By Matt Pozen – Director of Faith Formation
Last week we finished looking at the first of the Medici popes, Leo X (1513-1521), who reigned at the time that Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Luther posted his “95 Theses Against Indulgences” in October of 1517 but was not officially excommunicated by Leo until January of 1521. This 3-year gap allowed Luther’s ideas to spread like wildfire through Germany and beyond, thanks to the printing press and rising literacy rates among the middle class. In England, king Henry VIII took notice and commissioned his friend and advisor, Thomas More, to write for him “A Defense of the Seven Sacraments” against Luther’s ideas. For this, pope Leo bestowed upon Henry the title “Defender of the Faith”. How ironic that 12 years later Henry would break away from Rome when Leo’s nephew, pope Clement VII, refused to annul the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon (aunt of Emperor Charles V) so he could wed Anne Boleyn.
On December 1st, 1521, pope Leo X died in Rome. At the conclave to elect a successor, the cardinals were divided between a pro-Medici faction that wanted to elect Leo’s nephew and an anti-Medici faction. In the end the cardinals elected a Dutchman, Hadrian Dedal, who kept his baptismal name and became pope Hadrian VI (1522-1523). He had been the tutor of young Charles Hapsburg before he became king of Spain and then Holy Roman Emperor in Germany. The Roman people were appalled at the election of a “barbarian” from the north, rather than an Italian, and their animosity only grew stronger when pope Hadrian began to crack down on some of the Renaissance excesses of the city. He inherited a Vatican deeply in debt, due to Leo’s spending on artwork and the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica. In response to Luther’s growing movement, Hadrian focused on the reform of the Church’s central administration, which further turned the Italian cardinals against him. In the end he was isolated by his outsider status and worn down by the pressures of the times, and he died in 1523 after only 18 months of rule. It would be 450 years before another non-Italian was elected as pope: John Paul II in 1978!
At the conclave of 1523, the second Medici pope (nephew of Leo X) was elected as Clement VII (1523-1534). Like his uncle he was a Renaissance aristocrat with a love for art, commissioning Michelangelo to paint his famous Last Judgment scene on the wall of the Sistine Chapel. Fearing the power in northern Italy of both the French king (Francis I) and the Holy Roman Emperor (Charles V), the pope engaged in shifting alliances with them. Eventually Charles grew exasperated with this political game, and in 1527 his armies forced the Medici out of Florence and then invaded Rome. The German troops had not been paid in months, and many of them sympathized with Luther’s reform ideas. For eight days they sacked and pillaged the city, killing at least 4000 of its inhabitants, while pope Clement fled to the protection of Castel Sant Angelo. People all across Europe were shocked at the news of this worse sacking in the history of Rome. It wasn’t until Clement paid a huge ransom that the German troops withdrew from the city and the pope was able to reassert his control over Rome and Florence.
The tense relationship between the pope and the emperor prevented a united response against Luther’s reform movement in Germany, as well as against the Ottoman Turks in the east, who were now marching across Hungary towards Vienna. At the Diet of Speyer in 1528, Charles V and Clement tried to pass a law to end all toleration of Luther’s ideas. In response, 5 German princes and the representatives of 14 cities in the empire registered a formal “protest” against this law, from which the title “Protestant” gets its name. They forged a compromise with emperor Charles, by which the duke or prince of each region or city would choose the form of Christian faith adhered to by himself and his subjects. Two years later, at the Diet of Augsburg (1530), Charles sought to unite his empire against the Turks by seeking a compromise with the Lutherans. He asked their leaders for an orderly exposition of their reformed faith, much like a Creed, so he would know where they stood on important religious matters. Luther’s closest theological colleague, Philip Melanchthon, composed what would come to be known as the Augsburg Confession. When Charles saw some of the differences on issues like the sacraments and the papacy he realized he would not be able to reunite his realm around a common faith. He pushed the pope to convoke an ecumenical council to reform the Church and stop the spread of Protestant ideas, but Clement refused, fearing that a council would reduce papal authority and power.
Meanwhile in England, Henry VIII had his eyes on Anne Boleyn, and was pressuring Clement to grant an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had born him a daughter (Mary) but no son. The problem was that Catherine was the aunt of emperor Charles V, who was pressuring the pope to refuse the annulment. Unable to get his way with the pope, Henry decided that the annulment could be handled at the national level by the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. We’ll finish this story next week.