What incident caused Luther to break from the Catholic Church?

Answer 1

The Protestant Reformation of the early 16th century was an attempt to reform the Catholic Church. German theologian Martin Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses on the sale of indulgences in 1517. Parallel to events in Germany, a movement began in Switzerland under the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli. The political separation of the Church of England from Rome under Henry VIII, beginning in 1529 and completed in 1536, brought England alongside this broad Reformed movement. The Scottish Reformation of 1560 decisively shaped the Church of Scotland[1] and, through it, all other Presbyterian churches worldwide.

Following the excommunication of Luther and condemnation of the Reformation by the Pope, the work and writings of John Calvin were influential in establishing a loose consensus among various groups in Switzerland, Scotland, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere. In the course of this religious upheaval, the German Peasants' War of 1524-1525 swept through the Bavarian, Thuringian and Swabian principalities. The confessional division of the states of the Holy Roman Empire eventually erupted in the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648. This left Germany weakened and fragmented for more than two centuries, until the unification of Germany under the German Empire of 1871.

The success of the Counter-Reformation on the Continent and the growth of a Puritan party dedicated to further Protestant reform polarized the Elizabethan Age, although it was not until the Civil War of the 1640s that England underwent religious strife comparable to that which its neighbours had suffered some generations before.

The "Great Awakenings" were periods of rapid and dramatic religious revival in Anglo-American religious history, generally recognized as beginning in the 1730s. They have also been described as periodic revolutions in colonial religious thought.

In the 20th century, Protestantism, especially in the United States, was characterized by accelerating fragmentation. The century saw the rise of both liberal and conservative splinter groups, as well as a general secularization of Western society. Notable developments in the 20th century of US Protestantism was the rise of Pentecostalism, Christian fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. While these movements have spilled over to Europe to a limited degree, the development of Protestantism in Europe was more dominated by secularization, leading to an increasingly "post-Christian Europe".

Answer 2

The Papal Bull of excommunication of Martin Luther, the Heretic, and his Followers, is called Decet Romanum Pontificem issued on 3 January 1521. You may view it at the link below.

Answer 3

Modesty and the rules of WikiAnswers forbid an explicit answer to this question, but perhaps you can guess from what Luther himself wrote:

.

from The Facts About Luther by Msgr. Patrick F. O'Hare, LL.D., c 1987 by TAN Books, Rockford, Illinois

The cesspool seems to have been the garden that furnished his choicest flowers of rhetoric. To be plainer still, "It is a fact," Fr. Johnston says, "that Luther's usual talk took its imagery most often from the privy. In this connection, perhaps, it is significant that Luther admitted that it was precisely in the privy of the monastery that he received from God the revelation of his famous doctrine about justification by faith alone. 'By the grace of God, while thinking on one occasion in this tower over those words, "The just man lives by faith alone," the Holy Ghost revealed the Scriptures to me in this tower.' Protestant biographers have naively attempted to show that this place was not the monastery toilet; but there is no reasonable doubt."