it and I said dad you've never said a truer word and he went oh but he never got on my case about being Catholic again and that's sort of what the perspective I'd like to bring to you today about the Protestant Reformation that just because the church has something wrong with it you don't have to leave it and I want to try to unpack a little bit the nature of what that wrong was I don't want to today spend a lot of time refuting the fundamental premises of Protestantism all right you can if you want to hear that you can tune into my radio show because people call up every day and say I'm not a Catholic because of this that and the other thing and it's usually Reformation polemics and I go through in detail and I argue with them about the content of Christian faith that's not what I'm gonna do here today what I want to do is set a context and help you have some historical understanding for why the Reformation had the purchase that it did what was going on in the 16th century that so many people found this very novel construction of Christian faith compelling and it was extremely novel there's no place else in the world other than early modern Latin North Western Europe where the particular elaboration of Christian faith that we call Protestantism emerged it didn't happen in Coptic Egypt or Theo Pia or Syria or Byzantium and so kind of naive sense that sort of emerges out of the pages of the New Testament is falsified by history all right what was it about that time in place that made Protestantism seem compelling that's really well I want do um today is not going to be primarily recounting my conversion story that's a that's something I'm happy to do but it's not what I want to do today instead it's gonna be recapitulating some of the historical discoveries that I made as an academic alright because that's what brought me to the Catholic faith was historical study the Reformation recapitulating some of the discoveries that I made as an academic that opened up my mind to the possibility that Catholicism might be true and that the way I had construed history before was false so it's not going to be a refutation of Protestantism per se nor is it going to be comprehensive I one of the things that you need to guard against in any kind of historical study is mono causational explanation the idea that you just need one key to interpret a complex historical event that obscures rather than clarifies I don't believe there was one cause of the Reformation there were many and we're not going to be able to touch on all of them today I just want to highlight and touch a few things that I suspect you have never heard before all right that's why I'm giving the talk to teach stuff that you've not heard before that I hope will clarify give you something to walk away and think about all right so we're gonna be doing some exploration of depth and context now I want to I want to paint a picture for you a visual image of where I'm going I'm going to tell you a story from my own life quite recently I have a son who is a freshman at st. Bernard's Preparatory School in Coleman and he lives up there with the monks five days a week and then he comes home and stays with us on the weekends and we dropped him off in August and the day we left him there we went to Mass with the monks at st. burners and how many of you all have ever been to my house with the monks at st. Burnitz there's a beautiful experience you know you better not be in a hurry okay and so we sat there for this mass it lasted at least you know at least an hour and a half and it was replete with chant and Latin and English and and you know I thought the father Abbott's homily it was it was really outstanding and he drew on the tradition of monastic spirituality and asceticism but he also was sensitive to the teaching of the council and to modernity and I thought was very well formulated and I sat then I listened to the beautiful music and the chant and the liturgy was well performed but well celebrated I should say and the architecture of course is highly traditional in some respects in other respects it's a bit modern and but the whole effect was beautiful and aesthetic and rich and nuanced and of course you know having all the students there was a delightful and as I left I thought it was a wonderful experience I really enjoyed it it would have been utterly unintelligible to me 20 years ago utterly unintelligible everything that I enjoyed about this liturgy was something that I had to be trained to I had to read my way into I had to study my way into this tradition in order to fully appreciate it if I just plucked somebody out of First Baptist Church of wherever and dropped them in this liturgy they would not have known what was going on okay that is not an argument against the tradition at all right because it's precisely the liturgical theological richness of the Catholic tradition that made me a Catholic but it it is to demonstrate something of the catechetical and evangelistic burden that Catholics have today and that Catholics had in the 16th century in conveying why somebody would want to be a Catholic do you know what the most frequent reason people give is when asked why they left the Catholic Church I mean this is what Pew Research shows why do people leave the Catholic Church two out of three times it's a very simple reason the answer is that I didn't feel that my spiritual needs were being met which is a simple way of saying nobody ever taught me how to engage this incredibly rich tradition okay it's very simple we have a we have an enormous catechetical burden as Catholics which is also a privilege all right how well we execute that categorical ministry how well we teach people to embrace the tradition which is of the liturgy the theological tradition will determine how how well they're able to integrate it into their life meaningfully and our failure in that regard is one of the principal reasons that people leave the church and I would argue today this is what I want to help you see the same thing was true in the 16th century all right now my own personal thesis on the Reformation is that the Reformation was a symptom of the church's own pastoral efforts all right both of the church's successes and of the church's failures and as such there's much we can learn from it about how we should do ministry today all right and I believe that our that our access to the Reformation and I've already touched on this has been obscured tremendously obscured by stereotypes and polemics so a lot of what I want to do today is to get underneath and behind those stereotypes and fill the mix that help you understand I want to illustrate a couple of stereotypes the stories that I learned in studying history one of them that I remember the day that this way of reading history all right not reading it through the lens of the 20th century but really trying to get into the mind of the people that lived there first occurred to me I was writing a master's thesis on a little-known French theologian of Protestant theologian named plv la he was an associate of Calvin's and kind of a popular evangelist who travel around southern France and preached Calvinist doctrine he was very popular at the time and I'm reading this sermon that he wrote he delivered to people it was actually on the doctrine of predestination all right which is why I was reading it but there is this throwaway line in the sermon where all of a sudden he starts up braiding his congregation for wearing for wearing the Word of God for like cutting out Bible verses and pinning it onto their clothes and he basically said you don't wear it you read it and then and then or you listen to it and then he kind of goes back to his main theme and it was just a throwaway line but in a moment in a flash of insight a whole Vista opened up before me of a type of way of being Christian in the 16th century that had never occurred to me namely I had always thought of the Protestant doctrine of Sola scriptura the way I would interpret it today name the Reformation was all about putting the Bible in the hands of the common people so they could discern the Word of God now that was a very appealing message and all of a sudden I saw people who were brought