A History of Christianity - S1.E4 ∙ Reformation The Individual Before God
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00:00The Amish community of Pennsylvania are quiet and peaceable folk.
00:10And yet, five centuries ago, their ancestors were seen as some of the most dangerous people
00:16in Europe.
00:17They were radicals, Protestants, one of dozens of groups in the 16th century that tore apart
00:25the Catholic Church.
00:35In the fourth part of this History of Christianity, I'll point out the trigger for religious
00:40revolution.
00:45I'll try to make sense of the terrible wars and suffering it ignited in Europe, and show
00:51why it also brought great joy and liberation.
00:56I want to see how the old Western Church fought back, renewing Catholicism.
01:01Of all the mad churches I've seen in Mexico, this is definitely the maddest.
01:06Well, I think it's paradise.
01:09Above all, I want to understand how a faith based on obedience to the authority of the
01:15gave birth to one where the individual is accountable to God alone.
01:37In 1500, the only Christianity most Western Europeans knew was the church which called
01:44itself Catholic, the Church of the Pope in Rome.
01:56Its priests were an elite, with power to link ordinary people to God.
02:01They showed miraculous ability in the mass to turn bread and wine into the actual body
02:09and blood of Jesus Christ.
02:14Yet millions of Europeans were on the verge of rejecting this Catholic Church for a very
02:20different Christianity.
02:26Only one thing could force such dramatic change.
02:34That was the power of an idea, an idea about something which concerns us all, death.
02:47The Bible's New Testament offers a stark picture.
02:51When we die, we go to heaven or hell.
02:55But for us complex mortals, neither very good nor very bad, the Western Church said there
03:01might be a midway stage called purgatory.
03:05You wait there to be made ready for heaven.
03:09Now, purgatory is like hell in that it's not a nice place to be, but there is a time limit
03:14on it.
03:15And so you can do things to shorten the time.
03:18You can give a coin to a beggar and he will pray for your soul.
03:22People would even leave money in their wills to pay the village's taxes so that the villagers
03:26would pray for them.
03:28It's a wonderfully you-scratch-my-back, I'll-scratch-your-back system.
03:35By the 16th century, all through Europe, the Church was selling certificates called indulgences
03:46to show how much time in purgatory you had avoided.
03:51The cash paid for new churches and hospitals.
03:54When the Pope wanted to finish the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, he launched
04:00an indulgence campaign.
04:04Some might think this a worthy cause, but it raised big questions in the mind of a German
04:07monk whose views on the afterlife would change the Western Church.
04:12His name was Martin Luther.
04:18Luther lived most of his life in the small town of Wittenberg in eastern Germany.
04:24Each year on the 31st of October, they celebrate Reformation Day.
04:30It was on this date in 1517 that Luther announced a university debate on indulgences, which
04:36would discuss no fewer than 95 propositions or theses.
04:40And it's said that he announced the debate by nailing a notice to the door of this church
04:45here.
04:47And this, in legend, has become the start of the Reformation.
04:54So what was so revolutionary about Luther's ideas?
04:59Ironically, his inspiration, and so the whole Protestant Reformation, came from the most
05:05important theologian of Catholic Christianity, the 4th century African bishop Augustine of
05:14Hippo.
05:18Augustine said, the Bible revealed an all-powerful God who alone decides our fate after death.
05:24Luther, like Augustine before him, read the Apostle Paul as saying that we are saved from
05:30hell, justified not by any good deeds of our own, but by faith in God.
05:35Now if that is so, then the church has no claim to change or even influence the fate
05:40of a single human being.
05:42And the indulgences was wicked and useless.
06:01Luther was reminding people that the key to salvation didn't lie in the hands of the church,
06:06but in the word of God.
06:08And that could be found in the Bible.
06:13Trouble was that many ordinary people couldn't read or write.
06:17How could they hear the message in a book?
06:22Luther found effective ways around the problem.
06:46Up until his time, most church music had been sung in Latin by clergy and choirs.
06:53Luther wrote superb German hymns for everyone to sing.
06:58They helped convey the Bible's message.
07:08I asked this church's director of music why they were so successful.
07:14You've heard this great tune, A Mighty Fortress, Ein Festerburg, which does stick in the head
07:18somehow, doesn't it?
07:19Yes, the tune is by Luther and it brings in elements of the popular music of the time,
07:26the folk songs, a little bit of a dance-like.
07:36But big congregations couldn't do that, surely?
07:39They're not that sophisticated.
07:41We did have a hard time and the pastors complained.
07:44We keep trying to sing these hymns, but the people aren't, they're not singing loud enough
07:49or they're not working with it.
07:53But what they did is they tried to get the school kids to learn them.
07:58They were even sent into the congregation to sit amongst the people.
08:02And they're supposed to sing loudly in worship.
08:05And hopefully the others will come along with them.
