Comprehension Passages on the Reformation (for students with low literacy)
Comprehension 1 -- The Reformation
The Church and the State
In the year 1500, the Church (or what we now call the Roman Catholic Church) was very powerful (politically and spiritually) in Western Europe. It ruled over significant territory in Italy called the Papal States.
The Church was not the only powerful political force at work. There was the Holy Roman Empire made up of German speaking regions ruled by princes, dukes and electors. Rulers, monarchs or kings of Italian city-states, England, and nation-states of France and Spain were growing in power and wanted more power.
For some time the Church had internal power struggles. This made the church weak. Popes and Cardinals often lived more like kings than spiritual leaders. Popes commanded armies, made political alliances and enemies, and, sometimes, even waged war. Simony (or the selling of Church offices) and nepotism (or favouritism based on family relationships) were rampant. Clearly, if the Pope was concentrating on power and land, he did not have much time left for caring for the people in church. The corruption of the Church was well known, and several people like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus tried to reform or improve the Church, but none of these efforts successfully challenged Church practice until Martin Luther's actions in the early 1500s.
What is the Church called now?
What was the land the church controlled called?
Who wanted the power that the church had?
Why was the church weak?
Name five things that the church leaders did wrong?
Before Martin Luther came along, who tried to challenge the church?
Comprehension 2 Annotate this text
PART 1: Causes of Reformation
Read the whole article. Click the blue words if you do not understand a word. Circle other words that you do not understand. Put a question mark (?) beside what you do not understand. Ask a question about what you can’t understand if you can.
Colour the main idea of each paragraph. The main idea of the paragraph is called a topic sentence.
Many events led to the Reformation.
Clergy abuse caused people to begin criticizing the Catholic Church. Many clergy were greedy and had scandalous lives. They were supposed to care for the people in church but they did not speak the local language and lived separate from the people in their own area. The papacy lost the people’s respect.
The Bible was only printed in Latin, and not in the local language. And printing was controlled by the church by a system of censorship. Catholic Mass, the Church's main religious service, was also in Latin. This language barrier meant the people could not check from the bible whether what the priest said was actually correct.
The church sold tickets of indulgences (forgiveness) from sins for money. This suggested that the rich could buy their way into Heaven while the poor could not - quite the opposite of what the Bible says. (See Gospel of Matthew 19:24)
Religious posts or jobs were often sold to whoever was willing to pay the most money for them, see Simony. This meant that these priests were not qualified or suitable and did not know enough about Christianity. So they told the people many different things. Some of the things had little to do with what was written in the Bible.
Write out all the 4 main ideas. Paraphrase the sentences if you can. This is called summarise.
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PART 2: Answer the questions by colouring the sentences that answers the questions:
Red- What were the main complaints of Martin Luther in his 95 theses?
Yellow-What happened to Martin Luther after his protest?
Blue- How did Martin Luther protest?
Green-What made Martin Luther take action?
In 1515, the Pope started a new indulgence campaign to raise money for the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, a church in Rome. Preachers came to Germany to sell the indulgences, promising that money could release souls from purgatory. Martin Luther, a German Catholic monk thought this went too far. On October 31, 1517, he sent his 95 theses to the local archbishop in protest. It is said he nailed a copy to the door of a church in Wittenberg.
These theses, written in Latin, were points that Luther wanted to debate. Most of them related to the problems caused by the sale of indulgences. Luther said that the idea the money could buy forgiveness prevented people from turning away from sins. He said that it also made people give less money to the poor. Luther did not attack the Pope. He blamed the abuses on others. Nevertheless, his ideas implied that the pope was corrupt also. Without Luther's permission, the 95 Theses were translated into German and sent to many places. Many people agreed with Luther. The Catholic Church tried to stop these new ideas, but without much result.
The invention of the printing press helped spread awareness of the Church's abuses. A start was made in translating the Bible into various local languages. For example, John Wycliffe and William Tyndale worked on translating it into the English language. Much of Tyndale's translation was used in the King James version of the Bible. Luther translated the Bible into German.
Luther was considered an enemy of the Pope, and when he refused to change his ideas he was excommunicated (put out of the church). In the beginning, Luther had not planned to separate from the Catholic Church or to create a new religion; he wanted to reform the Catholic Church.
These questions must be answered in your own words. The answers are found in more than one place in the passage.
How did the printing press help Martin Luther?
Martin Luther wrote the 95 theses in Latin. Why?
PART 3 The impact or Consequences of the Reformation
1.The Pope reestablished the Inquisition to combat heresy. The Catholic Church responded to the Protestant reformation with the counter-reformation. Between 1545 and 1563 the Council of Trent met to decide what to do. Some of the worst abuses were eliminated but many of the old teachings were kept. The Inquisition tried to force people to keep those ideas. Finding force not very successful, the Pope created new religious orders like the Jesuits. These new religious orders were told to combat Protestantism by educating the population to Catholicism.
2. However, for a short time, Protestant and Catholic had managed to live with one another and with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. This Peace recognized the confessional division of the German states and gave the right to Protestants to practice their religion.
3.Today, the church has acknowledged the importance of that time in history. In 2016, Pope Francis praised Luther in a prayer service commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. In turn, some Protestant churches have embraced some Catholic worship traditions, and others have praised them for their stand on social issues.
4. Changes were made in books and art. The Pope made the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of banned books. It had a big influence in its first centuries and was not ended until the 1960s. The Catholic Church used baroque art to touch the religious feeling of the faithful and bring them to the Catholic religion.
5.In addition to the conflict in the churches, there were political consequences. Ordinary people were more open to questioning their leaders. In 1524-1525, millions of peasants rebelled against the nobles in the name of the equality of humanity in front of God. Many countries in Europe choose Protestantism as the state religion and so Europe was divided by religion. This brought religious wars such as the French Wars of Religion.
Adapted from https://kids.kiddle.co/
1.These paragraphs are in the wrong order.
Put them in the right order.
2. Colour the topic sentences blue.
3. Colour all the actions of the Pope in red.
Comprehension 3: Luther the Heretic
On November 9, 1518 the Pope condemned Luther’s writings as challenging the teachings of the Church.
One year later, a series of commissions were convened to examine Luther’s teachings. The first papal commission found them to be heretical, but the second merely stated that Luther’s writings were “scandalous and offensive to pious ears.”
Finally, in July 1520 Pope Leo X issued a papal bull (public decree) that concluded that Luther’s propositions were heretical and gave Luther 120 days to recant in Rome. Luther refused to recant, and on January 3, 1521 Pope Leo excommunicated Martin Luther from the Catholic Church.
On April 17, 1521 Luther appeared before the Diet of Worms in Germany. Refusing again to recant, Luther concluded his testimony with the defiant statement: “Here I stand. God help me. I can do no other.”
On May 25, the Holy Roman emperor Charles V signed an edict against Luther, ordering his writings to be burned.
Luther hid in the town of Eisenach for the next year, where he began work on one of his major life projects, the translation of the New Testament into German, which took him 10 years to complete.
Circle all the special words that refer to the actions of the church.
How do you know that the Pope saw Luther as an enemy?
How long did Luther take to translate the New Testament from Latin to German?
Do these quizzes on the same topic
https://www.ducksters.com/history/renaissance_reformation.php
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