Of Cranmer, Eucharistic Sacrifice, Problems in the Mass, and Students Writing Papers cont.

OK—let’s move on to Thomas Cranmer’s theology of the Eucharist—in particular his ideas  of Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  As I mentioned two postings ago, I had several requests from a student who has to do a paper and wanted leads on the topic of Eucharistic Sacrifice.  In my last two postings I gave resources that deal with the Catholic understanding—and misunderstanding—of Eucharistic Sacrifice at the time of the English Reformation.  What help can we give regarding Thomas Cranmer—the Archbishop of Canterbury who moved the Church of England from a Catholic Church to a strongly Protestant Church (I can’t say Calvinist because Cranmer would obviously go much further to the left than Jean Calvin ever went in his Eucharistic theology).   
One problem we have to face is that Cranmer was not an original theologian but more a liturgical composer whose theology moved from a Lutheran position in the 1520’s and early 30’s through Calvin’s theology to a far more Zwinglian position by the time he composed his Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 outlining the Anglican Liturgy.  Cranmer, unlike Calvin, did not leave much in the way of systematic theological works.  His ideas are found primarily in his liturgical writing.  But among his personal papers one would want to check Cranmer’s correspondence with the Strasbourg Reformer, Martin Bucer, who seems to have been the chief channel of continental Protestant thought to Cranmer.  Bucer spent three years in England—1549-1551—the definitive years of the Reformed English Liturgy.  One might also want to take a look at the writings of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester—one of the more extreme reformers of the Church of England, and Nicholas Ridley who replaced Edmund Bonner as Bishop of London when Bonner would not abandon the old liturgy and accept the Prayer Book Liturgy in 1549.  Hooper, in particular, was the theologian among the Anglican Bishops of the reign of King Edward VI and those who went along with the reformed rites did so under his influence.  (Not all Bishops did go along, as we shall see, and those who did not were deprived of their sees and replaced by new bishops who were amenable to the Protestant ideas of Cranmer and his associates. 
As I said in an earlier posting, I won’t do people’s research for them, but I do have a bibliography on Cranmer and his Eucharistic theology and I am happy to pass that on to any who want to do further research—or who, like our student who wrote me—need to do further research, like it or not.  Let me express my regrets that not all entries have their full bibliographical detail, but again any one interested needs do his or her own research and the works are easy enough to track down. 

 

John E. Booty: The Book of Common Prayer, 1559

Frank Edward Brightman, “The English Rite”

P.N. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay on Historical Development,” 2^nd Edition (MacMillan, 1992)

C. Buchannan, “What Did Cranmer Think He Was Doing?”

W.D. Cargill Thompson, “Who Wrote ‘The Supper of the Lord’,”  Studies in the Reformation, Luther to Hooker 

Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer[1]

Church of England, ‪The First Book of Common Prayer of Edward VI: ‪And, the Ordinal of 1549 Together with The Order of the Communion, 1548 

P. Collinson, “The Reformer and the Archbishop: Martin Bucer and an English Bucerian,” Journal of Religious History (6), 1971

Gregory Dix: The Shape of the Liturgy

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580

C.W. Dugmore: The Mass and the English Reformers

A.H. Courtain: The Holy Communion 1549,” Church Quarterly Review 1963

A.H. Courtain: The Service of Holy Communion 1552-1662,” Church Quarterly Review 1962

Francis (Aidan) Gasquet and E. Bishop, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer

B.A. Gerrish, “Sign and Reality, The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed confessions,” The Old Protestantism and the New

B.A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin

B. Hall, “The Colloquies between Catholics and Protestants 1539-1541,” Councils and Assemblies, ed by G.J. Cuming and D. Baker

Joseph Hooper Maude, The History of the Book of Common Prayer

C. Hopf, ‘’Bishop Hookers ‘Notes’ To the King’s Council,” Journal of Theological Studies, 44 (1943)

C. Hopf, Martin Bucer and the English Reformation

G. Jeanes, “A Reformation Treatise on the Sacraments,” Journal of Theological Studies NS  46 (1995)

M. Johnson (ed), Thomas Cranmer: Essays in Commemoration of the 500^th Anniversary of His Birth

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer

J.A. Muller, Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction

W. Page, “The First Book of Common Prayer and the Windsor Commission, Church Quarterly Review 98 (1924)

N. Pocock, “Preparations for the First Book of Edward VI,” Church Quarterly Review 35, (1892-93)

F. Proctor and W.H.Frere, The Book of Common Prayer With a Rationale for its Offices

G.E. Pruett: “Thomas Cranmer’s Progress in the doctrine of the Eucharist, 1535-1548,”  Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 45 (1976)

