Original subtitles

For over a thousand years, one Church dominated Western Europe.

Roman Catholicism was the only official religion.

And at its centre was the Pope in Rome,

a bishop who could crown kings and launch crusades.

Five centuries ago, that Church was torn apart

by a vast religious revolution -

the Reformation.

In this film, I want to discover what sparked

that cataclysmic upheaval that led Christian to kill Christian.

Luther said the devil was raging, and it was Luther

fighting against that devil, as a prophet at the end of the world.

That one man, Martin Luther, launched an attack on corruption

that split the Church.

Europe was gripped by religious wars and atrocities.

The Protestants were regarded as people who polluted the city,

and it would be doing God's work if they were massacred.

Christianity broke into intolerant factions

and communities were divided for generations.

The Pope is a man of sin, and I believe the Reform faith

and they identify the Pope as the Antichrist, and I accept that.

I want to find out if the Reformation really needed to happen,

if it had to lead to such bloodshed and turmoil.

This was the greatest struggle in the history of my religion.

It was Christianity's civil war.

I was brought up a Protestant in the Church of England.

My family went regularly to church.

And Sunday School was one of the few constants in my life,

as my father's work took us anywhere from Bath to Singapore.

But 15 years ago I went through my own personal reformation.

The Church of England had abandoned its roots and its traditions,

and seemed immersed instead

in the liberalism and political correctness of the modern world.

That wasn't the Church I'd been brought up in, and I didn't feel

I belonged there any more.

So I left and I became a Roman Catholic.

I was free to make my deeply personal conversion.

It opened no rift with my brother,

who's still a vicar in the Church of England.

But five centuries ago it would have been very different.

Back then, as the Reformation swept across Britain,

I could have been beheaded as a traitor

or burned alive as a heretic.

For a century, the common people of England

faced waves of religious change, tyranny and persecution.

At the Catholic monastery of Westminster Abbey,

the monks were thrown out and holy relics destroyed.

Families were divided by their faith

as England became an officially Protestant country.

This immense upheaval was sparked by a crisis in Western Christianity.

Across Europe,

there were fears the Medieval Catholic Church had become corrupt.

There were calls for sweeping reform,

even panicked claims that the end of the world was approaching.

The man who brought all these hopes and fears to a head was not a king,

pope or emperor, but a lowly German monk called Martin Luther.

There had already been attacks

on power-crazed bishops, ignorant priests and fake holy relics.

Luther targeted a set of corrupt documents, called Indulgences.

In 1517, he made them the launch pad for his religious rebellion.

This is Indulgence, it's a printed piece of parchment.

We have also got manuscripts with the same text,

it's a blank form, you had to fill in the name of the person who bought...

Received it, yeah.

..who received it here in this part...

So whose authority was behind this certificate?

In this case, it was the authority of the Pope.

'The Church sold these simple pieces of parchment

'for vast sums of money.

'It claimed by buying one you could wipe away

'all the sins of a wicked life,

'and were guaranteed swift access to an eternity in heaven.

'Luther saw Indulgences as expensive con tricks

'which could never save a sinner.

'He laid out his argument against these symbols of Church corruption

'in 95 academic points, or theses.

'But the Pope was less than pleased with Luther's detailed proposals.'

So, OK, Luther was attacking Indulgences.

What was so radical about that?

Many were critical of Indulgences, and that's of course the reason why

the 95 theses were so successful,

because people thought, "Yes, this is exactly what I think."

But nobody before had written really 95 theses attacking this

as a practice in the Church, and in 1520 Luther is declared a heretic.

Heresy was the greatest crime of the Middle Ages.

Luther was cast out of the Church, his books were banned

and the authorities were commanded to burn him alive.

At the same time, Luther was also raising the stakes.

It was no longer simply Indulgences.

He was now convinced that, instead of any Church ritual,

it was faith in God alone that would earn you a place in heaven.

For Luther, Jesus was the only leader of the Church, and the Pope,

who had damned him as a heretic, was actually the Antichrist,

his opponent in a titanic battle between good and evil.

