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Tag Archives: Catholics

Reformation 1517-2017

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by larrymuffin in Uncategorized

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1517-2017, 500, Catholics, Lutherans, Martin Luther, Pope Francis, Protestanism

It has been 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517, an event that changed the world – and this great anniversary in 2017 will be marked in fitting style, not just in Wittenberg and Eisleben but across the Republic. Germany is paying tribute to one of its greatest sons with an entire decade devoted to Martin Luther: monk, professor and church reformer.

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Pope Francis travelled to Sweden to assist in the launch of a year-long commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing of his 95 theses to the door of the castle church of Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, officially launching the Protestant Reformation. Luther was excommunicated and his theses rejected by Pope Leo X in 1520. This split in Christianity was the second major break-off after the Orthodox split in the eleventh century.

When Martin Luther posted his “Ninety-five Theses” on the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, no one expected the breadth of evangelical reforms in Christian teaching and practice that followed. In every dimension of Christian faith a renewed trust in God’s forgiving mercy replaced a reliance on teachings and practices that, like the sale of indulgences, were vulnerable to abuse and corruption.

It is worth knowing that the sale of indulgences had become very lucrative to the Papacy in the funding of the re-building of the Basilica of Saint-Peter in Rome, the building we see today took 100 years to build, used several architects and many artists. Its interior decoration would take another 30 years and would be directed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) he was the creator of the Baroque style.

If Martin Luther was the writer of the Reformation, then Lucas Cranach, the Elder was its painter. The Cranach studio produced more than a thousand paintings, most notably for the Small Catechism and Luther’s German translation of the Bible. Some of the best portraits of Martin Luther were made by Cranach, the Elder. Cranach was also a printer and his print shop made German language copies of the Bible available to all.

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If you wish to read a good book on Martin Luther, here is a suggestion;

Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet by Lyndal Roper, pp 562

Luther was born in Eisleben in northern Germany in 1483, and grew up under the shadow of the Counts of Mansfeld’s castles in the small mining town of the same name. In later life he would always insist on his impeccable peasant origins, but his father was a mining inspector and prominent smelting master and it was in a smoky, slagheap-filled town on the edge of the civilised world that the young Martin grew up.

The wider context of the adult Luther’s rebellion — the growing anti-clericalism of the late 14th century, the extravagance and exactions of the Renaissance papacy, absenteeism, the shameful ignorance of so many clergy, the scandal of indulgences, the simmering hostility between Rome and Germany — is familiar enough territory, but for Roper it is impossible to understand Luther without understanding this Mansfeld world from which he came. There is a natural tendency in Reformation studies to concentrate on the independent imperial cities of the south, but the ugly, precarious and divided world that helped shape Luther’s passionate, authoritarian, unforgiving, coarsely physical nature was closer to a 15th-century German Deadwood than it was to the humanist culture and civic traditions of Nuremberg.

Even though Luther remained loyal to his childhood home, there can have been little about it that gave him a very elevated sense of man’s goodness, and nothing that can have inoculated him against the less lovely aspects of St Augustine’s theology when he defied his father to become an Augustinian monk. It might seem odd in retrospect that a man who spent so much of his time railing against monasticism should have joined so austere an order, and yet for whatever reason — and Roper is right to give no pat answer — there was a streak of guilt and self-loathing in Luther that found some perverse balm in the ascetic disciplines and baleful theology of the Observant Augustinians.

In Augustine’s teaching of the utter depravity of man and a strict reading of Paul we have all the ingredients needed for Protestantism; but it is hard not to feel that the Reformation took the direction it did because of Luther’s personality. It was perfectly possible in the early 16th century to square a moderate Augustinian theology with Catholic orthodoxy, but moderation was never part of Luther’s character, and thesis by thesis, crisis by crisis, prayer by prayer, revelation by revelation — it was in the privy tower, on the cloaca, he famously claimed, that the idea of justification by faith alone ‘struck him like a thunderbolt’ — the reformer and the theologian in him came into alignment to produce the Catholic church’s most implacable enemy.

It was this combination of doctrine and character that gave Luther’s assault on the papacy its momentum and destructive power. There was nothing in his attacks on relics or indulgences that was not common enough currency across Europe at the time; but if man could be saved by faith alone and all good works were intrinsically sinful, then the whole penitential edifice of the medieval church — the sale of indulgences, the intercession to Mary and the saints, the cult of relics, the authority of the Pope, the distinct existence of a priestly caste to mediate between man and God — were all so much rubble.

