Explain why the Catholic Church was criticised in the early sixteenth century.

I would open my teaching of how to answer with this question by inviting the students to consider the structure of the early 16th Century Catholic Church and Papacy, based on the division of power and the placement of religious authority. From this we would be able to draw conclusions as to the failings of the Church in the period, such as nepotism, corruption, the purchase of office, clerical absence and scriptural ignorance. In looking at the factual reality of the Church, we could develop a point based on the incongruence between the Pope as a religious and spiritual leader, and as the temporal Prince of the Papal States, a crown that frequently became involved in geopolitical conflict and warfare- such as in the Italian Wars in the immediate run-up to the period described in the question. We would then return to the initial notion of the basic structure of the Roman Catholic church- unified under a single individual and geographic location- and explore how this caused conflicts with nascent feelings of nationhood, using the very philosophy of Martin Luther and many of his supporters in the Holy Roman Empire in the context of their view of the Papacy as an invasive, perfidious influence on 'Germany'. We would make this argument with reference to relevant primary source material, such as Luther's own writings or the view offered by Ulrich von Hutten's work, understanding the semantic significance of 'Germany' as a new concept.