Counterreformation

The Roman Catholic response to the Reformation, which consisted both of efforts to halt the spread of Protestantism and to reform the Catholic Church from within, is known as the Counterreformation or Catholic Reformation.

The term Counterreformation has inspired scholarly controversy. Some modern scholars use it, but others draw a distinction between the “Counterreformation,” which consisted of efforts to halt the spread of Protestantism and to regain lands for the Catholic faith, and the “Catholic Reformation,” a movement for reform within the church.

Efforts at reform and renewal within the church predated the Reformation by at least a century. Reformers often presented their goals as being conservative: They did not seek to introduce innovations into the church but instead to return to the simpler, more heartfelt religion of an earlier day. Those who sought renewal, on the other hand, were more likely to expect great changes in the church.

One important (but abortive) attempt at reform in the church before Martin Luther was the Fifth Lateran Council, which met in Rome from 1512 to 1517. At the Fifth Lateran Council, two monks, Vincenzo (or Pietro) Querini and Tommaso (or Paolo) Giustiniani, proposed that the church immediately make plans to send missionaries to the entire world, including the Americas. Many of their proposals seem to foreshadow the Reformation, because the monks sought to make the church more effective by mandating better training for clerics, eliminating most of the religious orders and reorganizing the rest, reforming the liturgy of the Mass, translating the Bible into vernacular languages, and making greater efforts to fight witchcraft (see witches) and magic. In the end, however, the Fifth Lateran Council did little.

Such dramatic proposals seldom appeared from within the Catholic Church after the Reformation began. As the historian Steven Ozment has observed, “the Reformation’s success made internal Catholic criticism and reform more difficult than ever. To censure even the most flagrant church abuses after 1517 was to be suspected of Lutheran sympathies.” Proposals for change in the church or the development of new kinds of piety, depending on the time period and region, might be welcomed as healthy reforms or criticized as heresies—or both. The Jesuit order (see Jesuits), for example, was condemned by the Faculty of Theology of Paris as “a disturber of the peace of the church,” and the Catholic mystic Saint Teresa of Avila faced criticism from her ecclesiastical superiors as she tried to reform her order.

At the Colloquy of Regensburg (1541), Catholic and Protestant delegations sought to find points of agreement in hopes of ending the ever-widening division between the churches. Although the delegates compromised on the issue of justification, the Catholic and Protestant parties could not agree on papal authority or the sacraments. The Council of Trent, which met in three sessions from 1545 to 1563, showed less interest in the fading hope that the Christian churches could reunite. Instead, it focused on reforming and revitalizing the Catholic Church. It strengthened the powers of bishops, required the building of seminaries to train new priests, and forbade the accumulation of benefices. On doctrinal matters, the council rejected the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, reaffirmed traditional Catholic beliefs and practices related to the saints and the sacraments, and strengthened papal authority.

In the decades after the Council of Trent, reforms ended or minimized some of the practices that Reformation thinkers had criticized. Church administration became more efficient, and the church focused more on pastoral care than it had in the past. In this effort the church sometimes demonstrated a “siege mentality” that made it less open to new ideas, as by the publication of the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559, which sought primarily to keep Catholics from reading Protestant works. The Counterreformation affected the Americas as well, where both new and restructured religious orders (see Franciscans and Dominicans) sent missionaries to convert the Native peoples.

Further reading: John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro, eds., San Carlo Bor-romeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century (Washington: Folger Books, 1988); Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, vol. 4 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); John C. Olin, Catholic Reform: From Cardinal Ximenes to the Council of Trent, 1495-1563 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990); Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980).

—Martha K. Robinson