Yes, and the REASON they had to keep implementing reforms over and over and over again, was because corruption crept back in quickly. There was no accountability in the Hierarchy, really, and no competition.
This is effectively a meaningless statement.
EVERY organization made and staffed by humans, particularly those related to governing an aspect of life, becomes corrupt with time. It's a natural consequence of people and groups learning the rules and limits of the organization and taking advantage for their own personal gain. So too with the Catholic Church.
It's not like Protestant churches were immune to corruption by secular forces and big personalities either IOTL, even at the very beginning. The idea that the Protestant Reformation was the only natural reaction to corruption is patently false.
Yes, it probably was. With the rise of a middle class, literacy and printing presses, people start comparing what the Church is teaching to what the Bible says. Unfortunately, there's a huge gap, and simply appealing to Apostolic Authority or to Tradition is NOT going to suffice for people who have learned to think for themselves.
That's a pretty simplistic reading of the Reformation, which is, as all history, a convoluted affair with tons of influences.
There were plenty of well-known intellectuals and fundamentalist movements that pushed back at parts of the Church's contemporary traditions even within that time. In fact, looking at pure numbers, more of the most heavily educated critics of the Church remained as Catholic as the poor illiterate masses not concerned with the vernacular.
Much of the Protestant Reformation ties to the rise of the middle class, but more broadly to the resistance to traditional power structures and ideas in general, and there's no reason that couldn't have taken one of many other forms within the context of an internal Catholic struggle rather than a complete schism and proliferation of Protestant movements that wholly broke away.
Take, for example, Zwingli's rise to power. I'm not saying there wasn't a theological and religious base of support for him, but one of the primary reasons he got the converts he did was because he opposed the mercenary system. The mercenary system had become extremely powerful and influential in Switzerland even in that time and allowed rural cantons (who would often become Catholic cantons of later years) to hold equal or greater influence than the more populous and more trade-oriented cantons like Bern or Zurich. Naturally, Bern and Zurich wanted more power within the confederation to pursue their own goals and were opposed to the excesses of the system, while other cantons refused. Power, centralization, breaking free from "foreign control" exemplified by both the Pope AND secular powers that paid for mercenaries, these were all incredibly big parts of Zwingli's reformation.
Appointing the whole Reformation, even a majority, just to the rise of vernacular bibles and the divide between what the bible says and what the Church developed over time is just painting with broad strokes.
Whether, of course, it turns out anything like Lutheranism or Calvinism, is another question, but SOMETHING will happen.
Which is the one thing just about everybody in this thread agrees on. SOME reform, SOME breaks from tradition and real effort to fight corruption were inevitable. The form that they'll take, particularly in a complete schism and proliferation of *Protestant churches, on the other hand, is by no means guaranteed or more likely than other possibilities that involve a more "Catholic"(though not necessarily Catholic as we know it, or united) western Europe.
Yeesh, sounds like somebody woke up on the wrong side of the reformation this morning
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None of that, please. It's a contentious issue involving religion, no need to get snarky.
Besides that, I tend to agree with most of what you said. Except the idea that OTL is a Protestant wank, that's pretty speculative. Once the cat's out of the bag and the movements were established there were quite a lot of ways for the theological disputes to have taken shape on both sides of the divide.
They might not have been developed for this, but public policy models would certainly be giving indicators of change occurring around that time. The Church authorities had a monopoly on knowledge, and there was a certain image of it. There's a reason why the technocratic elites are occasionally referred to as a "priesthood", some issues are simply arcane. When the printing presses started producing vernacular bibles and people started questioning the image of the Church, including the elite, the situation was ripe for change.
Of course, the models are for policymaking by modern advanced democracies, so it doesn't really account for the very high resistance to change of a religion. With change all but impossible, it shunted off elsewhere.
The problem with that model(aside from vastly oversimplifying the causes of the Reformation to one of many) is that it presupposes that the Church was this monolithic wall of opinions without internal conflict on the issue, which was not the case at all.
As others have noted, corruption, alienation from the far-away Pope of Rome , and even some doctrinal and ritual traditions were under scrutiny even from conservative members of the hierarchy in the period before the Reformation. That's not even taking into account secular forces pushing on the Church from without that could affect change in how that information is distributed in their own way.