OK whatever you say. It's your paper, not mine. Surely the anger at the Church predated 1500. Why was it such fertile ground? What abuses did the Church take part in?
Respectfully, this isn't my opinion. It's the opinion of scholars who study this period. As a lifelong Medievalist it's the basic premise that your studies don't go beyond 1500, because this is the Early Modern Period. This is perhaps not as well understood outside of historical circles.
The abuses were severalfold:
- The monasteries were a rich landowning class that came to be seen as ivory tower dwellers. They were meant to be ascetic but often ended up fat, rich and entitled. They would not fight in wars and so proved a liability in an age where battles were constant. They were also centres of what today would effectively be money-laundering and nepotism.
- The clergy were vastly undereducated. Some could barely read and sing Latin, nor explain Christianity well enough to the layman. They were also ordained often through nepotism and people became bishops on the basis of closeness to the King or Duke etc. rather than on merit. One bishop had to have his vows of consecration read to him because he couldn't read them himself, for instance, which ended up as a huge embarrassment.
- There were very few sermons in churches because technically only bishops were meant to give them, and they couldn't be bothered; didn't like leaving the city to visit rural churches and speak to rural people.
- The church was often seen as overtaking the power of the monarch in an unfair balance. The papacy famously hated temporal power and tried to strip it down as much as possible. Naturally this disrupted entire systems of government.
- Hierarchy in who-gets-communion-first and who-kisses-the-pax-first in the Mass. Rampant classism in the church.
You can find a lot of this in the wonderful book 'Going to Church in Mediaeval England' by Nicholas Orme. It's well worth a read.
I say all this as an Anglican with strong Catholic sympathies.