08:30Luther had no thoughts of quitting the church.
08:34All he was doing was giving God back the power which was God's.
08:40Then he found the church quit him.
08:43The Pope felt Luther threatened the God-given authority of the church.
08:50So a solemn papal pronouncement condemned him.
08:58Luther replied by burning it.
09:01Over the next decade, this open defiance of ancient authority was christened Protestantism.
09:08But in proclaiming his view of salvation, Luther risked death at the stake.
09:14He was defying not only the Pope, but Europe's most powerful monarch, the Holy Roman Emperor,
09:19Charles V.
09:20There's a pious legend that has Luther saying to the Emperor, here I stand, I can do no
09:33other.
09:34Well, if he didn't say that, he ought to have done because it captures the essence
09:42of his defiance.
09:43And it's a cry which I find the most compelling thing about Protestantism.
09:47We stand alone with our consciences.
09:49We can do no other.
09:59Luther's message appeals to modern individualism, a refusal blindly to accept authority.
10:07But it took huge bravery to defy Pope and Emperor.
10:14And the odd thing is that Luther also talked a lot about obedience to the powers that God
10:21had placed in the world.
10:24That meant a lot to him.
10:30So was Luther's message about revolt or about creating a settled, obedient society?
10:35Well, Luther never really answered that one.
10:38And that unanswered question remains a central problem for Protestantism.
10:42And worse was to come.
10:44Luther found that other reformers refused to follow his own line.
10:48Here he stood.
10:49They were going to do something else.
10:58While Luther was a university lecturer, another great reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, was a busy
11:21parish priest.
11:25He played out his own reformation in one of Europe's greatest city-states, Zurich.
11:35Zwingli always claimed that independently of Luther, he discovered the central Protestant
11:39idea that only God's gift of faith can save us from hell.
11:45I find that hard to believe.
11:47It would certainly be one of the biggest historical coincidences of all time.
11:51But it must be said that Luther and Zwingli did not get on.
11:55We'll see why.
11:58In 1522, Zwingli was invited to a dinner party where the guests ate a sausage.
12:08That night, the sausage became the rallying cry for a Swiss reformation.
12:19It was Lent, when the church told people to show penitence for their sins by giving
12:23things up, especially tasty sausages.
12:30The inappropriate sausage eating caused quite a stir in Zurich.
12:34Zwingli didn't actually eat the sausage himself, but he argued that there was nothing morally
12:39wrong with the sausage.
12:41He pointed out that the Bible has no commandment about keeping Lent.
12:44And he warned Zurich that the church was sidelining God's real laws by making such
12:49a farce about things like that.
12:55Zwingli was saying that the Bible, not the Pope, carried God's authority.
13:01So far, so much like Luther.
13:03But Zwingli's reformation went much further.
13:09Now here, there's no getting away from technical jargon to make things clear.
13:13All Protestants at the time were reformers, but it was only this non-Lutheran version
13:19of Protestantism that came to be known as Reformed, with a capital R.
13:24So what was happening here in Zurich was the creation of a whole new sort of Protestantism.
13:39The Zurich authorities felt that they had a sacred trust from God to govern.
13:48Zwingli told them that this was what God wanted.
13:52That nerved the city council to take the whole church of Zurich out of the hands of the local
13:56Catholic bishop.
14:00And Zwingli was more than ready to tell them how to run it.
14:07Zwingli and his colleagues re-read the Ten Commandments.
14:09The commandments forbid graven images, so they tore down the images of the saints.
14:17They even banned music for half a century and more because beauty distracts from worshipping
14:22God.
14:23And since the Bible nowhere tells clergy to be celibate, the Zurich clergy broke with
14:28half a millennium of Western Christian tradition and got married.
14:36Zwingli had one more controversial proposal that became a distinguishing characteristic
14:41of Reformed Protestants.
15:00At Zurich's wealthy collegiate church, the Great Minster or Großminster, Zwingli's view
15:05on the Mass or Eucharist transformed the heart of Christian worship.
15:15At the Last Supper, before Christ was crucified, he broke bread and took wine, calling them
15:20his body and blood.
15:24The old church taught that in the Mass, God had given the priest the power to transform
15:29bread and wine into Christ's body and blood.
15:32He actually brought God physically to the people.
15:37That gave priests astonishing power.
15:40For centuries, they were the main gateway to God, and the high altar at which they presided
15:45at Mass was the most sacred place in church.
15:51This Großminster had been built for Catholic worship centuries before the Reformation,
15:56and so the whole thing is intended to look behind me, right up to that east end.
16:03There you'd have the high altar, where the Mass was celebrated day in, day out.
16:07But you see, it's gone, and instead, everything's been pulled forwards to where I'm standing.
16:14This extraordinary piece of Reformation furniture, well, it's a font for baptism, but it actually
16:21doubles as a communion table on the top.
