The Believing Catholic's Position
The sincere, believing Catholic has his reasons ready for rejecting Protestantism. He too was offended by the Church's tithes, but he could not bring himself to think of removing the Church. He knew well that monks sometimes acted willfully, but he felt that the world must have a place and an organization for those who wish to devote their lives to study, inner contemplation and prayer.
The believing Catholic accepted the Bible word for word, but on two conditions: first, that the religion of Christ had superseded the religion of Moses, and second, that the Church founded by the Son of God has, equally with the Bible itself, the power of judgment, and should be accepted and honored by all as the final authority for interpreting the text of Scripture and the only means of adapting it to the changing needs of the time. If the contradictory and seemingly obscure parts of the Bible were to be interpreted and judged by the private opinions of individuals, think what indecision and uproar there would be in the world of religion. Would not the Bible be torn apart in the struggle of thousands of minds, and Christianity shattered in the strife of thousands of hostile sects?
The Charges Against the Reformation
The Catholic of today, the essay says, carries his argument against the Reformation forward in this manner, at each stage of modern life:
"Your stress on the importance of faith and the worthlessness of rites and ceremonies was deeply harmful and produced a religion that hid its coldness and hardness under the sanctity of fair-sounding phrases, so that for a hundred years the work of compassion and charity was swept away from the centers of your influence. You banned confession and penance, and stirred thousands of upheavals in the souls of people caught between instinct and civilization; and now, when the damage is done, you restore that same healing institution in a disorderly form.
You destroyed nearly all the schools we had founded and weakened to the verge of extinction the universities the Church had created and developed. Your own leaders admit that your break from firm faith led, in both Germany and England, to a deadly corruption of morals. In morals, philosophy, industry and government you spread the chaos that comes from belief in the individual. You took all the beauty and joy from religion and filled its place with demonology and fear of sin. You quenched the growth and leap of art, and wherever you set foot the study of the classics withered.
You seized the Church's property and gave it to the state and the rich, and so left the poor more destitute than ever and added humiliation to poverty. You pardoned capitalism and usury, yet took from workers the restful holidays of the holy days that the Church's mercy had granted them. You overthrew the papal government to raise royal government to the height of its power; you allowed self-seeking rulers to take the faith of their subjects into their own hands and to make religion a legal pretext for their devastating wars. You divided nations against one another and set even the people of one country and one city against each other.
You destroyed the international moral authority over national forces, which had a calming effect, and brought on an age of confusion among hostile states. You denied the power and firmness of a Church that by your own admission was created by the hand of the Son of God, yet you declared the absolutism of kings lawful; you confirmed the divine right of kings and, without knowing it, wrecked the power of the divine word, which is the only support against the power of gold or force.
You claimed the right of private judgment, but as soon as you could you denied it to others. Your refusal to tolerate dissenters is far harsher than our conduct as Catholics, for we never preached religious toleration and never opened the way for divisive opinions, since in our view toleration is born of indifference. (The source text repeats this sentence twice by mistake; it appears once here.) In all this, see where your private judgment has led. Everyone becomes his own pope, and before he has reached the age and maturity to grasp the effects of religion on society and morals, or to see how much people need to have faith, he subjects the principles of religion to his own private judgment.
A kind of splintering madness, under the control of no unifying authority, throws the followers of your creed into such harsh and foolish disputes that it weakens public confidence in every religion. And if there were no Church that stands firm, sober and manful amid all the shifts of opinion and argument and every scientific and philosophical fashion, and keeps its scattered followers gathered in its bosom, the foundation of Christianity would surely be lost, and people, without any spiritual refuge, would find themselves at death without provision. A time will come when those among you who have been guided and have accepted true Christianity will lay down their individual pride and intellectual strength at the feet of mankind's religious needs and turn to the faith that, in spite of the unbelieving views of this dark age, can keep the reality of religion standing."
The Protestant Reply
Can Protestantism answer these objections? Yes, it says:
"First, let us not lose sight of the cause of our separation. Your Catholic Church, in its administrative organization and the conduct of its officials, had become a center of corruption. Your priests lived in dissolution, your bishops were immersed in worldly ambition, and your popes had become the disgrace of Christendom. Have your own historians not confessed all this? Honorable men called you to reform, and, awaiting your answer, remained loyal to the Church. You made promises and put on a show of reform, but did nothing positive; on the contrary, you put to death men such as Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, who called for religious reform. Thousands of efforts were made to reform the Church from within, and all failed, until our Reformation woke you and forced you to serious action; and even after our revolt, the one pope who made a genuine effort to cleanse the Church was mocked by Rome.
You boast of having produced the Renaissance, but everyone agrees that in the end the Renaissance sank into such moral corruption, tyranny and treachery as Europe had not seen since the time of Nero. Did we not have the right to protest against that unbelief, which had made even the Vatican its playground? It is true that soon after our Reformation began, the morality of our society declined. Of course, founding a new moral life in a people whose religious and ecclesiastical foundations had become so decayed took time; but in the end the foundations of morality in Protestant countries became much firmer and better than in Catholic France and Italy.
We may owe our intellectual awakening to the Renaissance, but we surely owe our moral awakening to our Reformation. In other words, the Reformation added moral force to freedom of thought. Your Renaissance belonged to nobles and intellectuals and thought nothing of the common people, even mocking their simplicity in being deceived by traveling sellers of indulgences and by monks who made religious legends the basis of their profit. Was it not right that this crude and offensive exploitation of human hopes and fears be ended? We cleansed the insides of churches of the defilement of paintings and statues, because you had allowed people to worship those images themselves, just as you made them kneel and plead before the holy dolls that were paraded through the streets in religious ceremonies. We dared, instead of drugging people's minds with long-drawn church ceremonies, to build our faith on a straight and solid footing."