Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 6:52am

PopeWatch: Historian

 

 

Professor of History Bronwen Catherine McShea in First Things takes a look at some comments made by Pope Francis regarding history:

Such concerns may help explain the appeal that Martin Luther, with his stark emphasis on the preached Word and a radically spiritualized, ahistorical view of the Church, holds for Pope Francis. So let us turn to the historical claims of the Holy Father with which we began, about Martin Luther and the causes over time of deep divisions between Lutherans and Catholics. (They are remarks that, coming from a Pope of Rome, I cannot help but think would be eye-popping to the reformer himself.)

With respect to the simple assertion that Martin Luther intended only to renew the Church, not divide her, it is indeed the case that the historical consensus today is that the reformer had no intention of leaving the Catholic Church in 1517, when he first presented his Ninety-Five Theses to religious authorities and a wider public in and around Wittenberg. However, even scholars of the Reformation very mindful of contemporary ecumenical stakes do not deny that, very early during his reforming career, Luther became convinced that the international, visible Church as led by popes, cardinals, and bishops was irredeemably corrupt, “judaizing” in its emphasis on laws and rituals, and therefore inherently at odds with the “true,” invisible Church of all persons of sincere “faith” as he defined it.

In other words, from early on, Luther’s Reformation was centrally about separating, promptly—with the help of powerful territorial princes and city magistrates with local influence and armies at the ready—the hidden, faith-filled wheat from the papistic chaff, so to speak. Luther certainly believed in only one, true, Apostolic Church, but he redefined the Church in a direction that was inherently exclusionary of those who deferred to the papacy, affirmed seven sacraments and Christ’s institution of a consecrated priesthood, and acknowledged an active, participatory role for human free will in God’s economy of salvation. Any concern he might have had to preserve unity in the Church in a way any orthodox Catholic bishop or theologian of the sixteenth century would have recognized as such was, at best, a very secondary priority. Much more urgent for Luther was to rally other reform-minded men and women toward full acceptance of the creed his own conscience told him was the true creed—by 1530, that would have been the enumerated articles of the Augsburg Confession—and, in the process, reject communion with groups that departed in any way from that creed.

Scholars very sympathetic to Luther also acknowledge that he was incorrigibly pugnacious as well as deeply convinced his understanding of faith and of the Church was the only correct one. He sought out opportunities, often, to do battle not only with Catholics (or as he put it in 1545, “whatever riffraff belongs to His Idolatrous and Papal Holiness,” whose tongues “we should … tear out from the back, and nail them on the gallows”), but also with followers of the Swiss reformers Ulrich Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger, the more radical Anabaptists and Spiritualists, and Protestants closer to his own mind who nevertheless disagreed with him on this or that creedal article. Luther’s verve for creative name-calling and insults where all these groups were concerned was legendary in his own time, as it remains in ours. (Graduate students in Reformation history will confess to finding amusement in a website called the “Lutheran Insulter” in which real ad hominem attacks from the reformer’s writings are generated at random. While writing this paragraph, I clicked on its “Insult me again” button and was informed by Doktor Luther, as if I were Erasmus just daring to defend free will: “You foster in your heart a Lucian, or some other pig from Epicurus’ sty”—this from Luther’s Bondage of the Will of 1525.)

It is also the case that, during a time when some sixteenth-century reformers were actively engaged in the earliest ecumenical efforts to find common ground across the splintering confessions, and to strive toward the reunification of Western Christendom, Luther was relatively uninterested in such things.

Pope Francis, however, in order to push along the cause of Catholic-Lutheran reunification, casts Luther as someone who had no wish to sow discord among Christians. For the hardening sectarian divisions of the early modern era, Francis blames, instead, others who “closed in on [themselves] out of fear or bias with regard to the faith which others profess with a different accent and language.”

With all due respect to His Holiness, this explanation of what unfolded during and after Luther’s time is not only condescending to the full-blooded, spirited, and hardly faultless reformer himself. It is insulting to the intelligence of numerous theologians, apologists, and preachers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Robert Bellarmine and other Jesuits who devoted years of life, and heart, to clarifying and defending serious, important Catholic doctrines against serious, important Protestant challenges. And it is cavalier toward the memory not only of countless martyrs and war dead on all sides of that era’s terrible struggles, but also of numerous families, villages, even religious communities in Reformation Europe’s confessional borderlands, which were torn apart, agonizingly—while very much speaking the same language, with the same accents!—over very serious, important, real disagreements about doctrine and praxis.

Go here to read the rest.  History relies upon truth and accuracy, two traits not abundant in the current Pontificate.

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Pengiuns Fan
Pengiuns Fan
Friday, March 24, AD 2017 4:54am

How much of The Pontiff’s admiration for Luther comes from the German episcopate? He seems to-do what Kasper and Marx want him to do.

Dale Price
Dale Price
Friday, March 24, AD 2017 8:41am

The pontiff’s agenda requires a simplistic, contrafactual assessment not only of the moment but also of history. It is of a piece with his cringe-inducing argument [if it can be dignified with such a term] that terrorism is caused by arms dealers.

His worldview is frozen in a progressive dreamscape from 1965-79, but he’s going to impose it, reality be damned.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Saturday, March 25, AD 2017 3:48am

Silence would improve the Pope’s image and impact appreciatively.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Saturday, March 25, AD 2017 3:49pm

Francis gives his embrace of Luther as a sop to the apostate world around us because he doesn’t value the historical teachings concerning sacraments. priesthood etc. Church any more than Luther did.
Hopefully I say that perhaps Francis’ own “unintended consequences” of his deconstruction will be that the whole Faith will be more carefully studied.

CAM
CAM
Saturday, March 25, AD 2017 4:46pm

When our boys were infants I don’t recall them crying in church. When they were toddlers they were very active. My husband was at sea during that period and I found the nursery or the crying room to be helpful.
I or we could concentrate on the Mass and the boys were not annoying/distracting others. Except on two ocassions: at the younger son’s baptism the older one escaped from my mother’s grip and rang the bells during the ceremony. and once in a packed crying room when I was listening intently to a good homily, suddenly the priests lips were moving but there was no sound. My 3 year old was no longer in the room. I rapidly crossed the hall to another room and saw my little fellow at the controls of the sound system. Praying that I would select the right button I restored the sound. Why is it children always know how to operated electron devices?
I am still amazed at the parents who do not correct or remove their misbehaving children from the church during services. It is particularly bad at the Spanish language Mass with young children walking up and down the aisles and transversing past the altar at the Consecration with the aren’t I cute look on their faces. No you are not.
Catholic school and parents teach their children the proper respect to be shown during the Mass .

CAM
CAM
Saturday, March 25, AD 2017 9:39pm

oops wrong post. Long day and night.

Mary De Voe
Monday, March 27, AD 2017 9:29am

If the evil accusations against the Catholic Church are true, then each and every person has the choice that Martin Luther had to make, namely to repair the church or to start a new Christian religion without the REAL PRESENCE, without the APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION and the without CHURCH FATHERS.

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