My mother taught me to be careful not to make too quick a judgement because there are always two sides to every story. Brother Don wrote: "In my mind torture is evil." While many believe the Reformation was about the freedom of conscience, which had been suppressed and persecuted by the Catholic Church, history tells us a somewhat different story. Under Elizabeth I in England, Catholics were burned at the stake as heretics. In January 2017, The Archbishops of Canterbury and York issued a historic statement expressing remorse for the violence and persecution of the Reformation.
According to the international Catholic news weekly,
The Tablet: Recalling the October (2016) trip by Pope Francis to Lunt in Sweden, former
Tablet editor Catherine Pepinster said she thought Francis was trying to move the Church forward: "He wasn’t there to celebrate the Reformation, he was clearly there to commemorate what had happened and he clearly regretted it. But, very interestingly, he did say that Catholics should be grateful to the Reformation because it meant that Scripture had become more central to Christian life and that was not something that was part of the Catholic world."
Let me repeat that: Pope Francis "did say that Catholics should be grateful to the Reformation because it meant that Scripture had become more central to Christian life and that was not something that was part of the Catholic world."
What have various writers said about the Reformation?
"Historically nothing is more incorrect than the assertion that the Reformation was a movement in favour of intellectual freedom. The exact contrary is the truth. For themselves, it is true, Lutherans and Calvinists claimed liberty of conscience, ... but to grant it to others never occurred to them so long as they were the stronger side. The complete extirpation of the Catholic Church, and in fact of everything that stood in their way, was regarded by the reformers as something entirely natural."
Johann von Dollinger,
Grisar, VI, 268-269; Dollinger: Kirche und Kirchen, 1861, p. 68.
"Save for a few splendid sayings of Luther, confined to the early years when he was powerless, there is hardly anything to be found among the leading reformers in favor of freedom of conscience. As soon as they had the power to persecute they did."
Preserved Smith [Secular scholar and an American historian of the Protestant Reformation],
The Social Background of the Reformation, 1920, p. 177.
On Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Social-Background-Reformation-Preserved-SMITH/dp/B000NWW5ZI
"... (Martin) Luther’s nature was essentially despotic. He insisted that his will in theological and ecclesiastical matters must be supreme. Everyone who differed from him in regard to dogmas he pronounced a heretic, if not worse, and this in words which frequently were far too low and vulgar to be reproduced. Among the mildest of his utterances is: 'Whoever teaches otherwise than I teach, condemns God, and must remain a child of hell'. After such words he hardly needed to say, 'I can hear and endure nothing which is against my teachings'."
John L. Stoddard,
Rebuilding a Lost Faith by an American Agnostic, P.J. Kennedy & Sons, 1826, p.97
https://books.google.ca/books?id=pl5lgW85_toC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
It appears as though Martin Luther may have experienced a speedy onset of papal infallibility.
Martin Luther, not too kindly nor with religious tolerance wrote: "The Pope and the Cardinals ... since they are blasphemers, their tongues ought to be torn out through the back of their necks, and nailed to the gallows!"
Against the Papacy of Rome, Founded by the Devil, a 1545 anti-papal pamphlet by Martin Luther.
Huldrych (or Huldrych or Ulrich) Zwingli, a leader of the Reformation in Switzerland (1484-1531), declared the massacre of the bishops for the sake of the gospel. (Johannes Janssen,
Zwingli's Works V, p. 180;
Zwingli's Works VII, p. 174-184) By 1528, Zwingli’s treatment of Anabaptists hadn’t improved since 1525, for his town council ordered 170 heretics burnt through the cheeks with hot irons. Some had their tongues cut out, and many were beheaded. (Janssen,
Zwingli's Works V, p. 160)
See:
Selected Works of Huldrich Zwingli - Online Library of Liberty
German Lutheran theologian Johann Matthäus Meyfart spoke about the tortures of Catholics he personally witnessed: “(In) Rome, it is not customary to subject a murderer ... an incestuous person, or an adulterer to torture for the space of more than an hour; but in Germany ... the torture is kept up for a whole day, for a day and a night, for two days ... even also for four days ... after which it begins again. ... There are stories extant so horrible and revolting that no true man can hear of them without a shudder.” (Janssen,
Zwingli's Works XVI, pp. 516-518 and 521)
Sorry, I was on a roll. Now what was it you were saying about Catholic persecutions? There is a principle in law known as "clean hands". Sometimes called the clean hands doctrine or the dirty hands doctrine, it is an equitable defense in which the defendant argues that the plaintiff is not entitled to obtain an equitable remedy because the plaintiff is acting unethically or has acted in bad faith with respect to the subject of the complaint. Before somone says it was payback for centuries of persecution, let me ask: If persecutions by the Catholic Church were wrong (and I agree they were), why were the persecutions under the Reformation similarly not wrong? At this point, I think it would be a good idea to go to your Bible and look up: Romans 12:17-19 and Deuteronomy 32:35.
