The Counter-Reformation

Tue name of Counter-Reformation suggests a fight against Protestantism; There was a political aspect of the CounterReformation, a league of Catholic powers ready to crusade against the new Protestant states. There was also a true sense in which the fight against Protestantism encouraged the reforming movement within the Roman Catholic Church. But it did not create it. The conflict with Protestantism gave to reform a new edge, to cut through the vested interests and administrative conservatism which 2 frustrated reform. It gave to reform a dynamic, a vitality, an affection for ancient ways, and a mistrust of Protestant ways,

The vested interests were so powerful that no reformation, not even a Catholic reformation, was possible without an increase in the power of the secular state. Part of the difficulty was the independent power of the Church within each state. Part of the, difficulty was the interest of the Roman courtin maintaining all its financial and legal rights throughout the Church. Even a Catholic Reformation, in Spain, France, or Southern Germany, had as on¢ consequence a further restraint upon the power of Rome in those countries, and derived its effective impetus as much from Catholic sovereigns as from the moral and intellectual leadership of popes or divines.

The fight against the Mohammedans in southern Spain welded Spanish State and Church into a unity of crusading fervour. The Spanish crown already exercised a decisive power over the Church through the Inquisition, which was a royal weapon, and through the normal restraints which a national monarchy placed upon papal action, By 1550 the wealth of the newly discovered Americas was flowing into Spain; and new economic power, joined to the political status given by royal marriages, elevated the country to a leading place in the states of Europe. After 1562, France, split in two, was out of the political race, and Spain became the strongest power in Europe, without rival in means or in influence. By its rule of the Duchy of Milan and of Naples and Sicily it was able to dominate Italy, and the old titanic conflict of the Middle Ages between Pope and Emperor turned itself into petty bickerings between Pope and Spanish king; but only bickerings, for after 1562 the Pope depended as politically upon the king of Spain as ever medieval Popes had depended upon Saxon or Hohenstaufen or Angevin. Spain led the rest of Europe in military prowess, navigation, discovery. Spanish Catholicism was like a magnet, attracting towards itself the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation.

Cardinal Ximenes, primate of Spain from 1495 to 1517, conducted a reformation of the Spanish Church on lines which would have been traditional if the royal power had not been so directly engaged. He enforced poverty among the monks and friars; dissolved religious houses which failed to conform to his standards, or stripped them of their endowments and devoted the revenues to hospitals or to impoverished monasteries; compelled incumbents to reside upon their benefices, to expound the Scriptures, and to educate children; and created the university of Alcald, designed to train scholastic theologians and the clergy, where the study of the Hebrew and Greek languages was encouraged.

Here the leading scholars, some of them imported from Italy, warmly adopted the reforming and critical ideas of Erasmus. In the Spanish Netherlands, Vives edited St Augustine and devised enlightened schemes of education. Perhaps in no other country in Europe were the principles of Erasmus so zealously adopted, by a few eminent men, as a guide to reform. They were subjected to a battery of criticism in 1520-2 by a heresy-hunter, Zuniga, who tried to persuade the Spanish that Erasmus was responsible for Luther, but without evident success. Alcal4 rivalled Sala= manca for the intellectual primacy of Spain. Between 1502 and 1517 a group of scholars, under the personal direction of Ximenes, produced the Polyglot Bible in six volumes, a Bible in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts, and a critical apparatus. The volumes were to be sold only with papal approval (not obtained until 1520) and therefore the publication was delayed until 1522, and the New Testament of Erasmus was known in western Europe before the Polyglot version. The critical attitude of the cardinal was more conservative than the critical attitude of Erasmus, but his scholarship was by no means inferior. In 1512 appeared a Castilian translation of the Gospels and Epistles, frequently reprinted, so that the Spaniard had little difficulty in buying a copy in his own tongue.

But after 1530 the Erasmians of Spain encountered the disapproval of the Inquisition. They were a small group of educated men, and their ideals took no hold among the people or among most of the Spanish clergy or monks. In 1537 the Inquisition prohibited the reading in Castilian of the works of Erasmus, and ordered his Latin editions to be expurgated. The inquisitors began to expect, and to hunt, Lutherans. They found a little evidence. A group in Seville was discovered to have smuggled Spanish Bibles from Geneva. Solemn burnings in 1558-60 destroyed the few powerless Protestants, and probably some others. Once in the chase, the inquisitors were hard to satisfy. In Italy the destruction of Protestantism was as rapid.

