Major differences between Catholicism & Protestantism in the 17th century?

Factual Questions
1

I am a bit of a Tudor fanatic, and I am very, very familiar with the way in which England broke with Rome… at least, Henry’s part in it. (I say that because I have almost no grasp on the other forces shaping non-Catholic Christianity, principally Martin Luther…)

What baffles me is the seemingly rabid passion that (relatively) new Protestants had about their Protestantism, particularly after Henry’s death. Even accepting the fact of it, what were the enormous differences between the two religions that prompted Protestants to view Catholics with such rage and hatred? Yes, answering to the Pope wasn’t popular, but aside from that…?

2

There’s a whole bunch of possible answers to that question.

One answer, or perhaps more accurately, one facet of the answer, is that many people, both in and out of the Catholic Church, viewed large sections of the Catholic Church as tremendously corrupt. One of the reasons for this was the sale of indulgences. This issue was actually why Luther posted the 95 Theses, challenging the Catholic Church.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/luther/lutherindulgences.html

3

Both sides could point to periods when they had been violently persecuted by the other side.

France’s Louis XIV, for example, was a violent anti-Protestant fanatic. He sent troops into Protestant homes; the men were beaten and the women were raped. And they were told this was because they were Protestants and the violence would stop if they converted to Catholicism. (Louis also made it illegal for Protestants to leave France. He wanted to keep them where he could oppress them.)

This is a specific example of Protestants being persecuted by Catholics but there are plenty of examples of Catholics being persecuted by Protestants as well.

4

As I just happen to have been reading 16th-17-century European history for the last few months …

In addition to what ** Flyer** said, there were a lot of issues. I can’t list them all here.

Much of the Catholic ritual was regarded by Protestants as idolatry. Venerating the Virgin Mary and saints, the doctrine of transubstantiation (the Catholic belief that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ).

The Roman church placed great emphasis on “good works” being required to earn a place in Heaven. Protestants believe(d) in justification by grace, that is, it’s impossible for humans to be good enough to get into Heaven (we can’t “earn” our way); men only get into Heaven by the grace of God, through faith in Jesus. To early protestants, it appeared (with good reason) that the Catholic church encouraged the belief that it was possible to buy your way into Heaven. For centuries prior, it wasn’t uncommon for wealthy men, kings, and nobles, on their deathbeds, to bequeath their lands and possessions to the Roman church, believing that doing so would balance out their otherwise reprobate lives. This is a big part of the reason the Catholic church owned so much land in Europe. And then, of course, church lands tended to be exempt from taxation. So as the Church acquired more land in every Catholic country, and because the rulers of those countries lost tax revenue from church lands, those same rulers became dependent upon The Church when they needed money …

Politics. Politics. Politics, politics, politics. For many centuries, the Pope was essentially the king of Italy (I’m greatly simplifying for brevity’s sake). And, by extension, being the king of the Church (okay, Christ is actually the King of the church and the Pope is just his representative, but tell Medieval Europe that), he wielded immense influence throughout all of Christian Europe. The Pope got to confirm kings every time there was a succession in a country. If the Pope didn’t think a king was “Catholic” enough, he would excommunicate that king, and having excommunicated the king, the citizens of that country were released from their loyalty to their king and were free (and encouraged) to overthrow him, without endangering their eternal souls. Conversely, if the excommunicated king’s subjects loved their king and supported him in opposition to the Pope, the Pope could place that country under a ban, meaning that the priests in that country would not preach, not hear confessions, and not absolve sins, thus placing all of those loyal-to-the-king citizens’ eternal souls at risk. My understanding from my reading is that this system was, more or less, extortion.

While Protestantism started as a simple desire to reform the Catholic church, to do away with the numerous abuses, the Roman Church promptly labeled the Protestants “heretics”, and from there it effectively became a separate religion, whether it wanted to be or not. It started with Martin Luthor, other Catholic clergy, and soon after the common people, it was eventually taken up by the German princes (remember, Germany at the time was not a single, united nation — it was a confederacy [more or less] of small principalities) who finally said, “Hey, waitaminnit, why is this guy in Italy telling me how to manage my business?”

