Financial interests and the secularization of Church property

[Extract] It is easy to forget that those sixteenth-century German princes and cities who defended the innocence of Martin Luther, the Protestants, managed to win a place within what was still a Catholic state - the confederation of principalities and cities known as the Holy Roman Empire. Protestant success rested on a historical paradox. Protestant churches were very often built upon violations of ecclesiastical rights (the rights of both clergy and lay patrons), and reorganizations of church property by Luther's supporters provoked hundreds of lawsuits against these new "church robbers". Yet German Protestants managed to win recognition of their actions from their Catholic peers by insisting that they acted to defend true faith. The Catholic-Protestant détente achieved in the first half-century of controversy over Luther and the papacy rested not on theological but on practical agreements over church property. Property forms a kind of Archimedean point outside doctrinal debate, where the complex political effect of the Luther affair can be observed. It provides us with an opportunity to study closely the emergence of a new diversification of the lived expressions of Christianity.