Ignatius Loyola appears first in the pages of history during 1515, at Pamplona in Navarre, accused of ‘great crimes’ in though he has not deserved it, lifting him little by little from the proximity of agonies to contemplate the peace and the glory of Mount Sion, ‘from living upon Calvary to living with the Resurrection. The month was planned to lead to an act of will — the choice of a new way of life. This new way is to be lived by obedience to the teaching and the ordinances of the Church. Obedience to a superior is the condition of a soldierly service of God and of a total self-abnegation in the individual. The soul undertook to obey the Church, as the bride of Christ, and to sacrifice its own judgement; to practise confession, frequent communion, the recitation of the hours of prayer; to maintain such institutions of the Church as monasteries, the celibacy of the clergy, relics, fasting, indulgences, pilgrimages; and to defend the scholastic theology, the Church’s tradition and the decrees of the Popes. The book ends with ‘Rules for Thinking with the Church’. In these rules comes the celebrated hyperbole that he is to be ready to believe that what seems to him white is black, if the Church declares it to be so. (Contrary to a common opinion, however, it has been shown that for many years there’was no regularity about the practice of these exercises by Loyola’s disciples.)

In 1523 Loyola went as a pilgrim to Jerusalem. In 1526 he was a student at AlcalA preparing himself for ordination. His rigours and his little groups of prayerful friends made the Spanish Inquisition suspicious of him, and for a time he was imprisoned. He tried again at Salamanca and was imprisoned. In 1528 he tried again at the University of Paris, where he was again denounced to the Inquisition. He had begun at last to learn wisdom and prudence in picking his disciples. At Paris in 1534, his first six men joined him in a brotherhood — Francis Xavier, also from Pamplona, Faber (Pierre Le Févre), Lainez, Salmerén, Bobadilla, and Rodriguez.

In a chapel on Montmartre (15 August 1534) the little band vowed to go to Palestine to work for the conversion of the Turks; or if this proved to be impossible, to offer themselves to the Pope to be sent on.any work which he even if it were a mission, to the Turks or other persec powers. By 1538 it was clear that Palestine was impossible; and though the mind of Xavier was already turning towards the Indies, they offered themselves to the Pope. They had become aware of the crying needs of Italian parishes, and became known as educators of children, as conductors of ~ missions or retreats, as popular’ preachers, as chaplains’ to hospitals, At Rome in the spring of 1539 they formed a ‘Company of Jesus’ which was to instruct the children and the illiterate in the commandments of God. Its members were to take a special view of obedience to the Pope, to go wherever the Pope should send them. The priests of the Company, though bound to recite the hours of prayer, were not to do so in choir, that they might not be withdrawn from. the works of charity. It was not a good time for founding new orders. In the Papal court, reform made a stumbling beginning under Pope Adrian VI (1522-3), remained quiescent or worse under Clement VII (1523-34) and by 1539, with Paul IIT as Pope, began markedly to influence public opinion in Rome. Persons with revolutionary ideas could be found in high places. The canonist Guidiccioni, whom the Pope consulted about the Jesuits, believed that all the existing male orders except four (perhaps except one) should be © suppressed, At last, on 27 September 1540, the Society was established by a Bull entitled Regimini militantis ecclesiae,

The Society was in’ no sense designed to be a weapon for fighting the Protestants. Nor at first had it any reputation for intransigence. The Bull of 1540 declared its object to be the propagation of the faith, and the phrase ‘propagation and defence’ of the faith was not added till 1550. Nor was it in origin an autocratic society. Ignatius himself was less autocratic by temperament than John Wesley. But between 1540 and 1555 the Society grew so rapidly in numbers, influence, and range of activities that it could only be directed, perhaps could only have been held together, by a strong hand at the centre. And’ while Ignatius was not temperamentally an autocrat, and would probably have been content if another had governed the society which he had founded, he stamped it with his own religious ideals and therefore with the virtue of obedience at the centre of its devotional life. The rule of obedience taught in The Spiritual Exercises was not new. It may be paralleled in the rules of St Francis of Assisi, and its origins go back to the’ Rule of St Benedict and beyond. Yet he succeeded in imparting into his Society an atmosphere of religious obedience which easily fitted the autocratic constitution desirable for practical reasons, and which culminated in the special promise of obedience made to the Pope by fully professed members of the Society.

They intended to be a society of priests ministering to the heathen and the poor, and especially educating the children or the illiterate. Ignatius spent much energy in resisting the tendency of his more devotional followers to turn the society into a conventional, even amore contemplative, order. They established orphanages, houses for prostitutes, schools, centres of poor relief, in Sicily even a kind of banking institute for destitute peasants. Others among the new orders modified the obligation of the religious to say the offices in choir, but Ignatius carried this to a revolutionary abolition. There should be no common recitation of the office; thus the oldest obligation of the monastic community disappeared.