From there on out, it was all politics. It was The Pope in Rome trying to be the CEO vs. the local “managers” who figured they had a better idea of how to manage their stores than some distant Pope. And don’t forget the money. These German princes were getting sick and tired of watching money flowing out of their principality and into Rome. Solution? Violence! Let’s start raiding monasteries and convents and cathedrals and taking back what is ours! Screw Rome, that’s MY money!

Anyway, I could go on and on. I’m not even going to get into Spain vs. The Netherlands (did you know that Spain used to rule The Netherlands? I just learned that.)

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a lifelong evangelical Protestant, and everything I typed above was learned from reading The Cambridge Medieval History and The Cambridge Modern History, weighty tomes written in England by English scholars. And, of course, England is a Protestant country, as you know (thanks to Henry VIII). So I recognize that there is likely a certain bias in the writing, and of course, being a lifelong Protestant, I admit my ignorance of Catholicism beyond what I have read, and welcome clarification and correction. My above response is based entirely upon what I have read in those Cambridge volumes. To be “fair & balanced” and scholarly, once I have finished the Cambridge volumes, I fully intend to look for and study histories written by scholars from other European countries, particularly those written from a Catholic viewpoint. In particular, I would love to read a Spanish treatise on the reign of King Phillip II, and the Spanish perspective on the Armada that the English beat under Elizabeth I (hailing Nava!) as well as the Spanish POV of the conflict in The Netherlands.

That said, I had the most wonderful conversation with my pastor while we were waiting together in a stairwell immediately before my recent wedding. I mentioned that my reading of European history has given me an immensely greater appreciation for the fact that the USA’s founding father’s put in that bit about having no state-sanctioned religion. Because having a state religion is just nothing but trouble. Seriously. No sooner did a country kick the Catholics out (and sometimes, even before), Protestantism had split into different sects, and the original Protestants started calling the new Protestant sectarians “heretics”, and hey, more war. No, really. No sooner did The Netherlands kick the Spanish Catholics out than they were confronted by civil war between Calvinists and non-Calvinists. /sigh This is the entire reason I left the Republican party and became and independent voter. I just became sickened at the way my religion and my party had crawled into bed together, and were doing no good.

My pastor said “Yeah, that’s the problem with the fact that most people haven’t studied history. It just keeps happening.”

5

Politics, politics… And economics, economics. At least some of it was about which religious prelate got to charge tithes, fees, and other donations.

6

It started a century or so before Luther with Jan Huss in Prague. He was also against indulgences and the general corruption of the church.

7

There’s a good argument to be made here … there was never a conflict about the collection of indulgences, rather the conflict was about the spending of indulgences.

8

Regarding economics: The Catholic Church owned a lot of land in England. And land = power in those days. Now, the land had to be worked so there were very poor folk stuck working on Church owned lands for generations barely getting by (and sometimes not at all).

And the land kept growing. People loved giving stuff to the Church. Even a good percentage of non-land gifts were sold to buy land. Also, new monasteries and such were routinely started up. Those got some land to start with and would grow with new donations.

From top to bottom, a lot of people looked at this property and wanted it. Rich landowners were looking to expand their holdings but they couldn’t (usually) buy Church property. The people working the land wanted a better deal with long term rights a key component.

And the Church did their side no help by throwing their wealth around a lot of visible extravagance and corruption.

Once Henry VIII initiated closing of monasteries, there was a lot of force behind that. Unfortunately, a large amount of culturally important artifacts the Church owned got destroyed. Even the lead on roofs was stripped and melted down. Lead. It may not seem like a big thing now, but back then there wasn’t so much cheaply available lead around. It was a valuable thing to take.

The Church also interfered in politics a lot. Many times against England’s own best interests. This interference pushed many other monarchies towards Protestantism and such.