16:25And they're in the middle of the people, thanks to Zwingli and the Zurich Reformation.
16:43Zwingli argued that the bread and wine are not miraculously transformed in the Mass.
16:49He justified this revolutionary thought by his reading of the Gospels.
16:54The Bible tells us that Christ ascended to heaven and will not return until the last day.
16:59He's sitting at the right hand of the Father, not here on a table in Zurich.
17:04Zwingli said that breaking bread, drinking wine are symbols.
17:08The believer remembers that Christ died on the cross.
17:12Luther's come back to that.
17:13Zwingli is wicked and crazy.
17:20Today, the presiding minister of the Grossminister is Cati La Roche.
17:25In the true spirit of the Reformation, she has her own ideas about the bread and wine.
17:30So you're the successor of Zwingli in this church, but I just get the sense that you
17:34might not feel quite the same about the Eucharist as them.
17:38No, I'm a little bit more close to Luther.
17:42Aha.
17:43Yeah.
17:44Luther, the great enemy of Zwingli, you're closer to Luther.
17:47Luther was a very rationalistic man.
17:52Thought with a head.
17:53Yeah.
17:54Heads everything.
17:55Yeah.
17:56And I think Luther was more close to the people and I can feel when I give the bread to somebody
18:04and I say, this is the body of Christ or this is the bread of life, something happens between
18:12this person and me and receiving.
18:16And I think this is a moment where people can feel, yes, he is here with me.
18:23I see.
18:24So you're saying that Zwingli has this great idea of community, but there is something
18:29which he might be missing here, that there's an event between God and an individual.
18:35I think so.
18:36And that's the insight that Luther had, which Zwingli seems to have missed, perhaps.
18:41No wonder they hated each other so much.
18:46Both reformers championed individual conscience over obedience to priestly authority.
18:57It's just Zwingli favoured cool, logical thinking above Luther's insights into the more passionate
19:03depths of faith.
19:08But the split showed up the big problem for the Reformation, one that is still a hallmark
19:13of Protestantism, a tendency to sectarianism.
19:20If you let anyone read the Bible, then any idea can suddenly seem the most important.
19:26This can be a weakness.
19:29It can also be a strength, a trigger for expansion.
19:35To Zwingli's dismay, some of those he'd inspired now pointed out that the Bible made no mention
19:40of baptism for infants.
19:45So they began baptising adults afresh, earning themselves the nickname Anabaptists, or re-baptisers.
19:54Now they were not so much defying the Pope, but the city-state of Zurich.
20:00In fact, they argued that nowhere did the New Testament link church and state.
20:07In January 1525, a group of radical enthusiasts baptised themselves in public.
20:13They followed it up by breaking bread and drinking wine, and all without a single clergyman
20:18involved.
20:20It was an open challenge.
20:22It was too much.
20:25The city council condemned four of them to death in a way suited to their crime against
20:30the waters of baptism.
20:32They drowned them here in the river Limat.
20:41But the Anabaptists were not about to give up.
20:50In the hills above Zurich is the secret meeting place used by those who fled the persecution.
20:57I climbed up there with Peter Detweiler, who's a minister in the Reformed Church.
21:09You have to imagine people coming up here with their children, families being persecuted,
21:15or to gather here for services, and I think it was a very special place for them.
21:27The Swiss Anabaptists were soon just one among many groups claiming to be the only authentic
21:33Christianity.
21:36They all survived to this day, Unitarians, Mennonites, Amish, Quakers.
21:56Thirty years after Luther's revolution, it was not yet obvious that Protestantism would
22:12spread across Europe, never mind the rest of the world.
22:19It was at this moment that a young French exile brought a new dynamism to the Reformation,
22:25John Calvin.
22:28Calvin never wanted to leave France.
22:30Catholic persecution forced him out.
22:32It was a sheer fluke that he fled to a city-state on the edge of Switzerland.
22:42He never much liked the place, but he felt that God had sent him there, and you can't
22:46say no to God.
22:48Driven, single-minded, humorless Calvin, he was such a success that his city became known
22:54as the Protestant Rome.
22:56It was Geneva.
23:00There's an arresting intensity in what Calvin said about encountering God.
23:05He spoke of believers experiencing union with Christ.
23:11It tends to be remembered as a killjoy, and it's true that at one time he tried to stop
23:15the whole city of Geneva dancing.
23:22But his real significance is that he turned the swirling confusion of the Protestant Reformation
23:28into a practical and accessible guidebook, his Institutes of the Christian Religion.
23:37The former head of the Reformed Church in Geneva is now director of the city's Reformation
23:41Museum.
23:43She looked me out a special copy of Calvin's Institutes from their collections.
23:49Can I pick it up?
23:50Of course.
23:51It's the first edition, isn't it?
23:52That's right, 1536.