E.C. Ratcliff, “Liturgical Work of Archbishop Cranmer” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 7 (1976)

E.C. Ratcliff, “The English Usage of Eucharistic Consecration 1548-1662,” Theology, 60 (1957)

G. Redworth, In Defense of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner

R. Rex, “The English Campaign Against Luther in the 1520’s,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 39 (1989)

C.C. Richardson, “Cranmer and the Analysis of Eucharistic Doctrine,” Journal of Theological Studies, 16 (1965)

D.G. Selwyn “A New Version of a Mid-Sixteenth Century Vernacular Tract on the Eucharist,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 39 (1988)

N.S. Tjernagel, Henry VIII and the Lutherans: A Study in Anglo-Lutheran Relations from 1521 to 1547.

           Let me particularly recommend from the above list, Dix, MacCullocuh, Duffy and Ratcliff.  But I think all the sources will agree that the work of Thomas Cranmer brings the Church of England out of the orbit of the Church Catholic into a definitively Protestant theology modified by a semi-protestant liturgical praxis.  The long term consequence of this will make it difficult to argue for historical continuity within the English Church from pre-Reformation to post-Reformation Ecclesia Anglicana.  I regret saying this as I had always held for continuity until I looked in depth into just how radical a reformer Thomas Cranmer was. 

---

[1] This is not the prayer book itself, but a book published by Oxford University Press in 2011

The Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXII resumed

Tomb of Edward VI (and his grandparents

Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, in

Westminster Abbey

Well, there has been so much happening in the Church these last few months with bishops being deprived of their sees because of their taste for princely lifestyles and the papal canonizations and the pope sending signals about a “pastoral solution” for problematic marriage situations—history is being made faster than we can record it.  But I do want to get back, at least for several postings, to our ongoing look at the Church of England.
As I pointed out in previous postings, the English Church had a unique identity within the Catholic Communion from the very beginning.  Christianity was brought to England with the expansion of the Roman Empire into Britannia, possibly as early as the end of the first century and certainly by the midpoint of the second.  The ancient Christian Church in Britain was in communion with but not subject to the authority of the Roman Church and its bishop.  I say “not subject to” because for the first four centuries or so of the Church, the Church was a communion of local Churches and not an international hierarchical ordering with the Pope at its summit.  The various local Churches—what today we would call “Dioceses”—were autonomous self-governing Churches that recognized each other in Eucharistic fellowship based on accord in key doctrinal matters: most notably the Trinity and the Incarnation.  Bishops were elected by the clergy and faithful and the election was ratified by the neighboring bishops who would then consecrate the new bishop and receive him—and his Church—into Eucharistic fellowship.  The Roman Church was recognized as “the gold standard” of orthodoxy because it was founded on the Apostles, Peter and Paul, but there was no claim to a universal jurisdiction.  Because of its apostolic foundation, disputes of doctrine or discipline were often referred to the Roman Church and its bishop—such as when the Church at Corinth tried to remove its presbyters and an appeal to Rome for advice received the admonition of Clement, third Bishop after St Peter, that they did not have the power to do so.  (I should say that scholars dispute whether or not Clement actually wrote this letter, though the dating is thought to be about his time, c. 95 AD).  The ancient Church in Britain was all but wiped out with the Anglo-Saxon invasions in the fifth and sixth centuries and the survivors of the ancient Britons took refuge in the western part of the Islands where they were sustained by their co-religionists from Ireland.  Consequently the ancient Church in Britain picked up the unique customs of the Irish Church, especially regarding the dating of Easter and the monastic tonsure, and so differed in practice from most of western Europe.  There also was a particularly strong flavor of  Pelagianism among British Christians which is only fitting as Pelagius himself was British.  In the seventh century the Anglo-Saxon settlers in Britain were won to Christianity by missionaries sent from Rome and this led to a conflict over the various matters of discipline where some followed the Celtic and others the Roman discipline—and again, especially the dating of Easter—which were resolved at the Synod of Whitby in 664.
The Roman missionaries brought the English Church more deeply into the Roman Communion and these ties were strengthened by the deep loyalty of the Anglo-Saxon people to St Peter and consequently to his successor.  English pilgrimages to Rome in the seventh through the tenth century were so common that the village immediately to the east of the Vatican Basilica was known as “Sassia” (a corruption of the Latin, Saxonum) or Saxony because of the concentration of Anglo Saxon pilgrims.  In the early eighth century King Ine of Wessex established a pilgrims’ hospice there which still functions today as the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia.   Nevertheless the English Church continued to have its bishops elected by the local Cathedral Chapters and even more significantly developed its own liturgical practices in various rites peculiar to England, notably the Sarum Rite, the York Rite, the Hereford Rite, and the Bangor Rite.  This independent liturgical tradition persisted up until the time that Thomas Cranmer abolished them in favor of his 1549 Prayer Book.
As I wrote in my last posting on this subject, I had always favored the idea that Cranmer’s liturgical reforms were genuine reforms and while drastic, were in continuity with the Catholic faith passed down from the Apostles, but reading for this blog has made me seriously rethink that position.  I no longer think that Archbishop Cranmer was simply cleaning the liturgy of the accretions that had crept into it over the centuries of bad theology that had followed upon the Eucharistic controversies between Ratramnus and Paschasius Radbertus in the ninth century.  Rather there is no doubt that Cranmer was replacing the traditional Catholic understanding of the Eucharist with a doctrine that was a hybrid of Calvin’s over-enthusiasm for Augustinian neo-platonism and the even more radical—and heretical—doctrines of Huldrych Zwingli.  While Cranmer’s elegant texts are replete with theological ambiguities, it is clear that at the end of the day the English Church saw the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament as a mere remembrance of what Christ had once done for us in a long distant time and a far, faraway place.  Sad.  However, we must remember that with the biblical and patristic tools with which 16^th century theologians had to work, this was a sincere effort to be faithful to the scriptures. 
There is no other way than to say that by the end of the reign of King Edward VI, the Church of England had snapped the cords that bound it not only to the Church Catholic, but to its own 1400 hundred year history.  By this, I am making no claims against the validity of its sacraments and particularly against the sacrament of Orders.  These are complex theological matters that in the past have too often been dealt with from a political point of view rather than from a strict theological perspective.  Scholars on both sides of the issue have argued over the sacramental forms for both the Eucharist and for Orders and, as we shall see when we get (eventually) to Leo XIII’s rejection of Anglican Orders in his Bull, Apostolicae Curae, the grounds of form and matter have shifted over the centuries leaving the conclusions of Apostolicae Curae somewhat uncertain.   But while Catholic ritual—and theology—have been restored, at least in some sections of the Anglican Communion, there is no doubt that the Church of England was wholeheartedly committed to Genevan Protestantism when Edward VI was laid in his grandfather’s vault in Westminster Abbey.  There would be a Catholic renaissance however with the accession of his sister, Mary.  More about that in the near future.

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXII

I mentioned Thomas Cranmer’s elegant phraseology in his composition of prayers for his 1549 and 1552 Prayer Books.  Perhaps no prayer is as beautiful in the elegance of its English as is his “Collect for Purity” which he translated as

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secretes are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy holy spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name: through Christ our Lord. Amen.

This is not a prayer original in composition to Thomas Cranmer but his translation of the prayer in the Sarum Rite, where it served as part of the priest’s preparation for Mass. The prayer itself stretches  even further back to the Leofric Missal, an eleventh century sacramentary produced in Lotharingia from which it was brought to England  where further additions were made and from which the Sarum Rite of the Church of England was to develop.  Its origins in Lotharingia also allowed this prayer to find its way into the Roman Rite where it appears in the Missa ad postulandam Gratiae Sancti Spiritus.   Moreover it can be found today in many devotional booklets priests, more especially “Traditionalist” priests, use to prepare for Mass.  Its provenance and Cranmer’s faithful translations renders it perfectly Orthodox to the truest believer.  Cranmer moved it from the priest’s private preparatory prayers to the introductory prayers of the Eucharistic liturgy itself.   It is frequently used in Catholic celebrations as well, particularly as the conclusion to the Bidding Prayers, known in the American Church as the Prayers of the Faithful.  Priests today, both in the Catholic and Anglican traditions, tend to update the “thee” to “you.” 

