What conditions could help the Roman Catholic Papacy revive Paganism successfully to reduce Protestantism?

Question

In this alternate history, the Papacy becomes worried when those such as Martin Luther began complaining about the Church's practices. At this point, Luther breaks away, beginning Lutheranism. Fear of more Christians forming their own groups, such as Calvinism, Anglicanism, etc., the Pope decides there is one solution: Revive Paganism.

Of course, there are some conditions to this:

• They are not reviving all paganism, rather just and only Roman Paganism. They are more culturally familiar with it, and is still within their own domain to control

• Their goal is to create an "Us vs. Them" kind of unification

  • Also used to undermine Judaism

• They have updated parts of it, so that it fits more with 15th-16th Renaissance society (no sacrifices, some elements of Christianity, appeals to women and political leaders, etc.)

• The Church funds the building of a few Pagan temples, and have some cathedrals become temples as well

• The Church will also enforce authorities to prevent CERTAIN hate crimes. Christians and Pagans can hate and attack each other, but they cannot:

  • Destroy Pagan temples
  • Persecute Pagans and execute them for their deities
  • Have large-scale riots and violence

• Roman Gods in Renaissance art is encouraged more

With these provided conditions, could it be possible for the Roman Catholic Church to reduce Protestantism and prevent the Protestant Reformation with Paganism, or at least make the conflict smaller? And if not, what could I improve on, or also consider?

Note: For a better understanding of the question: What conditions could help the Roman Catholic's scheme actually work?

Answer 1

What would happen is that the Pope would immediately be locked up, forced to abdicate, and subjected to exorcism, at best, and surreptiously done away with otherwise.

The rest of the clergy and the other people of the Church would regard it as diabolical possession, or possibly insanity. Why on earth would anyone fight the corruption of true religion by bringing back false religion?

Answer 2

The key problem, to me, would be finding any pagans in the first place. At the time of the story, it's been centuries since any kind of paganism really flourished. The religion is dead, and the community is long gone. There's no wellspring of believers to tap into.

And recruitment is going to be difficult. Anyone who joins this pagan church knows that they're painting a target on their back. They know because they're being lectured in the church right now about how those pagans are a threat, and all good Christians need to put aside their differences, come together, and deal with them.

Even if there's an official ban on serious violence - riots, killings - that hardly guarantees that people will actually obey. Religious fervor is notoriously difficult to pin exactly where you want it; you'll always have a subset of believers who think they'll gain favor by going further, being more zealous than called for. Realistically, a neo-pagan would have to weigh the danger of getting killed by a Christian mob no matter what the Pope says.

Getting people to stick with their long-held, sincere religious beliefs in the face of such threats is hard enough. Getting them to abandon the religion and culture they were raised in, to adopt a new, essentially foreign religion that no one has practiced in centuries? Virtually impossible. Sure, you'd get a few sincere converts and a few curious hangers-on, but nothing that could give a serious impression of damaging the status quo.

Frankly, anyone who could convince people to become pagan in such circumstances could surely talk them around to Catholicism just as easily without needing an elaborate conspiracy.

Answer 3

There are No Pagans Left

Protestantism was a reaction to the corruption in the Catholic church. Bishops were rich and incompetent. Taxes went to Rome rather than the local lord. Only priests were allowed read the Latin Bible.

Protestantism was an attempt to rebuild the Church from the ground up, while keeping it spiritually almost identical.

Europe was a Christian nation. Not a Pagan Nation. People did not want a new religion. They wanted the old religion. They just wanted it to work properly.

Consider the options:

Catholicism $-$ Right religion. Poorly implemented.

Protestantism $-$ Right religion. Correctly implemented.

Paganism $-$ Wrong religion. Poorly implemented.

No one will choose the last one.

But why is Paganism poorly implemented? Because it is run by the Catholics, remember? And they are corrupt. That is the problem.

And if not, what could I improve on, or also consider?

If you want to quash the Protestants, simply make sure the Catholic church is not corrupt. I leave this to your imagination.

Answer 4

NO

This is an absolutely bizarre solution to the problem of Luther and his revolt. I honestly can't see how this would cause Luther to turn around and say "hey, wow, Paganism! I guess the Pope isn't that bad of a guy after all!"

That's just a no. The Church has had some pretty wonky popes, and they've made all kinds of bad decisions, but this one is just not likely. Not even within the realm of possibility.