up to a tactile form of religion and we're familiar with the relics of the saints and you know maybe you have a relic of st. Anne that you wear around your neck and you go on pilgrimage and you you try to engage the holy through through tactile and sensory or sacramental means and now you hear these preachers promulgating the power of the Word of God the Word of God the Word of God and you assimilate that to a form of spirituality with which you're more familiar so you rip it up stick it in your cup pocket you see it I'm saying and I thought no that's that's a that's a vision of religious life a strange amalgam of a certain kind of pre-modern unlearning Catholicism with Reformation doctrine that it never occurred to me before I want to investigate that and so I did my doctoral research on the sort of the interplay between learned and elite forms of religion and then popular spirituality and what I found was there was a tremendous amount of information that had never been plumbed looking at the Reformation through these lenses and I want to illustrate why this obscured why this failure obscures our understanding of the Reformation I thought my entire life that the doctrine of Sola scriptura was a bid for the private reading of the Bible all right and that is the way it has always been presented to me in the modern world into my church growing up you have to read the Bible you have to have your quiet time you have to study the Bible study study read read quiet time quiet time that was the way Sola scriptura was always taught to me and and when I was in seminary I had I had so many professors that said this is what the Reformers were teaching and promulgating and the whole first book of Calvin's Institute's which is hundreds and hundreds of pages long which glorifies the power and the authority of the word of God always read through those lenses Oh Calvin wants me to pick up and read the Bible and understand it it was only after I spent several years reading Calvin sermons and letters and and juridical decisions of the Geneva church courts and all the rest of it that I began to realize Calvin never asks anybody to the Bible never he asks them to sit and listen while he preaches about it and in fact when people do sit down and read the Bible for themselves and come up with a novel interpretation that conflicts with Calvin he he has them arrested there was a very celebrated case in 1551 when a learned physician who had been Catholic and became Protestant named Jerome Bowl sick came into the city of Geneva and listened to a public sermon given by one of Calvin's associates and after he read it after he heard it he said well I don't agree with that and he stood up in the it was kind of a meeting like this it wasn't a church service and he stood up in the meeting and he gave out his own interpretation of Scripture and why he thought the minister was incorrect and for that temerity he was arrested and thrown in prison and Calvin tried to have the men executed and in prison he he sought to engage Calvin in a theological debate to actually argue the issue out and in Bocek said this he says he wrote a letter to the City Council and he says does not Calvin confess that all the articles of faith and the doctrines taught in our Lord's Church must be proved from several manifest and evidence statements of Scripture which cannot be construed in diverse ways and from the authority of the holy scripture in its entirety in other words bollock articulated very much a adoption of the Bible that I would have been familiar with as a young promising hey I should be able to read the Bible I have the Spirit of God the same as you see what I can find from it if it doesn't accord with what you say then I should have a right to challenge you and Calvin would have none of it try to shut Bowl sit down tried to have him executed and I began to see okay at least in the mind of this one very influential reformer solar scriptura didn't mean anything like what I thought it meant and in fact we're gonna find out what Calvin meant by it was in order to curb all the social disorder and an emergent denominationalism there needs to be one coherent theological voice named Calvin's with the authority to teach from the Scriptures directly for the common people to submit to now how was that different from the papacy in Carmen's mind well in Calvin's mind the papacy just didn't teach the Bible that just wasn't what their spirituality was about so Sola scriptura for him many returned to the primacy of Scripture rather than the primacy the Roman Mass you see it's a completely different control of what these terms that we're so familiar with meant in the sixteenth century are you following me are you with me now this is subtle stuff so if I start to lose you let me know because I'm getting out things that I'm fairly sure you haven't heard before okay I want to give you one other example of how modern stereotypes of the Reformation obscure what actually took place in fact some of these stereotypes are grounded in the polemics of the 16th century itself when you're a Protestant child one of the sort of archetypal legendary moments that you were raised up on is Luther's so-called tower experience in about 1519 Luther's sitting in a tower in in in Germany and he's puzzling over the words of st. Paul and he has this epiphany this moment of enlightenment where he comes up with his novel doctrine of justification by faith alone and all of a sudden he describes unit so the heavens are opened in the light of God is shining down upon him and it's this real moment of illumination and all the fetters were thrown off and suddenly he realizes he saved by faith alone right well that that sort of archetypal moment in Luther's life becomes a model for Protestant spirituality and for a little Protestant kids down through the ages just this week in fact I had a guy called the radio show and he he was contrasting his understanding of justification with the Catholics in terms of this you know George Washington and the cherry tree he kind of kind of legend okay and and so the way Protestants are taught this story is that Luther's experiences in blaa matic it's sort of symptomatic of the whole thrust of late medieval spirituality and they depict all 16th century Catholics or 15th century Catholics as effectively neurotic nutjobs who are always sitting around chewing their fingernails off in anxiety over their salvation okay and that's the way it's depicted now interestingly that that picture of religious life in the 16th century gets picked up as a propaganda trope in 16th century France and so you find somebody like Calvin who when he writes to the Catholic Bishops thought a lot too Calvin says this he says pinus consciences which formerly boiled with quechua lands ayat 'i have at length begun after being freed from that dire torment to rest with confidence in the divine favor so you see this is how calvin depicts the reformation we were all these you know neurotic OCD people who were fearful for our salvation and we lived you know under the torture of the confessional and now justification by faith the heavens are open and we all finally have these free consciences right so he depicted the pre-reformation Europe is this very kind of neurotic self-obsessed kind of spirituality then I started studying coloman and I started his pastoral ministry in Geneva and I studied desire life and I discovered a problem that picture of Catholic life was nowhere in passed in Calvin's pastoral ministry in fact he spent his entire pastoral career in Geneva trying to combat the opposite problem people that had a very little developed sense of sin his problem was with Libertines people who wanted to take moral license as the guide rather than rather than dealing with their own neurotic obsessions and when I began to study Calvin's own life I realized that Calvin himself had very little sense of personal sin in his own narrative is above his own conversion there is no tower moment there's no moment where he lived in neurotic guilt and suddenly comes to see the light he's liberated for Calvin it was all about an intellectual realization that he had been given the task of teaching truth right it was a not you isn't