The young man who shook the Catholic Church to its core
Image copyright WITTENBERG STADTKIRCHEFive hundred years ago, a young German monk began the Protestant Reformation, shattering the authority of the Catholic Church.
Centuries later, there are signs that the churches have put aside their differences.
I pray thee… go not to Wittenberg. (Hamlet Act I, Scene ii).
In an early scene from Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet’s mother Gertrude begs him not travel to Wittenberg.
She believes that her son’s studies in a provincial German town on the banks of the River Elbe may be a threat to their security and the Catholicism of his upbringing.
She had good reason to be worried.
For that is precisely what happened when a monk called Martin Luther engaged in the concentrated study of scripture at the University of Wittenberg.
It would lead him to some Biblical beliefs – particularly the doctrine of justification by faith alone – that would transform Luther’s understanding of church, God and eternal life.
It would also result in him hammering 95 theses – arguments and objections – to the doors of the Schlosskirche, or University church.
With each blow, the authority and stability of the Catholic Church was challenged as never before.
“He wanted to rediscover Christ,” says Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Germany’s most senior Protestant bishop, “and he fought against certain practices of the Church of his time.”
“And since it was not possible to agree upon these things and to find a way forward to reform the Church, he started something new. And many people went with him,” adds the bishop.
The anniversary of Luther’s protest will be marked in Wittenberg on 31 October, 500 years after he hammered on the University church’s doors.
What was the Reformation?
- A religious movement which challenged the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church
- Began in Germany in 1517 but soon spread through much of northern Europe
- Held that salvation came by grace through faith alone, not by good works or deeds
- Led to the creation of Protestant churches separate from the Roman Catholic Church
- The Church of England broke from the Catholic Church later in the 16th Century
But this theological earthquake began a little earlier.
If Paul the Apostle was converted on the road to Damascus, then for Martin Luther it was thunder and lightening on the road to Erfurt.
Luther, aged 21, was returning to university having spent time visiting his parents in 1505.
As he walked, the heavens opened and a deluge of Biblical proportions rained down.
It provoked such fear and anxiety that he cried out to Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary’s mother, promising that if he survived he would enter a monastery.
Two weeks later Luther was admitted to the house of Augustinian friars in Erfurt and the rest, as they say, is history.
Luther’s theological crisis was accelerated by a Dominican monk called Johann Tetzel, who was charged with collecting so-called indulgences on behalf of the Catholic Church.
These were payments which were made in the hope that individuals, and their deceased relatives, would be fast-tracked through purgatory into heaven.
Tetzel was an effective travelling salesman.
He would ask his audience: “Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others? From this you could redeem us with small alms.”
He would even offer a jingle that would not be out of place in a modern advertising campaign: “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”
But as Luther read the New Testament letter to the Romans, he was transfixed by the phrase “the righteousness of God”.
He later explained his epiphany: “I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith.”
Suddenly, Luther came to believe that one’s acceptance before God could not be purchased by indulgences, nor achieved by good works, but only received through faith.
He also came to the conclusion that only scripture could determine the governance of the Church and the practice of Christians.
‘Son of iniquity’
Luther’s observations were not well received.
Within a year, Pope Leo X dismissed Luther as an outspoken drunk who would repent when sober, describing him as “a son of iniquity”.
Excommunicated in 1521, Luther was dragged before the Diet of Worms, an assembly of the Holy Roman Empire, but refused to recant, uttering words which are now permanently linked to him: “Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me.”
Before Luther could be punished, the territorial prince of Saxony, Elector Frederick the Wise, arranged for him to be smuggled away to his castle at Wartburg.
There he would spend a year translating the New Testament into German.
With the advent of the printing press, alongside Luther’s translation, the word began to spread.
Image copyright BBC/WITTENBERG STADTKIRCHELuther’s breakthrough led local artist Lucas Cranach to paint his friend, in disguise, alongside the disciples at the Last Supper.
The clear suggestion was that Martin Luther was much closer to the New Testament message than the Catholic Church.
But as the Reformation spread through Europe, it was marked by bloody episodes of warfare and violence.
Wars were waged in central, western and northern Europe from 1524 to 1649, fuelled by the religious rivalry that Luther had unwittingly inspired.
Eventually, the two Churches would co-exist peacefully, but without any formal links.
To mark the anniversary, we brought together the respective leaders of the Anglican and Catholic Churches in England.
Today, the Churches are arguably closer than at any point since the Reformation.
The leader of the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, said: “It’s unimaginable that 50, 60 years ago that the two of us should have sat doing an interview together.”
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster and leader of Catholics in England and Wales, also expressed relief that violence is no longer part of theological disagreement.
“I hope we will always maintain that mutual respect and freedom for religious expression in all its aspects,” he said.
To demonstrate the setting aside of differences, an act of reconciliation will take place at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday.
Mr Welby will present copies of a text that seeks to resolve the dispute that erupted in Wittenberg.
Although the joint declaration has been signed by denominational leaders, many individuals within their Churches still do not agree and prefer to stick with their own traditions.
But they might consider the question asked by Pope Francis, when he visited the Lutheran Church in Rome two years ago.
In a brief homily, he asked: “If we have the same baptism, shouldn’t we be walking together?”
The U.S. is 50 states strong today, but it began as 13 small colonies. Can you name them?
