The Catholic Reformation

Michael Mullett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134658527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Catholic Reformation provides a comprehensive history of the 'Counter Reformation in early modern Europe. Starting from the middle ages, Michael Mullett clearly traces the continuous transformation of the Catholic religion in its structures, bodies and doctrine. He discusses the gain in momentum of Catholic renewal from the time of the Council of Trent, and considers the profound effect of the Protestant Reformation in accelerating its renovation.
This book explores how and why the Catholic Reformation occurred, stressing that moves towards restoration were underway well before the Protestant Reformation. Michael Mullett also shows the huge impact it had not only on the papacy, Church leaders and religious ritual and practice, but also on the lives of ordinary people - their culture, arts, attitudes and relationships.
Ranging across the continent, The Catholic Reformation is an indispensable new survey which provides a wide-ranging overview of the religious, political and cultural history of the time.

1 ‘Reform in head and members’

The medieval background of the Catholic Reformation

A traditional view of the reinvigoration of Catholicism that got under way from the 1540s onwards is that at that juncture the Church was shaken by the impact of the Protestant Reformation out of apparently almost total torpor to rid itself of chronic abuses: the phrase ‘Counter-Reformation’ sums up a view of a defensive, as well as aggressive, and somewhat delayed, reaction to Protestantism, without whose challenge the Catholic Church could hardly have revived itself out of its own depleted moral and spiritual resources. Such a view can be traced in a number of surveys. For instance, in his textbook, Renaissance and Reformation, V. H. H. Green wrote, ‘Headed by non-reforming Popes, whose policy was dictated by family and secular interests, the Catholic Church might well have demanded a miracle if it was to be saved from…Protestant aggression’. Green went on to trace the origins of the Catholic response to Protestantism to a stimulus operating within the Church only from the time of Luther’s protest – the Oratory of Divine Love, founded in around 1517. The author of another textbook, Harold J. Grimm, while acknowledging the medieval roots of the sixteenth-century Catholic renewal, nevertheless saw it as an ‘amazing revival’, triggered ‘about the middle of the sixteenth century’, in a ‘defensive’ Catholic Church that had so far ‘showed few signs of spiritual vigor’. H. O. Evennett also pointed to the defensive nature of the Catholic revival as a reaction initiated within the sixteenth century to the Protestant challenge:

By the Counter-Reformation is…meant the long and difficult process by which, after the unexpected shock of the Reformation, the old church underwent a spiritual revival and an administrative renovation, putting her own house into a better order and deploying her rejuvenated forces against her assailants.¹

Against a view that the early modern revival in Catholicism had its genesis in a defensive reaction to Protestantism within the sixteenth century, mainly from its middle decades onwards, the argument of this chapter is that the renovation of the Catholic Church that gained momentum from the time of the Council of Trent (1545–63) represented an accelerated continuity of earlier reform trends and a number of realisations of earlier aspirations: by ‘reform’ in this context I refer to recurrent attempts to restore the Christian Church to its original state, ideally in the early centuries after Christ. Such campaigns for the renewal of the Church – for example, to sweep away superstition and financial exploitation of it, to improve the education and dedication of the parish clergy, to make bishops apostolic directors of renewal, to make the regular orders of monks, friars and nuns live up to their vows and rules, and so on – tended to look for leadership from the office of the papacy, the ‘head’ of the ‘members’ of the Church, without whose moral restoration the quality of the rest of the institution was thought likely to be parlous.