I believe that the medieval Church

wasin need of urgent and sweeping reform.

But what Luther was proposing was something more than just

a simple attack on corruption.

It was something more than just an academic theological debate.

He was mounting a challenge

to the very nature and structure of the Church.

He could never have realised it, but what Luther was unleashing

was one of the greatest

political and religious revolutions in history.

Luther was summoned to the German city of Worms

and given one last chance to recant.

But, even facing death at the stake, he stood by his beliefs.

This is one monk against a vast monolith of a Church.

Why wouldn't he back down?

That was of course very much a viewpoint of all the Church.

They thought, what is this man doing,

really he's saying, "I'm right and all the Church, all of the scholars

"that gather together, they're all wrong." How can he possibly say this?

But Luther saw himself as a prophet, at the end of the days.

So he actually believed the world was going to end?

Yes, and if you think that and if you think

that the Papacy is the Antichrist, it goes along with that that you think

everything will get worse and that are just the signs

of the world coming to an end.

Despite his recklessly brave stand, Luther escaped death at the stake.

He had won the support of a powerful prince,

who took the fugitive monk into hiding at Wartburg Castle.

Here, in disguise and under a false name,

Luther set to work on his masterpiece -

the translation of the Bible into his native tongue of German.

The medieval Church had used the Latin edition of the Scriptures,

which could be read only by priests,

monks and other well educated people.

Luther was determined to change that.

For me, this is the triumph of the Reformation.

The Luther Bible, with his own notes handwritten in the margin.

The Bible was so important to me as I was growing up.

And it was Luther who believed that everybody should have access

to this book, should work out their personal relationship with God.

It was this Bible which made the Reformation so necessary,

and this which made it a religious revolution.

Luther had changed Christianity forever.

But, while he had started the Reformation, he couldn't control it.

New Protestant groups broke away from the Catholic Church.

And when they read Luther's Bible they came to their own conclusions,

radically different from his.

The thousand-year monolith

of the medieval Church wasn't just cleaved in two, it was shattered.

The result was religious anarchy and political rebellion.

From 1524, hordes of rioting peasants overran Germany,

attacking corrupt priests and demanding religious reform.

Here, in the small town of Frankenhausen,

the site of their bloodiest battle,

their struggles have been immortalised

in the world's largest painting.

But, rather than a victory, the panorama shows a crushing defeat -

a one-sided slaughter in which the armies of the German princes

annihilated the untrained peasants.

Appalled by the rebellion, Luther could now only watch

as the Reformation took on a violent life of its own.

He thinks the world is a cesspit, it's full of sin.

And he thought again the devil was raging,

he was really doing his most, now was the time for the devil,

and it was Luther fighting against that devil,

as a prophet of these last days.

There were now dozens of warring religious factions.

Germany was riven with disputes and conflict.

Luther had every reason to believe the Apocalypse had come.

This schism soon spread to touch every country in Europe.

And in one land

it became a part of royal politics and court intrigues -

England.

Hampton Court. England's grandest Tudor palace.

In the 1520s, while Luther was fighting for his life

against the Catholic Church,

Henry VIII was one of his most formidable opponents.

He had copies of the German monk's Bible burnt in the streets,

and his English followers executed as heretics.

The Pope was the official head of the Church in England

and gave Henry the title Defender of the Faith for his loyal zeal.

Yet it was this same Henry

who eventually brought the Reformation to England.

As a politician, I know how important it can be

to harness the prevailing mood, and the Reformation was a gift to Henry.

He wanted a male heir,

but his wife hadn't been able to give him one.

So he wanted to get rid of her and marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn.

The only problem was, to do that he needed his marriage annulled,

and the Pope said...no.

What does that do to Henry?

Well, Henry hates to be thwarted, so the first thing it does to Henry

is just to get angry, and Henry becomes absolutely convinced that

he should have total control over the Church, that the Pope has usurped it.

