How did the Renaissance help to the split in the Church?

Answer 1

The Christian Church affected the Reniassance by influencing people that we are all equally the same and have the same rights.

Roman Catholic AnswerThe Renaissance started in the mid-fourteenth century in Italy and was in high gear in the fifteenth century. It was a melancholy end to the great age of faith which had proceeded it. G. K. Chesterton says that the Renaissance "was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing [the ancient world'" in contrast to the "great growth of new things produced by a living thing" which was medieval culture. The Renaissance initially started out trying to revive ancient Latin and Greek as it was used by the ancient Latins and Greeks, it was originally a linguistic revival. Prior to the Renaissance all of these ancient things were known and studied, but in a Christian light, the Renaissance scholars tried to discard their Christian eyes and look at things as purely pagan. Sadly, they succeeded all too well, for the first time in Christian Europe a purely secular business culture arose and businessmen discarded their Christianity when entering the Office. A coldness crept into Christian life as more and more Christians arranged their lives around something other than the Church. This depressing outlook would give rise in the sixteenth century to great heretics like Martin Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII who would look at their futures more in terms of what they wanted instead of what God wanted, thus giving rise to the great protestant revolt leading millions of souls astray and away from salvation.

Answer 2

Catholic Answer

The "split" that you are talking about is the protestant revolt which was not a split in the Church, it was heretics who disagreed with the Church's teaching on morality and doctrine who left to form their own "churches" separate from the Church that Christ had established and which had existed for 15 centuries. Even the "great reformer" Martin Luther, at the end of his life, realized what a disaster it had been and other "reformers" as well, wrote of this catastrophe.

extracted from Ten Dates Every Catholic Should Know by Diane Moczar,

c 2005 by Diane Moczar,

Sophia Institute Press, Manchester, NH 03108

The high point of the Renaissance was (late Renaissance) was the 14th

to the 17th

centuries. It was a broad and complicated movement all throughout Europe that actually extended its beginning back to the 12th

century. Some things which characterized the Renaissance were an interest in classical forms, both in art, architecture, and language; and new ideas based more on Science to the exclusion of faith. Before the Renaissance, there had been great developments in science, but they are were all by people of faith who were guided by their belief in God. As a matter of fact, there had been glorious developments in most fields before the Renaissance, but they mostly fell into disfavor with the advent of the Renaissance.

There were also factors, not directly related to the Renaissance in bringing classical ideas and languages into the present, that contributed to the disaster known as the Renaissance. Bad weather contributed to the famine of 1315 to 1322 and caused mass starvation in northern Europe with some areas experienced a Death Rate of ten percent. These was followed in France by seven other famines during the same century.

Less than 30 years later, the greatest plague the world had known - the Black Death - took millions of lives in a particularly gruesome fashion. Throw in the Hundred Years War between England and France and you have a setting for major disaster.

St. Francis of Assisi had noted a growing coldness, a lack of fervor and devotion that had invaded society, the love of God had grown cold. This was even noted in the Collect for the Feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis in the traditional liturgy (on September 17):

O Lord Jesus Christ, Who, when the world was growing cold, didst renew the sacred marks of Thy passion in the flesh of the most blessed Francis, to inflame our hearts with the fire of Thy love, graciously grant that by His merits and prayers we may continually bear the cross and bring forth fruits worthy of penance.

Another sign of this spiritual chill is the fact that the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was obliged to require reception of Holy Communion at least once a year under pain of mortal sin!

Two other things which contributed to this were that late medieval society was growing greedy, becoming more business minded, concentrating more on making money than saving their souls. And the new philosophy characterized by William of Ockham

whose philosophy of Nominalism

subverted the great scholastic synthesis of faith and reason by destroying its philosophic foundation in Aristotelian realism.

All of this, put together, set the state for what would become the most horrific catastrophe of Christianity in centuries, if not forever: the protestant revolt:

"All the water of the Elba would not provide enough tears to weep over the disasters of the Reform: the ill is without remedy." - quote from one of the major players in the protestant revolt, and one of Martin Luther's staunchest allies and friends: Melanchthon.

Even Luther, shortly before his death, wrote of his distress at the chaos and proliferation of sects that his teachings had unleashed:

"I must confess that my doctrines have produced many scandals. I cannot deny it, and often this frightens me, especially when my conscience reminds me that I destroyed the situation in which the Church found itself, all calm and tranquility, under the Papacy."

Answer 3

Catholic AnswerThis is too vast a subject to cover in Answers.com. The Renaissance was a period, roughly covering what we think of as "modern time" from right before the protestant revolt, which was endemic of it. The Renaissance was a nostalgia for the classical period of Greece and Rome and a throwing off of the extreme faith which had marked the Middle Ages. People became more concerned with money and this world, and less concerned about the Church and the next world. People no longer faced life as a community of Christians, but as a collection of individuals. These individualism gave rise to several who wanted to throw off the guidance of Holy Mother Church, to a questioning and a following of "I want it my way". Looking back at the great accomplishments of the Church and those saints of the Middle Ages, I think that most of the effects of the Renaissance on the Church have been disastrous to the salvation of individuals.

Answer 4

The Renaissance stunted the Catholic Church's growth by introducing serious grassroots objections to its policies. For the first time, average people felt empowered to combat it.