The age before the Protestant reformation and the Catholic Churches reforms was an age in which there were different feelings in the clergy. There was lukewarmness and zeal, immorality and piety which makes it difficult to make broad statements about the church at this time but there were some more universal problems. For one the ordinary monks and priests were ignorant. There were no seminary’s and a priest learned how to perform mass and other ceremonies from the priest before him in a kind of apprenticeship where the clergy generally ended up knowing nothing. Abuses among the bishops could be bishops holding multiple offices to generate more money, not living in their diocese, and being more focused on earthly things such as money. These and others were problems that Martin Luther saw in the Catholic Church.
Martin Luther was born in 1483 to the son of a copper tradesman, who wanted him to become a lawyer. In 1505 when he was twenty-two he was caught in a violent thunderstorm and promised Saint. Anne that if he survived he would become a monk. After he survived the storm he sold his books dropped out of university and entered the Augustinian order. He came to teach theology at the University of Wittenberg and in 1517 he posted his famous ninety-five theses on the door of the Church in Wittenberg. These theses were problems that he found with the Catholic Church and invitation for someone to come and debate him. This eventually happened but in the meantime the theses were printed on the newly invented printing press and distributed for the public to read, giving way for the Protestant reformation.