The thesis that the moral decadence of the Church, under the Renaissance Popes, had reached an intolerable extreme, and that Luther led the “Protestants” against this situation, demanding a “reform,” is false, and no present-day historian is capable of sustaining it.
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Luther Today.– This coming 31 October will mark another anniversary of the 95 theses nailed up in 1517 by Luther on the door of the castle church of Wittenberg. There are several recent publications on Luther in which he is portrayed as a lover of the Bible and one who spread it among the people, a reformer of a Roman Church corrupt in his time, and so on. It seems, then, fitting to make a few verifications.
He was not a reformer of morals, but of doctrines.– The thesis that the moral decadence of the Church, under the Renaissance Popes, had reached an intolerable extreme, and that Luther led the “Protestants” against this situation, demanding a “reform,” is false, and no present-day historian is capable of sustaining it. Among other reasons, because Luther himself rejects that interpretation of his work in numerous explicit declarations. “I do not attack bad morals, but impious doctrines.” And years later he insists on it: “I did not attack immoralities and abuses, but the substance and the doctrine of the Papacy.” “Among us –he openly confessed– life is bad, as it is among the papists; but we do not accuse them of immorality,” but of doctrinal errors. Indeed, “bellum est Luthero cum prava doctrina, cum impiis dogmatis” (Melanchthon).
Reformer of Catholic doctrine.– Luther, indeed, fought with all his might against the doctrine of the Catholic Church. To begin with, he demolished the Bible, for by leaving it at the mercy of private judgment he changed the infallible beneficial function of ecclesiastical law. He reduced the seven sacraments to one and a half. He asserted, starting from the total corruption of man by original sin, that “reason is the devil’s greatest whore, a whore eaten by scab and leprosy” (and so on, for five more lines). And for the same reason, and with equal passion, he denied the freedom of man (1525, De servo arbitrio), holding that “the safest and most religious” thing would be for the very term “free will” to disappear from language. As a logical consequence, he also denied the necessity of good works for salvation. In short, with his “correct answers,” as a present-day author writes, he practically destroyed all of Christianity, wrecking Christendom in the process.
Schizoid thinking.– The Catholic Church unites reason and faith, understanding theology as “ratio fide illustrata” (Vatican I). It unites the Bible with Tradition and the apostolic Magisterium (Vatican II, Dei Verbum 10). It unites grace with the free action of the human will. Et et.
Luther’s thinking, on the contrary, is schizoid: Vel vel. Considering that “reason is the devil’s greatest whore,” he concludes: sola fides. Convinced that the mind and conscience of the Christian stand above Fathers, Popes and Councils, he decrees: sola Scriptura. Affirming that man is not free, and that good works are not necessary for salvation, he declares: sola gratia.
The greatest insulter of the Kingdom.– Luther writes that “the whole Church of the pope is a Church of whores and hermaphrodites,” and that the pope himself is “a raving madman, a falsifier of history, a liar, a blasphemer,” a pig, a donkey, etc., and that all the pontifical acts are “sealed with the devil’s excrement, and written with the farts of the donkey-pope.” Innumerable pages could be filled with similar or worse phrases.
The Catholic theologians of Luther’s time rejected his theses, earning from him the predictable epithets. The Faculty of Paris is “the condemned synagogue of the devil, the most abominable intellectual harlot that has ever lived under the sun.” And the theologians of Louvain, for their part, are “coarse asses, cursed swine, bellies of blasphemies, Epicurean pigs, heretics and idolaters, cursed broth of hell.” It is not surprising that, thinking thus, Luther rejected the proposal made to him by Charles V at Worms, that he discuss his doctrines with the most prestigious Catholic theologians. Who could be interested in arguing with demon-possessed pigs?
Moreover, Luther’s insults had a universal reach: German women, for example, were “shameless sows”; peasants and burghers, “drunkards, given over to every vice”; and of students he said that “scarcely one or two in a thousand were commendable.”
The perfect heretic.– “I, Doctor Luther, unworthy evangelist of our Lord Jesus Christ, assure you that neither the Roman Emperor […], nor the pope, nor the cardinals, nor the bishops, nor the sanctimonious, nor the princes, nor the knights will be able to do anything against these articles, in spite of the whole world and all the devils […] It is I who affirm it, I, Doctor Martin Luther, speaking in the name of the Holy Spirit.” “I do not admit that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, not even by the angels. Whoever does not listen to my doctrine cannot be saved.”
Harsh with the poor, weak with the powerful.– On the occasion of the peasants’ uprising, who demanded, first by fair means and then by foul, what they considered to be their rights, Luther writes a most severe invective, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (1525). “The seditious man must be struck down, strangled and killed, privately or publicly, for nothing is more poisonous, harmful and diabolical than a promoter of sedition, just as one must kill a rabid dog, because, if you do not finish him off, he will finish you off and the whole country.”
Luther was, on the other hand, very gentle with the powerful German princes, in order to win their favor. When, for example, Philip of Hesse, the great landgrave, married to Catherine, by whom he had seven children, demanded the approval of an additional marriage to a young lady of the Saxon nobility, he obtained the license of Luther and Melanchthon, on condition that the concession be kept secret. In this case of polygamy, consummated in 1540, recourse was had to the precedent of the ancient Jewish Patriarchs.
Appalled at his own work.– The results of Luther’s preaching were devastating for the morals of the people, and he himself acknowledges it. “Since the tyranny of the pope has ended for us, everyone despises pure and wholesome doctrine. We no longer have the appearance of men, but of true brutes, a bestial species.” Of his followers he stated that “they are seven times worse than before. After we preached our doctrine, men gave themselves over to robbery, imposture, debauchery, drunkenness and every kind of vice. We cast out one demon [the papacy] and seven worse ones came.”
To Zwingli he writes, appalled: “It frightens one to see how, where once all was calm and peace reigned, now there are sects and factions everywhere: an abomination that inspires pity […] I am forced to confess it: my doctrine has produced many scandals. Yes; I cannot deny it; these things frequently terrify me.” And he foresaw even greater disasters. One day he confided to his friend Melanchthon: “How many different masters will arise in the coming century? The confusion will reach its height.”
So it was. And so it has been, in accelerated progression, until reaching the great present-day apostasy of the ancient Catholic nations.
Author: Fr. José María Iraburu