it was a he was an ideologue who had risen to the pet to the moment and now is gonna be able to liberate Europe all right so it's a completely different narrative of conversion in Calvin's own life and I began to realize this story of the neurotic 16th century Catholic who's tortured by the confession one has no assurance of salvation is a fiction it was true of Luther because of his own particular personality but it became a propaganda trope in the literature that has been inherited down to the state and it actually obscures the nature of the reasons that people became Catholic okay um now the way I would characterize us today if you want to know what's a Donald Trump thinks would you ask Nancy all right if you want to know what the what the policies and the philosophies of the Republican Party are you're not going to ask Bernie Sanders and similarly if you want to know what makes Barack Obama tick you're not going to ask George Bush right because what you're gonna get is a propaganda tool you're gonna get up the images drawn from the language of propaganda political ideology you're not actually gonna get decent historical analysis or and that's what we're up against in trying to understand the Reformation all right so you guys still with me all right now in brief what I got at all of this was a deep appreciation for the doctrines of catholicity unity liturgy sacramental realism Church Authority all of these very very Catholic ideals were taught by the Reformers themselves and they latched on to the language of Luther's peculiar theology his justification by faith and grace alone faith alone in Scripture alone is the vehicle to break away from what they viewed as an inefficient corrupt bureaucratic Roman hierarchy but in order to come back to an essentially Catholic vision of reform all right they wanted to teach the centrality of the Liturgy of the authority of the church embodied in agama Calvin all right the doctrines of grace and the sacraments and so forth and what's happened now 500 years later is that the essentially Catholic impetus behind the Reformation has been lost and it's been obscured under these few abstract formula that have taken on the character of historical polemics so so studying this out as a historian when I began to see the Catholic intent of the Reformers all right in the confused state of scholarship about it I began to realize this there's a deeper reality here than I've been led to led to consider now those bells are driving me nuts okay um so to unpack this I want to start with a question now I've already set you up okay I've already set you up so you kind of know where I'm going why was there a Reformation now I've already I've already kind of told you where I'm not going but if I were to ask that if I hadn't set you up or if I had to ask this question to another audience what do you think the most common response is to the question why was there a Reformation exactly exactly the most common perception is that the Reformation happened as a response to corruption in the church and the sale of indulgences in the line all right and you will hear that from Protestants and you will hear that from Catholics now has two things to say about it number one Luther himself explicitly repudiates that interpretation of the Reformation okay I'm gonna read to you a passage from a book that Luther wrote 1525 called on the bondage of the will it was a response to a treatise written by Erasmus of Rotterdam Erasmus was a Catholic Fulham assistant a humanist and the greatest scholar of his age and when Erasmus took up the pan against Luther he didn't attack luther on his doctrine of authority or his rejection of indulgences he attacked luther precisely on the question um of the freedom of the will is that luther you deny the freedom of the will and that's the key issue and luther writes erasmus back and he says this to erasmus I greatly commend and I extol you for this thing also that you are the only man of all my antagonist that has attacked the heart of the subject the head of the cause instead of wearing me out with those extraneous points the papacy purgatory and indulgences and a number of light topics which may more fitly be called trifles than matters of debate a sort of chase in which nearly all my opponents have been hunting me hitherto in vain you are the single and solitary individual who has seen the hinge of the matter in dispute and have aimed at the neck and I thank you for this from my heart Luther himself said the matter of indulgences papacy purgatory and the like were trifles not matters of debate all right so the first problem with interpreting the Reformation is a response to corruption is that the main dude and the Reformation says that's not what it was about okay now there's another problem with attributing the Reformation principally to corruption how many of you think that corruption in the 16th century Catholic Church was something new anybody here want to take that vote okay no now if you've ever read the the documents of the fourth Lateran council in 1215 so we're talking three hundred years before their information it was a large part a reforming council to deal with corruption and abuse okay so this is something that's been going on a long time the church anybody here ever heard of st. Peter Damien Peter Damien wrote a book called the Lee bear gomorian who's in the 11th century which is an attack on the sexual immorality being practiced by the Catholic clergy at the time all right st. Gregory's nuns eons us all right one of the one of the great great fathers of the church all right became 5th century patriarch of Constantinople he didn't want the job you know why because all of the corruption in the church in fifth century Constantinople alright if you've read the canons of the Council of Nicaea they were replete with directives to eliminate corruption in the church okay um how many people have ever read the biblical book of 3rd John it's in the Bible right some 27 books of the canonical New Testament 3rd John well the issue in 3rd John is Diotrephes Diotrephes is a corrupt Catholic bishop alright who was kicking people out of the church because they were loyal to Saint John alright in other words that how many people think we've gotten rid of corruption today there has never been an era in the church's history in which they were not corruption if corruption were a sufficient explanation for the Reformation then we should have been having Reformation every 5 minutes for the last 2,000 years but the point of fact is the peculiar form of Reformation that took place in 16th century European in Saxony and France especially alright it's something that emerged only in that peculiar place in time in history and no place else in the world you don't see a Protestant Reformation popping up in Coptic Egypt in the 5th century and it wasn't because the cops were so unbelievably pure oh I like the cops fine I'm not taking out on the cops but you see my point okay so what did change if it wasn't the press that the presence of corruption in the church what changed was the perception of corruption in the church how people at the time viewed the reality of corruption and what ought to be done about it and how they thought they should respond to it alright and in particular where did the idea come from that you should respond to corruption through primitivism right a key dogma of the Reformation is that we should return to the early church to a pristine form of Christianity in antiquity and that's the way to deal with corruption where did that idea come from question does the New Testament endorse the doctrine of primitivism does the New Testament itself ever tell us that the New Testament is an ideal expression of Christian life to which we should return no nearly every letter of the Apostles in the New Testament is dealing with the problem of corruption all right there's nothing in the data of the New Testament that suggests that the New Testament era is ideal far from it all right if anything the doctrine the the historical doctrine embedded in the New Testament is eschatological and developmental the kingdom of God here in seed that they will grow to be like the great tree with all the