Foundations of the Anglican Church XXXVI

Wittenberg Castle Church where Martin Luther

posted his 95 Theses

Before we look at why Henry didn’t get his annulment, we need to look for a moment at the broader picture of Europe in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. 

In 1517 a Saxon friar of the Augustinian Order, one Martin Luther, a professor of Sacred Scripture at the newly founded University of Wittenberg, posted 97 theses for debate on the door of Wittenberg Castle Church.  There was nothing unusual about this in an university town.  It was not an act of rebellion.  There was a long established tradition in university towns of professors or students posting subjects for debate.  Debate, particularly theological debate, was a major form of entertainment in university life.  Participation in such public debate was part of the requirements for one to be given the Doctorate.  Luther was a young hot-shot professor at a new university and both he and his university were trying to establish their respective reputations.  But this list of topics was to set off a chain reaction that shattered the Catholic world.
Luther had been born in 1483.  His parents were upwardly mobile but not particularly wealthy Germans of peasant stock but who had acquired some property and means.   His father was in the copper business, leasing mines and operating smelting works.  His mother was industrious and added to the family income through various domestic industries.  While the family was sufficiently devout, his father, Hans, wanted to see his eldest son, Martin, become a lawyer and was not enthused about Martin’s religious vocation when it emerged.  Martin had been given a very sound education by the Brothers of the Common Life.
Luther had a spiritual restlessness and Law was not meeting his psychological needs.  He seems from an early age to have been preoccupied with the question of his eternal salvation.  Law is a profession for cynics not searchers and Luther soon abandoned it.  There is a story—and it seems to be rooted in fact—that the young Luther was frightened during an electrical storm in which he was caught in a woods and vowed to Saint Anne that he would become a monk should he be delivered. 
Luther entered a very strict order, technically not of monks but of friars, the Augustinian observants.  (The various orders of the day mostly had observant branches which were reform movements within the orders and followed very strict rules regarding fasting, prayer, and separation from the world.  It is significant that Martin had joined an observant order, and one of the strictest, as that tells us about this religious enthusiasm.)     Luther had an excellent spiritual director in his superior, Johan van Staupitz, but seemed unable to break through scrupulosity that verged on a serious neurosis. Luther was ordained a priest and sent on for studies, receiving the Doctorate in 1512. Two years before he had made a fateful trip to Rome where he was thoroughly disillusioned by the scandalous conditions and cynical “faith” of so many involved in the governance of the Church.   (For information about Martin Luther’s trip to Rome, check out blog entries for September 13^th and 15^th 2011).   Rome can still be a scandal to the faithful.  Saint Francis had admonished his friars that for the good of their souls they should avoid going to Rome.  
Luther joined the faculty at Wittenberg in 1512 and a professor of Bible.  In 1514 the Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, published the first critical edition of the New Testament in Greek enabling biblical scholars to look at the text in the original language.  It was a huge breakthrough for scripture scholars and the young professor from Wittenberg threw himself into the task of studying the scripture in Greek.  He came to be thoroughly familiar with the Epistles of Saint Paul and was captured by Paul’s insistence that we are saved not by our righteous works but by faith in Jesus Christ.  Here Luther found a balm for his scruple troubled soul and as began to take St Paul to heart he became more and more uncomfortable with many contemporary Catholic practices.  This led to the publication of the 95 thesis.

More to follow. 

Victory and Victories

Father Baker's shrine of Our Lady

of Victory in Lackawanna NY,

named after a famous Paris church,

In the last posting I told the story of Monsigor Nelson “Father” Baker and his charitable institutions and the Basilica of Our Lady of Victory in Lackawanna NY.  In the telling of the story I mentioned that Nelson Baker as a seminarian had visited the Paris Church of Notre Dame des Victoires and the visit had changed his life.  Let me do an entry on this famous Paris Church.  I am embarrassed to say that as often as I have been to Paris, and that is quite often, I have never thought to visit this sanctuary.  I will have to go the next time I am the "La Ville-Lumière"  I love that city and in particular its churches.   