It is interesting to observe the balance with which the mature Ignatius, once a zealot and ascetic extremist, ruled his order. Though he maintained a severe and austere life for himself, he would allow no one to practise discipline so strenuously as to harm his health. He would even force some young ascetic, discovered to have been fasting beyond the rule, to eat a meal in his presence. His men were to be fit for hard work in the world. The success of the Jesuits sprang largely from this readiness to adjust the old ideals of the monks to the needs of the new generation.

The hierarchy of the order was complex. The novitiate, lasted two years instead of one, and was different from the old enclosed novitiates in containing a period of work ina hospital and a barefoot pilgrimage. Then the novice took the simple vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, and passed into the ‘scholasticate’, where he received a severe course of higher education, and might be received-at the end into full profession of vows and membership of the Society. If received, he could later be allowed to take a fourth vow, that of personal obedience to the Pope; and those ‘professed of the fourth vow’ were the governing body of the Society. They were not numerous — in 1556 they were only 43 in number, out of 1,000 members. This governing body was summoned only to elect a General or at the will of the General (except in exceptional circumstances where the General was insane or incapable), and the General: held office for life, restricted only by the advice of four elected assistants. The constitution in theory attributed no more power to the General, and exacted no more obedience from the fathers, than some medieval orders. But the old abbot had been limited by custom and enclosure and a body of tradition and a written rule, whereas the Jesuit General was administering a new body which needed strong government to control its rapid expansion and harmonize its various activities.

Their work became diverse as their numbers grew. The mission to the heathen was not allowed to drop — perhaps, indeed, it always remained as primary to the Society as were the struggles against the heretics. On 7 April 1541 Francis Xavier, with three Jesuit companions, embarked at Lisbon for the Indies. He was the first of a long line of missionaries to the Indies and the Americas.

In 1540 the Society was still a little group, primarily for education and pastoral work among the poor. By 1556, when Ignatius died, it had more than 1,000 members and had become one of the powerful forces in the Catholic world, by its ministry not to the poor but to the upper ranks. This happened chiefly through its hold upon higher education. It began by teaching the urchins of the Roman slums. It ended by teaching princes and princesses.

The Franciscans had begun by a ministry to the poor and had soon produced professors at the university. The parallel extension of the Jesuit work was less of a change than among the Franciscans. Education of children, to be effective, must lead them upwards. The primary school cannot be efficient unless the secondary school is efficient, and the secondary school will not be efficient unless the university is efficient. The first Jesuit secondary school was opened at Messina in 1548. The good sense of Ignatius exacted modern methods, fresh air and exercise, admirable teaching of Latin in the spirit of the Renaissance, care of good manners. Soon they were educating the upper classes of Catholic Europe. And meanwhile, colleges were founded in university after university, the first at Padua in 1542, the chiefat Rome in 1551. The Company of Jesus became a teaching order, the leading body engaged in the higher education of Catholics, And since its educational methods were effective, more effective than any other methods in contemporary Europe, it found itself educating aristocrats and kings. The association of the Jesuit with the Catholic court, an association to be perilous to both sides, was founded upon intelligent schoolmastering.

The Jesuits in Germany

Teaching the Catholic faith in the universities, they were brought into direct controversy with the swiftly spreading influence of the Protestant divines. Their own plan of reform encountered notions of Reform, and those notions in absolute conflict with their ideals of obedience to the Holy Roman Church, Their study of theology was first for pastoral uses, then for controversial uses, and finally it became an end in itself, an academic discipline. Ignatius, despite painful diligence, was never a scholar. But two of his original six, Lainez and Salmerén, rapidly gained a place among the leading theologians of Catholic Europe and were

The Counter-Reformation among the Pope’s more stalwart defenders at the Council of Trent. And from the moment (1542) that Jesuit Fathers were summoned by Catholic bishops to work in Southern Germany, they found that they were at once leading resistance to Protestant thought and seeking to confute Protestant theologians. In 1549 they began to teach at the Bavarian University of Ingolstadt, henceforth their German base. In 1552 the German college was founded in Rome; and from that time Ignatius regarded the battle against heresy as a primary task of his Company. He was succeeded’ as General by Lainez, the ablest theologian and controversialist among the early members,

For in 1555 sober men thought that the conservative cause in Germany was lost. Protestantism was still spreading in the Catholic lands like Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia.

