REFORMATION. This word, like "Catholic," is in itself a question-begging term ; but both are adopted, if only under protest, in the general speech of the present day. By "Reforma tion," then, we mean that religious revolution of the 16th century which has divided western Christendom into two camps, the Catholic and the Protestant. This was in itself a very complex movement, due to a multiplicity of causes which may be grouped under four main headings ; moral, doctrinal, economic and political.
Mora! Causes.—These were the most important of all, for they lay at the very root. From St. Bernard at the beginning of the 12th century to Bishop Fox, who founded Corpus Christi college at Oxford in 1516, there is no generation from which we cannot choose orthodox and distinguished churchmen who urged the crying need for Church reform in language which might seem harsh from the pen of a modern Protestant. From Innocent III. in 1215 to Leo X. in 1512, nine great world-councils were held, I with Church reform in the forefront of their programme; yet each in turn confessed the failure of its predecessors, and the Council of Trent (1545) testified to the impotence of them all.
The attempt to saddle the Black Death (1348-5o) with this state of things is grossly unhistorical. Two of the greatest cardi nals of the 13th century, St. Bonaventura (d. 1274) and Hugues de St. Cher (d. 1260 were among the most outspoken of all our witnesses against the clerical morals of their day. Even plainer is the testimony of another very distinguished bishop, Guillaume Durand, who was consulted for the Council of Vienne (13I 1). In his long memorial, he drew a terrible picture of the reigning and growing abuses, and concluded that the thing most needful was "a reformation in head and in members," that is, from the pope and his court downwards; and this became a watchword not only at succeeding councils, not only among outside cntics, but sometimes of popes. It is acknowledged on all hands that the abuses emphasized at the council of 1215 were in many respects even more rampant in 1512, and that the discipline so often de manded was never realized until after the Council of Trent had completed its long work The celibacy of the clergy had presented great and continual difficulties. (See CELIBACY.) Even so energetic a reformer as
St. Anselm was practically compelled to abandon his design of separating the English clergy from their partners. A visitation of the diocese of Hereford in 1397 shows 52 concubinary clergy known to the bishop out of 281 parishes. Another of Lausanne diocese in 1416-17 shows, among 273 communities, more than 8o clergy known as concubinary. The Oxford chancellor Gas coigne (1450), a strong anti-Lollard, tells us that the bishop of St. Asaph of his day was earning 400 marks (the equivalent of something like £5,000 a year in modern money) from the licences for concubinage that he sold to his priests; and, though these figures are doubtless greatly exaggerated, yet Sir Thomas More does not deny that there was something of the same system in Ireland; and similar evidence comes to us from other parts of Europe.
It is rare to find any mediaeval author who, if he generalizes about monks, friars and nuns at all, fails to complain of the im moral example which they too frequently set.' St. Bernardino of Siena (d. tells us that "very many" men of his day had no belief in Heaven, and looked upon the Christian scriptures as merely interesting figments, because of the evil lives of clois terers and other clergy. Pope Gregory X. had said the same at the council of Lyons (1274), and by about 1500 it had become a commonplace that the lives of the clergy were mainly responsible for the increase of heresy. And some of the most distinguished mediaeval witnesses, such as Cardinal Hugues de St. Cher (d. 1260) and St. Catharine of Siena (d. 138o) point out that clerical vices were naturally reflected and even exaggerated in the laity. Again, long before Luther's appearance, orthodox Catholics were emphasizing the abusive side of many Church ceremonies and practices; the sale of indulgences (q.v.), the multiplication of holy-days and the vice and riot which often marked these festivals; the abuse of the mass and of the consecrated oils for witchcraft; and the extent to which clerical immunities encouraged crimes. The laity of the later middle ages, with all their faults, were im proving far more rapidly than the clergy; and this gave a pro portionately increasing impetus to criticism.