Protestantism

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Protestant is one kind of Christian who does not follow Roman Catholic beliefs. The Protestants split from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500s. The word "Protestant" comes from "protest" because they were protesting against the Pope.

It was Martin Luther, a doctor of theology and a monk, who said that the church should return to its roots, and give more weight to what is written in the Bible. This returning to the roots was the basic idea of Humanism. Luther thought that the Church had gone too far away from the original teachings. He published 95 theses on the current state of the Catholic Church. Some say, he stuck them onto the door of the church of Wittenberg, but others say this is not true. The 95 theses were published in 1516 or 1517. With the theses he founded the Protestant Reformation.

He also did another thing. Until then, the Holy Mass was read in Latin. At that time, Latin was the language of science. Very few people understood it. So the people went to mass, and they did not understand what the priest said. Luther saw that. To help those people he was the first person to translate the Bible (into German), so the people could understand, and actually check that the priest did not tell any lies.