The successes of Calvinism spurred the Catholic Church into more vigorous responses to Protestant challenges, which had begun somewhat fitfully in the 1530s. Many historians see the developments within the Catholic Church after the Protestant Reformation as two Interrelated movements, one a drive for internal reform linked to earlier reform efforts, and the other a Counter-Reformation that opposed Protestants intellectually, politically, militarily, and institutionally. In both of these movements, the papacy, new religious orders, and the Council of Trent that met from 1545 to 1563 were important agents.
Beginning with Pope Paul III (pontificate 1534-49), the papal court became the center of the reform movement rather than its chief opponent. Paul appointed reform-minded cardinals, abbots, and bishops who improved education for the clergy, tried to enforce moral standards among them, and worked on correcting the most glaring abuses. Reform measures that had been suggested since the late Middle Ages - such as doing away with the buying and selling of church offices (termed simony), requiring bishops to live in their dioceses, forbidding clergy to hold multiple offices (termed pluralism), ending worldliness and immorality at the papal court, changing the church’s tax collection and legal procedures - were gradually adopted during the sixteenth century. Paul III and his successors supported the establishment of new religious orders that preached to the common people, the opening of seminaries for the training of priests, the end of simony, and stricter control of clerical life. Their own lives were models of decorum and piety, in contrast to the fifteenth - and early sixteenth-century popes such as Alexander VI (pontificate 1492-1503), Julius II (pontificate 1503-13), and Clement VII (pontificate 1523-34), who had concentrated on building and decorating churches and palaces and on enhancing the power of their own families. (Alexander was a member of the Spanish Borgia family, and accomplished his aims partly through the military actions of his son Cesare and the marriages of his daughter Lucrezia.) By 1600 the papacy had been reestablished as a spiritual force in Europe, with its political hold on central Italy suffering no decline in the process.
Reforming popes also supported measures designed to combat the spread of Protestant teaching. Paul III reorganized the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, giving it jurisdiction over the Roman Inquisition and putting its direction in the hands of a committee of cardinals in Rome. The Inquisition was given the power to investigate those suspected of holding heretical opinions or committing acts deemed theologically unacceptable, and was very effective at ending Protestantism, first in the Papal States and then elsewhere in Italy, though local authorities sometimes limited the scope of its investigations. Paul III’s successors, Paul IV (pontificate 1555-9) and Pius IV (pontificate 1559-65), promulgated an Index of Prohibited Books, which forbade the printing, distribution, and reading of books and authors judged heretical. (The Index was formally abolished in 1966, and the records of the Congregation of the Holy Office were opened to scholarly study in 1998. During the time of Napoleon many of its records had been carted off to Paris, where they were sold as scrap paper.)
Reforms involved religious orders as well as the papacy. Older religious orders, such as the Benedictines, Augustinians, and Franciscans, carried out measures to restore discipline and get back to their original aims. New religious orders such as the Theatines, Barnabites, and Capuchins worked among the poor and sick, establishing Hospitals and orphanages and preaching and administering the sacraments in poorer districts.
The most important of the new religious orders was the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, founded by Ignatius Loyola (i491?-1556). Loyola was a Spanish knight who became acquainted with the works of religious writers and mystics while his leg was mending after being broken in several places during a battle in the first Habsburg-Valois war. Like Luther, he went through a period of inner turmoil and crisis of conscience, but resolved this through a rigorous program of contemplation rather than a new theological approach. He later described his techniques - in Spanish, so that they could be read by those who did not know Latin - in the Spiritual Exercises, which sets out a training program of structured meditation, designed to develop spiritual discipline and allow one to meld one’s will with that of God. The ultimate aim of Loyola’s program was not a mystical losing of oneself in God, however, but action on behalf of God. Though Loyola had not studied as a humanist, his stress on the individual will and the possibility - with God’s assistance - of self-control and holiness certainly fitted with the ideas of Ficino and Pico.