23:54And so it's extraordinary.
23:57He's a university lecturer, what, late 20s?
23:59Yes, that's right.
24:00And he's trying to rewrite Christianity or encapsulate it in a little book, isn't he?
24:05Yes, and I think that I'd like to understand this attempt of Calvin as giving to people
24:11new keys for understanding Christianity, to interpret the Christian doctrine.
24:18And I like to think of Reformation first as an interpretation of the old ideas.
24:25Well, you use the word new, but I think Calvin would say really old, before medieval Catholicism,
24:31before that corruption.
24:32Yes, but at least we have to recognize that he brought these new waves, this new spreading
24:40of ideas, of old ideas, so to speak.
24:44Isabel, it's a special delight to me to meet you, because you were the first woman successor
24:49of Calvin.
24:50That's right.
24:51And less than 500 years after his birth.
24:53Well, that's nothing, is it?
24:55But what do you think Calvin would have thought of that?
24:58Of course, it was not acceptable for Calvin, because he had some of the ideas of his time
25:04that women should keep in their place.
25:07So I don't think that he would have approved.
25:11Neither did he approve women pastors or women who wanted to preach.
25:15So how did you approach becoming moderator?
25:17I went to Calvin's grave and I put down a rose in memory of this life, this so important life.
25:30But then I turned to the grave and then I said, now it's my turn.
25:41Calvin's guides spread Protestantism far beyond Geneva, thanks to a particular technology.
25:49Printing made it possible for anyone educated to read Calvin's institutes, which they did.
25:57His followers also used print to create a special Geneva Bible,
26:02carefully edited and annotated to guide their reading and interpretation.
26:10This is actually my own copy of the Geneva Bible.
26:13But this is from 1606, by which time it's a real bestseller in England.
26:17And it's more than just a book.
26:19It's a way of life.
26:21It's a way of Christian life.
26:23You open it up and you see every chapter divided into verses.
26:27So you can remember just a little bit and quote it.
26:30But much more than that, it tells you how to read it all around the text.
26:35There's huge quantities of notes.
26:37So you're told how to think as a reformed Christian.
26:42And bound up at the back, there's something else.
26:46The 150 psalms turned into metrical psalms, poetry.
26:52And some of these psalms still survive in hymnals in churches.
26:56And the famous one is Psalm 100, the Old Hundred, so-called.
27:08The Old Hundred.
27:16Geneva had become the beacon for a Protestant movement
27:19stretching right across Europe.
27:23Zurich and Geneva saw their church as the true, properly reformed Catholicism.
27:28Roman Catholics would disagree, of course.
27:31Calvin's style of Protestantism defined itself by what it was against.
27:36Not just the Pope, but to his mind,
27:38pathetically half-reformed Lutherans and mad Anabaptists.
27:44Reformed Protestantism was also extraordinary
27:47in its ability to leap over the frontiers of language and culture.
27:53Built into Geneva's old city walls
27:55is a memorial to key figures of the Reformation from all over Europe.
28:02Standing among them is a Scotsman, John Knox.
28:13In the Genevan church, Knox found a model to take back to Scotland.
28:18Preaching God's Word was central to worship,
28:21and this was reflected in the size and grandeur of the city's new pulpits
28:25and copied far beyond.
28:27The Genevan-style Church of Scotland out-Calvined Calvin.
28:33Scottish congregations might be moved to shout cries of praise or amen
28:37in a way that we're still familiar with in American evangelical Protestantism.
28:41Children would be expected to repeat at home
28:44what the minister had said that morning in church.
28:47As a result, the Scots came to value a good education for all
28:51in a fashion that has never quite seized their English neighbours.
28:57MUSIC PLAYS
29:13Protestantism did come to England too,
29:16but not in a form that John Knox would have approved.
29:21It took on a flavour unique in Europe.
29:28MUSIC CONTINUES
29:32In 1534, Henry VIII made himself head of the Church of England
29:36after the Pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
29:50Reformed Europe in places like Zurich and Geneva
29:53put a crack on formal sung services in grand cathedral settings.
30:00But King Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I,
30:02controversially decided to keep both.
30:08Responsibility for maintaining the sung tradition here at Winchester Cathedral
30:12is down to choir master Andrew Lumsden.
30:16Andrew, the choir's performed Teach Me, O Lord by William Byrd,
30:19which is one of my favourite pieces of Anglican music,
30:22so it says a lot about the English Reformation, doesn't it?
30:25Yes, you have the...
30:27One of the themes in the piece is a piece of Gregorian chant
30:31which had been around for hundreds of years before William Byrd.
30:34It's called Tonus Perigrinus,
30:36and you find it in the top of the chant with the full choir sections.
30:40CHOIR SINGS
30:43CHOIR CONTINUES
30:49Up until then, everything that had been sung in Latin
30:52was totally unapproachable by people,
30:54and one of the things was to make it sing in English so that it was approachable.