9

The same landgrab took place in Spain, but several centuries later (mainly during the 19th) and without creating a new Church. The main chunk of it is called the desamortizaciones de Mendizábal or ecclesiastical confiscations of Mendizábal.

Wiki because I don’t know how to search for a better source in English.

Mister Rik, the Spanish perspective on the Armada Invencible is that if Felipe II hadn’t let jealousy get the best of him, the ships would have sailed at a reasonable time and the result would have been different. Exactly how we don’t know, but definitely different. Religion ain’t much to do with sinking ships, but jealousy sometimes does. It’s actually a pretty good sample of what the Spanish court was like for several centuries: too often, politics weren’t decided so much by whomever wore the crown but by Queen Envy.

10

Several issues -

Remember Henry broke with Rome over his divorce problem. Remember that he was trying to divorce the Spanish Princess, and the pope was a 'guest" of Spain at the time. (I.e. under the thumb of the Spanish crown).

That too was part of it. Think of the vitriol over “communism” since 1917, that hyper-idealistic idea that all people would communally own property, and share the wealth, and work for the common good rather than to accumulate money… but Americans and western Europe hated and feared them. Why? Because essentially the alleged idealists were more often than not the dupes of the “evil empire”, the tool of Stalin and his successors, the enemy of all capitalist countries.

Now imagine that the protestant countries has the same image of papal states - mainly Spain and France - and by extension, adherents to the pope’s religion. This was no imaginary thing. There were regular wars with France and Spain, so anyone who adhered to “their” religion was by extension a fifth column against England who would get their orders from Rome, hence from the Catholic monarchs of rival states. Queen Mary did not help by importing Catholic inquisitors to seek out unrepentant protestants (and burning the prominent ones at the stake). Regular rebellions fronting the Catholic “rightful heir” to the throne (1689, 1715, 1745) didn’t help the paranoia either.

(Even JFK in 1960 had to address head-on the contention that a Catholic president would take orders from Rome above listening to his constituents.)

The economic argument was a convenience. Henry gave a lot of the riches to the nobles to ensure that when push came to shove, they were on his side. the church and its possessions were immensely valuable, and the nobles always needed money just like Henry - so they’d be reluctant to support anyone who was likely to re-instate the Catholic church which then might eventually demand its lands and possessions back.

11

And that “communal ownership” and “redistribution” and idealism often ended up in dictatorship and murder. It led to gulags, to Pol Pot, to things like the massacring of the Anarchist leaders by their Communist allies in the Spanish Civil War (ah, the Republican side, that bastion of liberty!), or produces beauties like current Spanish party Podemos, whose name was directly inspited by Obama’s “Yes, we can” slogan and whose ideology I’ve seen best defined as “Stalinist populism”: their promises are absurd as soon as you scratch the surface (let’s fix the justice system by firing all the judges - yes, that will work) and the actual program is “do exactly what Pablo Iglesias wants you to do, exactly how he wants you to do it, or else”.

12

This was hugely important. Early mainstream Protestantism was frequently very nationalistic; in Europe the big Protestant churches are specifically state churches. This is a concept specifically rejected by Catholicism and was a major source of disputes between the Church and many Catholic monarchs as well.

One of the issues in the Reformation Age was that Pope was always Italian. This had not been the case historically; it was largely a compromise because one nation or another was always trying to force a candidate, even to the point of great powers putting forth rival puppets. The downside was that this enmeshed the Papacy in Italian politics, and those were very messy indeed. it didn’t help that this was also the age when Spain, France, the Ottomans, and the HRE were all trying to establish an Italian empire for themselves.

More than a convenience - including for the later Catholic monarchs who also broke up monasteries. Doing so gave kings and princes a massive immediate influx of wealth, and let them build a network of strong supporters as you say. The net long-term effect was often not to the advantage of monarchy, as the newly-endowed nobility were more active in politics and after a generation or two had no specific gratitude to the monarchy and wanted their own say in things.

