Roman Catholic And Pre-Reformation Support For Protestant Beliefs

There were far more pre-Reformation individuals and groups who agreed with Protestant beliefs than critics of Protestantism typically suggest. And the beliefs people held prior to the Reformation, regardless of whether those people agreed with Protestants, were far more diverse than is often suggested. The people who agreed with Protestantism were accompanied by many others who had some degree of sympathy or tolerance for Protestant views, even though they didn't adopt those views themselves. Many people were agnostic about an issue, would hold a Roman Catholic view while attending the same church as somebody else who held a Protestant view, and so on. In 2008, I wrote a post providing some examples of the wide diversity of views people held at the time of the Reformation. A series of striking examples come from the diversity of views held by the Roman Catholic leaders who attended and voted at the Council of Trent.

An example that often comes up is that a minority of those who voted at Trent didn't initially support the council's position on the Old Testament canon. Another example:

"Debate over the decree on justification [at the Council of Trent] was lengthy, complex, and, once, so heated it led to a scuffle." (Anthony Lusvardi, Baptism Of Desire And Christian Salvation [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Of America Press, 2024], 223-24)

In a book about the Lollards, Robert Lutton not only provides examples of support for Protestant beliefs among pre-Reformation Lollards, but also discusses how widely people outside of Lollard circles seemed to be tolerant of and even sympathetic toward those views. His focus is on the situation in Tenterden, but he addresses circumstances outside that area to some extent as well:

Above and beyond this shift in emphasis, however, Marianism seems to have been in decline at Tenterden by the last decade of the fifteenth century, was certainly not as popular as it was in some other urban centres and was eclipsed by other, newer cults - in particular the Jesus Mass - in the early sixteenth century. Perhaps the roots of this were part and parcel of general sensibilities about saints' images. Lollard views about the irrelevance of saints in general may have had a creeping influence on orthodox piety, but whatever its causes, the decline of Marianism and the cult of saints as a whole at Tenterden was a significant aspect of a particular religious culture that does not accord with revisionist accounts of late medieval piety [the notion that the piety was of a traditional Roman Catholic nature]....

Denial of transubstantiation, rejection of prayers to saints, veneration of images and pilgrimage all featured strongly [in the beliefs of the Lollards]....

All but one of the thirty [Lollard] suspects [in a particular set of trials] confessed to holding that the sacrament of the altar was not truly the body and blood of Christ but material bread....There is nothing to suggest belief in a Wycliffite real presence, but, rather, a sacramentarian view of the eucharist as a memorial only....

This extreme sacramentarianism was continuous with White's teachings in East Anglia, and most probably the Tenterden region in the early fifteenth century.

A much smaller number of suspects abjured the common Lollard opinion that the sacraments of baptism and confirmation were unnecessary for the profit of a person's soul. According to her son Christopher, Agnes Grebill believed 'that baptisme was nothing worth for a childe putt into the founte was nomore better then if he had be putt into other water, and that confirmacion ys avayn thing and of noon effecte'....

In all the places from which Lollards came in Kent, including Tenterden, it seems that the orthodox were reluctant to incriminate their heterodox neighbours. This is suggested by the fact that all the witnesses mentioned in the trials belonged to heretical groups or households of heretics. The authorities appear to have had to rely heavily upon inside informers who, although unnamed, can be guessed at....None of the major Lollard figures mentioned in the trial proceedings were indicted in the visitation, and neither are there any references to heresy in the Tenterden returns for fourteen separate years between 1498 and 1523. There were very few presentments of heretics in 1511-12 in other parishes within the archdeaconry of Canterbury in which it is established that Lollards lived. It is almost forty years since J. A. F. Thomson stated with regard to Tenterden that 'even although there is nothing to show that the Lollards were anything other than a minority, the majority does not appear to have been vindictive towards them'. Thomson's hunch that this may have had something to do with sympathetic churchwardens [sympathetic to the Lollards] appears to be correct....

The evidence suggests that extensive and entrenched sympathy with Lollard calls for reform afforded heretics a degree of protection, and ensured they were not ostracised from town or parish affairs. Convinced Lollards at Tenterden on the whole appear to have attended church [orthodox churches] and so were not separatists and cannot be described as a sect. They do not appear to have conceived of their activities as constituting an alternative Church and may have exercised considerable influence over parish religion....

Conversion to heretical opinions appears to have been experienced by some in the form of an intellectual, emotional or psychological moment of passage into heresy but there may have been a substantial proportion of parishioners who held more ambiguous views which lay somewhere on the pious spectrum between convinced Lollardy and more traditional forms of orthodoxy....

Although differences in piety do not appear to have resulted in schism, the allegation in 1511 that many members of the congregation sat still in church during procession suggests a significant degree of fragmentation of the religious community of the parish. What appears to have been an ostensibly orthodox body of worshippers, disengaged from traditional ceremonial, was not afraid to make its views known. Quite possibly not convinced heretics themselves, the orthodox piety of these parishioners may have been influenced by Lollard ideas that had been in circulation for a number of generations.

(Lollardy And Orthodox Religion In Pre-Reformation England [Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press, 2011], 85, 152, 158-59, 170-71, 194-95, 197)