United western church

WI the reformation had succeed any the catholic church was reformed and there were no break aways. or at least no big ones.
Not precisely sure what the question is, but...

You are certainly going to get small 'heresies'/splits. OTL you had the Cathars (in Occitania), the Hussites (in Bohemia) and the Lollards (in England).

Can we keep that from expanding to a general reformation?

I think the answer is no, and for several reasons.

1) the printing press is huge. Once copies of the Bible become 'cheap' so any educated person can read it, the significant discrepancies between the words of the Bible and the Teachings of the Church become obvious.
2) with the growing commercial/middle class, you get a growing body of people who are not invested in the existing hierarchical structure of Society. People who want to think for themselves. Firstly about markets, of course, but then about politics and about religion.
3) Fueled by the printing press, and fed by the rising middle class, literacy is expanding. The more people who write letters and read books, the more they exchange ideas and learn new things.

The other thing is that the Church, especially in the West, had set itself up as the ultimate arbiter and authority, and they had an enormous history of precedent and tradition, some parts of which had nothing to do with actual Christianity, but which were defended as if they were. Including 1000 years or more of simple bureaucracy.

So. Is there any way to break the ossified bureaucracy without the kind of shock provided by the Reformation? I don't see how.

Obviously, if the West stayed in a 'mediaeval' culture, and never invented the printing press, you might well be able to avoid the Reformation as a significant event all together.

If the Hierarchy can continue to squash the growing middle class and 'keep them in their place', that might help.

It is even theoretically possible for the 30 years war (for instance) to be a crushing success for the RC side (although given that RC France was the biggest financial supporter of Lutheran Gustavus Adolphus, that could be tricky), which would at least drive Protestantism underground.

But I suspect that would just make more and more distrusting of the Church (and likely of Christianity), so you could see this ending up as a massive Islam-wank.
 

st.istvan

Banned
I think the unspoken question behind the OP, is: "Would we have had a united Western church today, or would there have been a Reformation later?"

You seem to be of the latter opinion....I tend toward the former. Of course, "ifs and buts", we can never say with certainty what would've happened, but if the RC church had reformed along the lines that Luther and Melanchton pointed out, I'm pretty confident that the Western Church would've more or less stayed one, under the leadership of the Bishop of Rome. Of course, reforming along "Lutheran" lines wouldn't satisfy the "left-wing" of the Reformation (Zwingli, Calvin), or the radical reformers (Karlstadt, Müntzer), but I'm pretty sure that since the radicals were, by definition, anti-establishment, they lacked the support of the German princes that ensured the success of the Reformation. At most, another "church" could've become a Swiss thing, but I'm not sure about the long-term viability of such a construction anyway.
 
I think the unspoken question behind the OP, is: "Would we have had a united Western church today, or would there have been a Reformation later?"

You seem to be of the latter opinion....I tend toward the former. Of course, "ifs and buts", we can never say with certainty what would've happened, but if the RC church had reformed along the lines that Luther and Melanchton pointed out, I'm pretty confident that the Western Church would've more or less stayed one, under the leadership of the Bishop of Rome. Of course, reforming along "Lutheran" lines wouldn't satisfy the "left-wing" of the Reformation (Zwingli, Calvin), or the radical reformers (Karlstadt, Müntzer), but I'm pretty sure that since the radicals were, by definition, anti-establishment, they lacked the support of the German princes that ensured the success of the Reformation. At most, another "church" could've become a Swiss thing, but I'm not sure about the long-term viability of such a construction anyway.
IF they had reformed along those lines, yes. However, I don't think that's possible, short of truly massive shock. (Such as a successful Reformation.)

Reformers in the Church can be very popular, and have a major effect - for about a generation or two, and then the system goes back to normal. The Cistercians, for instance, were a reaction to the laxity in the monastic system that previous orders had succumbed to. They spread widely across Europe - and in a generation or two were as corrupt and luxury-loving as the others. (One can, of course, overstate the corruption of the monasteries. There were many god-fearing, obedient monks, and many pious abbots. There were, however, monks who used the excuse of celibacy to avoid marrying any of the local girls they got involved with. And many abbots, younger sons of nobility, without real vocation, who lived a noble's life, rather than a monk's life.)

Without some outside example to hold their feet to the fire, as it were, I don't think the Roman church is capable of making and sustaining the kind of necessary reforms.
 
I don't see it happening, because I think the rise of the bourgeouisie, the rise of democracy, and the rise of nationalism were inevitable at that point, which inevitably means a break in the unity of western Christianity.
 
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