DRAFT OF A CHAPTER
Charles P. Poole, Jr.
March 2004; revised
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Chronology of Reformation Era
3. Abuses in the Church
4. Decrees of Mediaeval Councils
5. Principal Reformation Churches
6. Agreements and Disagreements
7. Returning to Christian Roots
8. Statements For and Against Faith
Table 1. Decrees of
Ecumenical Councils
1. INTRODUCTION
When
I was in college, a group of us Rams (Fordhamites)
used to contact Protestant ministers and inquire “What is the best
We provide
here a brief chronology of the Reformation period and a survey of medieval
council decrees. My comments on the
overall arrangement and content of four basic documents of the Reformation,
namely The Book of Concord of the Lutherans, the Institutes of the Christian
Religion and the Westminster Confession of the Presbyterians, and The Book of
Common Prayer of the Anglican Communion, are detailed in separate draft
chapters. Then several individual
beliefs and practices that the various reformed churches have treated in these
documents will be discussed here and compared.
Since I am not an historian, and have no expertise in history, I will
say very little about the history of the sixteenth century, except to present a
brief chronology of events during that period.
If
the Fifth Lateran Council, which ended the same year that Luther proposed his
95 Theses, had taken seriously its commission to bring about reform within the
Church, then the Protestant revolt might never have occurred. One can deduce from the basic writings of the
Reformation that the reformers justifiably found certain aspects of
contemporary Catholicism to be intolerable.
The Lateran Council did very little to address these terrible abuses and
implement reforms. As a result, two decades
later the Anglican, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches were founded, had
become entrenched in
2. CHRONOLOGY OF REFORMATION
ERA
Peter Lombard c.1100-1160.
John
Wycliffe 1330-1384.
Jahn Huss 1372-1415.
Desiderius Erasmus 1469-1536.
Thomas
More 1477-1535.
Martin
Luther 1483-1546.
Ulrich
Zwingli 1484-1531.
John
Eck 1486-1543.
Henry
VIII 1491-1547.
Ignatius
of Loyola 1491-1556.
Philipp Melanchthon
1497-1560.
John
Calvin 1509-1564.
John
Wesley 1703-1791.
Fourth Lateran Council 1215.
Council
of
Council
of
Fifth
Lateran Council 1512-17.
Ninety-Five Theses 1517.
Edict
of
Declaration
on the 7 Sacraments against Martin Luther by Henry VIII 1521
Turkish Siege of
Diet of
Church of England Breach with
Institutes of the Christian Religion 1536.
Society
of Jesus (Jesuits) founded 1540.
Council
of
Book of Common Prayer 1559.
Book of
Methodist break with Church of England 1795.
3. ABUSES IN THE CHURCH
It is
clear from the writings of the reformers, that they were reacting to a Church
which seemed to be sidetracked from its mission to preach the Gospel and
evangelize the world. There was a great
emphasis on obtaining indulgences to remit the guilt of sin and shorten, or
bring to an end, the punishment endured by souls in purgatory. This widespread practice of preaching
indulgences was accumulating huge sums of money for the coffers of the Church. Other abuses such as the immorality of some
priests and religious were scandalous.
In our generation, we have experienced the damage done to our Church by
the way our ecclesiastical authorities handled the pedophile scandals, and this
terrible contemporary scandal was mild compared to what was happening in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
I
remember that when I was a teenager, various prayers and devotions had
indulgences associated with them, and I used to think that the most effective
way to spend my prayer time was to find out the shortest prayer with the
largest indulgence, and repeat it over and over to maximize my spiritual
benefit per minute of prayer time. I am
pleased to report, in retrospect, that I was never able to find anyone who
agreed with me on this issue, although many of my fellow Catholics were very
interested in gaining indulgences. A
year or two later I realized that my earlier obsession with indulgences had
by-passed the essence of spirituality, and I lost interest in them. They did , however, benefit me because I read
the bible every day, and when someone occasionally criticized me for acting
like a Protestant, I always pointed out the indulgence for reading the
scriptures that appeared on the title page of my Douay/Rheims
Bible.
4. DECREES OF MEDIEVAL COUNCILS
Most
Protestant Reformers accepted the first four Ecumenical Councils, recognizing
them as having clarified our basic beliefs concerning the humanity and divinity
of Jesus and the Trinity. They did not,
however, accept the decrees of subsequent Councils, and the question arises as
to why this was the case. I deduce from
their basic writings that they were upset because some much more recent
Councils had issued decrees that approved of indulgences, purgatory, and other
practices and beliefs that had not been discussed at earlier Councils.
To
investigate, this I consulted the Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta which
contains the official decrees of all twenty Ecumenical Councils. I found
out that decrees on indulgences had been issued at the Fourth Lateran Council,
and at subsequent councils held at Lyon I,
5. PRINCIPAL REFORMATION
CHURCHES
On
this website there are separate draft chapters that discuss various churches
which have roots in the Reformation, namely the Anglican (Episcopal), Baptist,
Lutheran, and Presbyterian Traditions.
The basic document of the Anglicans is the Book of Common Prayer (
The
6. AGREEMENTS
There are many statements in these basic documents that are
quite close to corresponding Catholic positions. Examples are acceptance of the Creeds, of the
decrees of the first four Ecumenical Councils, of the Real Presence in the
Eucharist, of the importance and utility of sacraments other than Baptism and
the Eucharist, of the importance of emulating the ancient Christian Church, of
the wisdom of the Fathers of the Church, etc.
