The Church Prior to the Reformation: “The Purgatory Industry”

Salvation according to Rome: “Ye must!”

Of course, “corporal works of mercy” are a thing that Roman Catholics MAY do. Feeding the hungry, or giving alms – these are the kinds of good works that the Scriptures require. But notice how far down they are on the Roman Catholic “list of things to do”. When we are talking about being “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do”, these particular good works (those prescribed by Christ) are far down in the Roman Catholic system.

Rome does not require these things – merely points to them as good things. What it REQUIRES is that you do “the Precepts of the Church”.

As a Roman Catholic, you won’t find yourself in hell for failing to feed the hungry, or clothing the naked, etc. However, you will go to hell (at least, you would have, when I was a kid) for failing to keep the “indispensable minimums”, the “Precepts of the Church”, unless they’ve found some way to “reformulate positively” these things, the way that they’ve reformulated positively the statement “no salvation outside of the church”.

But it seems as if they may be trying. The online version of Paragraph 2041 says:

2041 The precepts of the Church are set in the context of a moral life bound to and nourished by liturgical life. The obligatory character of these positive laws decreed by the pastoral authorities is meant to guarantee to the faithful the very necessary minimum in the spirit of prayer and moral effort, in the growth in love of God and neighbor …

However, my version, a printed 1995 edition of the book, clearly does not say “very necessary” but “indispensable”. Now, if you were going to relax those precepts, from “indispensable” to something, well, less than “indispensable”, you might head in the direction of “very necessary”. Maybe a future edition of this will be “we kinda-sorta think you oughta do it, but hey, who are we to judge?”

The Church Prior to the Reformation: The Mass

Medieval conception of Purgatory

As Protestants, we all seem to know that the Roman Church was very bad during the middle ages, but in what ways? What, precisely, was being protested?

In his work “The Reformation: A History”, Diarmiad MacCulloch gives a brief overview of the Roman Church prior to the Reformation. He introduces that overview with this passage:

Nicholas Ridley, one of the talented scholarly clergy who rebelled in England against the old [Roman] Church, wrote about this to one of his fellow rebels John Bradford in 1554, while they both lay in prisons waiting for the old Church to burn them for heresy. As Bishop Ridley reflected on the strength of their deadly enemy, which now he saw as the power of the devil himself, he said that Satan’s old world of false religion stood on two ‘most massy posts and mighty pillars … these two, sir, are they in my judgement: the one his false doctrine and idolatrical use of the Lord’s supper; and the other, the wicked and abominable usurpation of the primacy of the see of Rome … the whole system of the medieval western Church was built on the Mass and on the central role of the Pope. Without the Mass, indeed, the Pope in Rome and the clergy of the Western Church would have had no power for the Protestant reformers to challenge, for the Mass was the centerpiece around which all the complex devotional life of the Church revolved (Diarmiad MacCulloch, “The Reformation: A History” (New York, NY: Penguin Books, ©2004, pg 10).

These are the things that the Reformation was all about: the “Mass” and the Papacy. These were the two real bulwarks of Roman strength. But in what way did they exercise power in the 16th century? In what ways did they hold captive the entire continent of Europe?

Ever wonder where “Papal Conclaves” come from?

Writing about what has been called “The First Reformation”, Diarmaid MacCulloch writes:

The idea of a Reformation in the sixteenth century is probably a familiar one, but it must be realized that an equally crucial Reformation took place in the Western church during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was not a rebellion in the ranks like the [16th century] Reformation; on the contrary, it was directed from the top of the church, and it resulted in the creation of the most magnificent single structure of government which Christianity has ever known. Whether we approve of this achievement or not, it deserves the title of Reformation just as much as the actions of Martin Luther and John Calvin (MacCulloch, “Groundwork of Christian History”, London, UK: Epworth Press, ©1987, pg 105).

The timing is important to note. Consider that the Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox split had just occurred with mutual anathemas in 1054. Those in charge at Rome had just cut themselves free from the Eastern Patriarchs who, for centuries, had resisted Roman claims to exclusive power. Now they had a chance to enact their own agenda.

