Autor: Bellco, Hilaire

Buch: The Great Heresies

Titel: The Great Heresies

Stichwort: Reformation; Kampf um Kirchenbesitz (Deutschland; anders in England); Situation ab 1650: Schwächung d. Kirche, Macht der Laien, Europa in zwei Kulturen zerfallen

Kurzinhalt: The first act of the Reformers, wherever they were successful, was to allow the rich to seize these funds. And the intensity of the fighting everywhere depended upon the determination of those who had looted the Church to keep their loot, and of ...

Textausschnitt: 99b Now anyone reading only the outward military story, with its first chapter of violent French religious war, its second chapter of violent German religious war, would miss the character of the whole thing, though he knew every battle and every leading statesman and warrior; for there underlay that great affair another factor which was neither doctrinal nor dynastic nor international but moral; and it was this factor which provoked fighting, imposed peace, and decided the ultimate religious trend of the various communities. It is recognized by historians but never sufficiently emphasized. It was the factor of greed. (Fs) (notabene)

99c The old Catholic Europe, prior to Luther's uprising, had been filled with vast clerical endowments. Rents of land, feudal dues, all manner of incomes, were fixed for the maintenance of bishoprics, cathedral chapters, parish priests, monasteries and nunneries. Not only were there vast incomes, but also endowments (perhaps one- fifth of all the rents of Europe) for every sort of educational establishment, from petty local schools to the great colleges of the universities. There were other endowments for hospitals, others for guilds, (that is, trade unions and associations of craftsmen and merchants and shopkeepers), others for Masses and shrines. All this corporate property was either directly connected with the Catholic Church, or so much part of her patronage as to be under peril of loot wherever the Catholic Church was challenged. (Fs)

The first act of the Reformers, wherever they were successful, was to allow the rich to seize these funds. And the intensity of the fighting everywhere depended upon the determination of those who had looted the Church to keep their loot, and of those who tried to restore the Church to recover the Church wealth. (Fs) (notabene)

99d That is why in England there was so very little fighting. The English people as a whole were little affected in doctrine by the early Reformation, but the monasteries had been dissolved and their property had passed to the lords of the villages and the town merchants. The same is true of many of the Swiss cantons. The French lords of villages, that is the noble class (what are called in England "the Squires"), and the greater nobles above them, were anxious to share in the loot. (Fs) (notabene)

100a The French Crown, dreading the increase of power which this loot would give to the class immediately below it, resisted the movement, hence the French religious wars; while in England a child King and two women succeeding each other on the throne permitted the rich to get away with the Church spoils. Hence the absence of religious wars in England. (Fs)

It was this universal robbery of the Church, following upon the religious revolution, which gave the period of conflict the character it had. (Fs) (notabene)

100b It would be a great error to think of the loot of the Church as a mere crime of robbers attacking an innocent victim. The Church endowments had come, before the Reformation, to be treated throughout the greater part of Europe as mere property. Men would buy a clerical income for their sons, or they would make provision for a daughter with a rich nunnery. They would give a bishopric to a boy, purchasing a dispensation for his lack of years. They took the revenues of monasteries wholesale to provide incomes for laymen, putting in a locum-tenens to do the work of the abbot, and giving him but a pittance, while the bulk of the endowment was paid for life to the layman who had seized it. (Fs)
(notabene)
Had not these abuses been already universal the subsequent general loot would not have taken place. As things were, it did. What had been temporary invasions of monastic incomes in order to provide temporary wealth for laymen became permanent confiscation wherever the Reformation triumphed. Even where bishoprics survived the mass of their income was taken away, and when the whole thing was over you may say that the Church throughout what remained of Catholic Europe, even including Italy and Spain, had not a half of its old revenues left. In that part of Christendom which had broken away, the new Protestant ministers and bishops, the new schools, the new colleges, the new hospitals, enjoyed not a tenth of what the old endowments had yielded. (Fs)

100c To sum up: By the middle of the seventeenth century the religious quarrel in Europe had been at work, most of the time under arms, for over one hundred and thirty years. Men had now settled down to the idea that unity could never be recovered. The economic strength of religion had, in half of Europe, disappeared, and in the other half so shrunk that the lay power was everywhere master. Europe had fallen into two cultures, Catholic and Protestant; these two cultures would always be instinctively and directly opposed one to the other (as they still are), but the directly religious issue was dropping out and, in despair of a common religion, men were concerning themselves more with temporal, above all with dynastic and national, issues, and with the capture of opportunities for increasing wealth by trade rather than with matters of doctrine. (Fs)