And he will not brook any opposition to this idea.

So he decided to set himself up as Head of the Church,

at any rate the Church in England,

and that he would set the rules, but was Henry convinced by Lutherism?

Not at all. He never accepted the real fundamentals of Lutheran belief.

If Henry hadn't needed a male heir,

would the Reformation have come to England?

I think it's most unlikely.

There was closed ranks against Lutheranism

in the 1520s, when Henry still thought he would have a male heir.

It was only after Henry took on

the supreme headship of the Church that things began to splinter.

Henry VIII didn't change the authority of the Church, he didn't change the structure of the Church,

it was just about putting him at its head instead of the Pope.

It had little to do with Luther's theology, and everything

to do with that crude mixture of power, pride, lust and politics.

In 1534, an Act of Parliament made the break from Rome official.

The common people were ordered to obey Henry's religious commands.

The first communities to feel the full force of the royal Reformation

were the monasteries.

Magnificent, rich and ancient, they were lifelines for local people.

The monks were major employers,

and provided charity to the poor and sick.

Their vast libraries were centres of learning and education.

All this was paid for by the monasteries' immense estates,

two million prime acres, a sixth of all the land in the Kingdom.

When he started the Reformation,

it was all about solving Henry VIII's marriage problems.

Oh, but soon he realised there were other advantages to being in charge

of the Church of England, that in the Church he now controlled

he had a vast source of wealth.

So I reckon that to the motives of lust and politics

we can now add greed.

Royal agents were ordered to draw up charge sheets against monasteries

and assess their wealth.

'In September 1539, they arrived at Glastonbury,

'the richest Abbey in England.'

What's the charge sheet against the monasteries, what have they done wrong?

Well, the popular perception, both in Tudor times and subsequently,

is that they had become horribly corrupted.

Now, as soon as one begins to dig beneath the surface of those charges,

one finds that there is far less substance to them,

because the monks provide a range of social and cultural services.

So what happened when the Reformation arrived?

Well, all of this, in a space of four years, is swept away.

The Abbey was ruthlessly stripped of its valuables, the land confiscated

and even the roof removed to stop it being used as a place of worship.

The Abbot of Glastonbury spoke out against the destruction,

and paid the price for his resistance.

He was found guilty on trumped-up charges,

and executed in a cruel mockery of Christ's Crucifixion.

He is dragged through the town to the tor, the hill outside the town,

where he is executed with

two others accused of the robbery of the treasures of the Church.

The mode of his execution undoubtedly has a kind of

biblical resonance, the hill outside the town, the...

The two people either side of him.

The two people either side, clearly designed to deter

any others from offering resistance.

Greed may have been the motive, but its realisation

was desecration, was sacrilege.

Like Luther himself, Henry VIII had unleashed something that he couldn't

actually any longer control.

And by the time the Reformation reached Somerset

it was no longer about theological debate,

wasn't even about political debate.

Now it was in the hands of some depraved and very vengeful people.

King Henry died six years after the last monastery fell,

and was succeeded by his son.

Unlike his father, Edward was a true Protestant believer.

But vast numbers of the King's subjects

were still, at heart, Catholic.

They were devoted to the medieval festivals,

processions and relics which Edward's government now outlawed.

In the Devon hamlet of Morebath,

Church rituals had held the community together for generations.

The humble farming folk didn't want the Reformation,

but were being forced to join it by royal commands.

'In the parish's ancient record book,

'Professor Eamon Duffy has made an incredible discovery

'of how far they would go to protect their Catholic faith.'

It's the removal of the traditional Latin Mass, that's the crunch point.

And in the summer of 1549

the parish, in common with most of the other parishes of Devon,

rebelled against the Reformation.

It wasn't till I became curious about this

and examined the original manuscript

that it emerged that here we had the only surviving record

of a parish equipping soldiers to go and commit high treason.

By rebelling, the villagers were committing a crime

second only to heresy itself.

But they chose their religion over their King.

