To those of you who don’t know who this Luther guy is. His name is Martin Luther and was a German monk who became the father of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther criticised aspects of the Catholic Church starting with nailing the 95 theses onto the doors of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. This was the act which sparked the Protestant Reformation, and it was the Protestant Reformation that brought light into darkness and recovered the core truths of the gospel obscured by medieval religion.
The 95 theses were luther’s point of view in the nature of penance, the authority of the pope, and the usefulness of indulgences. He boldly said that only false priests sell indulgences and by doing so he invokes not only the pope, but authority as well. Luther states throughout the theses that instead of paying for a so-called indulgence, he says that simply doing good works are much more valuable. He tried to explain his reasonings against the forgiveness of sins through indulgences, with logic and rhetoric language.
Luther caught the attention of people one of the reasons, because he was as if speaking for the pope, but it was all him and his opinions. As for the authority Luther wasn’t actually speaking for the pope. He said that the popes cared for money rather than prayers and that’s an assumption. The popes actually did want money, but they never said it was more important than prayer. The logic behind the theses didn’t support it, but the rhetoric worked. Why? Probably because the people suddenly didn’t want to pay money for something they are able to ask for free maybe.
Going back to the topic for this essay, in my opinion Luther did believe that Pope Leo X didn’t know what the indulgence salesmen were saying. I believe that, because pope Leo wanted to collect money to get the resources needed for Julius’s project of rebuilding St. Peter’s basilica. So in order to do that, he had people donating for the basilica. Pope Leo later gave the job to the salesman people to do the job for him. Leo got his money for the basilica and that’s all he really cared for at the moment. Whatever the process was that the salesman did in order to get the money, which was selling indulgences, pope Leo didn’t take it to notice until he saw the 95 theses from Martin Luther. After looking through the theses, pope Leo decided to take action by making Luther reject his ideas written in the theses. Luther rejecting the theses gets excommunicated.
In conclusion, I believe that Luther did in fact believe that Pope Leo didn’t know what the indulgence salesmen were saying only because he cared for achieving the goal in collecting the donation to the basilica and that’s it. It’s as if he didn’t care or didn’t notice exactly how he got the money, but as long as he did get it, he was ok. He started to take notice after seeing the 95 theses and making calls to action.
Thanks for reading my essay today. Hope you enjoyed it or learned something new out of this topic. I’ll be posting more soon so stay tuned!
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