It had been difficult for the old theologians to resist the new theologians, except at the most superficial level of controversy. John Eck, by his cleverness, produced little handbooks which scored points against the Protestants. But at a deeper level the learned divines had been on the side of Reform, The universal belief that reform was necessary, the aridity and staleness of the older scholastic tradition, its fruitlessness in a world dominated by the insights of humanism, the second-rate quality of many of the defenders ~ these rendered the traditionalist apologetic scanty and unconvincing, during the first forty years of reform. There were exceptions; Spanish friars like Alfonso a Castro or Dominic Soto were already in the forties and fifties creating a new apologetic towards Protestantism. But as scholarship improved and confidence returned, as the theologians found much common ground with the Protestants in the study of the Bible and of the ancient Church, the controversy be came less unequal. The conservatives discovered how in the new world they could defend the old ways, and were sometimes surprised to find that the old ways were defensible.

In Germany the Catechism of the Jesuit Peter Canisius (published in 1555) is a mark of this changing atmosphere. It was written in a style to be understood, it was lucid and attractive and supported by Biblical texts, it was not (as a catechism by Eck would have been) armed to the teeth against assailants. It was an uncontroversial statement of the Catholic faith, and won praise even among Protestant divines. Canisius toured the Catholic south, stirring the princes to the defence of their religion, disputing and preaching, founding colleges and institutions. For much of the century even informed Germans supposed that the founder of the Jesuits was Canisius.

It should not be forgotten that controversial disputations or pamphlets formed one of the least important parts of the battle against the Protestants. The only way to counter the Protestants was to reform the Church. In the Bavaria of 1550, for example, all the old abuses were continuing, and continuing in spite of a pious prince. The clergy were often illiterate, the monasteries often like country inns, the vicarages commonly contained a concubine and numerous progeny, there were many drunken priests. This was the condition which invited the Reforming ideals from the north to spread southward, and some of the Bavarian middle class were already affected by the teaching of the Lutherans or of the Anabaptists. The only way to stem the tide was to reform the Church. It was pastoral endeavour as well as militant antagonism which was at the base of the CounterReformation advance in South Germany, ‘The best way to fight the heretics is not to deserve their criticisms,’ said the nuncio Bonomi in 1585, But this pastoral endeavour was an action of the state. In Bavaria the pious prince Albert summoned Jesuits to his aid and reformed the parishes of his duchy with a soldierly severity. And to expel heretics or destroy Anabaptists or burn false books was for every Catholic sovereign a part of his endeavours to reform his parishes.

The Protestants - Luther, Henry VIII (if he was a Protestant), Calvin ~ appealed to a future General Council of the Church. The memory of the fifteenth-century councils was still potent. The most traditional of reformers looked to a General Council to reform the Church in head and members and, after the German revolt, to bring peace. The difficulty lay in the question when a General Council was free, who might attend it, and what might be its agenda. Papal divines held that the Pope alone had the canonical right to summon a General Council. Protestant divines could not expect, or did not expect, fair dealing at a Council summoned and arranged by their principal opponent. A moderate peacemaker, like the Emperor Charles V, was confronted with the formidable and unlikely task of summoning, or causing to be summoned, a Council which sensible men upon either side would recognize to be a true Council, of an authority and prestige comparable with the great Councils of the primitive Church.

Many moderates, especially in Germany, were passive in the growing schism because they looked for remedy to a future Council. They might not want Luther, but they wanted reform, and they suspected the Popes of failing to call a Council because they wished not to be reformed. The Germans wanted ‘a free Christian Council in German lands’. By ‘free’, most Germans meant that it must be independent of the papacy. The Emperor Charles V wished the Council to meet in Germany, partly because he was a good. Catholic and partly because he wanted and needed a united Germany.

The Pope and his advisers followed their predecessors of a century before in eyeing with suspicion and fear any Council which a German Emperor, however Catholic, might convoke. Their fear sprang as much from the fact that the vested interests of the papal court were afraid of the ‘reform in head and members’ on which everyone was theoretically agreed, as from the memory that any General Council raised constitutional hindrances to the freedom of papal action. They remembered how the Council of Basle had lectured. the popes like a nagging wife. They remembered how the Council of Constance had deposed popes’and elected a new pope. They’ feared that’a General Council outside their control would conduct a revolution in which Catholicism would be transformed and the See of Rome swept into insignificance. They admitted that sooner or later a Council ‘must be held, but they were determined that should be under the presidency of the Pope or his legates, should be held in the traditional manner’ with bishops attending, and should be as immediately under the direction of the Pope as the Lateran Council of 1512-17. They thought that the popes were capable of reforming the Church by papal decree, so far‘as it needed reform. If a Council could not be avoided, it should be held at Rome or in the papal dominions. They sometimes believed that no new decrees were needed, and that the nations needed only to enforce the existing canon law. ‘What is the point of a