Honestly, the only way to head off Luther's revolt is to deal with Luther himself. Too many people here (and in general) seem to be of the opinion that the Church was, for 1500 years, this horrible, mismanaged, utterly corrupt organisation that was in total need of scrapping; and then Martin Luther came along, nailed his thesis onto a church door, told the pope to sod off and die and came up with a perfectly reformed church to replace the old.

The truth is much closer to: the Church has always been corruptible yet has also always been in a state of constant reform. Luther was not some golden tongued reformer that showed up all of a sudden on the scene; he was one voice of reform in a long line of reformers and the seeds of his particular revolt had been planted some two centuries previous.

The only way to really reduce (or perhaps even ward off) Protestantism as we know it is to deal with Luther himself. He was an extremely intelligent man, but also was a manic-depressive, possibly OCD, definitely self-loathing, neurotic and suffered greatly from scrupulosity.

His later theology and system of biblical hermeneutics largely came out of his neuroses. And several key doctrines he flat out made up all on his own. If his abbot father (Luther was a priest and a monastic) and brothers had the tools to deal with some pretty severe mental health issues, I think he never would have ended up doing the things he did.

And without Luther intentionally leaving the Church, rather than simply seeking to tread the long path of reform, I don't know if we would see any great protesting movement coming from Calvin and Zwingli et al. Luther seemed to be the great spark, and I think that if he could have been 'controlled' or set to work on proper reform, history might have turned out quite different.

Without the need for a revived paganism that no one actually wanted or needed.

NOTE: here is an excellent synthesis and exposition of Luther, with loads of sources.

Answer 5

No, the Reformation was a Political Revolt more than a Theological One

One detail that a lot of people get wrong about Martin Luther is that he NEVER wanted to revolt against the Church to begin with. While he proposed a certain set of reformations to the church, the people who were actually leading the rebelling against the Papacy were the lords and kings, not the clergy. The Church had so much direct control over politics and policies at the time, that the secular powers were second class autocrats in their own lands.

Following the Charlemagne Empire, the Divine Right of Kings became the keystone to secular power. The church taught the people that kings rules as God's chosen leaders of humanity and were there for beyond contestation which, for a few centuries, served the kings of Europe very well. However, this mired the church in secular politics. Over time, Kings became more and more pressured by the church to do as the Pope says, or they would risk excommunication. The Pope started telling Kings what wars they had to wage, what laws they had to pass, etc. This was a really big deal to kings because excommunication not only meant that your soul would burn for eternity in Hell, but it also meant that as a king, you could no longer claim that you have the divine right to be a king. Without divine right, no good Catholic citizen would obey you, and rebellion would be almost certain forcing excommunicated rulers to abdicate and go into exile.

So, the lords and kings did not really care what cause they were getting behind as long as it fills the two following goals: It must remove the power of the church over their secular affairs and it must be something that the lords can get their own people to follow. The Protestant Reformation was effective because it allowed the nobility to rebel against the Church without giving up their claim to the Divine Right of Kings. Martin Luther's reform petition made it easy to convince people that "Yes, God is God and God is with me, but God is not with the Pope because the Church is against God for these 95 reasons."

Why Renewed Paganism will Backfire

Adding a Pagan revival to the equations would just add fuel to the fire because those same rebellious lords could just claim "God is the enemy, the true gods are with me, the Pope is the enemy."

Furthermore, this is a fundamentally un-catholic concept. One of the core tenets of the authority of the Papacy is that the Church should never be divided against itself. “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand” ~ Matthew 12:25, “And if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand” ~ Mark 3:25. If the Church allows this value to slip, then not only do the kings have room to rebel against the Church, but the bishops gain authority to rebel against the Pope if he stops pushing the importance of unity to his followers by trying to create division through paganism.

How the Church Could have Combated the Reformation

To stop the reformation, you either need to convince the people that Martin Luther is with the Pope so that no one can use his words as a credible source of weaponized morality, or you need to appease the lords who were already discontent with the church; so, that they would be better served by staying with the Church than by protecting the heretics.

For option #1, you need to call an ecuminical council and invite Martin Luther to attend it to discuss the merit of his theses. This is what Martin Luther actually wanted to begin with; so, as long as the church can find enough scriptural basis to get Martin Luther throw out some of his objections and to agree to a compromise that maintains the authority of the Papacy, then the Lords can not use Martin Luther's theses as evidence that God is not with the Church. As long as at the end of the day, Martin Luther publicly declares that God is with the Pope, the lords will have no loose threads to pull at in the name of Lutheranism; so, any rebellious acts they commit will have to be done in clear violation of the will of God.

