test tomorrow

• SOCIALLY: the Renaissance emphasis on the secular and the individual challenged Church authority.
• The printing press helped spread these ideas.
• POLITICALLY: Some rulers began to challenge the Church’s political power.
• ECONOMICALLY: northern merchants resented paying church taxes to Rome.
  • Corrupt leadership
  • Renaissance-era popes spent extravagantly on personal pleasure
  • Pope Alexander VI admitted that he fathered several children
  • Many priests and monks were poorly educated
  • How can you teach if you can barely read?
  • Some priests  broke their vows, got married, and had children
  • Some priests drank to excess, many gambled
    • The selling of indulgences (pardons) “releases a sinner from performing the penalty a priest imposed for sins”
    • Johann Tetzel was a monk who sold indulgences to help rebuild St. Peter’s Cathedral
    • A monk named Martin Luther objected to this practice
    Luther’s ideas are becoming popular, so the Church criticizes him & his “heretical” ideas
    Luther suggests Christians drive the pope from the Church by force!
    In 1520, Pope Leo X issues a decree threatening Luther with excommunication unless he takes back his statements
    When Luther returned to Wittenberg, many of his ideas/reforms were being put into practice
    Some of his followers had formed a separate religious group called Lutherans
    But some princes were still loyal to the pope
    Other princes who supported Luther signed a protest against the loyalists
    Eventually, the term Protestant was applied to Christians who belonged to non-Catholic churches
    Catholic is a term meaning “universal” or “whole”