The Church funded and armed five young men

and sent them to join the rebel siege at Exeter.

In order to finance this, they had a collection at the church gate

and the priest wrote down the names of everyone who contributed to the collection...

Contributed to treason, actually.

Yes, and he paid again to William Hurley, the young man,

at his going forth to St David's Downs Camp, six and eightpence.

Later, he crosses out, each time it occurs,

the incriminating word "camp". The word camp meant rebel camp.

And so this is desperately incriminating, and he makes a rather feeble attempt at covering up.

This wasn't trivial stuff.

What drove them to do it?

For a start,

this particular community had been stripped to the bone

by the Reformation, their dignity and independence

had been taken away from them.

And there's a tremendous sense of the worm turning,

of the West Country standing up for itself and saying, "Enough."

The royal government in London was determined to crush the protest.

An army of foreign mercenaries was assembled

and marched down to Exeter.

Thousands of Devon peasants were slaughtered.

The ordinary man or woman had no choice.

It was the King who decided what their religion was.

It makes me feel very angry.

The Reformation started as something, if you like to put it that way, noble

and it came to this - right to the heart of this ordinary,

law abiding, inoffensive little village,

and it had a huge impact on people, even to the taking of life.

In 1553, just four years after

Morebath's rebellion, the King died and his sister, Mary, became Queen.

Unlike Protestant Edward, she was a devout Catholic.

After 20 years of religious change,

Mary ordered the people to convert yet again.

For the last time in history,

England became an officially Catholic country.

Protestants faced five dark years of persecution.

Here in the market town of Lewes,

17 local men and women were tried for heresy.

They treasured their English Bibles and were committed to Protestantism.

So each was dragged through the town's high street and burned alive.

The Protestant martyrs are remembered every Bonfire Night

as Lewes turns into a festival of fire and thunder.

BANG

We have 17 crosses that we carry through the high street

and they're lit up almost as a literal reminder of the martyrs.

The martyrs gave this country a freedom that we didn't have.

Dying for their beliefs. And we're free to have opinions

and choices because of people like that that gave their lives.

The Reformation began with Luther's call for Christian freedom,

for everyone to form their own relationship with God.

But it's clear to me that in England

the Reformation had been hijacked by politics.

Instead of religious freedom, Kings and Queens gave

the common people a stark choice - convert or face horrific death.

But there's more to this.

This Bonfire Society burns a pope in effigy,

carries banners saying No Popery.

When Cliffe Bonfire Society was founded

over 150 years ago, this wasn't just an event to remember history.

Instead, it was a fiercely anti-Catholic rally.

Well, they're burning the Pope in effigy, cheering as they do it.

They're shouting, "Burn him, burn him!"

I find the image of the Pope burning particularly difficult.

It's the one that is very solemn to Catholics.

That is what they're burning.

They don't mean it like that, but it's ghastly.

You're not embarrassed to be burning the Pope in effigy?

Oh, absolutely not, we make no apology for doing that.

And we have many Catholics in the procession itself.

Some of our vice-presidents are, I wouldn't know how many in Lewes are,

and the "no Popery" bit we make no apology for.

The Pope we actually blow up is Pope Paul V, and we make no apology for doing that.

This crowd is no lynch mob.

Most of them aren't even anti-Catholic.

But this event is a deeply upsetting relic of a long and vicious history

of anti-Catholicism in Britain.

Because, as the years passed, the Reformation became more than

a set of theological doctrines or even royal commands.

Instead, being a Catholic or a Protestant became woven into

national identity and fundamental to how people defined themselves.

Those on the other side of the religious divide were seen as

enemies, outsiders, aliens.

Religious hatred tore nations, cities and families apart.

And it led to one of history's worst religious atrocities,

a massacre that turned a river red with blood.

By 1572, the Reformation had been sweeping over Europe for 50 years.

But the Catholic kings of France had stood firm.

Unlike the Tudors in England,

they had remained steadfastly loyal to the Pope in Rome.

France's monasteries stood intact.

