THE REFORMATION
The introduction during the Renaissance of the humanist idea that people should question authority led to the challenges to the Catholic Church that came about during the Reformation. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses certainly questioned the authority of the church, especially since it was Luther’s core belief that the bible, not the Pope or the church, was the real authority for Christianity. His idea of justification by faith alone and his argument against sacraments other than baptism and the Last Supper showed he was questioning authority. The influence of reformers such as Luther and John Calvin over European Christians certainly reduced the financial growth of the Catholic Church, since when people became Protestant they were no longer paying indulgences. The dissemination of ideas that countered Church policy was enabled by the printing press that had been developed in the Renaissance, an example of how accomplishments in one period in time enable change in another. The mass distribution of anti-Catholic literature was such a threat to the Church that it led to the creation of the Index of Forbidden Books, which was designed to keep
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When the German Peasants created their 12 Articles of the Peasants of Swabia, in order to protest the serf system, Luther did not support them. He wrote Against the Murdering and Robbing Hordes of Peasants, in which he called the peasants blasphemous for daring to rise up against their rulers. Luther may have wanted the Catholic Church to change, but he did not want to see social change in the hierarchy of European classes. The Reformation period was not a period of change of the social system in Germany. However, the seeds of such an idea were planted in Europe and would be revisited again during the Enlightenment and the French