Paul III Farnese (Pope 1534-49) was the Pope who recognized that a General Council must willy nilly be summoned, and abandoned the policy of his predecessors that a Council must at all costs be avoided lest Rome perish in the ensuing constitutional conflict. In his personal habits Paul was no great example of a reformed Pope, for he suffered from a numerous and avaricious family. But reformed or not, he was convinced by the urgent need to reform the Church from within. And his performance was courageous. Though he elevated a nephew aged fourteen to be a Cardinal and sent the red hat to his school, he also elevated several Catholic leaders of reforming zeal or humanist sympathy: Fisher, Contarini, Sadoleto, Caraffa, Pole. The reformers were given an immediate opening: In 1536 he appointed a commission of nine — including Sadoleto, Caraffa, Contarini, and. Pole —- to produce.a memorandum on reform. In 1537 they issued a Report ofa Select Committee…​ on Reforming the Church (Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia). They recommended that residence be made compulsory, that a certain standard should) be exacted of persons to be admitted to benefices. Though they were oddly silent upon ignorance and the need of education, they recognized the peril in indulgences and superstitious devotions. They were unpalatably frank in their denunciations of monastic abuses, the misuse of episcopal authority, the avarice and irresponsibility of the cardinals, the prostitutes in the city of Rome, and the claims of extreme canonists that the Pope, even if he sold benefices, could not commit simony. Unpalatably frank, for the text soon leaked out: and was published by Protestants in Germany. A picture was circulated of three cardinals sweeping a church with foxes’ tails instead of brooms.

The Catholic Church was no monolithic uniform structure. The medieval Church contained a wide range of opinion, and now the Pope found himself pressed by two different schools. Everyone agreed upon reform. But must reform mean an approximation towards the Protestants, conciliation and concession, an allowing of clerical marriage or the cup to the laity, an eschewing of the admitted abuses of the doctrine of merit by encouraging a more Scriptural teaching of justification by faith? Or was reform rather to be obtained by fighting the Protestants, refusing all concession, developing the unprotestant elements of devotion in the medieval tradition, strengthening the authority of the hierarchy?

The history of the Counter-Reformation is in part the history of the triumph of the conservatives and the militant over the conciliatory and the liberal.

Among the cardinals elevated by Paul III and among the authors of the Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia, two have been. seen as symbols of the rival schools: Cardinal Contarini who patronized the early Jesuits, and Cardinal Caraffa who organized the Theatines. Contarini ^[1] studied. philosophy among the humanists, was then a civil servant in the city of Venice, attending the famous 1521 Diet of Worms as the Venetian ambassador, and was still a layman when Pope Paul III made him a cardinal in 1535. Humane and courteous, he was for seven years the guide and inspirer of the Catholic Reformation. He believed that the Protestants had a measure of truth in their pleas upon merit, and to express the doctrine of justification he was ready to find formulas which would satisfy both Protestant and Catholic. He believed that the traditional abuses, even the highest, even the abuses of the Roman Curia, must be ended.

