Crisis of Faith: The Protestant Reformation

“As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory into heaven springs."

In 1517, a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel was dispatched to Germany to accrue funds for the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica. The method? The sale of special plenary indulgences. This caught the attention of Martin Luther, Augustinian monk and doctor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, who compiled a letter of protest to his bishop. In so doing, Luther unknowingly kicked off the greatest crisis of Church doctrine and authority since the Great Schism of 1054.

With the invention of the printing press, the distribution of new translations of the Bible and fresh ideas about it became widespread. The hitherto insular and unassailable Roman Catholic Church suddenly found itself the target of criticism that sent Europe into a spiral of dogmatic warfare that lasted over a hundred years.

This session will have a lecture on the key events and ideologies of the Reformation during the first hour, and an open discussion about this subject during the second.