30:58But Byrd was very cleverly just sneaking this in
31:01to remind people of the former regime.
31:03And that's because he's a Roman Catholic, isn't it?
31:06I'm writing for a Protestant queen, Elizabeth.
31:08How is she allowing this to go on?
31:10Well, that's a very good question.
31:12I mean, she obviously had a great love of music of this nature,
31:16and I think probably just turned a blind eye.
31:18CHOIR CONTINUES
31:41CHOIR CONTINUES
31:49But not everyone in England approved of half-measures of reform.
31:55Puritans were austere Protestants
31:58who hated anything which suggested Catholicism.
32:03Under Elizabeth's successor but one, Charles I,
32:06their anger swelled into civil war.
32:11Puritan soldiers fighting for the Westminster Parliament against Charles
32:16smashed stained-glass windows
32:19and any symbol of English Catholic monarchy.
32:24These caskets contain the bones of Anglo-Saxon kings,
32:27except all the bones are in the wrong place
32:29because parliamentary soldiers tore open the cases
32:32and scattered the bones around to express their contempt for kings.
32:36It was all part of their campaign against ancient superstition
32:39and their longing to bring the New Jerusalem to England.
32:43In the end, the Puritan commander, Oliver Cromwell,
32:46defeated Charles, even executed him,
32:49and set up a Protestant republic.
32:52But the Puritans' New Jerusalem wasn't popular.
32:55The last straw was their effort to abolish Christmas Day
32:58for not being in the Bible.
33:01The Church of England was restored, cathedrals and all.
33:05For all the later complications of English religion,
33:08Anglicanism became an integral part of the national identity.
33:14Since the Reformation, the Anglican communion has swung
33:17between the poles of Catholicism and Protestantism,
33:20producing a subtle, reflective form of Christianity.
33:25It's the part of the Christian Church which I know best,
33:28and I must admit that I still love it, despite all its faults.
33:33So, now we've met a gallery of Protestantisms.
33:37Lutherans, Reformed, Radicals, Anglicans.
33:44The Reformation story is one of splits and persecution.
33:49That's what people find most difficult to understand about it.
33:53How can you burn someone at the stake for saying
33:56that a piece of New Jerusalem is a piece of New England?
33:59How can you burn someone at the stake for saying
34:02that a piece of bread is not God?
34:04Our instinct is to feel the pain of the individual burning.
34:12This was a world with different priorities.
34:14They felt the pain of the whole of society
34:16if one individual denied God's truth,
34:18so society needed to be healed,
34:20even if that meant causing hideous pain for one individual.
34:23People cared passionately about these matters,
34:26and the passion was by no means all on the side of Protestants.
34:35Protestantism had already won over the North,
34:38and it had done well in Central Europe too.
34:41Now, Catholics were hardly going to stand idly by
34:44while it gobbled up the rest of the map.
34:57APPLAUSE
35:03If you've heard of a counter-Reformation,
35:06you may think it was just that,
35:08the Catholic Church's reaction to Protestantism.
35:13In fact, it began in response to a much older threat...
35:18..Islam's conquest of Spain in the 7th century.
35:22Catholic Christians hung on in northern Spain.
35:26For 500 years, they dreamt of reconquest.
35:32By the 13th century, they'd fought their way back to Andalusia
35:36in the south, and one of its greatest cities, Cordoba.
35:42Cordoba was a major step in the reconquest of Spain,
35:45and behind me is the biggest symbol you could have of that triumph.
35:51It's the Cathedral of Cordoba.
36:01Cordoba's cathedral is a weird building.
36:05The great choir and high altar are like a cuckoo in a nest.
36:11They're stuck right into the heart of what was once...
36:16..a mosque.
36:22This building was the greatest mosque of Arab Muslim Cordoba.
36:31But when the Catholics reconquered the city,
36:34they seized this sacred Islamic site
36:37and reconsecrated it for Christian worship.
36:42It shrieks Catholic triumph at you.
36:52CHEERING
36:57Catholic Spain was obsessive about suppressing Islam.
37:01It was equally worried about Judaism.
37:07Its rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella,
37:10became the first monarchs to run an inquisition
37:13to root out non-Catholics.
37:15The inquisition operated from Cordoba's old Moorish palace,
37:19the Alcazar.
37:24The Spanish Inquisition has had a bad press over the years
37:27for its cruelty and oppression,
37:29but it's worth remembering that every 16th-century system of justice
37:32was cruel and oppressive, and in fact, overall,
37:35the Inquisition executed a lower proportion of suspects
37:38than most secular courts.
37:42What the Inquisition did do
37:44was enforce a system of racial and cultural superiority.
37:50It added up to a militant, self-confident Catholicism
37:54emerging quite independently of Protestant reform.