Attention is often drawn to the scandalous state of the Renaissance papacy under such popes as Alexander VI (1492–1503) and Julius II (1502–13) in the decades preceding Luther’s protest against the Catholic Church, originating in 1517. Even so, it may be argued that the moral reputation of the papacy reached a particularly low point not in the early sixteenth century but during the fourteenth-century period when popes resided at Avignon in France (1309–77) and especially during the subsequent Great Schism of 1378 to 1417, Catholicism’s ‘Babylonian Captivity’, when its papal leadership was divided between two and even three claimants. The Avignonese residence, though not lacking in achievements for the papacy, took it away from the base of its spiritual and institutional prestige, Rome, the city of St Peter, claimed to be the first pope, by Christ’s appointment. The subsequent division in the papacy meant that there was discord in the very symbol of unity in the Church as the ‘seamless garment’ of Christ. The debased state of the papacy fostered the criticisms, which prefigured those of the Protestant Reformation, by the English heretic John Wyclif (c. 1326–84) and the Czech critic John Hus (1369–1415). In the minds of more orthodox reformists, such as the Frenchmen Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420) and Jean Gerson (1364–1429) and the German Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), representative councils of the Church, led by its bishops as successors to the Apostles, were the antidotes to the scandalous division of the papacy and the moral malaise of the Church. The prestige of such councils rose when a council, meeting in Constance between 1414 and 1418, achieved the cessation of the papal Schism with its deposition of rival claimants (three since 1409) and their replacement by Martin V (Odo Colonna, pope 1417–31), whose return to Rome made possible the papacy’s full reclamation of its title to St Peter’s leadership of the Church. Yet the rebuilding of the papacy was an uphill task, whereas the prestige of the council as an institution was at a high point as a result of the achievement of Constance in re-unifying the Church. The ideal of the council, says Delumeau, became ‘in the minds of many Christians, inseparable from [the theme] of reform’: ‘medieval conciliar reform’, writes O’Malley, ‘climaxed in intensity at the Councils of Constance…and Basel’. At Constance, hopes of the council as the reforming parliament of the Church were set out in the constitutional blueprint, Sacrosancta (1415), which stated that councils, alongside the pope, derived their authority from Christ. The decree of Constance, Frequens (1417), made provision for regular meetings of councils. The aftermath was a period of frequent council sessions, at Basel between 1431 and 1437 and at Florence and Rome between 1438 and 1445. Claims that the authority of the council was equal or even superior to that of the pope – ‘conciliarism’ – posed an obvious threat to the still insecurely re-established papacy in the line of Martin V, himself put in place by a council. Conciliarism, then, was a recipe for a running conflict between popes and councils, thwarting the proceedings of the Council at Basel, leading eventually to a denunciation by Pope Pius II (1458–64) in the bull Execrabilis (1460) of the constitutional claims of councils and sowing seeds of the discord between the papal and conciliar principles that delayed the convening of the vital reforming council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century. Even so, Trent had its precedents in the conciliar reforming proceedings of the fifteenth century and indeed may be seen as the fulfilment of those late medieval councils.²

Those councils, though, tended to be too much concerned with the constitutional questions of their authority to effect much actual reform, and Basel arguably was being unconstructively confrontational when it claimed that a council of the Church was superior in authority to the pope, that it took its authority direct from Christ and that the pope himself was bound to obey it. Nevertheless, Basel set out a clear programme of reform of the Church: it issued disciplinary regulations in areas where financial abuses were common, including rules on the conferment of ecclesiastical dignities, on elections to Church offices, on the award of ecclesiastical benefices in advance of their being taken up, on procedures over appeals and interdicts, as well as promulgating rules on the celebration of the Mass.³

In 1438 the Council, transferred to Florence under the control of Eugenius IV, made provisions for the worship and rites of the Church, focusing on the Sacraments. These were fixed at seven, an enumeration to be challenged by the Protestant Reformers but affirmed by the Council of Trent in an act of conscious continuity with its conciliar predecessor. It was especially important that, in asserting the creation of the seven Sacraments by Christ or the Apostles, Florence highlighted the sacramental ministry of bishops. This was particularly necessary in the fifteenth century when the process of converting bishops from pastors into politicians and administrators had reached a dangerous point of development. Even when, as was becoming increasingly rare, bishops concentrated on their dioceses, they tended to highlight their legal, administrative and disciplinary rather than their pastoral, priestly, evangelical and sacramental roles within their sees. Even more dangerously, bishops too often appeared not in the guises of fathers in God but were, rather, placed ‘among the greatest territorial magnates of Europe.…related to the most powerful families in their countries.…primarily men of affairs’. A typical example of the breed was England’s Cardinal Henry Beaufort (d. 1447), an illegitimate son of the royal family, made bishop of Lincoln in 1398 and of Winchester in 1404, Lord Chancellor of England and captain general of the army sent to crush the followers of Hus in Bohemia. In the context of the relentless politicisation of the episcopate, for the Council to reassert a bishop’s primary sacramental capacity, requiring his presence in his diocese where he was the ‘ordinary minister of holy confirmation’, represented a reminder, pointing towards Trent, of what a bishop’s reason for being actually was. Reform-minded bishops in the fifteenth century seized on this insistence that a bishop’s duty was sacramental and his title apostolic.⁴

Trent took up that theme and in doing so magnified its fifteenth-century predecessor’s statements on the apostolic nature of a bishop’s sacramental and spiritual functions:

the holy Synod [of Trent] declares that, bishops, who have succeeded to the place of the apostles…are placed…by the Holy Ghost, to rule the Church of God; that they are superior to priests, administer the Sacrament of Confirmation; ordain the ministers of the Church.

