Is Protestantism alone to blame for the split between the two branches of Christendom? In the current issue of the Catholic liturgical monthly, Orate Fratres, the Rev. Joseph Lortz, professor of church history at Germany's Münster University in Westphalia, declares that Roman Catholicism must share the guilt.
Long before Luther, writes Father Lortz, "there existed in the Catholic Church herself much that foreshadowed the Reformation . . . In other words, the so-called 'causes' of the Reformation had their origin within the limits of the Catholic Church . . . That means the Reformation had important Catholic roots."
For a European of 1500,...
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