Luther Excommunicated: The Great Church Schism Deepens

Martin Luther had three years to recant. He refused every time. Pope Leo X tried debates, threats, and diplomatic pressure. Nothing moved the German monk who insisted the Catholic Church could not sell salvation. On January 3, 1521, Leo issued the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem, formally excommunicating Luther from the Catholic Church and declaring him a heretic. The confrontation had been building since October 31, 1517, when Luther posted his 95 Theses challenging the sale of indulgences, the practice of paying money to reduce time in purgatory. An earlier bull, Exsurge Domine, had given Luther sixty days to recant forty-one propositions. Luther responded by publicly burning his copy of the bull along with books of canon law in front of cheering students at the University of Wittenberg. The bonfire was not a spontaneous act of defiance. It was a calculated declaration of war against papal authority. The excommunication should have ended Luther''s movement. In previous centuries, papal condemnation had crushed dissent effectively. But Luther had two advantages no previous reformer possessed: the printing press and a powerful political patron. Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, refused to hand Luther over to Rome. German princes who resented sending money to the Vatican rallied behind the theological rebellion as much for economic reasons as spiritual ones. Within a generation, half of Germany had followed Luther out of the Catholic Church. The schism triggered the Wars of Religion that devastated Europe for 130 years, culminating in the Thirty Years'' War, which killed roughly eight million people. Leo X died in December 1521, the same year he signed the excommunication, probably without grasping that he had just created Protestantism. The Catholic Church never recovered its monopoly on Western Christianity.