Mid-term essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Mid-term - Essay exercisingIt was a time of religious intolerance when a strict theocratic rule existed in close of Europe. An example of the extreme power of the Papacy at around this period was its ability to wage wars against new(prenominal) countries. This powerful papacy launched the Crusades which fought for a period of two centuries against the Muslims who conquered and occupied the Near East, especially Jeru sales eventm. It also fought against otherwise perceived enemies of the faith such as those pagans in the Slavic region, the Jews, the Mongols and other peoples it considered as heretics. In the accepted sense, the papacy was a power unto itself and exercised both religious and temporal powers. It concerned itself with matters of the state and even kings arciform to it. It was against this backdrop that the Reformation movement begun that was started by a simple act of Martin Luther. He questioned some of the suspicious practices of the clergy during his time. He s aw how the clerical powers had been abused at the expense of ordinary people and how it strayed so outlying(prenominal) away from its original religious mandate of saving the souls. It is necessary to give a brief downplay in order to understand the context in which Martin Luther challenged the papal authority and the manifest abuses of the system (Jacobs 7). parole The Catholic Church at around this time can be characterized, to put it mildly, as really corrupt. Candidates for the papacy outmaneuvered each other, busy in political intrigues, some pontiffs and priests were married and had families (before celibacy was imposed) and the general standard pressure within the Catholic hierarchy was far removed from religious matters. The main protest of Martin Luther was centered on the granting of indulgences. It was the practice of the Catholic Church at that time to give full or partial remissions for those sins committed and their accompanying or corresponding temporal punis hment. Indulgences were replacements for severe penances imposed by the early church for sins committed drawn from the supposed accumulated goodwill in the Treasury of Merit. Because the Church was very corrupt and engaged more in temporal matters than what was necessary, it was constantly in need of funds to finance its various projects desire building massive cathedrals and to finance its religious wars. Due to this scarcity of funds, the Church decided to raise capital through the sale of these so-called indulgences (Somervill 43). It was not originally intended by Martin Luther to split the Church itself but his intentions were just to point out the sheer error in selling indulgences when these were supposed to be free. A very important point raised by Luther was that indulgences cannot save sinners since forgiveness is a power minded(p) by God alone and not from buying and paying for these indulgences. He saw how unfair it was for the pope at that time (Pope Leo) to finance construction of an extravagant St. Peters Basilica when the papacy itself had so much money. Moreover, he did not like the lavish lifestyle of the pope and the squandering of church funds through the clog of extraneous things like art and culture. The pope had designated a short Dominican monk to undertake the sale of indulgences to raise funds going from town to town, telling the people how they can save the souls of their relatives in Purgatory by buying indulgences. The Ninety-five Theses of Martin Luther