Three things came together at the same time, which led to “spontaneous combustion’: (i) The deep-seated and institutionalised abuses entrenched in Western Civilisation (ii) the political situation within the Holy Roman Empire, especially as regarding the North German mini-states and the Moslem invasions (iii) the personalities of Luther and other contemporaries.
.
(i) The abuses that had become firmly entrenched by the end of the Middle Ages are not the ones that exercise Protestants against the Catholic Church today: they were:
§ Neglect of training for priests, leading to a neglect of catechesis of the laity;
§ Lay investiture, by which a nobleman invested a bishop of his own choosing, usually involving a money transaction, and naturally using as criteria the allegience of the candidate to the ruler rather than his depth of Faith;
§ Plural Benefices, by which one man held multiple salaried positions for the sake of the salary. It was physically impossible for the responsibilities attached to these offices to be carried out. Some titular bishops never once visited their dioceses. A particular problem was that conferring a ‘benefice’ on a younger son or nephew of one in the ruling class was the only available way to grant him a living wage. Hence we were seeing Cardinals aged nine.
§ A general disorganisation, with many local and unregulated superstitions being allowed to overshadow the Gospel.
.
(ii) It was the period in history when districts were developing a National consciousness. Vernacular languages were being cultivated. Before this, they had not been considered as of worth in their own right. There was ’The High Tongue’ – Latin – and ‘The Low Tongue’ – the regional vernacular, which varied from city to city. Society was close and personal. Loyalty was to one’s Lord and to one’s own city. This was now changing.
The hold of the Holy Roman Emperor was always tenuous. The Empire was too big and too diverse. Different regions had no sense of a shared identity. The Bohemians had a slogan, ’Neither Rome nor Vienna!’
And once the Lutheran Revolt had gained momentum, the prospect for the innumerable local barons and princelings of the North German districts, of permission to loot the riches of the Church, proved a highly significant factor.
Meanwhile, the emperor was severely handicapped by having to deal with the simultaneous threat from the Moslems.
.
(iii) Luther cf. Francis Xavier.
Martin Luther and Francis Xavier both suffered from a strong tendency to bouts of depression, allied to ‘scruples’ (an exaggerated fear of offending God). They both tried to escape these attacks by ever more severe penances and periods of prayer. Both were warned by their superiors that these actions, in the experience of the Church, could actually have the effect of heightening the symptoms. Francis took the advice of his superiors, mitigated his attempts to control his depression and scrupulosity by sheer will power, and moved on to become one of the finest instruments of Mother Church during the Catholic Reformation. If Luther, who at that time was an Augustinian priest, had listened to advice – and followed the Rule that he had sworn to adopt – history might have taken a very different course.
.
Luther could not argue that he was ‘following his conscience’ when he had already taken a vow of obedience. At that point, not one of the commands of his superiors was anything like a rejection of the moral law or of defined doctrine.
.
Luther began his career of Reformer by attacking clearly unjustifiable abuses. Most unfortunately, he was met, not by a reasoned rebuttal, or any discussion at all, but by a peremptory command to adopt ‘obedience’, which in this case only drove him into more determined opposition.
After this, Luther’s trajectory was very swift. From one year to the next, he passed from an objection to an unjustifiable abuse, through various stages until he had rejected the entire edifice of the Catholic Church.
And then by a sad irony, and impelled by the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt, he discovered that many of the institutional structures of the Catholic church were nothing more nor less than ‘the way to get things done’ and, against his will, he found himself leading a Lutheran Church, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the Church he had rejected.
.
And it is a fact of history that, once a movement becomes institutionalised, it acquires a life and an agenda of its own.
The Council of Trent met ‘in a chastened mood’ and did actually rectify a very large umber of issues including the systemic abuses: but by then it was far too late to prevent the Protestants from going their own way.