How did the Reformation change the political power and social influence of the Roman Catholic Church?

Answer 1

It's just Catholic, not Roman Catholic. Roman is an epithet first commonly used in England after the protestant revolt to describe the Catholic Church. It is never used by the official Catholic Church.

That being said, the revolt of the protestants (know as the "reformation" by protestants and secular historians) did not change the political and social influence of the Church so much as remove people from it. The Peace of Westphalia stipulated that all people in a kingdom had to follow the religion of the prince of that Kingdom, whether it was Lutheran or Catholic. This only applied in the Holy Roman Empire. England, which was not part of the Holy Roman Empire, it lived through its own revolt brought about by its King, Henry VIII. You may read about it in The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. Basically the revolt from the Catholic Church was brought into being by princes and Kings who no longer wanted to support Rome financially, and thought having their own Church was a fine idea. The result was the faithful Catholics were harassed, moved, threatened, tortured, and in many cases (especially in England) killed in the most heinous ways imaginable. The result, believe it or not, was the Enlightenment, Calvinism with its protestant work ethic, the grueling and painful deaths of thousands who the Calvinists viewed as "unsaved" and other atrocities, as we moved away from Catholic realism to protestant rationalism.