By rlp’s 16-year-old daughter
Okay, uh, the thing is that a long time ago - I
don’t know when but a LONG time ago - there was nothing but Catholics. I mean,
in the church. Course there were lots of other kinds of people and stuff, but in
the church, yeah. Nothing but Catholics.
Which was cool if you’re into the whole
Catholicism thing, but then, you know, not everyone is or even WAS back then.
Then the church got kinda messed up. Apparently
they were corrupt and all, you know? Like REALLY messed up. And there was this
one badass monk guy named Martin Luther. Not Martin Luther King, but another guy
and longer ago. Way back. So Martin was like totally disillusioned with the
church because they were doing stuff that was just like, SO wrong. Like I think
you could pay money and get to commit sins and stuff like that.
So Martin just got fed up with all of it, and
he nailed like all these reasons why the church was messed up onto a door on a
piece of paper. They had some weird name for them….uh, theses or something but
it was just a list of all the things he didn’t like about the church. He nailed
it on some door - I don't know where - Europe, maybe Sweden or something. Who
knows?
Oh, my dad’s yelling at me that this was in
the 1500s. Dude, that WAS a long time ago!
Anyway, the church officials and leader guys
got seriously pissed off about it, and they called him in for this big meeting.
It was called – this is hilarious – The Diet of Worms.
I had German last year, and “diet” is like a
council or a meeting I think, only that wasn’t on the vocabulary list Mrs.
Jenkins gave us, but I think that’s pretty much what it means. And Worms is the
name of this town, or it was a town - I don’t know. But Worms doesn’t mean
“worms” in German or anything. It was just a normal word to them, so they
wouldn’t have laughed at it.
So at this meeting they tried to make Martin
Luther take back everything he had written about the bad things the church was
doing in all these books he had written or whatever.
Oh, dude, this is totally messed up. Back then?
They could kill you, the church could, if you didn’t believe all what they
believed or at least kept your mouth shut and all. That is so totally uncool.
But Martin - and this is kinda why I said he
was a badass monk - he asked to think about his answer all night and in the
morning he said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” And he said that even
though he might be killed for saying it.
But they didn’t kill him, or maybe he escaped
or something, but he didn’t die. They did kick him out of the church and all,
which some people thought it meant you were going straight to hell, so it was
pretty serious to them. And after that him and a bunch of other people started
the whole Protestant thing. And nowadays Protestants are everywhere -
practically the whole world is filled with them. Except of course all the other
religions and stuff. I don’t really know that much about them.
And my dad says we’ve pretty much patched
things up with the Catholic Church now, so that lots of people who are
Christians are at least polite to each other. And that’s prolly why I’m allowed
to go to this Catholic church with my friend Andrea, and it’s a cool church, so…
But I guess that’s pretty much it.
The First of the Three Sisters