Another prayer of incomparable literary beauty is Cranmer’s “Prayer of Humble Access” said before the reception of Holy Communion. Unlike the Collect for Purity it is not a translation of an earlier source but a new composition—drawn however from the Liturgy of Saint Basil, the Gospels of Mark and John, the Gregorian Sacramentary, and Thomas Aquinas.  The prayer is theologically sound by Catholic Standards

We do not presume to come to this thy Table (O merciful Lord) trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We be not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his Blood, in these holy Mysteries, that we may continually dwell in him, and he in us, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood. Amen.

Unfortunately Cranmer deserts Catholic theology at this point and offers one of his  most beautiful prayers—but one that shows his Zwinglian Eucharistic theology.

Take this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in your heart with faith with thanksgiving.

Cranmer here makes clear that he believes Christ is present in the Eucharist by the faith of the recipient and not by a gratuitous act of God in which Christ becomes physically present by the sacramental means of bread and wine.  This is inconsistent with the theology of his Prayer of Humble Access but offers sufficient justification to show that Cranmer not only denied Transubstantiation but any formulation of the Real Presence.  He goes far beyond Calvin’s understanding of the Eucharistic Bread and Wine as Sacramental representations and reduces the Presence of Christ to the inner workings of Grace in which Christ becomes spiritually present by faith.  This is a clear break with Catholic doctrine and indeed with the Eucharistic doctrines of Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose followed by the Western Church from Antiquity.  

Catholic Calvinism





 John Calvin, inspiration for

those who would expel those
who disagree with them from
the Church

   The subject of whether those who do not agree in full with everything the magisterium of the Church teaches came up in one of my classes yesterday and one of the students had a very interesting insight.  Comparing and contrasting Calvinist ecclesiology (theology of the Church) with Catholic ecclesiology, this student reminded us that the concept of the Church as a spiritual community of those destined for salvation was held by John Calvin and has long been condemned as heretical whereas the Catholic understanding of the Church is that the wheat and weeds grow together until the day of judgment and the Church—until that day when the Divine Judge separates out the saved and the damned—is no more than the visible community of the baptized.  Incidentally Calvinism’s Catholic cousin is Jansenism—a disease that is rampant in some Catholic circles on the web. 

We had a long discussion on the English Puritains—the Calvinist faction within the Church of England in the late 16^th and first half of the 17^th century—who wanted all those who held to “Roman Catholic” customs (such as the Sign of the Cross, the ring at a wedding, the placing of a cross or candles on the communion table, the use of the surplice [the only vestment retained in the Second Prayerbook of King Edward VI and in use in the Church of England at the time], or even a fixed liturgy itself) expelled from the Church of England because they were not being faithful to the Scriptures.   The Puritans were convinced that they knew what authentic Christianity was and those who disagreed with them should be expelled from the Church. 

To a lesser extent the same false doctrine was held by the Cathars in the 13^th century.  The Cathars (also known as Albigensians) were Gnostic heretics who considered themselves the “Pure Ones” from the Greek  καθαρός (pure).  They knew the true faith and all others were on the road that led to damnation.  They alone were the true Christians.  These zealots who think that they can define who are the authentic Catholics and who are not authentic Catholics are cut from the same bolt of cloth.  People may choose—tragically—to leave the visible communion of the Church, but no priest or deacon or lay person can push them out or cut them off.  Ironically, those who argue for others to be cut off from the Church because they don’t hold authentic Catholic doctrine are themselves in violation of sound Catholic faith.  So let the weeds grow alongside the wheat and God will figure it out.   

Roots of the Reformation XIV: A Historical Take on Anti-Clericalism and the Protestant Reformations.

The medieval English Church at
Dartmouth in Southern England

I mentioned in our last entry that anti-clericalism is a very important monitor of danger for the Church.  Distrust of or discontent with the clergy undermines the Church as an institution and alienates people from the practice of the faith.  I want to look at this from a historical perspective.