     Compared to some of my favorite churches—Saint Étienne du Mont, Saint Eustache, Saint Gervais, Saint Merri, Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, Saint Séverin, O gosh, I could go on and on—Notre Dame des Victoires is a fairly new church.  In 1619 the discalced Augustinians, a Reformed Order of Friars known as the Petits Pères, built their monastery not far from the Palais-Cardinal, the home of Cardinal Richelieu (now known as the Palais Royal).  Actually the Augustinians moved in just ahead of the Cardinal who began constructing his palace just about the time the Augustinians were starting the construction of their Church in 1629.  King Louis XIII came in person to lay the cornerstone of the new church which he was building as a votive offering to Our Lady in thanksgiving for the defeat of the Huguenots in the Siege of La Rochelle.  (La Rochelle had long been a Calvinist city and the site of several conflicts during the French Wars of Religion going back to the time of the Saint Bartholomew Day’s Massacre.)  The title, Notre Dame des Victoires, Our Lady of Victories, was to wipe the eye (an anachronistic phrase, translated in modern American English as “to stick it to”) of the Protestants.  This section of the city was fast growing in popularity among the fashionable—after all Richelieu was in the neighborhood and the Louvre-Tuileries palace complex (the Paris residence of the King) was but a short walk. It was only a few years before the church was too small to meet the needs of the congregation and a larger church was begun in 1656, though only completed some seventy years later.          During the French Revolution the Augustinians were scattered and the church itself secularized.  Napoleon returned it to sacred worship but the nineteenth century was not  at first a good time for churches.  Many of the French did not return to the practice of their religion after the Revolution.  A modern air of liberalism combined with general French cynicism made religion, and Catholicism in particular, seem to be terribly un-chic, so benighted and medieval.  With the restoration of the monarchy after the fall of Napoleon many in the Church were confident in a restoration of the ancien regime with all the privileges of church and clergy but the French weren’t ready for that.  There was a need for re-evangelization.  And it centered, in Paris at least, on the Church of Notre Dame des Victoires.  In the very worst of the dark night of French Catholicism, when the faith was most dead and Charles X was trying to restore autocracy, a spiritual renewal started.  Paris had an extraordinary Archbishop in Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen who was famous for resisting the King’s political ambitions and for care for the poor.  Meanwhile the pastor of Notre Dame des Victoires Father Desgennettes, claimed to have had a vision of Our Lady.  Nothing has ever been made of this vision and I don’t think the Church ever ruled on its authenticity, but it sparked a revival among the Catholics of Paris and the church became the center of great devotion.  The Church was associated with the brothers, Alphonse and Théodore Ratisonne, converts from a prominent family of Jewish bankers from Strasbourg, who went on missionary work in the Holy Land, founding the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion.  Another distinguished convert from Judaism associated with the church of Our Lady of Victories, is François-Marie-Paul Libermann who went on to reestablish the Spiritans, known then as the Holy Ghost Fathers.  Alphonse Ratisbonne and Libermann both abandoned Judaism for agnosticism before converting to Catholicism whereas Théodore had passed directly from one covenant to the other.  Yet another figure associated with this Church is Théophane Vénard, a member of the Paris Foreign Mission Society martyred in Tonkin, Vietnam in 1861 and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1988.  After his conversion to Catholicism in 1845, Blessed John Henry Newman made a pilgrimage to this Church in Thanksgiving.  As an Anglican priest, he had prayed there for guidance years before.  In 1887—several years after Nelson Baker’s prayers there, Thérèse Martin, a young girl from Lisieux in Normandy stopped in this church to pray for her vocation—she wished permission to enter Carmel despite her being underage (she was not yet fifteen).  Unknown in her lifetime, she became the most popular Catholic saint of the twentieth century:  Thérèse of Lisieux, aka Thérèse of the Child Jesus, the Little Flower.  These are the greater and better known pilgrims but over 10,000 ex votos (plaques, usually of silver, acknowledging some prayer answered) as well as civil and military decorations, pieces of jewelry, and objects d’art have been left as a tribute to Our Lady of Victories. 