The Council of Trent is important, in the first place, because it failed to meet until 1545. ee The Cardinals, if they must have a Council, wanted it at ee The Emperor Charles V was determined to havea il in Germany. For long years papal diplomacy was directed to securing that a Council never rk The legate Aleander offered welcome advice to Pope Clement VII: ‘Never offer a Council, never refuse it directly. On the contrary, show you are willing to comply with the request, but stress the difficulties in the way. Thus you will be able to ward it off.’ ‘Commit yourself to nothing,’ the legate Cervini warned Pope Paul III at the eleventh hour, ‘until itis agreed that the Pope is absolute master of the Council.” The postponement, perhaps a fatal postponement for © Christendom, was made easier because Charles V was usually at war with the King of France. France, fearing a united Germany, feared a General Council. The French king was almost as anxious as the Roman cardinals to put off the Council indefinitely. After repeated false starts under Pope Paul III, who saw that the danger in not summoning was now greater than the danger in summoning, the Council was at last enabled to meet in 1545, because the Emperor and the French king signed the Peace of Crépy in 1544, containing a’ secret Clause’ whereby King’ Francis * pledged himself to further the Emperor’s plans for a Council. ~~ As early as 1524 the name of Trent was mentioned as a " possible site: a little town on the south side of the Alps and “the Brenner pass, under the rule of a Catholic bishop, ‘in “Italy, easy of access to Italian bishops, and yet also within: the Holy Roman Empire and therefore complying with the ‘German demand that the Council must meet ‘in German lands’. The Council of Trent opened after an infinity of delays ~ upon 13 December 1545, with only twenty-eight bishops present. The Emperor and the Pope wanted the Council to perform different functions. The Emperor hankered for religious peace in Germany, by reforming the abuses and corruptions of the Church and by giving to the Lutherans. } certain concessions, like the marriage of the clergy and we “communion in both kinds. He therefore desired the Council to attend to the questions of discipline and leave the p questions of doctrine, which his experience of divines led him to think insoluble. The Pope on the contrary instructed his legates, who presided, that the Council must first treat the questions of doctrine. It was therefore agreed that doctrine and discipline should be treated in parallel. But of the three sessions during which the Council sat (1545-8, 1551-2, 1562-3) the first was chiefly concerned with the doctrinal definitions believed needful upon the questions in controversy with the Protestants, and the last was chiefly concerned with those efforts at disciplinary regulation and correction which the traditionalists meant when they used the word reform. The Fathers of the Council felt no obligation to be ' tender to the Protestants. In the session of 1545-8 they were! mainly from areas unaffected by Protestant ideas, and they’ wished to condemn what appeared to them to be erroneous ‘doctrines. Confronted by the doctrine of justification by faith alone, they declared that faith alone was not sufficient! for justification, but must be accompanied by hope and love. Confronted by the Protestant appeal to the Scripture, they declared that unwritten traditions and Scripture were to be received with equal reverence, Confronted by. the Protestant declaration that the sacraments of the Gospel were three or two in number, they affirmed that the sacraments were neither more nor less than seven. Protestant scholars believed that the Hebrew Bible was the source of the authentic text, and therefore putithé Greek apocrypha upon one side as instructive for morals but uncanonical (the question had never been settled by the medieval theologians), The Fathers of Trent declared that the Latin Vulgate was the canonical and sacred text. The Protestant divines believed that the doctrine of a repeated sacrifice of Calvary in the mass, a doctrine which they attributed too sweepingly to the Catholic divines,-was perilous and unscriptural; and they abolished ‘private masses’ root and branch. The Fathers of Trent declared that in the mass there was a truly propitiatory sacrifice of Christ, and commended those masses at which the priest alone communicated. The Protestants contended that the liturgy should be in a language understood by the people. The bishops declared that the mass should normally continue to be in Latin.

These definitions or decisions effectively ended the hopes of the Emperor and other moderates’ that the Council might seek a measure of reconciliation with the Protestants. It is not to be denied that the fear of Protestantism led the bishops towards direct confutation of its doctrines. There were rumours in the Council, from time to time, that Protestant armies were marching upon Trent. The bishops sometimes felt themselves to be legislating under an imminent threat from heretical force. In 1552 a Protestant army under Maurice of Saxony was but a few hours’ march from Trent, and the Council hastily adjourned. But it should be observed that the doctrinal decrees of Trent, because they were sometimes given a polemical tone, sounded more hostile to the Protestants than they really were, In the early sessions of the Council, when’ the most: ‘momentous ‘of the doctrinal’ decrees were’ passed, the numbers of bishops present (about sixty) was still compara‘tively small. But even within this number, there was sufficient variety of opinion to illustrate the diversities of medieval theology. One bishop, Nacchianti of Chioggia, even believed that all things necessary to salvation are contained. in Scripture, and protested his right to continue to believe this until the Council declared otherwise. The bishops of. ‘Trent, in framing their decrees, needed to allow a breadth, which men of diverse opinions could accept as the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church, The decrees of Trent were ‘framed with care; their language was designed to allow more liberty of opinion than their Protestant critics believed. The care with which they were framed has only been fully evident during the twentieth century. During the last fifty years the Gérres Society has been engaged in publishing the minutes of the debates and discussions which lay behind the formal promulgation of the canons, One example will suffice: the decree of 8 April 1546 upon the canonical Scriptures. Later critics of the Council contended that this decree elevated tradition into a second. source of revelation, outside and independent of Scripture: an unwritten word spoken by Christ to his apostles and guaranteed by its acceptance in the Catholic Church. Many defenders of the Counter-Reformation understood the decree in this way. But the minutes of the discussion show that, if the decree is patient of that interpretation, it was not intended by all the disputants. Some bishops would have liked all the ‘traditions’ of the Holy Roman} Church to be declared sacred. Other bishops felt that this was too generalized; that the only traditions which} could claim this sacredness were ‘apostolic’ traditions, traditions handed down in the Church from apostolic times. Tt was suggested that a list of apostolic traditions might be framed in the canon; and this was rejected on the ground that a list might unwittingly omit an apostolic tradition and thereby cause. Christians.to neglect or repudiate it. The clause was therefore framed to sanctify only traditions ‘which have always been maintained in the Catholic Church’ ; and it is clear that some. of those who framed it were thinking not of an unwritten heritage of doctrine but of certain practices, like the keeping of Sunday or the baptism of infants. Though the decree was intentionally directed against. certain beliefs of Protestants, it .was less hostile to the Protestant doctrines. than was afterwards believed. And the same measure of diversity may be found among other decrees, even those on the eucharistic sacrifice or justification by faith,

Yet it is certain that the immediate effect was calamitous for the programme of the peace-makers.