One of the characteristics of the Churches that sprang out of the series of sixteenth-century Reformations that we call “Protestant” is the amount of control the laity exercise in Church matters.  Indeed for the most part in the Churches of the Reformation the distinction between laity and clergy is all but obliterated.  The roots of this declericalization was not doctrinal but rather a reaction to the abuses of clerical power in the late medieval Church.  Doctrines such as “The Priesthood of All Believers” which stamp most Protestant Tradition arose because of the strong anti-clerical mood in European society.  In other words, the doctrines were primarily a reaction to the exaggerated clericalism of the medieval Church.  And—by the way—we Catholics must remember that those doctrines are not heretical but at most an exaggeration of the authentic Apostolic Tradition which we call “The Baptismal Priesthood”  or the “Priesthood of the Faithful” which is rooted in the New Testament and in the Fathers and is celebrated in the official Liturgy of the Catholic Churchy, most notably but not exclusively in the rites of the Sacrament of Baptism.       

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there was a serious rise of anti-clericalism in Europe and in retrospect we can see how it made the Catholic Church vulnerable to the Reformers as well as paved the way for the Churches of the Reformation where the authority of the clergy was almost invariably replaced by strong lay control.  Calvin’s Geneva is one such example.  While John Calvin was the preacher and theologian for the Reformed Church in Geneva, actual power was exercised not by Calvin but by the town council which had determined that the Catholicism would be replaced by the Reformed Religion.  The Council often went against Calvin in its decisions about Church polity.  The laity, not the clergy, would chart the path for the Church.  This was true in most Reformed and Evangelical Churches—the clergy could persuade and encourage in their preaching, but decisions of Church polity were ultimately in the hands of the laity.  In England from the time of Elizabeth I onwards, Parliament would make decisions regarding Church polity.  Even the Queen had to concede certain points of theology and practice to the anti-clerical parties (The Puritan faction) in Parliament in regard to the approval of the Book of Common Prayer that was issued in her reign.  The bishops had a voice, but they did not have final word and into the twentieth century you had a predominately lay body, Parliament, not all of whom by any means were Anglican, making decisions about worship and other matters internal to the Church of England.  

We have gotten somewhat ahead of ourselves here.  Let’s get back to the period of history immediately before the various Protestant Reformations.  We had spoken some time back about John Wycliffe (see entries for April 27^th and 28^th 2011).   Wycliffe’s followers in England were very distrustful of the clergy.  Wycliffe, though himself a priest and holder of several fairly lucrative benefices, had preached against clerical wealth and privilege.  It was at this same time the Geoffrey Chaucer in England and Giovanni Bocaccio in Italy had drawn scathing portraits of the clergy in their varied literary works.  Friars were seen to be greedy and womanizers; monks, fat and lazy sodomites.   The secular clergy were seen as nickel and diming people with fees for every imaginable service they rendered.  How truthful were these caricatures?   Well, there were good monks and friars and priests, but the caricatures would not have worked in the various poems and narratives if there had not been some truth to them.  It was a time marked by some strong reform movements in the religious orders, but also by religious who refused to embrace the necessary reforms.  In other words, like today, you had good priests and not-so-good priests. 

Celibacy then, as today, is a tricky issue to speak of.  Popular mythology often points the medieval clergy as satyrs, totally ignoring the demands of celibacy.  The fact of the matter is that the secular clergy were pretty much ignoring celibacy, but they were not necessarily promiscuous.  Church law from the eleventh century onwards had forbidden the clergy to marry.  This was mostly a matter of preventing Church property from passing out of Church ownership to the heirs of the priest.  Children, by law, had rights of inheritance only if they were legitimate.  Prohibiting the clergy to marry rendered the children illegitimate and prevented them from suing for a share in their father’s estate.  Church properties were preserved for the Church.  The celibacy legislation worked fairly well in despoiling children and widows of their claims but despite the law of the Church, many priests continued to marry and have children.  The marriages were not usually solemnized—i.e. “blessed” in Church—but neither were many medieval marriages, especially among the more common folk.  What we call “common-law” marriages were taken much more for granted in the Middle Ages, especially among the peasantry and the working classes.  Weddings were mostly for the nobility and, after the twelfth century, the bourgeoisie.  Many priests lived in a stable relationship with one woman, having children by her and raising their children together.  This would have been especially common in both rural areas and on the fringes of European society—Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, where priesthood was often a part-time occupation combined with farming and where the collaborative work of family life was almost a requisite for survival.   This is not to gloss over clerical sexuality.  Clerical concubinage (a prelate, priest, or major cleric having a mistress), as differentiated from such common-law relationships, was by no means unknown in the cities and towns and among the hierarchy.  The stability of these relationships varied from the same sort of common-law marriages of rural clergy to the successive monogamy of a series of mistresses.  And, of course, there were those among the clergy and hierarchy, as there are in every place and time and profession—promiscuous swine to take whatever opportunity presents itself for sexual gratification.   Popes were rarely in a position to clean up this mess as more than a few were sexually active themselves. 