 

Dublin Churches

03 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by larrymuffin in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Cathedral, Catholics, Dublin, Ireland, Irish, Oliver Cromwell, Reformation

dublin-highlights-tour-including-skip-the-line-st-patrick-s-cathedral-in-dublin-191873.jpg

In Ireland being an old Christian country you have many churches here and there. In the Republic there is a mix of Protestant and Catholic Churches. In Dublin the Capital, the most ancient Churches are Protestant and more recent churches built after 1840 are Catholic. Now that is something that puzzled me and made me wonder how that could be, it was just not something I had thought about and again shows how historical events shape the world we live in.

In Dublin, two of the three Cathedrals are Protestant but were Catholic when they were first built until the Reformation under Henry VIII and then everything changed. It got uglier under the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, he stabled his horses in the nave of the cathedral. This was intended to demonstrate Cromwell’s disrespect for the Anglican religion, which he associated with Roman Catholicism and political Royalism.

Because we assume that St-Patrick, c. 435 AD, went to preach the Christian Gospel to the Island then everyone has to be Catholic. Not so, there was a long period of conversion from the old Celtic religion to Christianity, St-Patrick was also not the first Christian missionary just the most famous to come from Britain. Then the Protestant Reformation decimated the Catholic Church, confiscation of property and persecution ensued. Catholic churches were banned and no new churches could be built for many centuries. It was only in 1840 that the British authorities relented and allowed Catholics to have their own churches.

The Cathedral of St-Patrick in Dublin known as The National Cathedral and Collegiate Church of Saint Patrick, Dublin, or in the Irish language as Ard-Eaglais Naomh Pádraig, belongs to the Church of Ireland, it is surrounded by a large park with a water well, it has been established that St-Patrick used the water of the well to baptize early Christian converts.

John Comyn,(1150-1212) first Anglo-Norman Archbishop of Dublin, elevated one of the four Dublin Celtic parish churches, the one dedicated to St. Patrick, beside a holy well of the same name and on an island between two branches of the River Poddle, to the status of a collegiate church, i.e., a church with a body of clergy devoted to both worship and learning. The new collegiate church fell outside the City boundaries, and this move created two new civic territories, one under the Archbishop’s temporal jurisdiction. The church was dedicated to “God, our Blessed Lady Mary and St. Patrick” on 17 March 1191. The area is much changed nowadays the Poddle river is now 2.5 meters under the Cathedral and the island setting has disappeared.

Originally a Catholic Church it is currently or has been since the Reformation in 1537 an Anglican Church. It should be noted that Dublin is predominantly Protestant, another surprise for me, this is something that does not come up in conversation.

The inside of the Church is decorated with military banner of various British Regiments based in Ireland prior to 1922 and whose members where all Irish. The British army had until Irish independence a very large component of Irish soldiers. After the Easter uprising of 1916 many Irish soldiers who were active on the Western Front in Europe or elsewhere in the world expressed their dissatisfaction with British rule and many refused to serve, in some case entire regiments quit, a consequence of the heavy British repression in Ireland. It never occured to the Brits that the Irish component of their army would rebel against repression of their own back home, not a wise move during the First World War at a point where Britain needed all the help it could get.

St_Patrick's_Cathedral_Choir,_Dublin,_Ireland_-_Diliff.jpg

The banners are allowed to stand and decay, old with age many are well over 100 years old. The rest of the church is full of funeral monuments and one is of interest that to Jonathan Swift, the author, who was Dean of St-Patrick from 1713 to 1745. Many of his famous sermons and “Irish tracts” (such as the Drapier’s Letters) were given during his stay as Dean. He is buried here with his spouse? Ms Esther (Stella) Johnson. Some 500 people are buried in the floor of the Cathedral.

There are many other interesting things to see in the church, it is part museum of living history. The cathedral is the location for a number of public national ceremonies. Ireland’s Remembrance Day ceremonies, hosted by the Royal British Legion and attended by the President of Ireland, take place there every November. Its carol service (the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols), celebrated twice in December, including every 24 December, is a colourful feature of Dublin life.

We did attend the Evensong Service with the Men and Boys Choir, it was quite nice to take part in a service.  The Choir School was founded in 1432, supplied many of its members to take part in the very first performance of Handel’s Messiah in 1742.

The other great church is Christ Church Cathedral built in 1030, it too was a Catholic Church until the Reformation.  Needless to say it is always impressive to enter a building more than 1000 years old and still functioning.

Christ Church Cathedral is the cathedral of the United Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough and the cathedral of the Ecclesiastical province of the United Provinces of Dublin and Cashel in the Church of Ireland.

The Church is rich in history and many important events and figures attended service over the course of its history. I will do a separate blog entry on Christ Church.

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Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, C.1030 

 

 

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