Loyola had, in fact, not studied formally at all, a deficit that he recognized. He enrolled first at a preparatory school to improve his Latin, and then studied briefly at several Spanish universities. In 1528, he went to Paris to study theology, and quickly gathered a group of like-minded young men around him, including Francis Xavier (1506-52), who later became a missionary in Asia. Most of the members of this group were not priests, but they took the standard monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and also declared that they owed special obedience to the pope. After some initial misgivings, Pope Paul III responded in 1540 by recognizing the group as a new religious order, the Society of Jesus, whose main purposes were the entwined processes of education and conversion. The Jesuits founded schools, taught at universities, and preached popular sermons. They became confessors to influential people, and through this gained influence at many European courts. The order itself was highly centralized and arranged in a military-style hierarchy under a Superior General; Jesuits were not under the control of local bishops, an independence that the bishops often resented. Though Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises offered a quick four-week program for those beginning the process of self-discipline, preparation for admission into the order took many years, during which time a young man went through military-like training designed to transform him into a spiritual soldier controlled from within. Only those who had passed rigid examinations were allowed to become professed fathers and take the special fourth vow of absolute obedience to the papacy.
Their training and discipline made Jesuits extremely effective. Under the leadership of Peter Canisius (1521-97), they established colleges in Vienna, Cologne, Munich, Mainz, and other cities in the southern part of the Holy Roman Empire, reconverting some areas that had become officially Protestant and strengthening the loyalty of areas that Had been wavering. In 1565 Canisius sent ten members of the order to Poland-Lithuania, where many of the nobles were Protestants of various types - Lutheran, Calvinist, Socinian - and the official policy was one of religious toleration. Jesuits established several colleges for training noble boys, and became confessors to the Polish monarchs; loyalty to Catholicism grew, and in the early seventeenth century King Sigismund III Vasa (ruled 1587-1632) repudiated the policy of toleration with little resistance. Jesuit missionaries went to Brazil, the Spanish New World colonies, West Africa, India, the East Indies, Japan, and China, where they worked to convert indigenous people and minister to the European soldiers, traders, and settlers who were there. (Missionary activity outside Europe will be discussed in more detail in chapters 7 and 13.)
In 1580, Robert Parsons (1546-1610) and Edmund Campion (1540-81) began a Jesuit mission in Protestant England, providing spiritual guidance and religious services for English Catholics, and encouraging them to resist Elizabeth’s policies of religious uniformity. Campion was arrested and executed as a traitor, and Parsons returned to the continent to organize or expand colleges for Englishmen who wished to become Catholic priests. Despite the threat of arrest and execution, Jesuits and other priests stayed in England, where they were often sheltered by women from prominent Catholic families. Married women, according to common law, controlled no property, and imprisoning a woman would disrupt family life. Thus though Elizabethan officials fined and imprisoned Catholic men for recusancy (refusing to attend church), they were generally unwilling to apply the law to women, and English Catholicism increasingly centered on households.
The unusual situation of Catholics in England allowed recusant women to play a more prominent role in the maintenance of Catholicism than was possible for women elsewhere in Europe. The year after the Jesuits obtained papal recognition, Isabel Roser, who had been an associate of Loyola’s in Barcelona, sought papal approval for an order of women with a similarly active mission of education, along with care of the sick and destitute. Loyola was horrified at the thought of religious women in regular contact with lay people, and Pope Paul III refused to grant approval. Despite this, Roser’s group continued to grow in Rome and the Netherlands. Several years earlier, Angela Merici (1474-1540) had founded the Company of St. Ursula, a group of lay single women and widows also dedicated to the poor. This received papal authorization, and later in the century became a religious order focusing increasingly on girls’ education. Once they became a religious order, however, the Ursulines came under increasing pressure to become cloistered nuns, that is, to cut themselves off from the world in enclosed convents. Many Ursuline houses fought this, though others accepted claustration willingly, having accepted church teaching that the life of a cloistered nun was the most worthy role for a woman in the eyes of God. Ursuline houses were generally allowed to continue teaching girls, though now within the walls of the convent, and especially in France, they became the most important providers of education for girls.
World History