The other option is to relinquish control over the the nobility. The lords had a lot of advantages under the Catholic church that they lost to Protestantism. Forcing the scripture to remain in Latin kept peasants from finding their own loopholes and interpretations in scripture with which to challenge their divine rights, the Church helped broker peace and stability between Christian kingdoms, it helped unify Europe against Muslim expansionism, etc. The nobles would not have rebelled against the Pope, if the Papacy did not represent a Sword of Damocles constantly hovering over their collective heads. The best way to fix this would have been to restructure the European theocracy by "giving unto Caesar what is Caesar's". The Pope would have to create a checks and balances system instead of top down authority between kings and the church. If the pope publicly declared that in matters of State, the King is God's supreme voice, and that the church has no right to excommunicating a King for matters of state, then you'd relieve a lot of the political pressure that lead so many lords to rebel.

At the end of the day, the Protestant Reformation happened because the Papacy did not want to give up any of the wealth or power it had accumulated; so, it could not bring itself to negotiate for a peaceful outcome.

Answer 6

This seems far more convoluted and harder to do than just exterminating the Protestants, rather than just trying to kill enough of them until they submit.

That is something that the papacy would have a hard time justifying, but an easier one than this.

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Also, in a timeline where the papacy is organised enough to do this, I don't see how Martin Luther could end up happening.

The Protestants being a problem (the Vatican cares about) requires both Martin Luther's weird life journey happening and the Holy Roman Empire to get unlucky 😈🎲 and get a fundamentalist Catholic in charge. With a strong papacy, Martin would have been weeded out or bent into line, and there would have been a lot less reason for regime change.

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Also, this ignores the simple fact, the Vatican has no real reason to care about Protestants. The members will be long dead, before enough Catholics convert to dry up funds, and they will always find some nation to be on their side.

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Anyway, the way to actually make this happen easily, is just to change the Bible ✝️, so it mandates keeping the Pagan shrines alive. This is weird, but so is the scenario, so let's go with it.

The Bible says to maintain Pagan shrine, because of reasons. Let's go with:

The shrines of the demons (let's pretend they are more gnostic in this timeline) must be maintained, with all the proper rites, otherwise they will devour the world. Let them bask in the adoration of their worshipers. God saves only those who save themselves.

The injustice of the demons he will restrain, but not their desire for food. Don't bring harm to them, and God will ensure they will not harm you.

Anyway, the papacy does a 0 enthusiasm version of this for centuries, but when the Protestant reformation happens, they say the Protestants won't do the shrine thing and destroy the world.

They also take it much more seriously, because they have a reason to now.

That explains their actions, though the Vatican, for the simple reason it has no reason to, doesn't have a lot of enthusiasm to crush the revolt. Maybe a tinge of their own morality makes them want to crush their enemies. Nothing else.

It needs to at least pretend it does care though.

Answer 7

That would have been a plausible approach if paganism was an already powerful position. Then it could have been an alliance of convenience between two powerful forces, intended to crush the third (in this case protestantism), with a built-in if unstated assumption that they will then have the final showdown once the field is whittled down to two rivals. But if you had to revive paganism first... no.

Answer 8

Major Changes to the Timeline are Required, but the Pagans are useful to the Catholic Church as part of a Counter-Reformation .

The Roman Catholic Church sees itself as the direct continuation of Jesus Christ's ministry through the apostles. It would never truly endorse a practice which does not place Jesus Christ at the top. However, the Catholic Church does have a long history of tolerating certain unorthodox practices to keep followers. If in your timeline, a form of Roman Paganisim somehow prevented people from abandoning the church, then perhaps the Catholic Church would be amenable to allying itself with it.

Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus (Known in our timeline as Julian the Apostate) was an emperor of the western roman empire who strongly opposed christianity, to the point that planned to fund a reconstruction of the Jewish Temple just to oppose the spread of Christianity and reconstructed various pagan temples. He himself was a Neoplatonist Hellenist (This isn't quite traditional Roman Paganism, but it has a lot of similarities and is essentially a "reformed" Paganism). Maybe in your timeline he isn't killed, or at the very least he is a lot more successful before he is killed, leading to a significant Neoplatonic Hellenist minority in the world. This minority would probably be heavily composed of philosophers and scholars, which will become important later. When Islam rises, the Pagans would likely ally with the Christians because Islam is not as tolerant of non-Abrahamic religions as it is of pagans, meaning that this could lead to a competing scholastic tradition in the west separate from the Islamic Golden Age. Pagan philosophers and scientists would be somewhat respected, and considered a friendlier and more neutral alternative than foreign thinkers.

