John Wycliffe And John Huss Essay

Before the ecclesiastical reformation, formally known as the Protestant Reformation, before the time of Martin Luther, individuals began to spark the fire of the Protestant Reformation. Namely, John Wycliffe and John Huss, also known as Jan Hus, were predominant pre-reformers of the Protestant Reformation. Through their lifestyle, writings, ideas, John Wycliffe and John Huss triggered the Protestant Reformation. These contributions of Wycliffe and Huss were controversial in their time. The Catholic Church refuted, condemned, and persecuted the contributions that inspired the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Church persecuted those who upheld these contributions, such as Wycliffe and Huss. One can subsequently comprehend how these aspects …show more content…
Clouse wrote that these radical “views led to Wycliffe’s condemnation by a series of papal bulls issued in 1377.” Consequently, Wycliffe’s condemnation led Oxford to prohibit his teaching. In response, Wycliffe continued in a superior form of aggressiveness to oppose the Catholic Church. Anything that the Bible did not record, and church performed it, Wycliffe would oppose it. For example, he attacked transubstantiation; the sacramental power of the priesthood; the efficacy of the Mass; and the entire structure of the church’s rituals, ceremonies, and rites. In the end of his life, the Catholic Church did not directly kill Wycliffe. His death, while he was in Lutterworth in 1384, was due to a stroke. Although the church was not directly involved with the death of Wycliffe, it still desired to persecute Wycliffe, after his death. At the Council of Constance (1414-18), the Catholic Church condemned Wycliffe and his writings, and, subsequently, the church removed Wycliffe’s body from his burial ground and burned his remains and works. In juxtaposition to the church’s persecution of Wycliffe, the church’s persecution of Hus was severer. Instead of simply losing his job as Wycliffe had lost his, through the authority that Pope Alexander V empowered the archbishop of Prague to eliminate heresy in the archbishop’s diocese, the archbishop excommunicated Hus in 1410. However, this did not hinder Hus’s message. Hus continued preaching his message. Eventually, in 1414, he travels to Constance where the church trailed him and ultimately burned him at the stake. The ideas of both of these individuals caused the church to persecute them, and the church burned both of them: Wycliffe, when he was dead, and Hus, when he was