branches with all the birds come and nest it would suggest the opposite dynamic one of I think of developing and increasing elaboration and holiness over time not the opposite which is primitivism so where does the idea of primitivism come from you don't find it in st. Augusta right Augustine has no doctrine of Christian primitivism all right he does have a respect for tradition but that's a different thing in fact Augustine has if anything a far more cyclical view of history then we're going to have to like be born again every generation in in every human soul until the end of the time because the problem of sin and corruption and death and hell in the devil is never gonna end right until the coming of Christ there's no doctrine of primitivism per se you don't get it in Eusebius he thinks the kingdom of God has come with Constantine all right so you're not going to get primitivism out of these early documents so where does this idea come from any ideas what do you think how many people have heard of st. odo of Cluny st. odo of Clue all right what characterizes a spiritual life of medieval Europe more than anything else Benedictine monasticism all right telling them I should start with the discussion of my son his experience right Benedictine monasticism is the most characteristic feature the most defining feature of spirituality in the Latin West for a thousand years alright and what do you know about the character of Benedictine monasticism they change things up a lot from day to day don't they know the benedictions do the same bloomin thing day in and day out year after year for centuries right they stick to the rule no there's a joke about religious orders and some of you have heard this one right so there's a bunch of priests that get together to pray the Divine Office the Liturgy of the hours at night okay and the lights go off and nobody can see their bravery well the benedictions just keep on going the Dominicans pray for enlightenment the Carmelites thank God for the gift of darkness and the DA system priest goes in the basement and flips the few switch okay well what happens to the Benedictine Order after about say eight hundred years or no no I say say three hundred years 400 years well people become lakhs and following the rule they fall away from strict adherence to the rule of Saint Benedict all right if you've ever read a blog you know the story of Eloise and Abelard great it's called a flashy soap opera romance from the from the 12th century in Paris alright Abelard after after he's some I won't say it gives up on Eloise he he goes off and tries to reform a monastery in the monks I'll try to kill him because they're basically just pensioners they've quit practicing any kind of monastic life of all they all keep mr. Susan you know the beer barrels real thick and you know they just living off the fat of the monastery he's trying to pull him back on they trying to assassinate him that kind of thing was not all that uncommon so in the ninth century in early 10th century you get a movement to call the monastic communities back to the pristine early rule of the Benedictine Order and no place did this happen more than in the monastery the Benedict and Monastery of Cluny under the guidance of saint odo of Cluny okay and he was so effective in doing it that odo and Clooney with papal blessing begins to promote the site it's called the Clooney act reform they begin to promote this idea of the cluniac reform and a return to the pristine benediction rule of the early centuries throughout the monasteries of Europe all right and so the idea of primitivism originally had nothing to do with the New Testament per se it was a return to the early Benedictine rule and that ideology gets gets sort of shifted throughout all of Europe and all the Benedictine communities and especially through the work of odo and in the clothing acts now it has an effect on one very influential person all right a fellow by the name of of Hildebrand who became Pope Gregory the seventh and range from 1073 to 1085 all right Gregory the seventh is a sink in the Catholic Church all right and inspired by the cluniac reform which was primitive this Gregory says hey why don't we do with the universal Church what the cleaning acts did with the Benedictine rule let's go back to an early pristine model of Christian faith when everything was hunky-dory we lived by the rules and in his mind that now meant the canons right the early canons of the church and and that'll be a way to deal with this corruption so in fact the central sort of ideological claim of the Reformation that various corruption and that we should explain corruption by a departure from an early pristine model is a Benedictine idea promulgated by the papacy in other words the Pope started the Reformation okay for real five hundred years before Luther now um what happened a century later well that Gregory does something else that's highly radical highly radical he says to the laypeople i absolve you of your over your obligation to obey corrupt bishops now that's just astonishing all right so he puts into the common mind into the water if you will of medieval Europe the idea that the laity should stand in judgment over the morals of the clergy as a tool to bring about the reforming of the church all right a direct appeal to the lady now this direct appeal to the laity got taken up in a very very powerful way in the religious movements of the thirteen fourteen fifteen centuries by no one more effectively than Saint Francis of Assisi in 12 or nine all right and then state Dominic of course in has ordered 1216 and what do they do well Francis is animated by the idea that society is corrupt now also you have the advent of a money economy which is something radically new in European history we're moving away from manorial ISM a money economy and so it now so now the renunciation of property becomes something that's intelligible when you have some property to renounce which they didn't have for a long time and Francis goes out does this very radical thing now religious are no longer bound within the confines of the monastery now we can take monastic spirituality and we can popularize it for the masses and so Francis goes out and begins to preach this kind of spirituality but now in the popular idiom apart from the Liturgy of the church not in contradiction to but in Contra distinction too and apart from the monasteries and then Francis and Dominic and many of the other reformers do something incredibly significant all right they begin to form little associations of pious faith will call confraternities or third orders how many you believe humming I'll belong to a third order I know a couple of you do right if somebody's not raising somebody's hand but there are there we have a Franciscan Franciscan third order here we have a Carmelite third order of a Dominican third order all right and they're kind of complicated Christian Mother's and these kinds of small group discipleship type thanks it's the Franciscans that start this in the 13th century okay and they begin to form these little associations with Pi is faithful and they grow like math they grow like wildfire across Europe for for 300 years there's a rosary Confraternity in Cologne that has over a hundred thousand people in it at the time of the Reformation in Geneva Switzerland that had a population of about 10,000 there were about 60 confraternities that we know of that's one Confraternity for every say 150 hundred 60 people okay so there's tremendously engaged it's very very important okay now we back up a little bit prior to this to this explosion of lay piety in the religious movements what does church spirituality look like in around the Carolingian era okay so you know Charlemagne was crowned in 800 so say between 800 and the life of of Gregory the seventh what does a spirituality look like okay well number one it's intensely monastic we already talked about that okay outside of the monasteries what does it look like well the monasteries themselves had a really in view of the world outside the monasteries they thought it was almost impossible for people to be saved outside the monastic life that's true right outside it was heavily again tactile