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Comment by vosper | Hacker News Reader

> The printing press democratized knowledge

That's true, but it also allowed protestant "heretics" to propagate an idea that caused a permanent schism with the Catholic church, which led to centuries of wars that killed who-knows-how-many people, up to recent times with Northern Ireland.

(Or something like that, my history's fuzzy, but I think that's generally right?)

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I thought it was a king wanting a divorce, and as he couldn't get it from the catholic church, created his own.

Henry VIII created the Church of England in 1534 for the purposes of granting himself an annulment. Most histories count Martin Luther's 95 Theses as beginning of the Reformation in 1517 (a crisp date for a less-than-crisp event; Luther did not originally see himself as protesting the Roman Catholic Church). The Protestant Reformation was a heterogeneous movement from the beginning.

Not really, no. It was Luther who kick-started Protestantism. Henry VIII attempted to supplant the Pope, and kind of slid into Protestantism by accident.

That was the case just for the anglican church, which is only one "part" of the reformation.

Protestantism started in Germany with Martin Luther nailing his theses to a church door. Henry's reproductive problems came later and where only sort of related.

Long before that in 1054, was the East - West Schism that split the Catholic and Orthodox churches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism

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