Okay, so we're looking at the series of events now that led up to the... the Reformation. And as I've said before, and one of the things that I've wanted to emphasize throughout this history, is that the Roman Catholic Church was never monolithic. It was never just one thing. I think in a lot of ways, it was the very heavy-handed attempt to make it monolithic and make it one thing, which sparked the Reformation in a lot of ways. There were always those who disagreed with the kind of popular orthodoxy. There were various aspects of it on theological grounds, on ecclesiastical grounds. There were always those that taught predestination, salvation by faith alone, sola scriptura. There were examples of those throughout history, long before Luther. And some of those we're gonna look at in the next couple of weeks. Now some of them were, now there were some that we don't really know about too much. Because they didn't really make a big splash like most of us probably don't know the name Gregory of Rimini Gregory of Rimini was a theologian who taught who was an Augustinian who taught Predestination and salvation by grace alone and so forth he didn't get in trouble because one of the as I've said before one of the things that to understand about the medieval church was you almost never got in trouble with the medieval church for teaching doctrines that the Pope disagreed with. You didn't get in trouble for teaching things like predestination or salvation by faith alone or things like that. That was never what, now later on that changed. But what got you in trouble with the Roman Church with challenging the authority of the Roman Church? That was always the situation. And that's why Hus and Wycliffe and the Waldensians and ones like that, it wasn't because they believed in predestination or sola fide, it was because they rejected the authority of the Pope. And that was the whole thing with Luther. Luther was not condemned for his view of salvation. Luther was condemned for his rejection of papal authority and rejection of conciliar authority, the authority of the councils. And so, as long as you acknowledge the authority of the Roman Church, the Roman Church didn't much care what you taught. And so there are a lot of names throughout this period, names that are known to us, and I expect a lot of names that are not known to us, who taught things that to us would look a lot more like the gospel than what we think of as kind of the reigning orthodoxy of the Middle Ages. We just don't know about them or they're not very famous because they taught and they wrote and they convinced some people, but they didn't change the, the zeitgeist as a whole, and so they were kind of forgotten. They did not carry the day in a major way. We know the name Hass and Wycliffe because they got in trouble with the church and therefore became a much bigger deal. And that's ultimately why we know the name Luther too. Yeah. Absolutely. It was because it was all about papal authority, and especially papal authority, but also conciliar authority, the authority of the councils, as we'll see as we go on. But the doctrines were there. The doctrines were there and taught in the church from the beginning. And usually they would be described as Augustinians, meaning not necessarily that they were members of the Order of Augustine, because the Order of Augustine was a monastic order that lots of people were part of. But being part of the Order of Augustine did not necessarily mean that you were an Augustinian. And the church, it was interesting. Some have said that the Reformation, as I think I've said before, in a lot of ways, was Augustine against Augustine, because the church really liked Augustine. Certain aspects of Augustine's teaching, especially his teachings of the right of the church to interpret scripture, the right of the authority of the church. He had a very medieval Roman Catholic view of the authority of the church, and also of the sacraments. He taught transubstantiation and baptismal regenerations, no doubt about it. And so the Roman Catholics have always been big champions of certain parts of Augustine's theology. But he also taught predestination, salvation by grace alone. And how you join salvation by grace alone with baptismal regeneration has always been an interesting question. But Luther did it too. So the reformers as a whole always thought there was a tension there, which I think they're right. So anyway. there were those that challenged the authority of the church, that challenged the right of the Pope to govern the whole church. And we talked about some of those going all the way back to the early time. We talked about some of those various, when we talked about the growth and the consolidation of Roman power. One of the most prominent and striking examples of this though, was the group known as the Waldensians. And I want to start talking about them a little bit. Peter Waldo started teaching in the south of France in 1170. And he was not a monk or a priest, he was a layman. But he was an educated layman, he was a businessman originally. He taught, he denied the papacy, denied that the papacy was a real thing at all. He taught only two sacraments, baptism in the Lord's Supper. He taught that faith in God is required for salvation. Scripture alone is the authority. and that scripture should be read in the common tongue. So right there is 1170, and this is a big movement. This isn't just one guy. This is a big movement in the south of France, big enough to attract papal attention. And he anticipates many of the arguments of the reformers and of Haas and of Wycliffe. Waldensianism was declared a heresy in 1220 AD and was suppressed with a crusade. So you remember we talked the crusades were