Middle Age And Reformation Essay

MIDDLE AGES AND REFORMATION The society of the middle ages was based in a Catholic civilization, though there were tensions between the Church and the emperors. The empire had a huge influence over the Church even in the election of the pope and the bishops. However, a new movement of reform began within the Church that was concretized by Pope Gregory VII. He released a document called Dictatus Papae in which he affirmed among others that the Roman Church was founded by God alone and the Pope was the one in charge of deposing emperors and bishops. This affirmation only helped to prolong the tensions between the pope and the rulers of the time. In terms of freedom, the reform of Gregory VII brought libertas ecclesiae, an idea of religious liberty …show more content…
He talked against the idea that the kings had divine rights and he also presented arguments against those who considered that the political authorities had to have influence in the decisions on religious matters. Furthermore, Bellarmine thought the ideas of the Reformation were going to pass soon, thus he emphasized the power of the Pope to depose a civil ruler and the need for the ruler to chastise heretics who were not in accord with the official religion. The tense relations between the Church and the state continued, now encouraged by civil, academic, and scientific revolutions that occurred in the European world in the eighteenth …show more content…
The freedom that the revolution wanted to achieve included the area of thinking and conscience and had concretion in the social life, especially in press freedom, freedom of worship, and freedom of education. These principles let behind the roots of a civilization based on the sacred to begin a secular civilization, based on three main characteristics: recognition of the nature of the state as non-confessional; secularization and religious neutrality of the public services; and separation between church and state. In this context of rejection and persecution of the Catholic Church, religious freedom was “understood as the freedom of every individual to determine for him or herself whether and what to believe, and the duty of the state to sever itself from any support of or interest in religion.” Here it was not only the freedom that even the Edict of Milan had introduced in which everybody could belong to the religion they preferred, but this time the principle included the need for cutting off any relationship that the state had with churches, specifically in this context the Catholic