13

That’s sort of an overstatement. Central Italy, maybe. At its largest, the Papal States controlled land from Latina in the South to Bologna in the north, excluding Siena and Florence, who between them, controlled most of the west, and even most of the land the Pope ruled, he didn’t have much control over. It was mostly ruled by independent barons or hereditary “vicars”, who pretty much ruled as barons, doing what they wanted and not paying any attention to Rome.

14

A lot of that was reaction against the Carlists, right?

15

A wild overstatement. The Papal State controlled, more or less, two provinces of Italy, and not even all of that land. Naples (including Sicily), Milan, Siena, Florence, and Venice were all equally powerful or moreso. And that doesn’t even factor in the invasions by France, the Ottoman Turks, the Spanish, or the Holy Roman Empire. Indeed, the drive to acquire power in central Italy was probably a reaction to the invasions and occupations. Even “friendly” soldiers committed atrocities just because they were bored.

16

It started even before Huss with John Wycliffe and the Lollards in 14th century England.

17

No, that was used as an excuse for some individual desamortizaciones but it doesn’t hold water at all unless you squint a lot, specially since the process started decades before the Pretender Carlos was even born and wasn’t limited to the Carlista areas. Mendizábal’s took place during the First Carlista war but it affected the whole country; there had been no uprisings in the south or overseas. And while the main targets were Church lands, the places where commons (owned by the village, not an individual) were misappropriated in this way were again outside Carlista areas.

18

No argument here. But my point was - like the naïve and willfully blind idealists who comprised much of the rank and file of communist parties in the west; they were seen as tools of Stalin (and Mao) rather than “Feel the Bernie” idealists, and to a greater extent in the 20’s through the 70’s, this was very true.

In the same way, anyone heavily invested in Catholicism, and especially the clergy, were seen by 1700’s English, Dutch, Germans, etc. as far more in thrall to a foreign master (and that master was a puppet of their enemies) rather than religious idealists with no cynical intent. Episodes like Guy Fawkes didn’t help to calm that fear.

(you can go to Amsterdam and see the “hidden church”; Catholicism was technically illegal but tolerated, so some rich local Catholics had a small church hidden in the upper floors on a standard Amsterdam merchant house.

Another illustration, is George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”. He pissed of the English communist party brass, so he got a letter of introduction to a different faction in the Spanish Civil War. He ended up in Barcelona fighting for a different leftist faction that the Stalin-controlled communists later began purging over internal infighting. Orwell remarks on the irony that he escaped being tortured and killed because he escaped dressed as a rich bourgeois foreigner to get out, in the end that was safer than being a communist around Stalin’s minions. When he got back to England, the right-wing press was not interested in his story, and the left-wing press refused to print anything that called Stalin and his minions a homicidal tyranny.)

19

From a PM

The jealousy in question has nothing to do with the creation of the Armada Invencible itself, or with the King’s Catholicism, but with removing a capable leader (Don Juan de Austria) who refused to sail during the bad weather and replacing him with a sycophant who would have sailed in the middle of a snowstorm so long as that was what His Majesty wanted.

The Armada itself was probably not the best idea Felipe II ever had, but sailing off when they did was definitely a Very Bad Idea, and it’s not as if there hadn’t been anybody saying so.

That “different leftist faction” is the Anarchists I’d already mentioned.

20

To start with, it’s a mistake to say “both sides”. There were at least five sides: The Catholics, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Calvinists, and the Anabaptists. Of those, only the last three are properly called “protestants”.

The only thing that makes it seem like two sides is that, while the Catholics were pretty much everywhere, the other movements mostly didn’t overlap much, so in any given place, you basically had conflict between the Catholics and one kind of non-Catholic. In such an environment, all of the non-Catholics would view each other as allies of a sort, just based on “the enemy of my enemy”. But the doctrinal differences between any of them were just as great.