more than just against the Muslims, that there were crusades called against other people. There had been crusades in the south of France before. against the Qatari, also known as the Albigensians, they were actually heretics. They were not Orthodox Christians at all. They would have been viewed as heretics every bit as much by John Calvin as by the Pope. But the Waldensians were a different story. As I said, I think it's very, very fair to view them as proto-reformers. And they were suppressed brutally. It was a bloody, bloody thing. Whole villages massacred and awful things that happened through that crusade. But they failed to destroy them. And part of the reason for that was the hostility of the French King to the Roman Pope through a lot of this period that we'll talk about a good deal more. There was always a rivalry and a tension in a lot of times between the French King and the Roman Pope. And the result of that was that the Waldensians just barely survived. through to the Reformation. They fled out of the south of France in some cases and took up residence in Switzerland and other places. When the Reformation happened, the Waldensians basically just joined the Reformation. They recognized the Reformation as kindred spirits and joined the reformed wing of the Reformation, not the Lutherans. They would have had differences with the Lutherans, but they were very, very close to Calvin's teachings. and really joined the Reformation. Boniface VIII was the most significant Pope in this period. He became Pope at the end of the 13th century in 1290, 1294, something like, I didn't put the date down, but right around 1294, 1295, something like that. Between Innocent III and the Reformation, there was only really one significant pope, really one important pope, and that was Boniface VIII. After Innocent III, you remember we talked about Innocent III, that he was the really powerful guy. He was the one who raised the papacy to its pinnacle. He was the most powerful man in Europe. He directed civil affairs. He had fiefdoms and armies and, you know, as I said, overthrew the reign of kings and emperors, including Otto IV. After Innocent, the popes that came after him did a pretty good job of maintaining the aura of supremacy of the papacy. And the reason they did that was because they didn't, the reason they were able to do that was because they didn't try to exercise that power. They kind of left the glow around it and kind of continued to kind of make the claims of Innocent III, but they didn't try to do what Innocent III did. They didn't try to govern the affairs of nations. They kept a pretty low profile. As I have said, through most of the Middle Ages, and I think even into today, Most of the popes have been very practical men. And they've been interested in maintaining the power and the prestige of the papacy. And in order to do that, they exercise the authority of the papacy very carefully and very rarely. So they maintained that aura of the supreme papacy up until, as I said, the end of the 13th century, the reign of Boniface VIII. Boniface VIII Wanted to be innocent the third in a big big way and he tried very hard The problem was was that he was not innocent the third. He was not a Lot of innocent the third success came out of his own personal character. He was widely regarded as a very godly man Very interested in helping the poor and promoting Christian morals and and those kinds of things He took a lot of really ruthless measures to do that But everybody thought he was a good man, not interested in personal ambition or power or wealth. He was also very wise, very clever, knew who he could push around and who he couldn't and when and so forth. He was judicious. Boniface VIII was none of those things. Boniface was a greedy, arrogant, power-hungry, Even Roman Catholic historians acknowledge the many failures. Those that are interested in defending the institution of the papacy will try to justify some of his behavior, but most of even the Roman Catholic theologians will not, will acknowledge that he was a man of many, many personal failures. He tried to, it started with the, There were a couple of main things that he really engaged in. There was a family, a very, very powerful and wealthy, very old family in Rome called the Colonna. And he tried to instruct the Colonna, to tell the Colonna how they were to divide up their estate. There was a particular case when a death happened. And he wanted the wealth and the power of this particular family to support his own people, his own extended family members and supporters. And they refused. They just refused to acknowledge that he had any right to direct their personal affairs. And he excommunicated them and called a crusade against this family, the Colonna, in Rome. And there was a war and a great slaughter, and many of them were killed. And he ended up disbanding this family and giving all of their titles and their wealth to his own supporters. There was also the case of Sicily. Sicily had been under the rule of Norman kings for quite a while. And he tried to have Sicily, again, that that land redirected to his own supporters. He tried to demand that they give it up and give it to others. Never did succeed and made enemies of those kings as a result. He had one particular favorite, his own nephew, who ended up becoming fabulously wealthy as a result of the favor of, because every chance that Boniface got, he took lands and titles away from other people and gave them to his nephew. So he was widely known for simony and nepotism. When people talk about the papacy at its worst, they're often talking about a guy like Boniface VIII. A lot of the others were corrupt and evil men, but they kept a low profile and didn't cause this