FINAL WARNING: Setting the Stage for Destruction
was issued, that officially excommunicated Luther. It called for his
death because of his heresy, unless his document was retracted within
60 days. He publicly burned the Order. He went on to translate the New
Testament into German, and soon the Lutheran religion (derived from
his last name) became the dominant religion in northern Germany.William Tyndale (1494-1536) translated the Greek version of the New
Testament into English, but Church authorities prevented him from
publishing it in England, so he published it in Germany in 1525. By
1536 he finished translating the Old Testament, but before it could be
printed and distributed, he was burned at the stake in Belgium as a
religious heretic, by the order of King Henry VIII of England. A year
later, King Henry broke away from the Catholic Church, forming the
Church of England, and in 1537, authorized the Tyndale Bible to be
distributed as the official Bible of the Church. His translation became
the basis of the King James Version.Soon the Catholic Church was in trouble, and in 1534, Pope Paul III
instructed a Spanish priest, Ignatius de Loyola, to organize the ‘Order
of the Jesuits’ (also known as the ‘Society of Jesus’) in order to
oppose the Protestant movement. Loyola, as a soldier, had been
maimed in battle, and while recuperating, claimed a conversion to
Catholicism. He wrote a guidebook called Spiritual Exercises to help
people get spiritually closer to Christ. On August 15, 1534, in Paris,
Loyola and six other men, joined together in taking vows of poverty
and chastity, and to accept any assignment requested by the Pope.
The group was officially sanctioned by the Pope in 1540. The head of
the Jesuits became known as the ‘Black Pope.’Those taking the Jesuit Oath swore allegiance to “his holiness, the
Pope, (who) is Christ’s Vice-Regent, and is the true and only head of
the Catholic or Universal Church throughout the Earth.” The oath
contained a pledge to “make and wage relentless war, secretly or
openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals, as I am directed
to do to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole
earth, and that I will spare neither sex, age, nor condition, and that I
will hang, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous
heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush
their infants’ heads against the wall, in order to annihilate forever their
excrable.”