Catholic processions still marched through Paris's streets.

Despite this,

one in eight Frenchmen had converted to the new Protestant religion.

There had been riots, feuds, and civil wars

but in August 1572,

a royal wedding was arranged between a Catholic and a Protestant

to heal the rift.

Just days after the ceremony, as Gaspard de Coligny -

a leading Protestant - walked home from the King's palace,

an unseen assassin opened fire.

GUNSHOT

Coligny survived the attack.

But there were rumours of Protestant plans for retaliation.

So the Catholic royal council launched a pre-emptive strike.

In the early hours of the 24th of August - St Bartholomew's Day -

troops fanned out across Paris.

'They were sent to kill Coligny, and another 50 Protestant nobles.'

While you weren't aware of it? Yeah, yeah.

While you weren't aware of it? Yeah, yeah. Yes.

So, Mark, what was actually happening?

Things seem to have been going, more or less, according to plan,

through the night, until daybreak.

And by five o'clock, it seems,

the bodies were already beginning to stack up

of the leading Protestant nobles

in the Place Saint-Honore just over there,

where they were to be brought down by carts,

and dumped into the Seine round about there.

But at some point, the populace becomes involved in all of this.

Absolutely.

So it's at that point that the things start to move out of control.

CROWD SHOUTING

The Catholic citizens of Paris had been woken by the commotion.

For years, they had despised their heretical Protestant neighbours.

They now seized their chance,

and turned the targeted assassinations

into a general slaughter.

This doesn't look as if it's changed a great deal.

What was happening here?

We're in the suburbs just outside the city walls, here, Ann.

And it was here that lived about 1,500 or more Protestants,

and we have accounts, for example,

of a lady who was in the latter stages of pregnancy.

The midwife was already with her,

and she gets stabbed, thrown out of the window,

and the baby, even, is half-born as her dead body is in the streets.

So, it's as though people are no longer human beings.

So, it's as though people are no longer human beings. They've crossed a line.

So, it's as though people are no longer human beings. They've crossed a line. They have become animals.

But who was doing all this killing?

Who were these Catholics who were doing it?

Often, it was neighbours, people that they recognised and knew.

But it could be the chap next door?

Often was.

Despite royal attempts to halt the carnage, it continued for five days.

The River Seine ran red with blood,

and copycat attacks occurred across France.

10,000 Protestants died in the wave of hideous violence.

So, it's all been pretty horrible,

but why were people doing this?

What was the driving motivation for a man to kill his neighbour?

We live in a century of mass violence and genocide,

and we tend to think that's something unique to the 20th, 21st century.

It's not. It was also a feature of the 16th century,

it's just that the religious component is more obvious.

If you've been told, from the pulpit,

as Parisians in this city were,

that their city was going to be under God's judgment

if they allowed Protestant heretic pollution

to survive within its walls,

then it's not surprising, is it,

that people take into their own hands,

believing they're not just doing the King's will,

but that they're doing God's will?

In this city, the religious divide was so intense,

the Catholics no longer saw the Protestants as Frenchmen,

neighbours, family, or even fellow human beings.

The Reformation had led ordinary Christians to butcher one another.

News of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre raced across Europe.

Before the Reformation,

a single religion had bound the continent together.

Now, people defined themselves as either Catholic or Protestant

and fought to defend that faith.

When the Pope heard of the Paris slaughter,

he had a medal struck to celebrate a "Glorious Catholic victory."

In 1588, his successor blessed the Spanish Armada as a crusade -

a holy invasion fleet - sent against heretical England,

where Protestant Elizabeth now ruled.

As the threat from abroad rose,

the Queen turned on the Catholics within England.

They were banned from celebrating the Mass,

their priests were outlawed

and for 200 years,

it was illegal to be a practising Roman Catholic

in this country.

But the old faith did survive.

Hidden away on their country estates,

a few devoted families, such as the Stonors, kept Catholicism alive.

