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Protestant Reformation Research Paper

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The Protestant Reformation was a time period where the Catholic Church was majorly questioned and people began to rebel and protest the church. Several things caused the Protestant Reformation such as an unequal distribution of wealth. Poor people couldn’t even afford food at times. With the addition of the poor, many people could not pay the indulgences. Indulgences were payments that people would make out to the church so that they could lessen their time spent in purgatory, the boundary between heaven and hell. Humanist ideas were also able to spread at this time so people knew what the church was doing to the people.The Catholic Church had several problems within as well. The Church needed to raise an abundant amount of money so they raised …show more content…

New Christian churches were introduced like the Lutheran Church and the Church of England. The Lutheran Church was created whenever Martin Luther, a German monk, read the Bible, which, at the time, was only written in Latin, and he learned that the Church lied about several things. Not everybody could read Latin so the Popes used this to their advantage. Martin Luther wrote the 95 Theses or the 95 things wrong with the Catholic Church. He says that the Pope and church couldn’t decide who went to heaven and who didn’t. He said that people should be able to read the Bible on their own and not listen to what other people say it says, so he translated the Bible from Latin to German. Because of Martin Luther, we now have the Bible written in our language. Without him translating it we wouldn’t have read it today. The church wanted him to recant and say he was wrong but he refused and was excommunicated and made an outlaw by the King. The Church of England was created by King Henry VIII. He wanted to divorce his wife but the church didn’t allow divorce, so he made his own church so he could divorce her. King Henry VIII was a building block for the religious freedom in the U.S.

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