The Religion Guy had planned an off-the-news story proposal appropriate for the reflective moods of the Lenten season, Good Friday, Passover and Islam’s holy month of Ramadan that soon follows.

At issue: why do people lack or lose faith?

As it happens, this now fits into the media’s necessary All-COVID-19-All-The-Time mode.

Perspective. The worst-case coronavirus scenarios floated this week are trivial compared with the Black Death in the 14th Century, when sanitation and biological knowledge were primitive. These were mostly cases of bubonic plague with its wretched suffering. The World Health Organization says unstoppable disease killed off some 50 million victims in Europe alone (starting in Italy!) and within just a matter of years. By some accounts, a third of the world population perished, and it took two centuries for numbers to recover.

Unimaginable. The spiritual angst must have been beyond belief, so to speak. Fears that this was somehow divine punishment led to extreme acts of penitence and fear-fed persecution under the Inquisitions.

While people talk about turning to “foxhole faith” in times of trial, the opposite can also occur. Did the plague years underlie in some way the massive attack upon the old church in the 16thCentury Reformation, and then the religious skepticism of Europe’s “Enlightenment”? Does that history tell us religious faith could confront serious challenges following the current, vastly less devastating, outbreak?

A prime thinker to ask is Britain’s Alec Ryrie, a Durham University historian who specializes in that era. His book “Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World” (Viking, Penguin paperback) was an ornament of the 500th anniversary observance of the Reformation.

Ryrie’s recent “Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt” (Harvard) has direct bearing on our present moment.

More than an academic question: At year 500, what is the legacy of Protestantism?

The Religion Guy raised the above question and answers it with a few thoughts upon the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

This vast, ongoing split in Christianity involved theology and spirituality, but as a journalist The Guy [disclosure: a lay Protestant] will emphasize culture. The uproar originated on October 31, 1517 (All Saints’ Eve), when Martin Luther issued his “95 Theses.” Matters evolved from there into a sweeping assault on the papacy and the Catholic Church.

Historians debate whether the tempestuous Wittenberg professor actually posted this protest on the legendary door of the town church or simply distributed it. Whatever, Luther sent a copy to the Germans’ most powerful churchman, Archbishop Albrecht, who fatefully referred it to the Vatican for scrutiny.

The “Theses” decried lavish sales of “indulgences” from the church’s “treasury of merits” to lessen punishments due for sins of the living and of the dead in Purgatory. Rid of corrupt money-raising, indulgences still operate in 2017 (per “Catechism of the Catholic Church” #1471 – 1479).

The indulgence money was supposed to fund construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But Albrecht skimmed off half the proceeds to repay a loan of 23,000 ducats he used to purchase leadership of Germany’s most lucrative diocese -- at age 23! When Luther faced Catholic derision for violating his monk’s vows and marrying, he told Albrecht to end his unwed sexual partnership!

In other words, late medieval Catholicism had some problems. Nonetheless, was this split necessary?