How inevitable was the Protestant Reformation?

Primarily, I'm wondering, if Luther's life is butterflied away, along with his personal ideas, how inevitable does any eventual 'Protestant' movement become? I'm given to understand that by the time of Luther, there already was serious discontent in the Church, and there had been some fairly well known and serious movements even beforehand (I can only really think of Hussites off the top of my head, but I imagine there were many). However, given that Luther is effectively considered the father of Protestantism, how likely is it that Protestantism as a whole develops to the same scale and strength as OTL if the events surrounding him are butterflied away? And, if it does rise to the same scale, how long a "gap" would be the maximum before it truly is completely "inevitable"?

The only way I could see avoiding the Protestant Reformation is if you had a series of national churches that owed only nominal allegiance to a figurehead pope in Rome. So they're all still Catholic but they could believe radically different things.

That's one condition.

The other condition is that the Curia and/or the national churches would need to avoid badly abusing the immense prestige and authority they had in the Middle Ages. So, basically, abolish human nature.

That said, avoiding the Babylonian Captivity and having the papacy dial down its political pretensions somehow would at least help.
 
Not inevitable if there is greater growth of the Conciliatory Movement that started in response to the Great Schism. I think that splitting up the Catholic church under a series of National churches run by democratic councils will increase the survivability. This will also mean a closer alignment between Church and the Monarchs will bring many Monarchs in on the Catholic side of things. If you look at Spain for instance the Monarch practically never had any sort of argument with the church, because they basically had total control over the hierarchy.

Essentially splitting it up into a Gallican Church, an Angilican Church, a Hispanic Church, and a Germanic Church would probably address the concerns of the Reformers and the Monarchs while it is likely that Catholicism would be saved.
 
The Catholic Church had gone through several periods of reform and house cleaning. Even without Luther, something was going to happen. Furthermore, the printing press, rise of urban bourgeosie, and royal desire for increased control of the national church is going to lead to something more than just the cleaning of the Augean Stables that had happened previously.

So without Luther, there is still a Reformation, and highly likely even a Protestant Reformation. What there won't be is Lutheranism, although some Protestant sect may approximate it in parts. And of course, depending on how the Reformation makes out, this laternate post-medieval Catholicism may turn out differently than Tridentine Catholicism turned out IOTL.
 
Nothing in history is inevitable.

Nothing.

But some things have much more chance to happen than others.
In the timeframe considered, there was a lot of discontent within the church for many things, the Popes where trying to centralize it further and most people in some areas were quite upset at that. Demand for decentralization of the Church ironically met with the trend for centralization of proto-national states.
There were a lot of abuses, society simmered with more egalitarian demands that the Vatican generally failed to even consider, and there was a hell of a lot of relatively new ideas sparked by technical progress, printing press, geographical discoveries and so on.
In a sense, OTL Reformation can be called a reaction of the Middle Ages against Renaissance, and the Reformers failed to take the lead of the most progressive forces demanding social change, more freedom and the like, in allying with political powers against the central Papacy.
So, the conditions for a religious change are there, and any spark could set the fire.
No Luther would mean that different theological views in different places could be dominant. So, in a sense you have a turning point with him. But Lutheranism wasn't the single brainchild of one man alone.
I think that a vaguely similar phenomenon has overwhelming chance to occur in some form. It might be a movement the Catholic center is able to accomodate with, correcting some abuses, renouncing some power (and some lands) and accepting a strategic retreat in the conflict with the State conceding some points. Or maybe it will be a radical movement that scares States and Church alile inducing them to forget their differences and band together, think of the German peasant revolt on spades.
 
even without luther as others have said thier was simply too much wrong with the church that eventually protestant revolution would occur on a much larger scale than what was occurring before lutherism.
 
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