"reforming" The Holy Mother Church

[voiciblanche]

I don't really think reforming is the best word I could pick... but my question is "How much is too much?" There can be problems inside the Church because the people of the Church are imperfect, while the the Church Herself is not - right? So, if people inside the Church are doing things that are wrong, how far is too far when correcting the problem? Obviously it's happened before - Martin Luther was trying to reform things and said that he "never approved of a schism." But it ended up in a huge break from the Church, so clearly that wasn't good. But would there be any way to change groups of people within the Church without "reforming" the Church Herself (since that'd be crazy - how could you reform the Truth?), and if there is a possible way, how would you go about as not to be reforming the Church Herself?

Argh... sorry if that's confusing. Hopefully there's someway to answer that, and I'm hoping I'll get more than one answer (since this is the debate table.)

[Iacobus]

What Luther (partly) tried to do was to control so of the opressive things done in the name of the Church. He didn't think paying money to the Church would grant you salvation and he wanted to reform the priesthood (really bad priests *doing really immoral things like engaing in sex and such as a man of God* were common). He also wanted to get rid of the poltical promotion in the Church, people should be able to buy the role of priest or cardnail or so forth. So reform of the bad [i]human[/i] elements is okay. But the divine elements are prefect and therefore unreformable. Unless tainted by human but I am not sure that is possible.

[Norseman82]

And let's not forget the whole political angle of this: how many rulers became protestant and imposed it on the populace partly to get the church lands?

[Crusader_4]

slow down tho...lets not get into the protestant reformation too much lets just focus on catholicsm what are things we can reform in our own parishes and church worldwide that we as Catholics see? Look at the counter-reformation taht did soo much good cleaning up in the Church or even Vatican II.