What were the penalties,

what were the restrictions that practising Catholics

actually faced?

actually faced? depending on what you did,

started with treason at the top,

life imprisonment was the next worst, of course,

and then, a lesser period of imprisonment.

So, did your family remain loyal to Catholicism?

Yes, there was a priest here who celebrated Mass,

and this,

they somehow continued to do.

Through the very difficult times, they hid priests here.

These priests were concealed in hidden compartments and holes.

If caught, they and their accomplices

could have been executed as traitors.

On top of this legal threat,

Catholics also faced popular prejudice.

Hundreds of gutter-press pamphlets attacked them and their faith.

Well, in this library here,

I found these pamphlets,

most of which have been here from the time of their publication.

So, you've got here The Necessity Of Maintaining

The Established Religion In Opposition to Popery.

Yes, it's all very blunt, in your face, isn't it?

Yes, it's all very blunt, in your face, isn't it? Yeah.

This is what they're afraid of, isn't it?

This is what they're afraid of, isn't it? Yes, that's what they're afraid of.

This is what they're afraid of - "establishing popery," as they call it.

Here, we're into the tabloid.

It was...the propaganda was wild.

Certainly was.

These pamphlets were published and soldon the street in London,

or sometimes in pubs.

'All the Stonors wanted

'was to live in peace, as both English and Catholic.

'But for centuries, it was claimed

'only Protestants could be loyal to king and country.

'British law still states

'that the monarch cannot be a Catholic,

'or even married to a Catholic.'

Given the history of your ancestors,

what they went through, what they did, how they held out,

are you proud of them?

Oh, yes, very.

I'm very proud of them indeed,

and I'm particularly proud that, whilst they kept their faith,

they were never disloyal to the sovereign.

Today, practically all the old intolerant laws have been repealed.

But I believe there's still plenty of anti-Catholic sentiment

around in Britain today.

And when I converted to Catholicism 15 years ago,

I found out just how extreme some of it still is.

CHEERING

In 1995, I was at Westminster's Catholic cathedral,

when the Queen made the first visit by a British monarch.

CHEERING

We were heckled by hard-line Protestants yelling, "Betrayal."

Betrayal! Betrayal! Betrayal!

Ever since my conversion, I have received a stream

of anti-Catholic letters, accusing me of betraying queen and country.

"Ann Widdecombe being received into Popery."

And they've changed "converts to Rome" to "perverts to Rome."

"Traitor, go and live in Rome,

"with the Pope and the Mafia!"

I'm not surprised that one didn't have any address on it.

According to this, I'm bringing back the Antichrist.

It would be easy to dismiss these letters as the ranting of lunatics.

But, unfortunately,

they are also a tragic, lasting legacy of the Reformation.

Ah.

"A Protestant country has given you the right to high office,

"which you have abused."

These letters contain the same ideas

that sparked the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

They maintain the perverse Reformation beliefs

that Catholics and Protestants are natural mortal enemies,

that someone can't be both Catholic and British.

PIPES AND DRUMBEATS

Most of us have now escaped from these dreadful ideas.

But in one region of modern Europe,

this language of religious hate has kept its power.

There, the divisions of the Reformation

are still marked on the streets,

and God has been called on to bless killers.

In the century after Luther's break with Rome,

the people of Europe were divided by religious wars and feuds.

But sheer exhaustion eventually led to pragmatism.

In 1648,

the rulers of Europe gathered together for a massive conference.

They agreed the Peace of Westphalia,

an end to holy wars

and a grudging promise of religious acceptance.

But as ever, this tale of great men and grand ideas

was only part of the story.

Actual religious tolerance was already all round them.

This building may look like any other Amsterdam town house

but actually it conceals an extraordinary secret.

This house was built in the mid-17th century.

Holland was an officially Protestant country

and Dutch Catholics were banned from worshipping in public.

The Mass was illegal and priests were outlawed.

But rather than a dusty storage loft,

this staircase leads to one of the hidden wonders of the Reformation.

Ah!

I don't believe it.

They hid this.