and and the devotion to Saints in the relics which I embraced as a deeply Catholic pious practice and is a huge part of my own spirituality but was a an incredibly important part of lay spirituality in the late Middle Ages so much so that if you were known to be a pious hermit in say around the eleventh or twelfth centuries um they wouldn't let you leave town when you started feeling sick this is true all right because they didn't want you dining someplace else all right because once you were dead you were their Hermit all right and then you think that we got some relics going on right here okay and there is a and I read a taco dissertation one time called fertile site it was all about the problem of relic theft in the middle agents so you know we know they've got this you know pious aesthetical hermit who lives you know walled up in a hole over here and he just died let's let's go steal his relics at night so we can have some relics do it in our community and there were relic salesmen you know would run around sell spurious relics all the time and this was a story I'm not sure if this was true but it's it captures the spirit of the age I think pretty well of the relic salesman who shows up and tells the community that he's got the head of John the Baptist and I said we are not such idiots we have already gotten the head of John the Baptist and he says no no you don't understand I have the head of John the Baptist as a child all right and so what's going on to the mass and this is incredibly important okay so how many people have been to Paris and been to Notre Dame not told I'm thinking okay well when you go there what do you notice about the high altar if you notice the high altar there's this string well they've moved it up right but formally you can imagine they had this giant screen all right she's called a Rood screen that Bluffs off the high altar and what's going on the howl from the people down here all right another thing you noticed you see this st. Bernard's Abbey also the average Church as well you see all these little side altars all up and down the side of the church right now I want you to imagine I want you to go back in time and I want you to imagine time when it's a high altar there's a priestess saying Mass and it's not the Tritton teen mass right that doesn't come till the 16th century we don't know what version of the mass it was there's many in competition back son and his he is he's not just got his back to the congregation he's hidden behind the Rood screen there is no chance whatsoever at all do you have any clue what he's saying maybe speaking in a very quiet voice it's not this it's not even the formalized Tridentine mass all right he's he's speaking in a very low voice behind a Rood screen with his back to you maybe maybe you know ranked by a couple of the clerics at the same time you may have priests at every one of these side altars they're called Mass priests that are saying massive simultaneously and there are lines of laypeople behind them who are gonna pay a stipend to have a mass set for their intentions all right and the people that are engaged in the Liturgy of the high altar if anything they're going to be on their knees and they're gonna be praying their rosaries or whatever their own private pious devotions are and the only point of the mass where they connect is the elevation and they know what happens at the elevation right they know that's really Jesus that's why the elevation was instituted in Latin right because was the only part of the mass that the people would really connect to in their own interior life all right so they knew the mass was a sacrifice they knew it was the sacrifice of Christ being represented in a reparation for the sins of the world would have had propitiatory value that's why they were paying for them you know to all the mass priests lined up all right but in terms of the nature of their own personal engagement of the mass is something very very different all right and easily assimilated to the very tactile sort of relic centric spirituality that they already knew this is a source of power I need the source of power I'm gonna come here it's efficacious for my temporal and spiritual needs all right but in terms of an engagement with the kerygma with the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the call to the ethical life of conversion and mysticism that that way of articulating the faith which of course is deeply Catholic and you find it in Agustin is remote from the experience of your most of your average Carolyn G Emily Catholic all right but this is what the Franciscans begin to teach the Franciscans begin to evangelize Europe in the 13th century and they teach the message of the death and resurrection Jesus and his significance for my life and the need for conversion and they begin to call people away from a purely you know sort of tacked on all this worldly overly interested in you know can I get this relic to help my crops I mean they're there were there were exorcism rituals to get rid of elves yeah and cast them out of your fields you know so you'd have a good harvest we're going to move away from that kind of spirituality and get into the real imitation of Jesus this is something that the Franciscans bring about okay um now what does a spirituality look like preaching where does preaching happen in the 13th century not in the churches it happens in the highways and the byways in the public squares as the Franciscans and the Dominicans go out to preach the gospel all right so where do you engage the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus in the imitation of Christ not a mass with the Franciscans and the Dominicans preaching on the highways and the byways it's the Gospel message it's good stuff all right and it's not in competition with the mass but it is in Contra distinction to the mass you follow me right very different way of construing the spiritual life all right and this is of course the evolution as Christianity is is trying to penetrate into an essentially pagan culture that was Germanic and Scandinavian and and very very very different all right so by the time you run in the 12th ladder and Council with Lateran Council 1215 one of the things they try to deal with is trial by ordeal and the council rules out basically you could no longer have trial by ordeal how many people saw Monty Python so holy girl all right all right it's a it's a kind of a wicked satire and I wouldn't recommend it but there's a scene in the film where some villagers grab all the woman that the accuse of being a witch and they say we're gonna we're gonna find out if she's witch and the way you know that she's the witch is that you know we throw witches in the water and if they're witches they float well you know what else floats well wood floats and duck floats so we're gonna weigh the witch and see if she weighs the same as a duck and if she is and we know she's a witch Morgan's mistake all right it's just a convoluted reasoning that's that's a satirical book there's an element of truth in it all right so this is what the church is trying to come back all right through elevating the level of lay consciousness changing the law I mean we're dealing with a very very illiterate in culture it takes centuries to evangelize them all right now so after the Franciscans have done their work all right and they've done their evangelism and they've preached the imitation of Christ and they form the confraternities okay and they've tried to elevate the level of lay spirituality and they've responded the call of the Pope to go back to primitive Christian culture which for them means for Francis means a return to the gospel the gospel values of renunciation and poverty and once they've done their work now with 300 years into this papal Reformation 400 years into this papal Reformation where are we on the eve of Luther's Reformation what displays spirituality look like what is Catholic like look like on the eve of Luther's Reformation no that's what I must speak about today a little bit just a little bit fortunately with the advent of printing in the 1450s the most popular form of literature was religious literature and one of the book genre that was a