Introduction
Church has always been a very influential department in the society. People have turned to church for many years since its appearance and continue to look for escape in church and for its blessing in important affairs. The development of the church may be divided into several periods, which occurred at different times. The Christian community suffered a lot of complications and division to gain its modern appearance. Being united at the very beginning, 1054 was the year when Christianity took two directions, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. This was not the end of Church divisions, as XVI century was the year of different changes in the church canons and as the changes occurred everywhere, so the whole period was called the Reformation.
Main Body
Reformation is the period when the church was changed according to the old traditional canons. This was the movement in the western Christian world to clean the church from medieval abuses. These changes were aimed to renew the doctrines and practices of the Christian church according to Bible and New Testament. To understand the causes of the Reformation better, the background for this movement should be discussed.
Reformation
Catholic Church had a great influence on the social life of the people in the Europe. Church owned about 1/3 of the lands and the serf labor was used on those lands. To make people work, Catholic Church used the same methods as the other feudal lords. Feudal system was the main guarantee for Catholic Church’s development during those times. But new system, new ruling class began to form, the class of bourgeoisie. This class needed a new ideology, which differed from existed one. Their aim was not to throw money on the building of huge and magnificent cathedrals, not to spend on the spectacular ceremonies. The new ideology had to be cheaper, and the money from the church had to invest in manufacturing and create new enterprises.
Causes and background of Reformation
There were a lot of different causes which served as the reasons for this Reformation to start, which were complicated and interdependent. One of the main reasons for this reformation movement to start was the dissatisfaction of different layers of European population with the moral degradation of the Catholic Church, which was accompanied by economic usurpation and creation of different obstacles on the way to power centralization. The society was ready for the changes as they got tired from the constant Catholic press, both economical and national. The epoch of the Renaissance allowed people to look at the things from different sides. This changed intellectual environment and desire for humanism were also the reasons for th conclusion.
Conclusion
The Reformation was led complicatedly and the results of it are not definite. On the one hand, Reformation there was no the united Christian World, under supervision of the Pope, anymore as well as there was no the united Christian culture. The single church was divided into lots of national churches, which were dependant on social rulers. On the other hand, the national churches promoted the growth of national self-consciousness of the peoples of Europe. One of the main aspects of the Reformation was the growth of cultural and educational level of citizens, as there was the necessity to study Bible, which led to appearance of different educational establishments. Reformation was the period when old feudal economical relations were changed to new capitalistic, which caused the development of economical relations in the world.