38:02But eventually, Rome realised it had to react to the Reformation as well.
38:10In 1545, a council opened at Trent in Italy
38:14to restate Catholic truths and to reassert papal authority.
38:27This is another church in Cordoba,
38:30and it embodies the spirit of the Council of Trent.
38:34It was built for a brand-new organisation,
38:37ready to do the council's bidding,
38:39the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.
38:44This is a very grand building.
38:47But it's also very plain.
38:49The early Jesuits liked plainness.
38:52And, of course, it's also very open.
38:54There's no screen here.
38:56There, of course, is a pulpit,
38:58because Catholics can preach as well as Protestants,
39:01but the Catholic Church could offer much more from its tradition.
39:04Sitting on that high altar behind me
39:06is the tabernacle in which you keep the consecrated bread,
39:10the body of Christ for the faithful to worship
39:13whenever they walk into church.
39:15But more than that, his mother, Mary.
39:19She is always present, a human mother who has borne God.
39:24And she adds a femininity to worship, which Protestantism rather lacks.
39:29And you also have the confessional,
39:32a brand-new invention of the Counter-Reformation,
39:35so that you can unburden yourself of sin to a priest.
39:39What the Counter-Reformation offered you was a sense of companionship,
39:43companionship with Holy Mother Church.
39:45This was the Counter-Reformation's answer to Martin Luther,
39:49Uldrich Zwingli, John Calvin.
39:57Far from being destroyed by the Protestants,
40:00the Catholic Church did what Christianity always does.
40:04It adapted itself in a crisis.
40:07It eventually emerged renewed and poised to win new converts.
40:14This is Granada, the last Muslim stronghold
40:17to fall to the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella.
40:21As Muslim power faded here,
40:23Catholic Spain and Portugal began building empires overseas.
40:29The man you see above me is Christopher Columbus
40:32at the feet of Queen Isabella in 1492,
40:35in the same year that Muslim Granada fell.
40:37Columbus reached what we now call the West Indies.
40:40The Church travelled out on the same ships as his soldiers.
40:44Counter-Reformation Catholicism
40:46was about to become the first worldwide religion.
40:50The first missionaries to the New World were Franciscan friars.
40:55Desperate to spread the word,
40:57because they believed that the end of the world was coming.
41:02Half a century later, the Jesuits followed them.
41:07The Jesuits were the first Christian missionaries to the New World.
41:13The Jesuits were the first Christian missionaries to the New World.
41:18In countries such as Mexico,
41:20these envoys of militant Catholicism met civilisations
41:23which, to begin with, were able to fight back.
41:28But suddenly, the native peoples began dying in thousands,
41:32in the words of one despairing ruler,
41:35in heaps like bedbugs.
41:38It wasn't the soldiers,
41:40but invisible armies of European diseases that did most of the damage.
41:44Traumatised local peoples
41:46were often only too ready to turn to Catholicism.
41:51Up there is the Church of Our Lady of Help.
41:53You might think it was built on a hill,
41:55but in fact, it's built on top of the largest man-made pyramid in the world.
42:01When Catholic missionaries came to Mexico,
42:03they deliberately put churches on top of temples.
42:06They placed their place of sacrifice
42:08on top of the church of Our Lady of Help.
42:11When Spanish conquerors came to Mexico,
42:13they put churches on top of temples.
42:15They placed their place of sacrifice
42:17slap-bang on top of the old place of sacrifice.
42:20You might say, Catholicism rules OK.
42:26We can learn a great deal about the mindset of the Spanish conquerors
42:30by taking a closer look at one of their monuments to victory.
42:37This is the Capilla Real de Indios,
42:40or Capilla.
42:43I paid it a visit with leading Mexican historian Clara García.
42:51I was intrigued because it took me far away to Spain and Jerusalem.
43:06It's like nothing in the Christian world,
43:08but there are lots of great mosques in Syria and Egypt,
43:10and, of course, one in Spain.
43:12You've got the Grand Mosque of Cordoba.
43:14Now, do you think that's coincidence?
43:16No, no, no, you're quite right.
43:18It's fashioned after the Great Mosque in Cordoba.
43:20It's got 49 domes and seven aisles,
43:23and it's a huge open space also.
43:25Actually, what it reminds me of is an Islamic building in Jerusalem.
43:29It's the courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
43:32Now, let me just run this idea past you.
43:35This is built by Franciscans, right? Yes.
43:37Franciscans at the time think that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the temple,
43:40Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
43:42So do you think they're trying to recreate
43:45the New Jerusalem of the last days here?
43:48Oh, definitely, they're trying to recreate the New Jerusalem
43:51with new Christians, new Catholics.
43:53New Catholics.
43:54At the same time that the Protestant Reformation is going on in Europe,
43:58Catholicism is losing souls to the Protestants,
44:02and here they're gaining thousands of new souls.
