The Plot Thickens...or...The More You Learn, the More There is to Learn.

One of the things I love about a good thick book on a subject I already know about is the chance to learn new things and see things in a new perspective.  As I continue with Diarmaid MacCulloch's book, The Reformation, I've been intrigued by the author's attempts to show the parallel developments that were going on throughout the 1500's in areas that converted to Protestantism, and those that did not.  It was not as if reform was absent in Spain or Italy while Martin Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were working in Northern Europe, but rather that those initiatives toward reform took different tracks and ended up with different outcomes.  Some of the explanation is as simple as the normal N/S divide in Europe's culture (along with its climate and geography), as well as the differing relationships between rulers and their nobility, and the simple fact that Rome was in the south.
One particular connection between the Jesuits and Methodists struck me as interesting.  The Jesuits resisted the urge to become a clerical order, "We are not monks!  The world is our house." (Jeronimo Nadal, Society member, 1550's)  Likewise, two centuries later John Wesley sent out another group of traveling preachers saying, "the world is my parish".  That Jesuits and Methodist preachers would have anything in common may seem surprising, but one of Loyola's core beliefs was that the Medieval Church was wrong to think that priests or monks had any greater chance of getting to heaven than anyone else. {an idea he learned from Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ}.  That idea was at home within the Protestant Reformation, where the idea of the priesthood of all believers became a foundational understanding of our salvation by grace. 
What's the point of all this?  Am I saying that there are no real differences between Catholics and Protestants?  Of course not, but if we are ever going to see past those differences and begin to work together for the kingdom of God, it would help if we understood that our common ancestry, the Medieval Church, gave rise to reformers throughout Europe (not just in the North).  That we went down differing paths from there is obvious, but that both groups were in the process of reform should help us see that our paths may at some point run closer together once again.