Luther and the 'Hussite' catechism of 1522

Abstract

Pure Hussite religion was never Protestant. Before the famous 'here I stand' of Martin Luther at Worms, lasting reform had swept the lands of the Czech crown. Before John Calvin took up his pen to compose 'The Institutes of the Christian Religion' a reformation had transpired in the kingdom of Bohemia. A tumultuous century before Luther challenged the right of the Church to distribute and sell indulgences for the forgiveness of sins, Hussite reformers had broached the fundamental issue of the Church's authority. While the vast majority of the Hussite-Utraquist Church continued to adhere to many of the teachings and practices of the Catholic Church, the more radical face of religious reformation was exemplified by the Táborites and later by the Unity of Brethren (Jednota Bratrská). Late medieval heresy had successfully transformed itself into movements of religious 'reformatio' and 'renovatio'. Thus, before the dawn of the European Reformations, Bohemian Christendom had achieved a unique status. Many Czechs had gone over to a faith and to a religious practice which the Catholic Church, in both papal and conciliar decrees, had condemned as heretical. They had joined themselves to an alternative church which was at first simply schismatic but then, through protracted disobedience, deliberately heretical.