All this is simply a way of making clear that there was not much to admire in the clerical state.  There were fine priests of course; priests beloved and admired by their congregants for their devotion and pastoral service.  Then too there were priests admired and loved by their parishioners who had common-law wives and children and whose parishioners did not see anything wrong with that.  There were priests who were celibate and who were loved and admired by their parishioners.  And there were priests who were celibate but whose parishioners disdained them, even hated them, because while celibate they still begrudged their congregants good pastoral care. 

It was common practice for priests to hold lucrative posts called benefices.  The benefice might be the pastorate of a wealthy church that paid a hefty salary.  The benefice might be a position at the Cathedral.  The benefice might be the chaplaincy at a hospital or a school.  When the salary was sufficiently high, or the priest held several high-income benefices at the same time, he might pay out of his salary a “vicar” to do the actual work.  Priests might often live in a degree of luxury, a high degree of luxury, and do little or no work.  None of this helped clerical reputation and by the early sixteenth century clergy were often held in contempt.

The Church in the Middle Ages had become incredibly wealthy.  Over the centuries immense amounts of land had been left in wills and bequests to monasteries, parish churches, cathedral chapters, schools, and other religious institutions.  Unlike family lands which were always being both added to and divided by dowries and divisions among heirs, (and bequests to churches), the Church did not pay dowries nor did it leave lands by bequest to others.  Thus the Church and its various institutions only increased in wealth and property.  It was always the receiver, never the giver.  Of course, it did pay salaries, and not only to clergy but to vast numbers of servants and workers required to maintain the various institutions.  It also spent huge sums hiring stonemasons, carpenters, glaziers, smiths and others in the vast construction projects of the Middle Ages.  It made heavy purchases in everything from beer, wine, food, and clothing for its clergy and employees to silks, gold and silver and jewels, organs, incense and other requirements for services.  In other words, the Church was a vital part of the economy.  In addition to its lands and the revenues its properties generated in rents and leases, the Church depended on the non-voluntary contributions called tithes of everyone from small tenant-farmers to powerful merchants.  It was required by Church law and enforced by the civil officials called reeves that the Church got ten percent of your income.  As the Church grew richer—in some places owning up to a third of the land in a kingdom—and more opulent in its display of wealth, many—especially in the merchant class—began to resent that they had to pay these tithes when the Church seemed to be so wealthy.  With the rise of the urban business classes, people began wanting to reinvest their spare capital in order to make more money yet.  They were not happy in seeing their hard earned money going to an institution that seemed to have so much already.     

Another reason for the lack of respect of the clergy is that in the early and central Middle Ages, that is from the eighth through the thirteenth centuries, the priest was most often among the best educated, or even in some places, the only educated person, in the town or village.  Even where the priest was no more educated than the peasants he served, his guardianship of the Sacred and his control of the Rites was seen as giving him a quasi-magical power.  But from the twelfth century on, with the economic revolution in Europe that created a strong and vibrant middle class, the educational level in European society rose fast.  Laity began to read and study—and develop areas of expertise such as law and economics.  Educationally the clergy began to meet their peers among their congregants.  Even in the rural areas reason began to replace superstition and magic.  No longer did the word of the priest have authority simply because he was a priest.  His words were weighed for their value as they corresponded to the knowledge and insight of his listeners.  An individual priest might be respected for his intelligence and wisdom but by no means was such respect automatic; much less would respect be given simply because a person was a priest.  In fact, people did not hesitate to question the opinion of a priest and counter with their own insights from their experience and from common sense.   It was a new age and not all the clergy recognized that their control over the faithful had eroded.