Protestant reformation?

Question

these are my last few questions which i hope you can help me with.

i will still get information from websites.

i will really appreciate if you help me with some of these questions.

1. what did erasmus state about the authority of the catholic church and the pope?

2. what is "heresy"? what is excommunication?

3. what were indulgences? why would some be angry at them? why was the catholic church so in need of them?

4. what is "clergy"? specifically, what is the "pontiff"?

Answer 1

1)  I'm not sure about erasmus but an educated guess is that he said that they have the wrong idea about religion and they don't actually have any kind of rightful claim to authority.

2)  Heresy is when you disagree with the established religion and have a better idea that goes against what most people believe.  Excommunication is when you make the pope really really angry at you and he says that you aren't allowed in any of the churches, therefore you can't receive the word of "god", therefore you're doomed to go to h**l.  Excommunications were almost always because of political differences.

3)  Indulgences were a completely backward, corrupt system of funding the catholic church and allowing the elite to sin all they wanted without fear of punishment.  Say you broke one of the ten commandments.  Now your average person would have to suffer whatever punishment the church wanted to dole out- but if you were very rich, you could afford to buy an indulgence.  It made the sin go away and everything was peachy.  It was a nice little system they had set up and it lasted for a while until Martin Luther called bullshit and started the Protestant Reformation.  So some would be angry at indulgences because they only existed to line the pockets of the church, and maintain a nice relationship between rich nobles and the catholic church.  The church needed them because people were starting to wake up and realize how corrupt the catholic church was and they were losing a ton of money.

4)  Clergy just means members of the catholic church.  The pontiff is either the pope himself or one of his bishops.