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The
"New" Martin Luther
from the May-June 1996 issue
 Cincinnati’s diocesan newspaper, The
Catholic Telegraph, carried a short Catholic News
Service (CNS) story in their April 12 issue,
"Understanding Martin Luther" which reported
that thousands of Catholics joined in "activities
honoring [Luther] on the 450th anni-versary of
his death". The article claims that Catholics now
have a "new" under-standing of the man whom
they were "once taught to revile… as a heretic
who led millions from the faith." This
"new" understanding relates primarily to those
who have been taught in Catholic universities by
dissident theologians seeking to ad-vance the cause of
Luther’s rehabilitation as a Catholic; this
"new" understanding has been fueled by an
academic misinformation campaign that further seeks to
minimize the importance of the Council of Trent which was
called in response to Luther’s heresies; this
"new" understanding is a false one.
There is a substantial body of
literature now extant which points to the unavoidable
conclusion that Martin Luther suffered from serious
mental illness and that his mental illness was directly
related to the theological opinions he espoused when he
broke from the Church in the 16th century. The
common excuse offered by dissident theologians that he
was a crude peasant ignores the fact that Luther was
hypercritical of his opponents to the point of inventing
faults they didn't have while being himself morally
suspect. Erasmus, for instance, had many faults, but
Luther's attacks on him in "The Bondage of the
Will" were exercises in slander fueled by his own
battle with manic-depression and psychotic tendencies
during his periods of mania.
For a man who was going to
"purify" the Church "out of love and zeal
for the elucidation of the truth" (as Luther is
quoted by CNS), Luther lived an immoral and unprincipled
life. In "Table Talks" Luther got drunk one
night and told some of his fawning sycophants that Jesus
must have been an adulterer because even He could not
resist temptations of the flesh. He went on to claim that
Jesus had an affair with Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha
of Bethany, and the Samaritan woman at the well. In
Luther's own words in a "Spiritual Counseling"
letter to Jerome Weimer: "[t]he whole Decalogue must
go! ... Sin strongly; believe more strongly." The
breaking of the Decalogue includes more than mere
pecadillos. Luther was advising Weimer to commit mortal
sin. This scheme of desensitization is precisely what the
Marquis de Sade recommended to men as a way of toughening
themselves to be able to abuse women of the lower classes
for "fun".
To be clear, the Reformation was a
demonic deception from the start. The so-called reformers
were not sober Catholics trying to recapture the vigor of
the New Testament Church. The 16th Century
Protestants were apostates who have wrought nothing but
havoc on the world and the Church. To depict Luther as a
reformer of the Church in the same way we venerate St.
Catherine of Siena or St. Ignatius Loyola, as some
eminent theologians and newspaper mercenaries are wont to
do, is an insult to Christ, the Church, and her martyrs.
It is true that Luther was not all
wrong or completely crazy. Indeed, some of his critiques
of the folk Catholicism in his day, and of the hypocrisy
within the hierarchy and clergy were justified.
Nevertheless, he was wrong on key issues of doctrine and
discipline and had no right to sit in judgment of the
Catholic Tradition to the point of breaking with the Pope
and the hierarchy and calling for their deaths and the
extirpation of their offices by military force. His
mental illness contributed directly to this
rebelliousness and his religious errors. And even as
modern dissidents claim he can somehow be rehabilitated
as a Catholic, his excommunication was based on sound
reason and is witness against this man's apostasy and its
bitter fruit—Arthur Sippo, MD, MPH.
[ St. Catherine Review ]
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