This is balanced by the uniform rejection by all the Reformers of the “Romish doctrines” enumerated in Statement XXII of the
The early Christian Church has often had disagreements, and
many of them were resolved in time. The
first such disagreement occurred in the Acts of the Apostles concerning whether
or not Gentile converts were obliged to obey Mosaic laws, and an amicable
agreement was arrived at whereby they did not have to obey them. During the first few centuries of the
Christian era, the Church convened four General Councils. There Councils
resolved the current Christological and other controversies, and provided us
with the Nicene Creed which clarifies our beliefs about the humanity and the
divinity of Jesus, and about the three Persons in the Blessed Trinity. During the thirteenth to the fifteenth
centuries various ideas and practices,
some with roots in the past, became
prevalent in the Church. Unfortunately during this same period
abuses crept in and became widespread.
After the Council of Trent,
Europe was divided into reformed Catholic and reformed Protestant camps, the
former retaining the new ideas and practices, and the latter rejecting
them. After the second Vatican Council
ended in 1965 the Catholic Church adapted some of the reforms that had been
characteristic of the fledgling Protestant Churches four hundred years earlier. For
example, celebrating the liturgy in the vernacular, receiving Communion in the hand
and under both species, preaching homilies on the scripture readings of the day
instead of giving sermons on miscellaneous topics, and an emphasis on the laity
reading and discussing the scriptures. In addition there was less
emphasis on indulgences and purgatory.
Catholics reformed the Lectionary by instituting three Sunday and two
weekday cycles, and the Anglican and Lutheran Communions responded by adopting
much of this new lectionary reform. More
recently (1998), Lutherans and Catholics signed a joint agreement on
Justification. We are now much closer to
each other in belief and in practice.
Perhaps we may eventually approach the point where the Pope might be
accepted by Protestants as
primus inter pares at meetings, or as Melanchthon said “if he would allow the gospel, we, too,
may (for the sake of peace and unity among . . . Christians . . . ) grant
to him his superiority over the bishops.”
7. RETURNING TO CHRISTIAN
ROOTS
In the sixteenth century the Catholic Church was morally in
a very bad condition, as was explained at the beginning of this chapter. In addition to this the six general councils
which convened between 1215 (Lateran IV) and 1445 (Florence) introduced beliefs
and practices such as an emphasis on indulgences that Protestants interpreted
as detracting from the ancient piety which they considered more central to the
real meaning of Christianity. Many of
these practices became official at Lateran IV or later, although some
considerably antedate the year 1215, as the Table shows. From the viewpoints of the Reformers, the
corruption in the Church was, to a great extent, attributed by them to
innovations not present in the ancient Church.
Their aim was to return to the ancient Church as it existed before
changes were introduced. The Council of
Trent, which set into motion the much needed Reform of the Catholic Church,
devoted most of its energies to producing an overall synthesis of the ancient
and the more recently formulated beliefs and practices, thereby accentuating
the factors that divided Christendom.
The Roman Catechism, which was issued shortly after the Council Decrees
were ratified by Pope Pius IV in 1564, became the official compendium of Catholic
beliefs. By the end of the sixteenth
century much of the decadence that had aroused the indignation of the
Protestant Reformers had vanished from Catholicism.
During the next four hundred and fifty years the Catholic
Church remained fairly fixed in its ways, while Protestant churches tended to
split apart and deviate from ancient practices. The twentieth century saw a
reversal of this trend and the onset of initiatives toward unification, with
the declaration of the 1886 Lambeth Conference urging
a return to early Church practices, the formation in 1910 of the International
Missionary Council by the Protestants, and the establishment of the World
Council of Churches in 1948. The Second
Vatican Council, which ended in 1965, accomplished two objectives: returning the Catholic Church to its roots by
becoming much more biblically oriented (ressourcement or ad fontes),
and facing up to the modern world (aggiornamento). The subsequent forty years have witnessed
various movements toward cooperation and the patching up of ancient differences,
especially among the creedal churches.
There are recent tendencies of Protestant Churches rediscovering their
sixteenth century Confessional statements, which were mentioned above and
summarized in other draft chapters, and which in many ways are much closer to
present day Catholicism than they were to the realities of sixteenth century
Catholicism. There is real hope for the
future!
8. STATEMENTS FOR
The basic current compilation of Catholic Beliefs is the
Catechism of the Catholic Church. This
is a lengthy and thorough work. A
shorter summary in question and answer format called the Compendium was
published in 2006. I am very pleased
that these works tell what we believe without commenting on or refuting what
other Christians believe. I have been
discouraged by the subtle and often not so subtle disparaging remarks about my
beliefs that appear in some of the official confessions of faith and statements
of belief now in print in books and on websites of some of our sister
churches.
Table showing which of the ten most recent Ecumenical Councils discussed particular
doctrines and practices of the Church. The table entries were compiled from Conciliorum
Oecumenicorum Decreta; the (X) entry is from The New Dictionary of Theology.
|
Doctrine or Practice |
Earlier Councils |
Lateran IV 1215 |
I 1245 |
II 1274 |
1311-2 |
Const- ance 1414-8 |
1431-45 |
Lateran V 1512-7 |
1545- 1563 |
1869-70 |
1962-5 |
|
7 Sacraments |
|
|
|
|
|
|
X |
|
X |
|
|
|
ex opere
operato |
|
|
|
|
|
X |
X |
|
X |
|
|
|
Confirmation |
Constant. I, 381 |
|
|
|
|
|
X |
|
X |
|
X |
|
The Mass |
|
X |
|
X |
|
|
|
|
X |
X |
X |
|
Mass as sacrifice |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
X |
X |
|
|
All in 1 species |
|
|
|
|
|
X |
X |
|
X |
|
|
|
Transubstantiation |