kind of transnational problem. Where he really met his match was with Philip of France, Philip the Fair. He was called the fair after his appearance, not after his personal character. Philip was an intensely ambitious, cruel, greedy, he was everything that Boniface was without the pretense of holiness. Philip the Fair was actually the most powerful man in France, in Europe, not Boniface VIII, as much as Boniface wanted to be. And he had a long-running feud with Philip. It started because Philip was at war with with England, Edward II, I believe. And he needed money for the war. And so he taxed the French clergy, the French bishops. As was always the case throughout this period, The bishops were usually fabulously wealthy, and they were also not subject to the taxation of the state. And so they were a right target. So Philip tried to tax them. The bishops tried to refuse. They complained to Rome. And Rome forbade Philip from taxing the bishops. And Philip responded with a couple of measures. One of them was that he forbade any gold or silver from being exported out of France. And also forbade any foreigners from living in France. which did two things. It prevented money from going out of France to the Pope, and it also got rid of all of the papal legates out of France. It went back and forth. Philip wouldn't stand down. Like I said, he was not one to be pushed around. He would imprison bishops that were loyal to Boniface. It finally came to a head. He excommunicated Philip. Philip ignored it. Many of the cardinals in France ignored it. They believed that Boniface, and they started, and then Philip started calling into question the legality of Boniface's election. He accused Boniface of murdering his predecessor. accused Boniface of denying eternal punishment and declaring Christianity to be a false religion. A lot of stuff which was obviously spurious, but he also accused Boniface of simony and nepotism, which was true, and he also accused Boniface of an immoral relationship with his own niece, which Nobody knows for sure whether we expect not but that was always the sort of things whenever you wanted to accuse somebody of something you always threw into some steamy bit of immorality to really make it stick. So back and forth it went. Boniface was Boniface was just about ready to pronounce the ban on France. He would not back down, and neither would Philip. At one point, he called the Holy Roman Emperor. He released, he deposed Philip the Fair, said that Philip the Fair no longer had the right to the French throne, and called on the Holy Roman Emperor, the German Emperor, to take his throne. The Holy Roman Emperor wisely declined the gift because there would be no way that the Holy Roman Emperor at that point in history could have successfully invaded France and defeated the king. So he was just about to drop the final tool he had at his disposal to see whether that would work and put the ban on France, the interdict on France. Fate intervened. There was an attack in Rome by supporters of the Colonna and supporters of the Cathari. You remember the Cathari were the heretics in southern France that had been suffered so much from the Crusades. They banded together and they sent a group of about 300 men in to actually besiege and take the, it was a surprise attack that captured the Pope. They ransacked the papal palace and captured him and were going to take him up to, they were going to take him up to, to, to France, to, to, be under the justice of the French king. But some of them had a change of heart at the last minute and rescued him and brought him back. But he was utterly humiliated by that, by his inability to even protect himself. At that time, he was in his 80s by then. He'd ruled about nine years. And they think at that point that he was probably insane. He would spend all day beating his head on the wall and uttering gibberish that he'd just gone mad by then. He was so obsessed and he'd been humiliated and shamed and died about a month after that attack. A historian of the day said that he came in like a fox and ruled like a lion and died like a dog. And that was And Boniface's rule began the downslide of the papacy. It was all kind of downhill from there to the Reformation. The man who was the pope after Boniface ruled only a very short time, about nine months. We believe that he was probably poisoned and murdered, which was a very common occurrence throughout the Middle Ages. Many popes were. Popes often had a shorter lifespan than kings, because he usually got fabulously wealthy by being the pope. Boniface had a huge estate. would be modern days, it would be the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars he was worth by the end of his, from all of the wealth that he received. He was the one, as I said, that had declared the year 1300 to be a jubilee, which meant that anybody who came and spent 30 days in Rome at a pilgrimage would receive plenary indulgences, would have all of the temporal punishment for their sins remitted. And it was so popular that they said there were 200,000 pilgrims in Rome at any given time that year, which was probably double the population of the city normally. They said he employed two monks full time with rakes, sweeping up all the coins in front of St. Peter's, the altar in St. Peter's Cathedral. It was so popular. It was supposed to be once every century. There was a story about an old, old man who was 107 years old who came in that said that he had been there for the Jubilee in 1200 and his father had told him they did this every hundred years. So he needed to come back in 1300 when they have the second one. There's no historical verification that any such jubilee ever happened in 1200, but they were going to do it every