best-seller at the time were prayer books prayer books instructing the laity and how to go to Mass and how to participate in the liturgy and how to have a spiritual life unbelievably popular literature I mean we have the the the wills and Testaments of book dealers that died in early 16th century Europe who left inventories of tens of thousands of copies all right that's just what they were inventory and that's just like one bookseller in Paris you multiply this across all the big cities of of Europe now I want to take just one illustration how many people have read the story of this whole white dress of Lisieux do you remember a passage into residues you know where she talks about bringing the blest bread to home from mass this is it's just one tiny little wine she talks about going to Mass and getting the blest bread and bringing it on right it didn't make an impression on anybody here obviously right but she does talk about it all right what the heck was blessed Brent remember I said that we've been developing forms of communal life and pious devotions and spiritualities that are complementary to but distinct from the spirituality of the mass well father's up there behind the Rood screen we don't know what he's about but we now know 300 years into the papal Reformation we now notice something about spiritual participation in Christ and how we all are one body in Jesus so why don't they come up with a symbol right a form of like devotional worship where we can all affirm our commonality in Jesus and our spiritual unity hmm I wonder what that should be and so they take unconsecrated bread and the priest blesses it as a sign of their spiritual unity in Christ excuse me guys did you think that maybe the Eucharist could have been that they didn't naturally all right and so there's a moment in the worship when the laypeople pass around a loaf of unconsecrated but blessed bread is a sign of their corporeal excuse me of their spiritual unity in the body of Christ it's a bizarre thing for obvious reasons it's a good thing we don't have this practice anymore okay um they also would pass around a board piece of wood called the pax board and you can see images of these in the prayer books it would have it would be a piece of wood with me maybe say a lamb or some sign of Christ and printed on the on the wood okay and they would pass the wood around and they would kiss this piece of wood and pass it to the next guy again as a size as a sign of their solidarity in the in the corporate fellowship of Christ which is the church okay now one of the prayer books from the fourteen fifties or early 16th century gives this instruction about the reception of the PAC's board not the Eucharist the PAC's board no one should take the PAC's board if he has not fasted and is without mortal sin for whoever takes it in great faith receives the body of our Lord spiritually and participates in all the goods done by the entire holy Christian Church this is a doctrine of spiritual participation which ought to be directed towards the Eucharist but was being directed towards the PAC's board a la devotional practice that was in context of but conceptually distinct from the Holy Sacrifice of the mass you follow me you still with me right now commentary on the Gospels from 15 22 in the diocese of moe by the Catholic reformer shop lafete what they top and did top their rights of this great is the faith which knows that Christ is corporally where he is sacramentally okay so the table says it's good to believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist he just confesses that so he's Orthodox he's worth the dogs but it is greater to know that he is corporately present absolutely everywhere for the one is to know without means the other with means the faith which is what that means however is greater than the faith with means now the table has just articulated a completely Orthodox spiritual perspective and I'm not gonna go in because I'm gonna run out of time why his relative ranking of spiritual versus corporeal is actually an Orthodox framing of the issue but he's he's dealing with a form of spirituality at a time of the church in churches history in which in these confraternities in these third orders we have lay people where investments celebrating quasi liturgical ceremonies passing around bless bread passing around PACs board boards and affirming their spiritual participation with Christ and one another as something that is intrinsically superior to the mass and they're all Orthodox and none of them reject the Catholic Church you would think so I've just shown you that in around 1500 all right you have proto Protestant congregations already existence all over Europe embracing a form of spirituality that is a hair's breadth away from Zwingli anism that's the Reformed Protestant tradition of the 1520's a hair's breadth away from Julian ism and the entire thing is a product of the reforming impetus of the Catholic Church inaugurated by Gregory the seventh and embraced with enthusiasm by the religious orders like the Franciscans and Dominicans you would think okay if I'm not making sense to somebody ask the question because I know this is I know you've never heard this before but I'm documenting I'm sure the texts okay now at the same time this is going on the spirituality is intensely anti-clerical so there's a heavy sentiment of resentment against the clergy and the quality of the clergy and again the Franciscans themselves are partly to blame do you know where the doctrine of the papal Antichrist comes from who first articulated the thesis that the Pope was the Antichrist the Franciscans it wasn't the route there wasn't the Lutheran's okay um anti-clericalism is rife alright Thomas More st. Thomas More complained that the quality of the clergy would go up a lot if we ordained fewer men okay in other words the church had been wildly successful in her evangelistic enterprises she had created a culture absolutely effervescent with spirituality you got guys getting ordained left right and center the the mass is celebrated everywhere always and people are queuing up for those private masses like crazy like anybody's business so the place is absolutely suffused in religiosity all right and so the the weakness and the pastoral failure of the clergy is on display for everybody to see everywhere right the quality would go up if we ordained fewer men so slums more all right Chaucer Erasmus more proud lay Catholics all of them and deeply anti-clerical in their writings a lot of them criticizing the failures of the clergy right and left okay on the eve of the Reformation Christian society was already religiously in doctrinally divided in ways that would anticipate elements of Protestant theology which divisions that had Catholic origins and the propaganda about abuse and corruption was already long standing before Luther comes on the scene so what caused the Reformation corruption is is a grossly insufficient explanation okay so now let's turn a pivot a little bit to Luther okay why did Luther do what he did all right what motivated him now the age was also characterized by a certain amount of eschatological anxiety okay they were heard of the flood gel on taste so it's a heretical second but in the 15th or 14th centuries of people that went around beating themselves all right trying to try to appease God to to get rid of the plague okay again I hate to go back to Monty Python but it's a common cultural reference if you remember the monks walking around beating themselves in the head singing PA gazing dominate that happened okay that happened all right now so this is the culture in which Luther grows up now what Luther had going for him that they didn't was number one Luther was absolutely scintillating Lee brilliant he was a genius theologian and there's no denying the fact he was an absolutely brilliant human being he also and I'm this is my own personal opinion but I'm utterly convinced suffered from a very intense form of obsessive-compulsive disorder scrupulous it a type and was likely bipolar all right if we put him on the couch because he meets the description perfectly he was always cycling back and forth between these tremendous highs and these