In October and November 1551, after a period when Pope and Emperor were in. vehement conflict, Lutheran. representatives at last arrived at Trent to prepare the way for their theologians. They refused, to participate in the Council unless. the bishops would begin to discuss the questions of doctrine again from the beginning and regard as null all the decisions which had. been. taken. Understandably ; and it is equally understandable that the papal legates and the bishops should have rejected the suggestion with warmth. By the word Council, the two sides meant different assemblies. One assembly at Trent could not serve for both.

The Council was not under the immediate control of the Pope, who never came to it. His legates presided and teceived frequent communications and instructions from. the Curia at Rome, just as the representatives of the Emperor or the kings of France and Spain received frequent instructions from their respective sovereigns. The majority in the Council was Italian; but as the number of bishops tose (in the last session of 1562-3 it was over 200) the successive Popes needed to exercise vigilant diplomacy through agents at Trent. It was important to the Popes that the Council should not be swayed by the political desires of

It was not difficult to assert that the clergy must be educated and must preach sermons. It was more difficult, and took far’ more time, to secure that the sermons which they preached were not offensive to instructed ears. It was easy to’legislate that a seminary should be instituted in every diocese. It was long years before there were seminaries in most dioceses and before many of those seminaries were purveying an education worthy of the ideal which inspired their foundation. It is possible that in the Protestant countries the problem of ministerial education was made easier to solve because the revolutionary changes in the ecclesiastical constitution gave the authorities a hand less tied, and also allowed a somewhat larger proportion of endowment to be diverted into education. But in Protestant as in Catholic countries a long age of endeavour was needed.

In the Protestant countries the reform was often carried through by the princes against the Pope. In the Catholic countries the process was not so different — it was carried through by the ecclesiastics with the active or reluctant assistance of the princes. In Catholic France and parts of south Germany the decrees could not even be received, and Spain helped itself to what it preferred. It was not easy to reform the episcopate when so many Catholic kings, including those of France and Spain, exercised an almost absolute control over the choice of men to be bishops. As late as June 1569, the Venetian ambassador in Paris said that at | the French court ‘they deal in bishoprics and abbeys as merchants trade in pepper and cinnamon’, The Council of Trent was an effective reforming council mainly in Italy; elsewhere it was an encouragement and stimulus to reform. The decrees were accepted by some French provincial councils in 1580-4, and solemnly in 1615 by the representa tives of all the French clergy, at a brief moment of independent assertion. Spanish councils of clergy consented to them forthwith (1564) but could not put them into practice without leave from the crown. In south Germany, thanks to the skill of the:papal legate Commendone, the bishops and Catholic princes (except the Emperor) received: the decrees of Trent in 1566, though with a few reservations. c 3

The reforming party in the Church was helped to overcome the conservative traditions of Rome by the new ‘political predicament of the Pope. Considered as a political sovereign, the Pope was less important to the European powers in 1565 than in 1510. In 1510 Julius II made the Papal State one:of the powers of Europe, maintaining the political balance between France and Germany and so

papal independence and sovereignty. In-1565 all this was changed. The Pope was much poorer, for Germany’ and England had defected, France was fighting a civil war, and fees and dues were not paid. The Spanish Cardinal of Compostella wrote with a cool cynicism»to the Emperor Charles V in 1555 that the Pope must reform the Church, because he was now too poor to do anything else. The rules of the Council of Trent hampered traditional and lucrative sources of profit, and made the Papal State a less happy ground for adventurers ready to be ordained in re for a fortune. Then Pope Paul IV (Caraffa) attacked 'the Spanish in Naples with his armies, was defeated, and threw the Papacy under the dominance of Spain for forty years.