Popes in the past had been appointed in a bewildering variety of ways – elected assemblies of clergy and people, hailed by acclamation at the funerals of their predecessors, nominated by local gang-bosses, appointed by emperors.

A synod at the Lateran in April 1059 promulgated a new papal electoral decree, confining the actual choice to the seven cardinal bishops, with the subsequent assent of the cardinal priests and deacons, and then the acclaim of the people: vague and grudging provision was also made for imperial approval.

The ‘cardinals’ were simply the senior clergy of Rome. The word itself is probably derived from the term for a hinge or joint, and was first given to the twenty-eight parish priests of the titular churches of Rome, who also served the five papal basilicas which collectively formed the Pope’s cathedral. This double role made these priests the ‘hinges’ between the See of Rome, and the parishes of Rome. The word lost this precise original meaning, however, and became an honorific sign of status.

It was extended to the holders of the seven ‘subarbican’ bishoprics round Rome, and to the nineteen deacons of the city, and it was this group of fifty-four senior clergy which was now envisaged as the sole electoral body for the papacy, with the initiative and determining role going to the cardinal bishops.

The decree was a clear attempt to exclude lay influence, whether from the Emperor or the Roman nobility, from the whole process.

The same synod made clerical marriage illegal, ordered the laity to boycott the Masses of priests who kept concubines, forbade the acceptance of churches from lay proprietors, and stipulated that the clergy serving a great church should live in common, a move towards a monastic pattern intended to improve clerical morals and discipline (Eamon Duffy, “Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes”, New Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene (Yale University Press) ©2001 edition, pg 118).

For more information, see also this article: What are Cardinals?

By all means, lets keep checking the facts

Those who have no history are always on the verge of insanity. When individual people lose their memory, they find it a very distressing experience; history is like a collective memory, the recollections of a nation, of a culture, or of the entire world. When a nation forgets its history, or worse still, invents a history to take the place of the facts, the consequences are tragic. The proof of that can be seen by looking at what happened in Nazi Germany half a century ago; there Hitler began rebuilding a whole society on lies about the past, filling the past with demons, of which the worst were the Jews. Under the influence of these lies, ordinary, decent human beings became accomplices in some of the most horrific crimes which humanity has ever committed. There are plenty of other examples, perhaps the most chilling coming from the world of fiction. In the novel 1984, George Orwell created a world where those in power could never be defeated or removed because they were always right; they were always right because they constantly rewrote the past to show that they were always right. They removed the possibility of change from the world by removing the consciousness from people’s minds that change could take place.

From Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Groundwork of Christian History”, London, UK: Epworth Press ©1987, pgs 1-2.

As I wrote at another point:

Prior to Newman’s “theory of development,” it was the practice of Catholic apologists (see Bossuet) to argue that the church had never changed: “semper eadem.” But in the course of further historical research, it became necessary for someone like Newman to explain the huge scope and number of the changes that Rome had effected on the church over the centuries.

In the Orwell novel, 1984, it was the job of the main character, Winston Smith, “to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs — mostly to remove ‘unpersons,’ people who have fallen foul of the party.”

To find precedence for this practice, Orwell had to travel no further than the Roman Catholic Church, which had made this its practice for centuries. In describing how we have come to know about the genuine teachings of Nestorius, Friedrich Loofs wrote, “The church of the ancient Roman Empire did not punish its heretics merely by deposition, condemnation, banishment and various deprivation of rights, but, with the purpose of shielding its believers against poisonous influence, it destroyed all heretical writings ... a similar fortune was prepared for Nestorius.” (Loofs, “Nestorius,” 2-11).

Of course, according to Orwell, “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.” (Book 1, Chapter 3)

This is precisely what the Catholic Church, at an official level, to a greater or lesser degree, has been doing for centuries, and it is the type of thing that its modern apologists continue to do today. (Especially adherents to Newman’s “theory of development.”)