America’s Forgotten Swedish Colony
Swedish colonists landing on the Atlantic shores of Delaware during the 1600s. (Credit: North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy Stock Photo)
Most Americans are familiar with France, Spain, Holland and England’s colonial history in the United States, but lesser-known is New Sweden, a Swedish holding that once spanned parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
The upstart settlement dates to the early 17th century, when the great powers of Europe were all scrambling to plant their flags in North America. In the midst of this frenzy of colonization, the Kingdom of Sweden looked to carve out a piece of the New World for itself. The result was one of the most peculiar overseas ventures of the Age of Discovery.
“New Sweden was the last of the European colonial empires to be founded in North America,” the historian Hildor Arnold Barton has written, “as well as the smallest, least populous, and shortest-lived.”
Minuit took great care in selecting the location of Sweden’s first settlement in North America. Not only was it built in prime territory for trading with the natives, it was also situated in an area not yet occupied by other Europeans. When the fort was completed, the colonists hoisted the Swedish flag, fired celebratory cannon shots and christened it Fort Christina after the adolescent Queen of Sweden.
The Dutch still considered the Delaware River Valley their territory, however, and it wasn’t long before a messenger arrived from the nearby New Netherland colony with a letter warning of the “mishaps, bloodsheds and disturbances” the Swedes were risking by encroaching on their turf. Minuit ignored the letter—he knew the Dutch didn’t have enough troops to run him off—but it set the stage for a territorial dispute that would loom over most of New Sweden’s history.
The New Sweden settlers began a peaceful trade with nearby Indian tribes, but they suffered a significant setback in August 1638, when Peter Minuit died in a Caribbean hurricane while trying to sail back to Sweden. His colony soldiered on for the next couple years, surviving on corn and other goods bought from the Indians and the nearby British and Dutch. Nevertheless, it remained little more than a far-flung outpost until 1643, when a formidable Swedish military officer named Johan Printz took over as governor.
A giant bear of a man—his 400-pound frame earned him the nickname “Big Belly” from the Indians—Printz was also a shrewd leader who was determined to extend the reach of his colony. Shortly after his arrival, the Swedes reinforced Fort Christina and established Fort Elfsborg and Fort New Gothenburg, two additional bastions on the Delaware River. They also increased their trade with the Indians and began growing food and tobacco crops on plantations.
The vast majority of New Sweden’s settlers were natives of Sweden and Finland, and they introduced Lutheran Christianity and several Scandinavian customs to the New World. Perhaps most influential was their habit of building log cabins, which later became a fixture of North American architecture. Johan Printz built a two-story log dwelling known as “Printzhof” near Philadelphia, but most of the colonists’ cabins were more humble affairs. One example located in Gibbstown, New Jersey, dates to as early as 1638 and is considered the oldest surviving log cabin in the United States.
Despite Printz’s early improvements, the New Sweden colony never became as prosperous as its Dutch and English competitors to the north and south. Part of the problem was a near-constant lack of manpower and government support. The colony’s population was often less than 200, and interest in immigrating was almost nonexistent back in Sweden. Settlers were so hard to come by that the Swedish crown eventually resorted to forcing petty criminals and military deserters to serve, but the colony was still largely neglected.
“I look at myself at least 100 times a day in this mirror,” Governor Printz wrote in 1644, “God knows with what doubts, for I sit here alone and there are hardly 30 men, of all that are here upon whom I can rely.”
The colony’s troubles only mounted in 1647, when a headstrong Dutchman named Peter Stuyvesant took over as director-general of the neighboring settlement of New Netherland. Under his rule, the Dutch took a more hard-nosed approach to the Swedish interlopers by restricting New Sweden’s access to the Delaware River and squeezing it out of the fur trade. In 1651, meanwhile, the Dutch built a stronghold called Fort Casimir only a few miles away from Fort Christina.
Even as the Dutch applied pressure from the outside, New Sweden also suffered from internal turmoil. Colonists were deserting the settlement in droves, and many others had grown dissatisfied with Printz’s iron-fisted rule. Having served for a decade, the hulking governor finally stepped down in 1653 and returned to Sweden. His replacement, Johan Rising, arrived the following year along with several hundred new colonists.
Rising had orders to avoid “danger and hostility” with the Dutch, yet shortly after his arrival, he seized Stuyvesant’s Fort Casimir, which the Swedes renamed Fort Trinity. The ill-advised attack proved to be New Sweden’s undoing. Just a year later in August of 1655, Stuyvesant retaliated by sailing seven ships and several hundred troops up the Delaware. In short order, his superior Dutch force recaptured Fort Trinity and secured the surrender of Fort Christina and several other Swedish holdings on the river. Having survived for some 17 years, New Sweden ceased to exist as an independent settlement.
Sweden never again had an American colony after 1655, but its short-lived enterprise left a mark on the Delaware River Valley. Many Swedes and Finns continued to live in the area after the Dutch annexation, and they remained a major demographic force up until the English took over and set up the Pennsylvania colony in the 1680s. Even as late as the 1750s, visitors reported that the Swedish language was still being spoken in the region.
Despite its failure, New Sweden would prove to be only the first chapter in the history of the Swedes in North America. While Scandinavian immigration to the colonies slowed to a trickle during the 1700s, it surged again during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when some 1.3 million Swedes relocated to the United States.
