Christian Church In Middle Ages Essays - Avignon Papacy,

Christian Church In Middle Ages The Christian Church in the Middle Ages played a significant role in society. Unfortunately though, the church is often regarded as the capital of corruption, evil, and worldliness. Today, so many people depict the medieval church as being led by materialistic popes, devouring tithes from poverty-stricken peasants, having various illegitimate children, and granting indulgences for money from wayward believers. Yes, circumstances like this may have been the case, and is often hard to disapprove, considering the fact that this notion is often advocated in movies. But we must open our mind, and look at the situations first before jumping to conclusions. As many things define the distinct characteristics of history, the Christian church has made a remarkable milestone especially during the Middle Ages. Christianitys emergence as an official religion influenced not only the church, it enabled people to look beyond the obsession of power and worldly pleasures, but to a final and ultimate reward for a life well spent. Everybody put their faith in the hope and love of the Christian God. It gave the people goals and led them to the right path, yet why is it looked down upon so harshly? Maybe it was because of the wealth it exemplified, or the deterioration of morality in the popes. One can heedlessly conclude that the Medieval church was corrupt and unholy, but that would not justify its existence. Accordingly, the church was just trying to adjust itself to an age of chaos and uncertainty. The idea that the medieval church was immoral can be rooted on a few methodological errors. The arbitrary use of historical evidence and the ignorance of the circumstances are a couple to name. Maybe putting together one thousand years of the history of the church with a disregard to any historical development may represent the medieval church as a corrupt institution, but still it is not necessary to go as far as to say that the church was corrupt. It is also worth noting that not all contemporaries who were interested in the reformation, such as Erasmus, joined Luther in his famous feat, the Reformation. With this in mind, Luther and other reformers are usually credited with bringing the church back to the New Testament ideal, which is not necessarily the case. Luther and his contemporaries definitely did not introduce the concept of reform. Actually, during this time of the wealth and luxury of monastic orders, reform was a recurring theme. But considering the way various popes around Europe tried to bring the church back to its wholesome state, is good to note that most monastic treatises arguing the moral decline of the church do their best to make the church appear as black and unholy as possible. They depict every little thing that is in the least tainted with anything immoral ten times as worse as it really was, alleging that it was excessive with luxury, worldliness, and corruption. Another element that contributes to the misleading idea that the church was corrupt were the clerical abuses taken place during the later Middle Ages. Many people picture the church being run in an authoritarian and totalitarian way by misguided popes, hungry for money and power. This was not always true but trying not to contradict that fact that there were cases of clerical abuses during the medieval times would be a lie, which were accurately addressed by Protestant reformers. The major problem relating to the maltreatment of power between the popes was commonly known as the traffic in indulgences, which certainly was a commercial exploitation. Essentially, it meant to basically pay off for forgiveness whatever you are going to do or did wrong. With this money was the church able to build various art forms that made it clearly visible of the popes abuse because of its elaborate existence. An example of this would be in the Vatican, which we can still see today. With this, the sales of indulgences brought forth a major factor concerning the corruption of the church. The granting of indulgences was accepted from the Crusades and grew more popular during the later Middle Ages. This practice of Tetzel, Luthers adversary went way beyond the doctrinal limits the church set long