Here are a number of passages from Pelikan in his The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (Abindgon Press, 1959), interspersed throughout the chapter entitled “The Tragic Necessity of the Reformation”, and found on pp. 48-54:
Hence the Reformation was indeed a catholic movement. If we keep in mind how variegated medieval catholicism was, the legitimacy of the reformers’ claim to catholicity becomes clear. With men like Augustine and Bernard on their side, the reformers could well protest against the usurpation of the name ‘catholic church’ by their opponents. A leading irenic and orthodox theologian of the seventeeth century Johann Gerhard (d. 1637) spoke for all the reformers when he said: “If the papists want to prove the truth of the name ‘catholic’ as applied to their church, let them demonstrate that the dogmas of their church are catholic, that is, that they are in conformity with the catholic writings of the prophets and apostles!….If the papists want to deny us the name ‘catholic’ let them demonstrate that we have seceded from the catholic faith and that we deny the mystery of the Trinity.”
Not a new ‘Protestant’ gospel, then, but the gospel of the true church, the catholic church of all generations, is what the Reformation claimed to be espousing. Substantiation for this understanding of the gospel came principally from the Scriptures; but whenever they could, the reformers also quoted the fathers of the catholic church. There was more to quote than their Roman opponents found comfortable. Every major tenet had considerable support in the catholic tradition.
That was eminently true of the central Reformation teaching of justification by faith alone. For the reformers, this teaching stood or fell with the question of biblical support for it; but because it was so important to the very life of the church, the reformers could expect to find it being taught by theologians between Paul and Luther, too. That the ground of our salvation is the unearned favor of God in Christ, and that all we need to do to obtain it is to trust that favor–this was the confession of the great catholic saints and teachers. Justification by faith alone really means justification by grace alone, “grace” understood not as something in man which wins God’s good will, but as something in God which makes man pleasing to him. Without this teaching, the reformers maintained, there was no church, catholic or otherwise, but only a human institution built upon human merit. The target of their critique was only one strand in the development of the medieval teaching on justification, and with other strands of that development the reformers had a definite affinity……
Loyalty to the catholic fathers consisted in subordinating them to the Scriptures, as they had subordinated themselves to the Scriptures.
In their own way, therefore, the reformers not only retained but actually restored the ancient Christian definition of catholicity as identity plus universality….
According to both of these Reformers (Luther and Calvin) the church had been Christian and catholic before the papacy; therefore it could be both Christian and catholic without the papacy. In the name of such Christian catholicity they were willing to challenge Rome….
To save itself from its own distortions, catholic Christianity has repeatedly needed prophets, who have been born of Mother Church but have grown up to denounce her for her harlotry. Tertullian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Savanarola, Luther — all these were sons of the catholic church whose devotion to the church compelled them to speak a prophetic word against the church as it was…