In 1565 Michele Ghislieri, the Grand Inquisitor of Pope Paul IV (though no disciple or favourite), was elected Pope and became Pius V (1565-72, canonized in 1712). A holier man than Paul, he looked upon reform with a similar contempt for compromise, politics, and diplomacy. He was another ascetic with a decisive mind, a body which made him look nothing but skin and bones, and away of life which was still that of a strict friar. He once said that the Church had need neither of cannon nor of soldiers, that its weapons were prayers and fasting, tears and the Bible, But he was prepared to use other weapons: than the spiritual when: they were available. He encouraged the killing of Huguenot prisoners, He sent the consecrated hat and sword to the Duke of Alva to show his gratitude for the reign of terror in the Netherlands.

Edicts imposed savage penalties for simony, blasphemy, sodomy, concubinage. They limited luxury in dress or in banquets, expensive marriages or marriage settlements. They expelled all the prostitutes from Rome within six days, unless they would marry or enter the convent of the Penitents — a decree which was not carried out in its full rigour, but those who preferred not to brave the perils of flight were confined to a special quarter, which was walled in and: where special sermons were arranged for their instruction. Another edict forbade all residents with houses to visit taverns. The Pope was narrowly dissuaded from imposing the” death penalty for adultery. Parents were subjected to special penalties if they failed to send their children to Sunday schools, Priests, who had commonly dressed like laymen, were compelled to wear clerical dress and to shave off their beards. Physicians and doctors were forbidden to wear the biretta. Doctors were not to visit the sick for more than three days without receiving a certificate that the patient had confessed to a priest, The Pope tried to restrain, the luxury of banquets, of weddings, and of dress; his police raided jewellers’ shops to confiscate the world’s baubles; his taxes discouraged carriages; his decrees limited dowries and forbade shopkeepers to hang out signboards with saints painted upon them, He thought itunfitting that pagan images should decorate his residence, and gave a few of the classical statues to the Roman people. He wanted to give away many more, including some of the great statues housed in the gallery of the Belvedere, and

allowed them to remain only on condition that the collec~ tion should not be open. to the public. He approved of the covering of the statue of Neptune on the fountain at

Bologna and hired an artist to clothe more of the frescoes, though in’ general he did not further drape the nudes. Gossips began to say that Pope Pius wanted to change the’ whole city of Rome into a monastery. :

Sumptuary legislation of this sort was impossible’ to” enforce effectively in the Rome’of 1570. Outside the power” of the papal government it was altogether ineffective. The Pope published a decree abolishing bull-fights, but the Spanish bishops dared not publish it. These’ sumptuary laws were more important as a symbol ofa programme and! an ideal than as/a practical venture in moral government. In the realm of administration the Pope ran into those obstacles which had frustrated the reforming efforts of his predecessors. The Pope once professed that the Church — needed no wealth. In fact, Rome contained a great’ civil service, a network of administration, and the papal govern-) _ ment could not be carried on without money. Offices had _ been sold for money; and in moments of imminent bank-" tuptey, popes had created more offices, with incomes attached, in order to find capital. To clear out the hangerson, the corrupt and petty officials from the papal court, was not only an’ act of administrative reform. It meant finding huge sums of money to compensate persons who had bought offices in good faith and would now find their offices and their income abolished. Pope Pius told some officials dismissed from the Penitentiary that ‘it is always’ better to die of hunger than to lose one’s soul’. He said that it was preferable for the Curia to be ruined rather than’ Christianity. But common justice could not sweep away the bureaucrats of Rome without making provision for them, He tried to force every priest and bishop who had a cure of souls outside Rome to go back to his benefice, and even imprisoned in the Castle of Sant’Angelo some bishops who failed to obey the order. It was an attempt to cure the symptom rather than the disease. Yet it was much for the future that a Pope should have attempted so fearless a reformation of the Papal administration. ‘Men in Rome,’ said the Venetian ambassador Tiepolo, ‘have become a great deal better-or at least they have put on the appearance of being so.’

In 1568 the Pope reformed the Breviary. He adopted . some of that programme which Cranmer had wanted earlier — making it clearer and simpler, restoring the Psalms and the reading of the Bible. to: their dominant place, removing passages from the non-Scriptural readings that were spurious or incredible. He restrained the issue of indulgences; and in every way he attempted to carry into Ptactice the decrees and the spirit of the Council of Trent. In St Maria Maggiore in Rome may be seen the copy of the decrees of Trent which Pope Pius V used. The historian Pastor looked upon that little book with deep emotion, and commented: ‘It became in his hands the hoe by which he uprooted a whole world of weeds.’

Every state which became Protestant lost, churchmen by’ flight or banishment. A small number were not reconciled to change and preferred to maintain their traditional worship in other lands. These men were not attracted by the | whitewash and the destruction or by seeing vestments, Pyxes, images, copes, altars and. censers being sold on the open market.