A hundred years in advance of Trent, the Council at Florence was heralding Trent’s affirmations of the essential pastoral and sacramental roles of the bishops of the Church. It would be easy to be sceptical about the real achievements of this Council which was riven by conflict with the pope, and was transferred by him to Florence in 1438: at the sessions ‘politics predominated throughout and the prelates from Italy attended at the will of their rulers, mostly to embarrass [Pope] Eugenius IV’. The Council’s legislation was adopted in France and Germany but not in Italy. Yet it established, or rather reiterated from such writers on the episcopal office as St Gregory the Great (pope 590–604) an insistence that the bishop, in Gregory’s words was ‘a minister, not a master’ and a pastor of the Church, not an officer of the state. This was the approach that was to be taken up in the Council of Trent’s designation of the bishops as the implementers of the renewal of the Church in the dioceses of Catholic Europe.⁵

As we shall see in Chapter 2, the fifteenth-century councils heralded that of Trent in the enunciation of Catholic sacramental theology. The same would hold true if we were to take as a further example of continuity of doctrine from the fifteenth-century councils through to the Council of Trent, the setting out of beliefs with respect to Mary, in which the fifteenth century was a particularly creative period. Of particular interest in this field was the evolution, amidst much controversy, of a doctrine establishing the purity of Mary as a fitting vessel to bear the God-Man Christ, her ‘Immaculate Conception’, or freedom, when she was conceived in her mother’s womb, from the ‘original sin’ with which, it was believed, all human beings save she and Christ were tainted in their very conceptions with an inherited sinfulness as a result of Adam’s and Eve’s first sin of disobedience. Perhaps because it was disputed even by some of those most devoted to Mary, especially St Bernard (1090–1153), the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception took a long time – until 1854 – to become established as a dogma, an essential or required belief of Catholics. Yet Basel made its own contribution to the development of the doctrine: Mary’s

immaculate conception is a pious opinion, consistent with the worship of the Church, to Catholic faith, to right reason and to Holy Scripture.…[A]ll Catholics must assent to it;…no-one is allowed to teach, or preach to the contrary.…[T]he feast of the [Immaculate] Conception should be celebrated throughout the Church on the 8th December, according to the custom of the Roman Church.⁶

The Council at Basel developed its position on the Immaculate Conception in the process of setting it out: from a ‘pious opinion’, in a few lines the doctrine had become an obligation of universal Catholic assent and observance marked by a feast-day. The Council of Trent was, on the face of it, more cautious about this doctrine and, as the authors of the Histoire Écclésiastique wrote, ‘made no resolution on this issue’. That said, as Ashley and Sheingorn point out, what Trent did was exempt Mary from its decree of 1546 on the universality of original sin, resolving not ‘to include in this decree, when it is dealing with original sin, the blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary, mother of God’. In effect, this exemption was tantamount to saying that Mary was immaculately conceived. The Council of Trent also upheld a constitution in favour of the doctrine’s adoption by a pope who strongly approved the belief, Sixtus IV (1471–84). Trent, Ashley and Sheingorn conclude, ‘obviously favoured the Immaculate Conception’. The Council of Trent, indeed, endorsed the whole sprit of late medieval special reverence for the Blessed Virgin, known as ‘hyperdulia’. Against a background in which Reformation Christocentricity tended to downgrade Mary, Trent, in the area of Marian doctrine as in the other topics to be considered, ratified the conclusions of its fifteenth-century predecessors.⁷

A further feature of later medieval Catholic doctrinal evolution consolidated by the mid-fifteenth-century councils and subsequently endorsed by Trent (also in the face of Protestant objections) was the definition of the doctrine of Purgatory, the place or state of punishment after death to exorcise the guilt still accruing to sins forgiven in the Sacrament of Penance on earth. In this area of doctrine the Council of Florence confirmed the doctrine that:

if truly penitent people die in the love of God before they have made satisfaction for acts and omissions by worthy fruits of repentance, their souls are cleansed after death by cleansing pains, and the suffrages of the living faithful avail them in giving relief from such pains [by means of Masses, prayers and almsgiving].