        When Father Baker built his ex voto, his basilica in Lackawanna New York, he changed the title a bit to Our Lady of Victory.  Lackawanna today is a blue collar and working class city.  Most of Western New York has suffered economic depression for decades since the collapse of the steel industry in the 70’s.  Locals there probably know little about the French church that inspired their local hero, Father Baker, but the people of Lackawanna, Buffalo, West Seneca, Cheektowaga, Hamburg and all of Western New York are proud of his beautiful church and pray for the canonization of this priest who as a pilgrim had prayed at Notre Dame des Victoires. 

More abut Martin Luther's Trip to Rome

This is not what it looked like in Luther's Day, or even

a century ago, but here is a contemporary picture of

the Vatican Basilica at night.

As I mentioned in the last entry, Martin Luther went to Rome in  late 1510.  He was a young priest, twenty-seven years old and ordained only three years.  Martin was a very scrupulous man and had undergone a “conversion” as a young man of twenty-one when he was nearly missed by lightening on his way back from home to the university where he had been studying law.  Giving up the profitable career in Law he entered a reformed monastery of Augustinian hermits in Erfurt.  Luther was by own admission a monk’s monk—scrupulous in every detail of his religious life.  He strived to say ever prescribed prayer, keep every mandated fast, avoid even the smallest sins.  He worried endlessly about his salvation.  A wise superior, knowing that the young friar had to loosen up a little, sent him to Rome as the companion of an older friar who was going on business for the Order.   Luther could use a break and could use also to see that sin ran deeper in the human experience than this naïve friar allowed for.  Unfortunately, with an idealist like Martin, this strategy was not the wisest.  
     Luther spent about two months in Rome.  Passing through the city gate he fell to his knees and prayed: Hail, Holy Rome, Thrice Blest for the Blood othe Martyrs who died here!  This guy was a believer!  He ran from church to church, said mass at every shrine he could arrange.  He climbed the Scala Sancta (The Holy Stairs—a set of stairs supposedly brought to Rome from Jerusalem where it was said Christ had climbed these steps on his way to be judged by Pilate.)  He sought out relics for veneration and lighted votive candles. He made a general confession of all the sins of his life.  As I said this boy was a believer.  But his eyes were gradually opened to the corruption of the city.  The priest to whom he confessed treated lightly the sins that Luther bore with such serious guilt.  He saw that there were brothels reserved for the clergy and the monks.  The Cardinals and other high churchmen were immensely wealthy and amidst the poverty of the crowds they displayed their wealth in a show of red silk and fine horses and luxurious palaces.  Priests were sloppy in their duties and said mass with little or no reverence.  Luther himself claimed to have seen a priest distributing communion declare “panis vinumque es et panis vinumque manebis”  ( Bread and wine you are; and bread and wine you will remain.”  Personally, while I am sure that most of the Roman priests said mass with little or no attention to the sacred rites, I suspect this story is what the clergy refer to as a “pulpit tale;” that is a preacher’s exaggeration or fabrication to illustrate a point.  The reason I say that I believe this story to be unlikely is that I don’t believe that a priest would undermine his own earning ability by making little of the Sacrament; furthermore at the time it was only the bread that was given to the faithful at communion, not the wine; and finally I wonder how many priests then—or now—would know enough Latin to be able to put together an original sentence.  But who knows—the situation was every bit as bad as Luther described it.  And I am not convinced—as a person who has lived in Rome for considerable periods of my life—that it is all that better now.  When Martin Luther headed back on his two month journey to his monastery in Erfurt, he was a far less naïve fellow.  He had not lost his idealism but he had lost his confidence in the institutional Church.  Meanwhile Julius’ church was rising, the artists were hard a word, and the chamberlain of the Roman Church—the Cardinal in charge of finding money to pay the bills—was working hard to come up with new sources of revenue to finance this renaissance.             