44:06So it's the perfect New Jerusalem with the perfect Christians.
44:10They win some and you lose some.
44:12Yes, in the matter of speaking, yes.
44:17The inside of this church seems to mirror the mosque in Cordoba.
44:21The courtyard, the mosque in Jerusalem.
44:24So what is this building trying to say?
44:29Maybe this.
44:30Back home in Spain, Catholic Christians had crushed Islam.
44:34They turned their mosques into churches.
44:36Now, here in New Spain, Mexico,
44:39they crushed other false gods and conquered their princes.
44:42Now, what better way to commemorate that victory
44:45than in the same way build the princes a church which looked like a mosque?
44:51Just an idea.
45:04But after the horrors of conquest,
45:06the missionaries realised that in order to win hearts and minds,
45:09they would have to help the new converts
45:11to find joy and celebration in Catholicism.
45:14It had to assimilate native cultures.
45:19Nowhere have I seen a clearer demonstration of how this was done
45:23than in the nearby town of Santa Maria Tonantzintla.
45:27Of all the mad churches I've seen in Mexico,
45:30this is definitely the maddest.
45:32Tell me about it.
45:33Well, I think it's paradise.
45:35OK. It's a mad paradise.
45:37This is what I would imagine heaven to be like.
45:40Full of people, gay, angels everywhere.
45:43Pretty, beautiful.
45:46What happened is that when the Franciscans came to Santa Maria,
45:49a small village that they couldn't afford to leave a friar,
45:52so they would teach, maybe some elders, some children,
45:55educate them in the Spanish language and the rudiments of Christianity
45:58and then leave, come back a few years later
46:00and see how Christianity was doing.
46:03The actual villagers, the dwellers of the area,
46:06took Christianity and fashioned it in their own image and likeness.
46:14So it becomes an indigenous religion then
46:16because it's taught by people to pray and to worship.
46:19It becomes an indigenous religion then
46:21because it's taught by people to people in the village.
46:23Totally. And if you look at the faces of the angels,
46:27they're all local faces of the time.
46:30The Catholic Church
46:46When the missionaries went overseas,
46:48the Catholic Church was more than happy to mingle two cultures.
46:51But it was a curious sort of flexibility
46:54because it was flexible only about everyday religious practice.
46:58Now, some missionaries, especially the Jesuits,
47:01wanted to talk about the Christian faith itself in new ways,
47:04which would make sense in other cultures.
47:06But after much argument, the church hierarchy rigidly insisted
47:10that whatever Rome had said about Christian doctrine
47:13must be right and could never be altered.
47:22A perfect example of that curious flexibility
47:25is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
47:33The appearance of the Virgin Mary to a native near here
47:36was more than a miracle.
47:40She looks like the people of Mexico,
47:43which means that she and the Catholic Church can speak directly to them.
47:48But doctrinally, she is still the Virgin Mother of God.
47:56It's a Tuesday, and there are 8,000 people gathered.
48:04It's estimated that by 1550,
48:06as many as 10 million had been baptised as Catholics in the Americas.
48:17It was a huge morale booster for the popes in Rome,
48:21still smarting from the Protestant Reformation.
48:26Catholics were ready to fight back.
48:33A hundred years after Martin Luther
48:36first pinned his rallying cry to a church door,
48:39northern Europe had become solidly Protestant.
48:44But southern Europe had fallen behind the Catholic Church.
48:48And there was a great swathe of central Europe
48:51where the options were still open.
48:54It was a recipe for war.
49:09The first battlefield was Prague,
49:11capital of the modern-day Czech Republic.
49:14At the start of the 17th century,
49:16Protestantism had not only taken over
49:19much of northern and western Europe,
49:22it even reached here, to the capital of Bohemia,
49:26a kingdom which was a vital part of the Holy Roman Empire.
49:30By now, the vast majority of Bohemians were Protestants,
49:34and their Catholic rulers, the Habsburgs,
49:37had been forced to conspire against them.
49:40But in 1617, everything changed.
49:48The Catholic Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor
49:50chose one of his own family to be the next king of Bohemia.
49:53Archduke Ferdinand despised Protestants.
50:02In a pre-emptive strike,
50:05Bohemian Protestants seized the royal palace.
50:15On 23rd May 1618,
50:17they threw two of Ferdinand's officials out of this window.
50:23A heap of straw just below saved their lives,
50:26but not Habsburg pride.
50:28This incident has been splendidly christened
50:30the Defenestration of Prague.
50:38The Protestants invited a neighbouring Calvinist ruler,
50:41the Elector Palatine Friedrich, to become their new king.
50:49Friedrich lasted barely a year,
50:52and the new king, Friedrich I,
50:55Friedrich lasted barely a year.
50:58Unfortunately for Bohemia,
51:00Archduke Ferdinand became Holy Roman Emperor.