Subsequently, Trent added its endorsement of the belief ‘that there is a Purgatory, and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful’. The Council of Trent’s refusal to advance beyond that laconic formulation and expand on the nature of Purgatory, along with its unwillingness to countenance any further general discussion of the matter – ‘let the more difficult and subtle questions [about Purgatory] be excluded from popular discourses’ – were also well within the conciliar tradition of the fifteenth century in which it had been established that ‘the type of sufferings endured [by the souls in Purgatory] is not a matter of importance’.⁸

Both the fifteenth-century Church councils and that of Trent made major contributions to a long-term campaign to ‘purify’ the worship of the Catholic Church, to make it more dignified, more carefully performed and purged of ‘profane’ or popular elements, especially in Church music. The Council of Basel’s rulings in this regard are worth citing because they look forward to Trent’s canons on liturgical propriety. In 1435 the Basel Council issued regulations on the ‘Office’, the cycle of prayers normally chanted daily in cathedrals and monasteries:

that in all cathedral and collegiate churches, at suitable times and at the sound of a bell, the divine praises shall be reverently celebrated by everyone through all the hours, not hurriedly but gravely and slowly with reasonable pauses.…[Clerics] shall behave with such gravity as the place and the duty demand, not gossiping or talking among themselves or with others, nor reading letters or other writings. They…should sing to God eagerly in psalms, hymns and canticles.

There were denunciations of ‘secular song’, ‘conversation and laughter’ in choir, of wandering the premises, ‘coming and going’, strolling and chatting’; timetable boards were to be set up in churches where several clerics lived in common, listing the liturgical duties of the priests over the course of each week. The use of short-cuts and abbreviated forms of prayer in the Mass was condemned. Basel went on to attack inaudible and indecorous ways of saying Mass, for the Council’s vision was of a clergy committed to an edifying level of liturgical performance. In association with this, Basel strove to purge from the liturgy its lay, popular and secular elements:

Some people with mitre, crozier and pontifical vestments give blessings after the manner of bishops [,] called the feast of fools or innocents, or children. Some put on masked and theatrical comedies, others organize dances for men and women, attracting people to amusement and buffoonery. They prepare meals and banquets there. This holy synod detests these abuses.⁹

It could be argued that the rituals of inversion and saturnalia thus condemned helped integrate religious worship and popular culture in medieval Europe, especially through linking the Church’s liturgy with vernacular culture’s key themes of folly and clowning, but this interpenetration was seen by Catholic reformists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as derogating from the dignity of the clergy, a status which Basel, in its ruling on the liturgy, was attempting to make priests themselves uphold. Delumeau connects the campaign conducted at Basel against the invasion of the rites of the Church by popular masquerades to a longer-term battle for liturgical solemnity evident in statutes of diocesan synods at Lyons in 1566 and 1577 and in constitutions of the archbishop of Cologne in 1617. Trent’s measures formed a link in this long chain of purification of the liturgy. Bishops, Trent ordered, ‘should keep out of their churches the kind of music in which a base and suggestive element is introduced into the organ playing or singing, and similarly all worldly activities, empty and secular conversation, walking about, noises and cries’.¹⁰ Once more we observe Trent’s continuities with its fifteenth-century predecessors, indicating that in key respects Trent concluded the series of late medieval general councils of the Catholic Church.

The traditions of conciliar reform of which Trent was to be the heir were resumed when, in the pontificate of Julius II, dissident cardinals, appealing to the reforming traditions of the fifteenth-century councils, met at Pisa in 1511. At loggerheads with Pope Julius, the Pisa Council achieved little of substance; however we should at least take note of the moral aspirations this Council adopted, since, whether or not these were devised as propaganda to challenge Pope Julius’s immorality, they re-established targets of devotion, sobriety, self-restraint and piety for senior clerics which were the preconditions of the Tridentine achievement. For if the bench-mark of the decadence of the Renaissance papacy was the corruption and irreligion of which Julius was the leading practitioner, then the quest for renewal through austerity and religious observance pursued by the Council at Pisa reaffirmed standards for Catholic reform in terms of targets of personal holiness, and especially of asceticism, goals that were to be achieved as the sixteenth century unfolded in saintly popes, particularly Pius V (reigned 1566–72), and bishops, above all Carlo Borromeo (1538–84). Indeed, personal holiness was seen by the Council of Pisa as the precondition of institutional reform: it linked ‘the need to reform oneself and the need to work for the reform of the church in its head and members’. The last phrase had by this time become a slogan, or even a cliché, of anti-papal conciliarism, while Pisa’s reference to ‘the reform of the church, whose irregularities are now so swollen’ suggests a consciousness inherited from the middle ages that, in O’Malley’s words, ‘the Church as a whole might be subject to reform…[,] that moral and legal abuses were wides...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Reform in head and members: The medieval background of the Catholic Reformation
• 2 The Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation
• 3 New religious orders
• 4 The papacy and the episcopate of the Catholic Reformation
• 5 The impact of the Catholic Reformation
• 6 The Catholic Reformation and the people
• 7 The Catholic Reformation and the arts
• Notes
• Index