In the autumn of , Beatlemania was a raging epidemic in Britain, and it was rapidly spreading across the European continent. At the time of his death, Phoenix was considered one of the most promising actors of his Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, is assassinated in New Delhi by two of her own bodyguards. Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, both Sikhs, emptied their guns into Gandhi as she walked to her office from an adjoining bungalow. Although the two assailants immediately On October 31, , in his first speech before British Parliament since the leaders of the American Revolution came together to sign of the Declaration of Independence that summer, King George III acknowledges that all was not going well for Britain in the war with the United Live TV.
This Day In History. Peter's and give the money to the poor folk who are being fleeced by the hawkers of indulgences. Beware of those who say that indulgences effect reconciliation with God. He who is contrite has plenary remission of guilt and penalty without indulgences. The pope can only remove those penalties which he himself has imposed on earth, for Christ did not say, 'Whatsoever I have bound in heaven you may loose on earth.
If the pope does have power to release anyone from Purgatory, why in the name of love does he not abolish Purgatory by letting everyone out? If for the sake of miserable money he released uncounted souls, why should he not for the sake of most holy love empty the place? To say that souls are liberated from Purgatory is audacious. To say they are released as soon as the coffer rings is to incite avarice. The pope would do better to give everything away without charge.
Buying indulgences gives people a false sense of security and endangers their salvation. Christians should be taught that he who gives to the poor is better than he who receives a pardon.
He who spends money on indulgences instead of relieving want receives not the indulgence of the pope but the indignation of God. Indulgences are most pernicious because they induce complacency and thereby imperil salvation. Those persons are damned who think that letters of indulgence make them certain of salvation. God works by contraries so that a man feels himself to be lost in the very moment when he is on the point of being saved. The church had established an elaborate machine for enabling its members to deal with their moral transgressions.
They could confess them to a priest and receive absolution on condition that they did a prescribed penance. But for a medieval Catholic, the visceral fear was of dying with an unconfessed — and therefore unabsolved — mortal sin on your record.
In that case, you went to hell for eternity, tortured by perennial fire and all the horrors imagined by Hieronymous Bosch. If you died with just unabsolved venial sins, however, then you did time in an intermediate prison called purgatory until you were eventually discharged and passed on to paradise. Being in purgatory was obviously better than roasting at gas mark six, and your place in heaven was ultimately guaranteed. But if you could minimise your time in the holding area then you would.
Into this market opportunity stepped the Roman church with an ingenious product called an indulgence. This was like a voucher that gave you a reduction in your purgatorial stay.
Initially, you could get an indulgence in return for an act of genuine penitence — following the confessional model — or for visiting a holy relic. But there came a moment in when Pope Sixtus IV announced that indulgences could be purchased on behalf of another person — say a deceased relative who was assumed to be suffering in purgatory, and therefore lying beyond the reach of confession and absolution.
In a continent of credulous and devout believers, this turned indulgences into a very big business. And, as with the US sub-prime mortgage market pre, it got out of hand. By , as Luther saw it, indulgences had become a racket in which a crass financial transaction substituted for the serious duty of real repentance.
A couplet coined by a particularly enthusiastic indulgence-hawker captured this crudity nicely:. As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, The soul from purgatory springs. In two consecutive theses, 20 and 21, for example, Luther set about attacking the very essence of papal authority. This might not look like much to a modern reader, unfamiliar with the intricacies of 16th-century Catholicism, but it was the equivalent of calling the pope a liar.
And in the Europe of , that was fighting talk. People had been burned at the stake for less. In the ordinary course of events, the church would have squashed such a turbulent friar as one would a mosquito. All it would have required was a letter to his religious superior, followed by a kangaroo court in Rome, and that would be that. Instead, Luther escaped death, survived excommunication and went on to light the fire that consumed Christendom. How come?
Historians cite two main reasons. What happened, in a nutshell, is that Luther understood the significance and utility of the new communication technology better than his adversaries.
In that sense, he reminds me of Donald Trump, who sussed how to use Twitter and exploit the hour news cycle better than anyone else. But whereas Trump contributed nothing to the communications technology that he exploited, Luther did. His understanding of the new media ecosystem brought about by print has been expertly explored by the Reformation historian Andrew Pettegree in a brilliant book, Brand Luther: , Printing, and the Making of the Reformation Penguin, Unlike most scholars of his time, Luther was both interested in and knowledgable about the technology of printing; he knew the economics of the business, cared about the aesthetics and presentation of books and understood the importance of what we would now call building a brand.
He knew, for example, that his message would only spread if he gave printers texts that would be economical to print and easy to sell — unlike conventional scholarly books in the early decades of printing.
Because paper was expensive, printing a standard scholarly tome required capital resources for buying and storing the necessary reams of paper. And because there was no developed market for distributing and marketing the result, many printers went bankrupt — which is why most printing and publishing was concentrated in large towns with established universities where at least some of the necessary infrastructure existed.
Although the original 95 theses were in Latin, as were most theological books of the period, Luther decided that he would write in German.
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