Question: Where is the district that the person who wanted to reform and address Vincentas Sladkevičius' religion preached a sermon on Marian devotion before his death located?

Despite Martin Luther's harsh polemics against his Roman Catholic opponents over issues concerning Mary and the saints, theologians appear to agree that Luther adhered to the Marian decrees of the ecumenical councils and dogmas of the church. He held fast to the belief that Mary was a perpetual virgin and the Theotokos or Mother of God. Special attention is given to the assertion that Luther, some three-hundred years before the dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX in 1854, was a firm adherent of that view. His final thoughts on Marian devotion and veneration are preserved in a sermon preached at Wittenberg only a month before his death: Others maintain that Luther in later years changed his position on the Immaculate Conception, which, at that time was undefined in the Church, maintaining however the sinlessness of Mary throughout her life. For Luther, early in his life, the Assumption of Mary was an understood fact, although he later stated that the Bible did not say anything about it and stopped celebrating its feast. Important to him was the belief that Mary and the saints do live on after death. "Throughout his career as a priest-professor-reformer, Luther preached, taught, and argued about the veneration of Mary with a verbosity that ranged from childlike piety to sophisticated polemics. His views are intimately linked to his Christocentric theology and its consequences for liturgy and piety." Luther, while revering Mary, came to criticize the "Papists" for blurring the line, between high admiration of the grace of God wherever it is seen in a human being, and religious service given to another creature. He considered the Roman Catholic practice of celebrating saints' days and making intercessory requests addressed especially to Mary and other departed saints to be idolatry. <SEP> the legend goes that livinus was born from irish nobility. upon studies in england, where he visited saint augustine of canterbury, he returned to ireland. he later went on a "peregrinatio domini" and left ireland for ghent (belgium) and zeeland (netherlands) where he preached. during one of his sermons, livinus was attacked in the village of esse, near geraardsbergen by a group of pagans who cut off his tongue and head. <SEP> bedel was a native of oxfordshire. one henry bedel took the degree of b.a. at corpus christi college, oxford, on 13 february 1555-6, and m.a. 1566 (wood, "fasti oxon". (bliss), i. 146, 172). wood is not certain, but it seems probable from the dates, that this graduate was identical with the preacher of the same name. bedel was collated to the rectorship of st. pancras, soper lane, on 4 october 1561, and preferred to the vicarship of christ church, london, on 28 january 1567. the latter living he resigned in 1576 (newcourt, '"rep".' i. 320, 519). while vicar of christ church he preached "a sermon exhorting to pity of the poor, which treatise may well be called the mouth of the poor". it was delivered on 15 november 1571 and published in 1573. waterland praises it as "learned and elaborate". this is his only extant work, although wood says that he was the author of other sermons. <SEP> Wittenberg is a district () in the east of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Neighboring districts are (from west clockwise) Anhalt-Bitterfeld, the district-free city of Dessau-Roßlau, the districts of Potsdam-Mittelmark, Teltow-Fläming and Elbe-Elster in Brandenburg, and the district of Nordsachsen in the Free State of Saxony. <SEP> Although there had been significant earlier attempts to reform the Catholic Church before Luther -- such as those of Jan Hus, Peter Waldo, and John Wycliffe -- Martin Luther is widely acknowledged to have started the Reformation with the Ninety - five Theses. Luther began by criticising the sale of indulgences, insisting that the Pope had no authority over purgatory and that the Catholic doctrine of the merits of the saints had no foundation in the Bible. The Protestant Reformation, however, would come to incorporate doctrinal changes such as a complete reliance on Scripture as a source of proper belief (sola scriptura) and the belief that faith in Jesus, and not good works, is the only way to obtain God's pardon for sin (sola fide). The core motivation behind these changes was theological, though many other factors played a part, including the rise of nationalism, the Western Schism that eroded loyalty to the Papacy, the perceived corruption of the Roman Curia, the impact of humanism, and the new learning of the Renaissance that questioned much traditional thought. <SEP> He served as Archbishop of Kaunas from 1989 to 1996, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1988. Vincentas Sladkevičius, MIC (20 August 1920 – 28 May 2000) was a Lithuanian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.