Martin Luther
When Martin Luther’s Augustinian superiors in Germany decided he should add foreign travel to his CV, and sent him to Rome in 1510, he arrived there as a thorough-going Catholic priest and friar. He happily went up the Scala Sancta on his knees, said several Masses in succession for the Holy Souls in the catacombs, and would have done the same at St. John Lateran’s were it not that the priestly queue was too long.
However, he also saw the building work on the new St. Peter’s and knew that it was largely financed by the sale of indulgences. A little inner voice began to call “faith, and faith alone!” So began the great “faith versus works” controversy. In 1997, 480 years after Luther nailed his 95 objections to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, the Catholic and Lutheran churches were able to declare that they shared a common belief that faith is God’s gift, and the prime mover, leading to a reasonable response in works, but that works cannot in themselves bring us – still less buy us – salvation.
However, those were passionate times, and the genie once out of the bottle could not be put back in.
Martin Luther in 1533 by Lucas Cranach
Luther was convinced that priestly ordination did not effect a change of one’s nature, but commissioned one to service – that prophetic office, which demanded the preaching of the Gospel, in the local language, and which had been lost in the over-emphasis on the priest as the intermediary in the sacrifice of Christ, and that alone. He certainly did not reject the priesthood, nor the sacraments. He did reject ‘transubstantiation’ as a way of understanding the Real Presence in the Eucharist (and the Church has never said we have to accept that explanation), largely because it relied on the categories of ancient Greek, and therefore pagan, philosophy. He also rejected the very monastic flavour of the contemporary priesthood, and so rejected obligatory celibacy.
Luther was bitterly disappointed to see the Protestant reform fragment so totally and in some cases more or less reject the Eucharist, the living ‘paschal mystery’. altogether. But it was too late. In the ensuing centuries, Protestantism was to go down the road of the Word – coupled with private interpretation of it; Catholicism was to pursue the path of the Sacraments mediated by the Church, but with a more disciplined and better educated clergy, and a Papacy cleansed of its hair-raising corruptions.