It's a full-scale, illegal Catholic church.

It is appropriately called "Our Lord in the Attic."

It's beautiful.

This church,

it's not exactly something you can hide if anybody comes.

Did anybody know it was here?

Everybody knew it was here.

It could accommodate a congregation of a good 150,

and of course even 150 people coming and going

were always going to be noticed.

All the neighbours knew. They pretended that it wasn't occurring.

It was much easier, wasn't it, not to notice it was just plain,

if you like, rather cold pragmatism?

There was some pragmatism involved, to be sure,

but these were people's neighbours,

these were in many cases close relatives.

Love thy neighbour was an injunction that crossed these religious divides.

The Attic Church represents a brave first step towards toleration.

Ordinary men and women,

who had suffered so much from the turmoil of the Reformation,

were drawing on the peaceful message of the Gospel.

Gradually, over the next 200 years,

hatred gave way to acceptance across Europe.

We were finally escaping the worst of the Reformation.

In recent times, only one region

has been plagued by that old mix of Christian division and violence.

Like the wars of the Reformation, there were always many factors

here in Northern Ireland.

But the religious divide was always woven in to this deadly conflict.

Here, people are three times more likely to go to church regularly

than they are in modern Godless England.

And more than that, they mark their differences on the streets.

Every year the Orange Order celebrates its devotion

to fervent Protestantism.

Religious zeal is also found in the corridors of power.

Northern Ireland's former first minister, Dr Ian Paisley,

is the founder of his own Protestant church.

He believes the Reformation was a breakthrough that freed Christianity

from the corruptions of Roman Catholicism.

PEOPLE CHANT

The Roman Catholic Church believes that she is the supreme church

and if you're not a member of her, you're not in the book, as it were.

I don't believe that,

I believe that Christianity's basis

is a personal relationship to Jesus Christ,

rather than relationships to churches.

Don't you regret how the Reformation worked out in practice?

I don't think the Reformation was responsible for that,

I think that was the reaction of the Roman Catholic Church

to retain her position.

to retain her position. Solely? >

Well, there was resistance to it.

You think that the violence of the Reformation

was solely down to the Catholic Church?

Well, I think they started it.

You attacked the Pope in the European Parliament,

indeed you proclaimed him to be the Antichrist.

...to say how much I...

enemy and Antichrist!

And all your false doctrine.

I denounce you! I denounce you!

Mr Paisley...

I denounce you as the Antichrist!

Is that still your position?

Do I believe in the Reform faith position? Yes, I do.

No, do you believe the Pope is the Antichrist?

Yes, what it says in the confession of faith.

I signed it when I was ordained,

that the Pope is that man of sin, that son of perdition.

I believe the Reform faith

and they identify the Pope as the Antichrist and I accept that.

For the second time, Mr Paisley...

Do you regard the Pope as the enemy?

Well, yes, I would say...

I would say that Romanism is not good for the country

and it's not good for the world, and it's not good for me.

For Protestants like Ian Paisley,

the Reformation remains the bedrock of their faith.

And, even as a Catholic,

I support so much of what the Reformation stood for.

Luther showed incredible bravery in standing by his beliefs.

The Bible needed to be made accessible to everyone.

The Church had to do away with indulgences and other abuses.

Christianity needed a Reformation,

but I think the way it worked out in practice

was the most appalling tragedy.

I passionately believe that Christianity

can be and should be a massive force for peace in the world.

After all, the central tenet of my religion is love thy neighbour.

And yet, for centuries,

Christian killed Christian in the name of their faith.

Theological debate led to war,

persecution and religious divisions which have lasted to this day.

People had to convert on the orders of their ruler,

rather than follow their own personal convictions.

Both Catholics and Protestants

lost sight of what still united them

as they fought over their differences.

I believe we should celebrate

the breakthroughs and the reforms that the Reformation brought about.

But we should also remember that like any family feud

it left behind a bitter legacy of division

and brought about some of the darkest moments

in Christian history.

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