How did Erasmus feel about the Catholic Church?

Answer 1

Erasmus was a priest and deeply loyal to the Catholic Church. He was critical of the abuses in the Church and steered a middle ground. He entered the Augustinian Order when only 19, but left to become the bishop's secretary. His canonical status remained irregular for many years until he finally received permission from the Pope to live effectively as a layman. He was known as a master rhetorician and was deliberately ambiguous about his real thoughts (Hitchcock, History of the Catholic Church), although he favored vernacular translations of The Bible, he published "his greatest achievement" a Greek edition of the New Testament based on the best manuscripts that he could find. His text did not differ from the Vulgate in any crucial way but raised two questions: 1) whether the Bible might have been misunderstood as people has no access to the original text, and 2) whether scholars like himself could questions doctrines and practices on that basis (Hitchcock, ibid). Most of the people who state that they know what Erasmus really felt are making it up from whole cloth as he deliberately never spoke his real thoughts, and his satires could have been taken many different ways. Both the protestants who revolted from the Church, and the Churchmen who remained loyal to her disliked him as he would not take sides. "Some of those who drew these conclusions (the monastic life was corrupt, it was not an authentic Christian vocation, not only did sacramental ritual foster credulous superstitions, it was an obstacle to faith; and not only was the great edifice of formal dogma remove from the spirit of the Gospel, it was a distortion of Christ's teaching, etc.) condemned Erasmus as a heretic, while others welcomed him as a liberator from religious tyranny." (ibid). We will never know, Erasmus died a good Catholic while keeping his distance from the likes of Luther.