Within Catholicism, the relationship between church and state in the development of a rigid system of belief was somewhat different than in Protestant countries, as the pope was both the head of a “state” - a political unit stretching across central Italy - and the universal head of the Roman Catholic Church. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent affirmed the power of the papacy, and late-sixteenth-century popes created a strong bureaucracy and centralized institutions that paralleled, and in some cases served as a model for, those developing in nation-states. By the late seventeenth century, this consolidation of papal authority increasingly conflicted with the power of both local bishops and secular rulers.
Spanish monarchs controlled church appointments, limited papal tax collection, reserved the right to approve papal bulls before they could be published, and directed the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition was successful at combating any sign of heresy at the Spanish universities, but this also stamped out any free inquiry, and Spanish universities languished. Despite the Council of Trent’s call for improvements in clerical education, most priests in Spain had little opportunity to obtain more than rudimentary training. Spain had more priests and monks as a percentage of the population than any other Catholic country, but most of them were not interested in intellectual pursuits.
Monarchs also increased their control over the Catholic Church in France. As we traced in chapter 9, Louis XIV, seeking to make his realm more uniform, gradually made it more difficult to be a Huguenot. In 1685, these repressive policies culminated in the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and thousands of Huguenots fled. Louis hoped this would also be a way of demonstrating his Catholic loyalty to the pope, for in other ways he was taking measures to limit papal power. These built on a long-standing tradition of hostility to papal authority within the French church, called “Gallicanism,” that began when the papacy moved to Avignon in southern France in the fourteenth century. During the Avignonese papacy, all the popes were French, but when the papacy returned to Italy, almost all the popes were Italian. By the time of Louis XIV, all the popes had been Italian for more than a century - and would continue to be so until the election of John Paul II in 1978 - and the king and many of the French clergy saw the pope primarily as an Italian prince, not the leader of an international church.
The French church refused to accept any of the decrees of the Council of Trent that dealt with church-state relations, and in the seventeenth century the French bishops declared that they were superior to the pope when they met in a council. They largely supported the king in his declaration that he did not have to submit to papal authority in ecclesiastical matters. The popes objected, but they could do nothing about the growing royal influence on church personnel, or state involvement in matters that had previously been the province of the church, such as education and marriage.
The clergy and the monarchs in France did not always agree about how and why papal power should be limited, however, and theological issues were closely interwoven with political concerns. As was true throughout Catholic Europe, the French clergy were very diverse, ranging from bishops and archbishops who were nobles down to very poor parish priests. The church owned a huge amount of land, none of which was taxed, so that high church officials were economically independent of the crown, but parish clergy were totally controlled by their bishops. During the seventeenth century, increasing numbers of people began to feel that the church hierarchy was too focused on monetary concerns and the outward observance of ritual. They called for spiritual regeneration, ethical earnestness, and deep piety, taking the name for their movement from Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), the bishop of Ypres in the Spanish Netherlands. Particularly in his posthumously published work Augustinus (1642), Jansen advocated greater personal holiness, lay reading of and meditation on Scripture, lay participation in church services, and scrupulous attention to morality. Jansenism won converts among middle-class townspeople, intellectuals, rural clergy, and even a few convents and members of the nobility. Its most famous follower was the mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-62) who became convinced that philosophical reasoning was not sufficient to understand God.
Jansenist ideas led to attacks on the Jesuits, some of whom had developed a system of penance they termed “probabilism,” which held people were free to follow their own consciences if they had any moral doubts about an action. No confessor could judge something invariably a mortal sin or refuse to grant absolution, which made probabi-lists popular confessors and confession an increasingly frequent and important part of
People’s religious lives. By contrast, Jansenists held to inflexible moral principles, and suggested people confess and take communion less frequently, thus reducing the role of confessors and other clergy over their congregations.
Two papal bulls in 1653 and 1656 condemned some of the ideas contained in Augustinus, and in 1661 Louis XIV ordered all members of the French church to sign a statement indicating their adherence to the bulls. Many refused, including the nuns at the convent of Port-Royal, which, under the leadership of abbess Angelique Arnauld (1591-1661), had become the spiritual center of Jansenism in France, renowned for its piety and discipline. A truce with the papacy quieted the debate for several decades, but in 1705 the Port-Royal nuns were ordered to accept another anti-Jansenist papal bull. They again refused, and in 1709 Louis XIV demolished the convent and banished the nuns to other houses.
The writings of the Port-Royal nuns became part of a body of Jansenist literature that continued to circulate, and the fight over Jansenism continued. Though some Jansenist priests fled France, Jansenist laity continued to hold underground prayer meetings. Jansenism continued to shape the religious life of many men and women in France, encouraging them not only to become literate but to become frequent readers, and to develop their children’s spiritual lives through family devotions. Salvation was not something to be left in the hands of the clergy, but to be sought through personal piety and prayer, an idea that spread among many Catholics outside France as well. In 1713 Pope Clement XI condemned the main ideas of Jansenism again in the bull Unige-nitus, which led to a schismatic Catholic church being founded in Utrecht. The French church continued to debate theological issues raised by Jansenism, and the proper level of papal power, right up to the Revolution.
Along with Jansenism, what came to be known as Quietism also led to controversy within Catholicism. Quietism was based on the ideas of the Spanish theologian Miguel de Molinos (1628-96), whose Spiritual Guide (1675) advocated losing one’s individual soul in God, reaching inner peace through prayer and pure disinterested love of God. Any visible religious activity, including attendance at services or even ascetic discipline, took one away from this passive contemplation. Molinos was arrested by the Inquisition, which argued that his teachings were leading people to neglect morality and reject the authority of the church. At his trial, Molinos refused to defend himself, which his followers interpreted as Quietism in action and his opponents as a sign of his guilt. The pope decided not to make a martyr out of Molinos, and imprisoned him for the rest of his life instead of executing him.
Conflicts about church and state also emerged in German-speaking Catholic areas. There was no unified German state to oppose the power of the papacy, but several German theologians wrote works that built on Gallican ideas. In 1763, the auxiliary bishop of Trier, Nikolaus von Hontheim (1701-90), writing under the pen name “Justinus Fe-bronius,” attacked the papacy and called for a conciliar church structure and a stronger
Role for the secular ruler in church affairs. Febronianism was condemned by the pope, but won support in Germany, where both Catholic secular territorial rulers and prince-bishops, modeling themselves on Louis XIV, sought to restrict the power of the pope in their domains.
In Austria, the Habsburg rulers remained Catholic, but felt they had the responsibility to oversee all aspects of religion. The church, in their view, was simply one arm of government, there to assist rulers improve the lives of their subjects, but not to play an independent role. Joseph II issued an Edict on Idle Institutions (1780), closing hundreds of monasteries and using their property to provide better incomes for rural priests, state-controlled seminaries, and more secular schools. The following year he issued an edict of religious toleration for Protestants and Jews, and later called for civil marriages and funerals. These policies of limiting the economic and cultural power of the Catholic Church are often called “Josephinism,” with Joseph commenting at one point that he viewed service to God as the same as service to the state.
World History
