![]() Historians name the ongoing violence of the second half of the sixteenth century in France and the Low Countries “wars of religion.” Despite the distinct political and economic elements that entered into this violence, religious differences aptly symbolized the principal and conscious sources of alienation. Reformed theologians found religious statues and paintings to violate the prohibition of idol-worship contained in the Ten Commandments. Similar outbursts had occurred or would yet occur in parts of Germany, Switzerland, France, and Scotland. Some expressed their rejection of his autocratic methods, as well as the offense they took at Catholic “idolatry,” by taking part in a wave of iconoclasm, the Beeldenstorm of 1566. This civil war would continue intermittently for the next 36 years, leaving a legacy of hatred that neither side could suppress.ĭuring the same decade in the Low Countries, Calvinists met with refusal the categorical demand of their king, Philipp II of Spain, that they return to Holy Mother Church. ![]() The Guise-led massacre of worshipping Huguenots at Vassy the following year marks the beginning of the French Wars of Religion for modern historians. Neither side would make concessions to the other. She took measures to reconcile opposing sides, Catholic and Reformed (Huguenot) at the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561. The widow queen-regent of France, Catherine de’ Medici, strove mightily to fend off religious violence in France that might, in fact, undermine her sons’ dynastic hold on the throne. Papal Bull, June 16, 1521, Magnvm bvllarivm Romanvm. In this document Martin Luther is officially excommunicated as a heretic from the Catholic Church. The Colloquy of Regensburg of 1541 was designed to reconcile Catholics and Lutherans, but it, too, quickly went down to defeat, paving the way for the War of the League of Schmalkald of 1546-1547, a portent of religious wars to come. Martin Bucer thought he had found a solution in the shaded wording of the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, but he had not. Huldrych Zwingli wept as their attempts failed, and Luther ranted. Whereas the Diet of Worms of 1521 revealed that under no circumstances would Martin Luther submit to the dictation of the Catholic Church, the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, hosted by Landgrave Philipp of Hesse, showed that the most committed new reformers of European religion would not accommodate one another in their definitions of what occurred during the Eucharist (or Lord’s Supper). The forums of such attempts ranged from personal meetings to formally organized disputation, imperial diets, and ecclesiastical synods. Where it appears to have existed, it was likely a pragmatic forbearance.Įfforts to force recantation or to reconcile opposed theological positions were incessant. Toleration was hardly a moral virtue or a social ideal. ![]() The rulers of the sixteenth century were, in short, intent on the purification of the body of those residents who were subject to them. A recent interpretation of the Reformation by Nicholas Terpstra has seen nearly every region and territory as determined to root out recusancy (refusal to adhere to the established church) and as casting sizable populations into refugee status. Even then, Anabaptists, Spiritualists, Jews, and Anti-Trinitarians were not accorded the privilege of freedom from persecution that, officially, Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed Christians enjoyed. Only with the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, was the futility of compulsion acknowledged. The Reformation ushered in a period of conflict that would produce not merely impassioned debate of theological precepts but also murderous violence and finally war. This conviction was hardly conducive to peace. In the Reformation era, every emerging Protestant denomination along with the Catholic Church believed in one exclusive religious Truth-each of their versions of that truth was different from every other. The Augsburg Confession, June 25th, 1530 (Illustration printed in 1665) ![]()
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