Saint Peter's Basilica and Martin Luther.

This fresco in one of the Roman basilicas is the only

surviving depiction of Old St' Peter's which was torn

down by Julius II to build the current St, Peter's.

Well, the Rome of Julius II was a busy place.  The south-west pier of what was to be the central dome was rising up behind and towering over Old Saint Peter’s.  This would be one of the four piers that would support the central dome.  The old basilica was still standing and in fact being used, but the plan was for the new one was to grow up around and over it.  As his rival (and nemesis) Bramante was supervising the building plans, Michelangelo was collecting marble in a vast workyard –wagonload upon wagonload of marble from Cararra, tons of marble, to be used for the 40 larger-than-life figures that were to adorn the tomb.  Julius was expanding the Vatican Palace and hiring Raphael—a friend of Bramante’s—to decorate the suite of rooms that he had built for himself overlooking the Belvedere courtyard.  Meanwhile, Raphael and Bramante were conspiring together to bring down Bramante’s rival, Michelangelo and they persuaded the pope to abandon, at least for the present, the project  of his tomb have Michelangelo, a sculptor and not a painter, fresco the ceiling of the chapel that Julius’ uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, had built some thirty years before.  Michelangelo was not happy about this change in project—he was even more dedicated to the tomb project that Julius, its future occupant (or so Julius thought).  All this was enormously expensive.  The first year’s construction cost over 12,000 ducats.  The second year’s building more than doubled that to just under 30,000.  To give you an idea of cost—a middle class family income might be about 40 ducats a year.  That would translate to approximately 15,000,000 the first year and 35,000.000 the second.  This is not to complete the church—far from it.  The Church was to take approximately 105 years to complete and while every year’s projects may not be as intensive as this first year, all they had to show at this point—50,000,000 spent—is one pier of the dome!  And that doesn’t include the work on the palace or the tomb.  And there are other projects going on all over Rome—though many are being paid for my various cardinals and princes who, like the pope, were vying for displays of power and wealth. 
     So where is the money going to come from to pay for this basilica?  Welll, there were various sources of income.  The Papal States, like other nations, have taxes.  They also have monopolies on certain items.  Central Italy—the Papal States—contained some of the richest alum mines in the world and alum was a necessity for the dying of cloth and Europe’s economy rested heavily on the cloth trade.  But still—this was barely enough.  Well there were a wide variety of fees coming in to Rome.  Every Archbishop, bishop, abbot, cathedral dean, and other major official needed to have his election or appointment confirmed by the Holy See.  He was expected to pay the “annate”—the first year’s income from his new post—to the Holy See.  Moreover, during the time the see or abbacy or deanery had been empty—its income was frequently appropriated by the Holy See.  Money was flowing into Rome from every part of Europe!  Lots of money!  Renaissances are not cheap!  When kings and dukes and minor nobles needed to have a marriage annulled—well there were fees for that sort of thing.  A university or a cathedral or a monastic foundation required a certain privilege that exempted them from a particular law or obligation or gave them some honor over their peers—it could be arranged, for a price. During the reign of Julius II, a young Augustinian friar was sent down to Rome from Germany on business for his congregation.  Entering the city through the Flaminian Gate—he fell to his knees on the site of today’s Piazza del Popolo (in front of the Church and monastery of Santa Maria del Popolo where he would live for his stay in Rome, and cried “Hail, Holy Rome—thrice Holy for the Blood of the Martyrs shed here.  When he left Rome a month later he had a different opinion. “Everything is for sale in Rome,” he would declare.  And indeed it was!!!  This was the visit of Martin Luther and it established a direct connection between the construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Reformation.