century. Well, it was so popular and so enriching for the papacy that they declared another one in 1350, 50 years later, and then in 1400. Then they started doing it every 33 years. Well, the Pope said, people's lifespans are short. They might not have a chance to do one if it's only 50 years. And then 25 years, and so then it got pretty frequent after that. So I think they were doing it every 25 years, up until about 1900. I'm not sure if they're still doing it or not. But anyway, huge source of revenue. Brought in pilgrims from all over Europe who donated huge amounts of money. Anyway, the man who ruled after Boniface ruled only a very short period of time and was probably poisoned, as I said. After that, that takes us to the next section on your outline, which is the Avignon Papacy. This is when things started getting really ugly. What happened after the rule of Boniface's successor, There was a long, very difficult struggle for the papacy, who it was that was going to be elected. There was basically, it was a huge power struggle, mainly between the French faction and the Italian faction. And the French faction ended up winning the day. And a French cardinal became elected the pope. And he never left Avignon. He just stayed right there at Avignon and decided that he would move the papal court there. He was the creature of Philip the Fair. He was owned lock, stock, and barrel by Philip. Philip pretty clearly maneuvered the election to put him in power. And that began what they called the Babylonian captivity. Because through that next 70 years, And in the reign of seven popes, the papacy was captive to the French king. And it was in Avignon and not in Rome. And it was utterly corrupt. It very much It very much was an echo of the worst days before Gregory the Great in the late first millennium, in the 8th century and 9th century. They openly sold office. They favored their own family members. There was greed, immorality, sensual. It was an extremely sensual court. not even a pretense of celibacy. It was a scandalous, corrupt time for those. There was a couple of them that were kind of decent men, but most of them were just total villains through this 70 years. during that 70 years, it says a lot about Rome that by the end of that period, Rome had become so destitute. It was so dependent completely on the papacy for all its revenue. Uh, the, they said the pools were stagnant and full of weeds. The monuments had been broken down. You were actually in danger of being attacked by wolves in the city at night. The population probably fell to around 20,000. The walls were in disrepair. It just was becoming a ruins because it was almost completely abandoned through the Avignon Papacy. And the effect of the Avignon Papacy was to bring the papacy into just complete contempt throughout Europe. Everybody knew there was a huge problem that needed to be dealt with. At the end of that time, Late in that period, in, let's see, it was about 70 years, it was about, let's see, 1369, I believe it was, when finally the cardinals got together and tried to fix the problem. And they said, we need to fix this, this is ridiculous, we need to get it back into Rome. So they were in Rome for the papal election, and there was a crowd of Romans that was rioting, and the cardinals were afraid for their lives. And so they elected, and what they were rioting for was they wanted a Roman bishop to be elected. They wanted one of the Roman cardinals to be elected pope from one of the Italian families. So they did, because they were scared for their lives, and they elected Urban VI. Then they left Rome and they felt better of it because Urban VI, everybody knew he was a scoundrel. And so they departed a little ways into France and they held another election and elected a different man the Pope. The problem was Urban VI didn't step down. So now you had two Popes. Now there had always been cases where there had been some other pope that was declared by some king or emperor or some small group of cardinals or something like that. But here it was the same group of cardinals that had elected both popes. And so there was no simple way to determine which one was the right one. And so that state of affairs went on for another 30 years because their successors didn't step down either. So you had two popes for this 30-year period. It's called either the Western Schism or the Great Schism. And then all of Europe would divide up under support of the various different popes. France and Scotland and Spain might support the French pope, and Italy and the Holy Roman Empire, and England would support with all the various other smaller players lining up onto one faction or another, would support the Italian pope. At the Council of Pisa in 1409, they tried to fix it again. The council deposed both popes. Both popes agreed to step down, and they were deposed, and another pope was elected. The problem is that both of the other popes reneged on their promise. They did not step down. And that led to a six year period when there were three popes. Three popes all officially claimed by a council of the church. By an official valid election of the church. And with no clear way to distinguish which was which. So then, as I said, for a few years there were three popes. That all finally ended at the Council of Constance in 1415. And part of the Council of Constance, part of the thing that happened there was what was called the rise of the theory of conciliarism. Part of the problem was, was because in Europe at the time, in Roman Catholicism, there was no power recognized as higher than the Pope. So that if there was no power higher than the Pope, who could tell the Pope to step down? Well, there was nobody that could tell the Pope to