desperate lows and when he was on the high as he thought he was in heaven and speaking to angels that he was alumina lows he thought the devil was ripping his heart out okay and and there's more going on in his reputation of the indulgences practice and just a response to abuse Luther's own neuroticism is deeply enmeshed in his theological critique thesis 15 from the 95 theses loser Luther writes about the fear and horror of Hell that he experiences on a daily basis and he says this fear or horror is sufficient in itself to constitute the penalty of purgatory since it is very near their horror of despair we don't need purgatory because life itself is purgatory my life the torture that I experience this is Luther's position on fact tune is the German word for trial or temptation Luther says I went where my own fat tune took me it wasn't understanding or reading or speculation but living in a rather dying and being damned that makes a theologian he theologizing out of his own personal experience of neuroticism and guilt and fear and anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder right the personality of Luther and his tremendous intellect is an incredibly important point in the development of reformed theology okay and as I already said what he does is he essentially theologizing as own neuroticism and it becomes a propaganda trope picked up by guys like Calvin for purposes that are radically different than the ones that Luther anticipated okay and the interpretation and the reception of Luther is something very different from Luther himself Luther sets off Luther touches this world of late medieval piety that I've just described to you with with one final theological key he drops a match on a tender that's ready to explode into anti-clerical rebellion all right and his brilliant but neurotic personality was the key it set the whole thing going all right now I want to talk a little bit about the about the reception of Luther not Luther himself but the reception of Luther and his novel doctrines of justification by faith and scripture alone and all the rest of it in the diocese of mode where Jean Lafitte had a toddler lived the professional classes and the cloth workers in particular were likely to become Protestant okay why the cloth orders why not other people I'll come back to that there's a cloth worker by the name of Nicola Botha who was arrested for heresy in tois in 1528 in interrogation by the Inquisition Nicola says this there are many of us who study the Bible in the books of Luther of Germany no could you have had a Nicholas of Bava 100 years earlier because there were no books there were no books there are many of us who study see how technology played a role there are many of us who study the Bible in the books of Luther of Germany after we have read him we go out preaching through the country and there is no doctor or cleric who can stop us no one has ever damned but the evil rich what stands out in Nicholas is testimony it's certainly not his tormented conscience is it no it's not okay but his anti-clericalism his class envy and his sense of personal dignity I too can read the scripture and preach and no cleric can stop me you see how Luthor's being assimilated he's being received and interpreted by a cloth worker and Moe in a way that's very foreign to the way Luthor himself understands the gospel in the city of Lyon in France you know who became Protestant it disproportionately large numbers it was printers Jordan right the the profession of the printers journeyman they were much more likely disproportionately more likely to become Protestant why what was it about printers journeyman ok these guys were the computer programmers in Silicon Valley of the 16th century printing of course was the new thing it was the in thing it was the intellectual profession alright these guys were the with a warpin wolf they with a glue that held the whole thing together just like a computer programmer and Silicon Valley working for Google knows that he's on the cutting edge of the next big thing these guys were on the cutting edge of the next big thing in a society that did not have room culturally for the next big thing all right and they embrace the doctrines of the reformation is so much liberation and in gratification of their growing and emergent sense of personal dignity all right it wasn't Luther's self-hatred and his and his tormented conscience it was the idea that now we're on to something and we to matter we have the priesthood of all believers we can read the Bible heck we're printing the Bible all right prejudiced journeyman became Catholic excuse me became Protestant disproportionately large numbers compared to the rest of the population until the 1550s when the protestant church began to clamp down and define the authority structures of their own communities and then all the printers gentlemen went back in became Catholic again because the life there was more lacks that's true that's true ok all right um no homo devimon was a french catholic polemicist who studied the stuff contemporaneous and he said that it was a certain nobility or independence that was the defining mark of those more likely to join the Reformation that sense of self-importance ok and then the printing press itself 1450 religious literature fart away the most popular artists talked about that ok along with the literature came the money the economy the Age of Exploration were talking about a period of history that's very different from the social world of the 11th century or the Carolingian Empire all right the social location location of Catholics has changed and the pastoral ministry of the church has not caught up to them all right now that's where we are today by the way the social location of Catholics has changed all right we are no longer an immigrant population living in urban centers in ethnic enclaves your polish Catholics your Italian Catholics your Irish Catholics all right where where father doesn't have to worry about living alone because he's got 32 cousins nephews and nieces all living this little Catholic Enclave right and you know that's no longer the Catholic world that we live but it's taken us 30 years 40 years 50 years 60 years after that to begin to realize that the pastoral ministry in philosophy of the church has to catch up to you know look the grandchildren of those people are now entrepreneurs and they run some of our best restaurants in town you know I mean they're not living down there anymore and they live over the mountain they live other places right and we've got a different social location and the church has to catch up to it all right one more the affair of the placards la falda blackout 1534 no I'm illustrating here the reception of Luther not Luther himself but the reception of Luther what motivated people to buy into this Reformation so in 1534 there are posters that go up all over the city of Paris okay they're attacking the Holy Sacrifice of the mass written by Protestant propagandists we know today they were written by antoine baku mark who was a humanist scholar who was inspired by rob lays satire all right so that's the kind of vain he's coming out of now the people putting the posters up attacking the mass did a stupid thing they put one inside the Kings bedroom door okay this would be like posting communist propaganda in Eisenhower's bedroom during the McCarthy hearings okay um because kingship in France was considered to be a sacral reality and attacking the Eucharist was tantamount to attacking the monarchy also up from a responded by hanging a bunch of Protestants off the balcony of his palace it hablas but I will look at the text of the placards what do they actually attack all right now we're dealing in popular literature we're not looking at Luther we're looking at the kind of I mean literally we're looking at posters tracts and treatises being passed out on the street side corners to people in France okay did they say did they say ease your conscience by adopting the doctrine of justification by faith that all faith alone is that what they said it's not what they say I'm gonna read this passage by the mass volume asked by the mass the poor people are like Jews or miserable sheep