Question

What was a major part of the Protestant Reformation?

Answer 1

Martin Luther was unhappy with the Church and decided to take the task upon hi shoulders, though it was really the pope's job. Eventually his pride took over and he thought that he was the only one who knew what would be right. The pope realized after this, that they did need reform and called up a council called the Council of Trent to make the much needed changes in the Church.

Answer 2

The propositions that (1) each man could and should have his own relationship with God; there was no superiority of access by priests, bishops, popes or saints, and (2) good works could not get you into Heaven -- only the grace of God could do that.

The first challenged both the spiritual and temporal authority of the Catholic Church, which led to violent conflict with it, and, later, to the splitting of Protestantism into a thousand competing sects, from Presbyterianism to Baptism (and there are different kinds of Baptists at that). The conflict with the Church, which ended in bloody stalemate, and the fissioning of Protestantism, probably led to, or at least hastened, the decline of religion as a governing influence in political and social life -- and hence directly to the resurrection of quasi-classical means of government, the republic, democracy, separation of church and state, et cetera, which came to flower in the early to mid 1700s, most spectacularly in the founding of the United States.

The second led willy nilly to the Protestant ethic of predestination, which encouraged the wordly work ethic, and a great deal of fairly virulent prejudice, which also came to flower in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Catholic Church had been a strong force for tolerance and (in the modern parlance) "diversity" in the late medieval and renaissance world, a force opposing nationalism and chauvinism, which taught that all men (and women) of whatever color and creed were the children of God, and equally sinners. (Whether that worked out in practice is, of course, a different story -- but that was the official line.)

With the decline of the Catholic Church the impetus it brought to internationalism declined, and pride in national and racial identity soared. Along with it came the ideas from Protestantism that the ultimate religious fates of individuals were fixed, and with the rise of science and scientism, a number of pseudo-scientific prejudicial theories of the "classes" of men -- which allow you to "discover" the ultimate fates of individuals -- arose that still plague us today: the idea that some races, or sexes, or any other type of man, are inherently inferior from birth and doomed to lesser stations, or even damnation.