step down if there was no power higher than the Pope. That gave rise, as I said, to the theory of conciliarism, which was that the council was higher than the Pope, and that the Pope had to answer to the council. Now, this is one of the great ironies of medieval Catholicism. is that it was conciliarism that saved the papacy. But then the papacy shortly afterwards rejected conciliarism and said no. They once again went back to the old theory that there was no power higher than the Pope. That the Pope would never appeal to anyone else. It was never appealed to a higher authority. That was officially declared in by Pope Pius II in the late 1900s, that was officially declared, that the pope never had to answer to any council. But the Council of Pisa succeeded. Two of the three popes agreed to step down and did. The third pope was excommunicated and declared an antipope, and they restored the singular papacy. in 1415. That council was also the council that burned John Huss at the stake, and we'll talk about that in a moment. But one of the things that happened, so this was basically from 1300 to 1415, when you had this combination of a little over a century, when you had the combination of Boniface VIII and that great scandal, the Avignon Papacy, and then the Great Schism. And you can imagine what this did for the reputation of the papacy at this time. And this gave rise to the beginnings of the great assault on the very institution of the papacy itself. Pamphleteers and writers and scholars began to openly question the papacy, began to openly call into question the whole thing, and say that we just don't need this. We can do better than this. both from within the Orthodox Church and from outside of it. There was also a great increase in nationalism at this time, an increase in identification with looking at the national institutions like France or Germany or Italy, even though Germany and Italy as nations didn't really exist yet, but especially France and England as being strong nations or what's going to provide prosperity and peace rather than this endless divisiveness of the papacy. Men like Pierre Dubois, Marsiglius of Padua, Ockham the schoolman, that all called into question in one direction or another. Some of them would say that there should still be a papacy, but the papacy should be just first among equals, should not direct all the other affairs of the bishops, and has no right to tell the kings or emperors what to do. Some of them said there should be no papacy at all. We should not acknowledge any succession of St. Peter. And various things like that. Some of them advanced conciliarism, that the councils of the church were superior over the papacy. Some of them advanced something more like an equality of bishops. So there was a variety of approach that was taken throughout this period. but there were a lot of different voices rising up. And it was the best and most memorable and most brilliant of the voices at this time were all the ones attacking the papacy. The ones who were defending, there were lots who were defending the papacy, but were widely regarded as the lapdogs of whatever Pope they were under and were not very impressive. One of those, a rather famous man named Dante Alighieri, you're familiar with the Divine Comedy perhaps. If you really want to understand the period, you really want to understand the Middle Ages, one of the best sources you can go to is to read the Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy will tell you a tremendous amount about the nature of things in the Middle Ages. It was written in 1300. Now, you have to get a version that has good notes, because there's constant references to the politics and the events of the day without any explanation. So unless you get some good historical notes along with it, you won't understand it. But two versions I know that are very good. Dorothy Sayers' version has long been very, very widely regarded as a great translation with really good historical notes. And John Ciardi's version is a modern version that I've read, and it's also very, very good. A very readable style of poetry. He really seeks to capture the feel of the original poetry, and his notes are very, very helpful as well. But he, the Divine Comedy in lots of ways, one of the major themes of the Divine Comedy is attacking the popes. Attacking the institution of the papacy. He put several of the popes in hell. including Boniface VIII, who was the Pope at the time he wrote it. Now you might ask how it was that he had Pope Boniface VIII in hell when Boniface wasn't even dead yet. Well, the way he got around that was by saying that Boniface was so evil that demons took over his body so that his soul could be cast into hell early. And he had good reason. Dante was a member of a prominent family in Florence. Florence at the time was maybe the richest city in Italy. And Italy at that time, remember, was not a nation. It was a collection of city-states, really. And Florence was one of those city-states. Florence had an ongoing problem with factionalism. There were two rival factions that had long battled over control of Florence. One of those factions won out. And then that faction split into two factions and was fighting with each other over control of the city. They called in Boniface VIII to help them. Boniface offered to mediate the dispute. They accepted his help. He came in and used it as an opportunity to bring his own soldiers in and put the previous faction that had been outed back in control of the city, which led to show trials and massacres and slaughters, including much of Dante's own family. Dante was a politician in the city at the time. Dante happened to be out visiting other other family members abroad in Europe and