51:04His revenge was swift.
51:11In November 1620,
51:13the Bohemians and Protestantism
51:16were crushed at the Battle of White Mountain.
51:26Today, the site is at the end of a tram line,
51:29which seems appropriate, really.
51:32The only indication of its importance in European history
51:35is the nearby Catholic Church of Our Lady of Victory.
51:42And what we're looking at is the place which triggered
51:45one of the most bitter, destructive wars in European history.
51:49It lasted 30 years.
51:55In his victory, Emperor Ferdinand declared an empire-wide ban
51:59on reformed Protestantism.
52:03Lutherans and Calvinists realised that they had to come together
52:07to fight for the future of Protestantism.
52:11War overtook countries,
52:13and the Roman Empire,
52:15and the future of Protestantism.
52:18War overtook countries from Sweden and Denmark in the north
52:22to France and Spain in the south.
52:25Even Poland and Transylvania were sucked in.
52:31In the fight, between a quarter and a third of the population
52:35of Central Europe died before their time.
52:41It was 1648 before peace finally broke out.
52:44Much of Europe was a wasteland,
52:46and much of Europe would never be Protestant again.
52:49Wars of religion didn't seem such a good idea after all.
52:55The Catholics managed to push Protestantism back
52:58from parts of Central and Western Europe
53:00and confine it mainly to the north.
53:06But the Thirty Years' War
53:08had a much wider significance for Christian futures.
53:15Persecuted Protestants took flight, not just from Prague.
53:23Some, like the Swiss Anabaptists, quit the Old World for good.
53:30Maybe Protestantism could steal a march on Catholicism.
53:36In the New World...
53:39..in the New World...
53:41..in the New World...
53:44In the New World...
54:08In 1682, an influential English Quaker, William Penn,
54:12secured a new colony in North America.
54:17His goal was religious freedom,
54:19not only for Quakers, but for all Christians.
54:25Religious exiles of all persuasions flocked from across Europe.
54:33William Penn named this land Penn's Paradise.
54:37Pennsylvania.
54:43If you want to spot Anabaptists,
54:45then Lancaster County is the place for you.
54:47This is home to 37 distinct religious groups
54:50collectively known as Plain People,
54:52all descended from the radicals of the Reformation.
54:58They all belong to the Amish, Mennonite or Brethren churches.
55:04They keep up many old ways,
55:06especially a fine Protestant disregard for outside authority.
55:13Some defy the modern world by living without things
55:16we take for granted, cars, electricity.
55:24I met Stephen Scott of the Old Order River Brethren,
55:27who reminded me of that name all these folk have for themselves,
55:31the Plain People.
55:35Why have the Plain People split so much?
55:39Our faith applies to not only intangible doctrines,
55:45but to daily living.
55:47So, unfortunately, the more there is to disagree about.
55:51And an important principle is non-conformity to the world.
55:56So where do you draw the line between the church and the world?
56:00You have Mennonites and Amish who drive horse-drawn vehicles,
56:05but in my group we have cars.
56:08Well, this might seem a mischievous question,
56:11but what's wrong with the world?
56:13And I don't just mean the 21st century world,
56:15I mean the 16th century world that the first Anabaptists
56:18refused to conform to.
56:20What's wrong with the world?
56:22Well, there would be some basic issues,
56:25like the whole matter of pride.
56:28Dressing in a way that would draw attention to your body
56:31is very much discouraged.
56:33You would say, well, the Plain People do attract a lot of attention
56:37by the way they dress,
56:39but it's actually little if any different
56:43than the principles of monastic order.
56:49The Plain People are more than a curiosity.
56:53They tell us a great deal about what would have happened
56:56if the small Jewish sect from Galilee had not adapted.
57:02Yes, it may well have survived,
57:04just like the Plain People into the 21st century.
57:08Clinging to tradition can help in that way.
57:12But it would never have spread and become a world religion.
57:19The refusal of the Plain People to change their ways
57:22meant it wasn't they who would turn America
57:25into a great powerhouse of world Protestantism.
57:32In the next programme,
57:34I'll be looking at how a tiny, persecuted group of Bohemian Christians
57:39transformed Protestant fortunes.
57:45They sparked religious revivals that swept across Britain...
57:51..America...
57:53..and the world.
57:55They sparked religious revivals that swept across Britain...
58:00..America...
58:02..Africa...
58:04..and Asia.
58:06Protestantism was about to outstrip the missions
58:09of the Catholic Church.
58:14Why not take part in the Open University's online survey,
58:18What Does It Mean To Be A Christian Today?
58:22..and follow the links.
58:35You can see the next chapter of the history of Christianity
58:38next Thursday night at the later time of 11.30.
58:41Tonight on BBC HD, a rescue mission for an elderly lady,
58:45fables of forgotten things.
58:51MUSIC FADES