kept and maintained by these bewitching wolves who are the bewitching wolves the priests okay then eaten and gnaw and devoured is there anyone who would not say or think that this is larceny in debauchery by this mass they have seized and destroyed and swallowed up everything they have disinherited Kings princes nobles merchants and everyone else imaginable either dead or alive because of it they live without any duties or responsibilities to anyone or anything pause is that true what was their principal responsibility to say to mass okay by this mass they live without any duties or responsibilities to anyone to anything even the need to study the mass is bad because it absolves the priest of the obligation to study can you imagine a peasant in Carolingian Europe making that complaint about the Catholic Church it's unintelligible unintelligible but it illustrates the change in social location between the 12th century in the 15th century that now to criticize the clergy for not being learned has some purchase that has some political appeal all right where did that idea come from it's the massive social change is sweeping through Europe speaking to a population that had already grown accustomed to developing their own spirituality out of their own prayer-books of their own liturgies ok one one polemicist said of the priests it's only the mass they say they do nothing like that's kind of like saying the the exterminator doesn't do anything except kill bugs you know I mean what else did you want them to do okay all right so Luther's theology emerges from this idiosyncratic subjective domain but he lights this tinderbox of disaffection and gives sort of metaphysical teeth to a movement that was just waiting to break out which was again in large part the fruit of Catholic pastoral ministry in the form of the religious orders okay now um I have got I've been going an hour I haven't touched on Calvin who is my main man I got a lot to say about Calvin all right but I also understand that some of you have families and things that you need to do so here's what I'll do if I will offer a few summary thoughts all right and if you need to go go but if you would like to stick around and talk about Calvin a little bit we'll do that too okay how's that sound all right so here my here my summary thought then I didn't what I didn't get into let me just give you a preview of what I'm gonna say about Calvin so I've just painted a picture right of Europe in flames of the Catholic world just torn asunder before the Reformation by a myriad of theologies by anti-clerical sentiment but by by radically divergent ways of relating to the Holy Sacrifice of the mass and people straining and yearning to find a way to make the gospel intelligible and lived life lived out in their own lives and they're doing it in Catholic ways in ways that are fully Orthodox but right with tension all right the people of the confraternities are Orthodox faithful Catholics that believe us Christ is present in the mass and yet there are pastoral tensions in the church that are not getting resolved and Luther lights the tinderbox and poof everything blows up and guys like Nikola Bava take it in radically anti-authoritarian ways and become deeply socially revolutionary all right and so that the king is hanging people off the balconies and on bras card to stamp down this this this nascent rebellion of the populace that clothed in Lutheran propaganda that's where we are when Calvin comes on the scene he's 26 years younger than Martin Luther what does Calvin try to do to put the genie back in the box back in the lamp all right mixed metaphors sorry why does he try to do to put the genie back in the lamp all right Calvin articulates the most Catholic synthesis of reformed doctrine of anybody in the 16th century calling for the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist the exclusive authority of the Magisterium of the church to interpret the sacred tradition by the Magisterium of course he means himself all right the the the the unity of the church in its catholicity all right intensely intensely Catholic themes that Calvin is deriving from a deep knowledge of 15th century Catholic reform ISM and guys like Jeff saw he was a Catholic reformer present at the Council of Constance okay and and and so if you stick around what I want to show you is how deeply Catholic Calvin's sentiments were not as doctrines but his sentiments and then I want to show you why he failed what was lacking why could he not accomplish that because the end result of all that was that reading through all of this stuff as a historian of myself and a deeply dogmatic Protestant who hated the Catholic Church Calvin is the man who woke me up to the realization that I needed one holy catholic apostolic church that conveyed to me the real presence of christ and the sacraments for a transforming union that would make me more and more like Christ every day and that apart from the church I was dead it is a Protestant who woke me up to that realization but then I simultaneously realized that Calvin sowed the seeds of his own destruction and because of his commitment to ultimately to the Lutheran anomaly all right that it was doomed from the start and it led to the birth of modern Protestant denomination ilysm and so I was forced with a dilemma either I take the Catholic elements in Calvin seriously in which case I have to leave Calvin and become Catholic or I have to take up the essentially sort of anomalous Lutheran elements in Calvin which will lead me into modern evangelical Protestantism but I have to give up the Catholicism element and then I said which one is more primitive right which one has actually reflected in the text of the New Testament nearly church and I realized that I could have my cake and eat it too that I could have everything that Luther wanted me to have right all that interior spirituality and assurance of grace and and hope in Christ I could have that whole cake in the Catholic Church but I could also have it conveyed to me through these sacramental and liturgical means that Calvin is preaching so that's where I'm gonna go and the conclusion is gonna be what does that have to do with today and I've already said this that the Reformation happened in my view because the social location of Catholics changed and the pastoral ministry of the church did not catch up to it okay and and at the time there were reformers who saw what was going on and there were people like Francis DeSales father saw who was actually the bishop of Geneva believe it or not although he never got to visit his seed who said we need to teach people the life of prayer in the sacramental mysteries we need to teach them how to embrace the Holy Sacrifice of the mass as their principal form of spirituality so they're not having to get they're not scratching that inch through the confraternities and through Pat's boards and bless bread they're getting it from Christ in the Eucharist all right and the very same sentiment is articulated by the Second Vatican Council that's a croissant can continue and I'll read you the passage later but basically it says what we have to do as a church is teach people above all how they are to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the mass not only through the hands of the priest but also in their own lives all right so the Reformation sets before us a deep pastoral challenge that has never gone away and the very same dynamic why did you leave the church because I wasn't having my spiritual needs Matt that's true all right and the past full challenge is to unfold for them the riches of the tradition like I experienced the st. burners like we did today I'm Holy Sacrifice of the mass it is a it is a rich and ennobling kind of catechol burden all right and it's why I do what I do catechesis is why i like me that's the challenge that I want to leave you with so I'm gonna stop there and if we want to stick around and talk about Calvin we'll do that too but we'll take a pre Calvin break [Applause]

Channel: Birmingham Office of Religious Education

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Length: 70min 24sec (4224 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2017