so was not caught up in it. He spent the rest of his life in exile and had a bitter hatred for for Boniface as a result. But he said he He rejected the supremacy of the Pope. He said the Pope should be supreme only over the church, not over the affairs of state. He thought that the solution was the supremacy of the emperor, of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, that he should be elevated to a much higher, should be supreme over earthly affairs, that that would lead to a much better. But his work was powerful, and it had a huge impact on Europe, because it's a brilliant poem. They say Dante basically invented the modern Italian language, much like the effect that Shakespeare had on modern English. So he was widely influential. He wrote in 1300, and he was followed by all these other, he kind of opened the floodgates in a lot of ways, made it intellectually respectable to criticize the pope, and so a lot of people did. And not just the particular behavior of any one pope, but the papacy itself. Another, Ockham the schoolman, you may have heard of Ockham's famous razor, badly abused in debate and discourse often in our own day. But Ockham was a schoolman and he was another one, a major theologian, widely respected, that rejected the institution of the papacy. He said the papacy was not necessary or of the essence of the church. He said you could have a papacy if you wanted to, but you didn't have to have one. It wasn't necessary. and that popes and councils can and have erred, made mistakes, and that the pope had no secular power. The pope should have no right to direct the affairs of secular states. So I think that's enough for today. Next week, we'll take up John Wycliffe and John Huss, the real, in lots of ways, the really important forerunners of the Reformation. Are there any questions or comments of any of that? So this is the, as I said, the 14th century, which really leads to the scandal of the papacy, which really leads to the ferment, which creates the Reformation. Christy, do you have a question? What would the Catholic Church say about this time period and their popes? Would they defend them, would they? Different things. It depends, depending on the particular pope. Their argument is, Their argument is not that any of the popes were perfect men, apart from maybe St. Peter himself. That the popes are flawed men, and some of them are more flawed than others. The Roman Catholics admit that some of the popes clearly were not even believers. They were openly not Christians. But it doesn't matter, because the papacy is still the institution that God ordained, that God set up to do his will, and God does his will through the papacy. And therefore you have to submit to the papacy, whether or not the Pope is a particularly good man. Okay? So they freely admit that there were abuses, there was, you know, simony, nepotism, corruption, immorality, all those things. But to them, that doesn't matter because of the way they view the church. To them, see, we believe, of course, in the visible and the invisible church, right? There is the visible church, which is the institution. And that's important because it is the vehicle by which God does his will through, and it's the vehicle in many ways, which contains the invisible church. But it's the invisible church, which is composed of all the believers. So somebody could be in the visible church and yet not of faith. Right? Not really of the invisible church. Not really believed. And will ultimately, therefore, be separated out. Will be revealed as a hypocrite and separated out. So the Roman Catholic thinking, there is no such division. They don't make a distinction between the visible and the invisible church. There is just the visible church, right? And salvation is to be found through the visible church. And so even if there are members of the visible church that are not believers, It doesn't ultimately matter, even to their own salvation. But you can still go to heaven because you're part of the visible church. You're in communion with St. Peter. You're in communion with the Roman, the Bishop of Rome. And that was one thing I mentioned about, one thing I should have mentioned about Boniface VIII. He issued the very famous bull, Unum Sanctum, the names of those are always the first two words of the bull in Latin. Unum Sanctum means one holy, because one holy Catholic Church is the main thrust of that. And what he states in that is, first of all, there's the big point about the Church's superiority over all secular states, that they gain their power from the Pope like the moon gains its light from the sun. is the precise argument that Boniface makes in that bull. He also says that there, and this is unique for the Roman church. This is the first time that this is so baldly and plainly stated that there is no salvation for any human creature that is not in submission to the Pope of Rome. So he excommunicates all the Eastern Orthodox Christians and all the, everybody really, everybody that is not in fellowship with the Pope of Rome is out. And that was a papal bull and that is the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church today. Whatever they say, whatever spins they put on it, that is the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, is that salvation is to be found in fellowship with the Roman Bishop only. Okay, so because of that very monolithic, very unitary understanding of what the church is, that there is the visible church, and that's the Roman church, and that's the only one there is, and what matters for salvation is being in that church and receiving those sacraments. Personal faith is good, and any good Roman Catholic will tell you, yeah, you should have faith, absolutely. But