The Catholics aren't crazy about this minority, but they tolerate it, probably because a lot of them are relatively wealthy and influential people with ties all the way back to the original Roman Empire and they're useful. The scholastic tradition of the pagans would probably mean that they are allowed to research and publish things that the historical catholic church would have never allowed Christian scholars to do. Look at how Muslim and Jewish scholars in our own timeline were allowed to pursue topics of research that "no real christian" would have been allowed to pursue. Or how many Christian scholars were prevented from continuing their studies because the church was afraid of a Christian saying things that might be wrong or controversial. The pagans would be forced to become scholars, tutors, and philosophers, much like how the Jews were forced into moneylending as one of the few jobs they would be allowed to hold. History would probably go on relatively normally, except with Christianity in a slightly less dominant position. Paganism probably flourishes in the Byzantine empire, where it could pick up more of it's ancient traits out of a sense of nostalgia and Roman nationalism.

These Pagans would not be endorsed by the Church, but maybe centuries of peaceful coexistence might make the Church comfortable with a lot of Pagan elements, which would just be seen as "being nice to ones neighbors." However, the reformation comes, just as it did in our timeline, except Martin Luther has another complaint to lodge against the Catholic church; it's refusal to exterminate Pagans. This isn't too much of a stretch, later in his life Martin Luther became quite anti-Semitic, and in this timeline, the Pagans probably occupy a similar role, so its reasonable that Martin Luther might develop some hatred towards them.

If the protestants begin persecuting Pagans, perhaps burning them as witches, then it would only be reasonable that many of them flee to the Catholic Church. Maybe many well known Pagan scholars begin writing propaganda with their brand new printing presses on how "Real Christians" are tolerant of Pagans and how corrupt the protestants must be. The Pagans, out of desperation, become major supporters of the Catholic Church, coming up with arguments to undermine the protestants and promoting the Church as "good Christians." The more critical the Pagans are of the protestants, the better.

The Catholic church, in this scenario, would likely support pagans who defend the church from the protestants, as it would simply see them as "neutral" scholars whose work happens to help them address "extremist" reformers. This would likely shift the Church's position from indifferent to the Pagan minority, to actively supporting it in places where it might combat the Reformation. This support would likely be given under the guise of charity, but ultimately, I could see the Church helping revive paganism by funding new neoplatonic schools, temples, and advocating for them as long as the pagans agree to not portray the church in a negative light or counter it's teachings among its own followers.

Answer 9

Probably Not

You're approaching this from an existentialist/postmodernist point of view; namely, that whether a religion is actually true or not doesn't matter (usually with the unstated underlying assumption that there is no "true" religion).

Contrary to popular opinion, most educated Christians prior to the mid nineteenth century weren't superstitious idiots or hippies like modern media often portrays them. They had faith, but it was largely a rational faith, like how most people have faith that the sun will come up in the morning. As a result, the sorts of people who led the Protestant Reformation are also the sorts of people who would immediately reject a revised paganism. After all, it is a human fabrication with little to no basis in reality—something even the classical Pagans themselves knew.

Also, as I previously mentioned, Protestantism was a response to the established Church abandoning Biblical doctrine in favor of oral tradition, Papal fiat, and the power of the purse (especially the latter, but the former two are more relevant here). Thus, even if Rome did come up with a form of Paganism which could even remotely pass scientific muster, Protestants would still reject it. Soli Deo gloria, and all that.

That said, do not abandon hope entirely! There's still a chance the Pope's hare-brained plot will work. As I said, people who have taken the time to actually study the Bible, philosophy, and science will immediately reject revived Paganism. However, most people don't take that time. The common man is much more likely to be taken in by Rome's shenanigans. More importantly, Western European "folk religion" (i.e., religion as it is practiced by the common people) had a great deal of pre-existing syncretism with Paganism.*

In real life, both clergy and the civil authorities would immediately take action to end these shenanigans.** For example, take the Servetus affair. However, this is a story. While it's bad form to ignore real life entirely, you can take creative liberties. For example, perhaps the religious authorities have a miscommunication that slows their response down in the critical early stages. It's unlikely to happen, but not entirely unfeasible. The key is to have the response from those who know better be delayed long enough for those who don't to be taken in.

EDIT: All this presupposes that the Inquisition doesn't nip it in the bud, as @Mary pointed out.

* "If my crops died, it must be because a witch cursed them!"

** Unfortunately, often under the principle of "overkill is underrated."