also worth noting that not all contemporaries who were interested in the reformation, such as Erasmus, joined Luther in his famous feat, the Reformation. With this in mind, Luther and other reformers are usually credited with bringing the church back to the New Testament ideal, which is not necessarily the case.Luther and his contemporaries definitely did not introduce the concept of reform. Actually, during this time of the wealth and luxury of monastic orders, reform was a recurring theme. But considering the way various popes around Europe tried to bring the church back to its wholesome state, is good to note that most monastic treatises arguing the moral decline of the church do their best to make the church appear as black and unholy as possible. They depict every little thing that is in the least tainted with anything immoral ten times as worse as it really was, alleging that it was excessive with luxury, worldliness, and corruption.Another element that contributes to the misleading idea that the church was corrupt were the clerical abuses taken place during the later Middle Ages. Many people picture the church being run in an authoritarian and totalitarian way by misguided popes, hungry for money and power. This was not always true but trying not to contradict that fact that there were cases of clerical abuses during the medieval times would be a lie, which were accurately addressed by Protestant reformers. The major problem relating to the maltreatment of power between the popes was commonly known as the traffic in indulgences, which certainly was a commercial exploitation. Essentially, it meant to basically pay off for forgiveness whatever you are going to do or did wrong. With this money was the church able to build various art forms that made it clearly visible of the popes abuse because of its elaborate existence. An example of this would be in the Vatican, which we can still see today.With this, the sales of indulgences br...
