Catholic Reformation

Historiographical context: Counter Reformation vs Counter Reformation

  • The scholarship surrounding the Reformation and the Counter Reformation has been confessionally charged. Protestant scholars suggested that the Catholic Reformation was a kind of anti-Reformation. As the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner points out in the preface to his Foundations of Modern Political Thought, those identified as revolutionaries of early modern Europe, such as Calvin, were ‘almost entirely couched in the legal and moral language of their Catholic adversaries’
  • It was Protestant historians that emphasised the idea of radical rupture and attached this to the start of modernity, seeing Protestantism as more rational, and modern, and important to the history of capitalism, because it was more ascetic and pious.This narrative needs to be challenged, as does the idea that the Reformation came about as the collapse of the Middle Ages and the corruption of the medieval church. The works of contemporary polemicists, such as Paolo Sarpi, have shaped historicisations of this period.
  • Problematic I: the entanglement between the Reformation and humanism. For example look at Erasmus, he was a vocal humanist who was critical of the church and called for reform, but recognised the authority of the pope and remained catholic all his life. Juan Luis Vives was another prominent Catholic humanist. He wrote the tract de subventionepauperumsive de humanisnecessitatibus, on assistance to the poor. This is significant because it calls for a transformation of poor relief and is opposed to begging, phenomena normally associated with the Protestant Reformation.
  • Problematic II: The Church had successfully dealt with heretics before.For example, most famously putting down the Cathars during the Albigensian crusade. Further, the history of the Waldensian heretics questions Reformation chronology.
  • Problematic III: There was a long tradition of reform before the ‘Reformation’.
  • The most significant event of the Catholic Reformation was the Council of Trent. This was not a single event but a series of disconnected events that took place over 5 papal reigns. Most of the outcomes occurred in its final phase
  • Resorting to a council to solve a big problem in the church was also not a new idea. Between 1378 and 1417 the church had experienced a papal schism and had looked to councils to resolve this. While the Council of Pisa failed to resolve the Western Schism, the Council of Constance was more successful. However, it proclaimed superiority over the pope, which created a papal suspicion and hostility towards the councils and in the fifth Lateran council the papacy condemned conciliarism.
  • One of the key outcomes of the Tridentine Council was the centralization of papal power.
  • Policy outcomes of the Council of Trent: Education: establishment of diocesan seminaries, Society: Increase in church weddings, Accountability: annual episcopal visitations, Preaching: increase in standards, Reform: regular and monastic clergy, Faith: affirmation of veneration of saints and images
  • The papacy took different measures to try to rebuild their monopoly on authority. One action was to issue a new Index of Prohibited books. The first list was adopted at the Fifth Lateran Council of 1515 and confirmed by the Council of Trent in 1546.
  • Another action was the creation of a new set of saints in 1622, which reaffirmed both the spiritual power of Rome, and acted as a tool for the papacy to communicate the kind of Christianity it was endorsing.
  • The Counter Reformation did have a big imprint on the European and global landscape, The Council of Trent had decided that images were good for preaching and for convincing people of the true religion, which led to greater intensity in the production of Catholic Art, and also to greater realism. Gabriele Paleotti, Archbishop of Bologna produced the De sacriset profanes imaginibus (Discourse on Sacred and Profane Pictures), published in Bologna in 1582.
  • The Jesuits were the face of the Catholic Reformation? Founded by Ignatius of Loyola and Francisco Xavier in 1540 they can be seen as the shock troops of the counter reformation. They have been very controversial. They gained approval much like earlier religious orders, like the Franciscans and the Dominicans. They were supposed to be mendicant and value poverty like these earlier orders, but this was never important to them and they became rich and powerful. They were favoured by the Popes as global missionaries, pushing out the earlier missionaries. They became very powerful, caused a lot of resentment and were suppressed in Portugal, France, and the Spanish empire. However the story did not end there and there was Jesuit revival in the nineteenth century.
  • The Jesuits were particularly connected to another strong arm of the Catholic Reformation. The Inquisition.
  • Inquisitorial processes began in the twelfth century, particularly in response to the aforementioned heresies of the Cathars and Waldensians. Pope Gregory IX established the first formal ecclesiastical Inquisition in 1231 as a tribunal to combat heresy. The Inquisition was revived in Spain in the fifteenth century. And the Sixteenth century witnessed an Italian and Spanish Inquisition. In the Early Modern period the Inquisition was particularly interested in the beliefs of those who had converted to Catholicism – the conversosJews and moriscosMuslims in Spain.
  • The global inquisition was conducted by Jesuits, but also other orders such as Dominicans and the Franciscans, who had conducted the medieval inquisitions before the establishment of the Jesuits. The Inquisition followed conversos Jews into the Canary Islands, and then became established in the Americas. Inquisitorial processes took place in the Americas before the official establishment of the Mexican Holy Office by Philip II in 1571.
  • In conclusion, we can see from looking at the long history of the Catholic Reformation that it was not inevitable. Many of the challenges had been faced before and many solutions tried before. There were also many overlaps between the beliefs and ideas of the Catholics and the Protestants which suggested that the separation of the two churches was not inevitable. The Catholic Reformation did bring some changes, the Tridentine reforms in particular characterised the shape of Catholicism up to the second Vatican council. The establishment of new saints, new religious orders, and the Spanish inquisition also evidence the imprint of the catholic reformation, and this certainly influenced the shape of global Catholicism.