you don't absolutely have to. You can have what's called an implicit faith, where you believe what the church believes, whatever that is, even if you don't know what the church believes. The Council of Trent declares the doctrine of salvation by faith alone to be a damnable heresy. So then you can say, here's a guy like, and even Boniface VIII, they would not say, they would defend him, or they would admit his faults. Other popes, they would not. There were two different popes that were beaten to death by men who came home and found them with their wives, okay? Two different occasions in papal history when that happened, okay? So, you know, there were a lot of these guys that were like that. who everybody knows got their office by murdering their predecessor and so forth. But the Roman Catholic theology, the thesis, has to say that even given that, they are still the Pope, and they are still the Vicar of Christ, and they are still the ruler of the Church, and you must be in fellowship with him in order to be saved. Papal infallibility needs to be understood carefully. Papal infallibility does not mean that everything the Pope says is true. It doesn't mean that at all. Papal infallibility means that when the Pope makes ex cathedra declarations, when they issue papal bulls or things like that, ex cathedra means from the chair, okay? Then those are infallible. But the popes don't do that very often. Now there's a lot of debate about how, that doctrine has been so heavily qualified in our own day that it almost doesn't mean much. That the real power of the pope is not in his infallibility, it's in his right to govern the church. The right to appoint and depose bishops and so forth. They very rarely, the pope hasn't made an ex cathedra declaration I think in several hundred years. Since probably, I think the excommunication of Martin Luther, I'm pretty sure, was the last papal bull. Or the last infallible statement of the ex-cathedral declaration of the pope. Anyway, around that time, modern popes are, as I said, they're very pragmatic people. They're very practical. And they know that you can claim a lot of power, but if you try and exercise it, you'll just look foolish. And so they don't, very often. So they'll freely admit that there were popes that were heretics, there were popes that were unbelievers. Because you have one pope declaring a previous pope to be a heretic. I mean, that happened. So if they're all infallible, then how does one pope declare another pope to be a heretic? And yet, that's a matter of historic record. One pope declared the doctrine of papal infallibility. You lie from the pit of hell. How do you, I don't know, you know? And then the other thing they do is there is the idea of the antipope. There are some popes, now this never has to do with the character or the doctrine of the man in particular. It always has to do with the way he was elected. So in these periods, when you have two popes or three popes at the same time, when there were rival popes, through complex legal theories, they will determine which one of those lines was really the right one and say, this is the line of two popes and the others were anti-popes, because there cannot be more than one pope. There cannot be more than one vicar of Christ. So they declare the other ones to be false popes. And again, there's complicated legal theories that I don't understand that will decide which election was the valid election and which ones weren't. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Yeah, one point, and we'll see this more when you get into the Reformation, sometimes the Council of Trent is just, you may have heard it referred to as the Counter-Reformation. That there was the Reformation, and then the Roman Catholic Church responded with the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation, to kind of respond to the Reformation. I think that's probably not a very fair way of looking at it. And I make this point just in response to your question, because, Everybody knew the church needed reforming. Everybody knew that. And what happened is, is that the church as a whole engaged in a massive effort at Reformation. And some of those efforts at Reformation ultimately ended up being incompatible with other efforts at Reformation. Part of that Reformation became the Protestant Reformation. That was one direction that was taken by many countries and people and areas. The other part of that reformation became what is now the modern Roman Catholic Church, and what found its expression at the Council of Trent. So the Council, you say, how do they respond to it? The Council of Trent is how they responded to this, in a lot of ways. Because like I said, everybody knew that this was a huge scandal that needed to be dealt with. Other questions or comments? All right, let's close in prayer. Merciful and gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you again for your wonderful providence and your benevolence and your sovereign power in preserving your church, even through these very scandalous and difficult times when the church fell into such disrepute and such corruption and evil in so many ways. We thank you for preserving your true church through all of this. and continuing to draw in your people and to spread the gospel among your elect and to pave the way for a much greater and fuller recapturing of the gospel and the prophecy of reformation, Lord. We thank you for that and we pray your blessings on us. We pray that you would likewise work reformation in our own times, that your gospel would continue to spread and your people would continue to be drawn into the kingdom by your truth and your spirit, Lord. We pray all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.