The Counter-Reformation

The Counter-Reformation really began with the convening of The Council of Trent in 1545. It was preceded by a long series of negotiations between German Catholics and Protestants sponsored by the Emperor Charles V. The failure of these efforts at reconciliation at Regensburg in 1541 marked the beginning of planning for a general Church council that would deal with the Reformation crisis. Pope Paul III was determined not to allow this council to establish any degree of independence like the councils of the fifteenth century.

To that end, he established control over the council’s agenda through the appointment of a series of papal legates, several of whom later became popes themselves. The Council of Trent lasted from 1545 to 1563 with some significant interruptions. In general the goals of the council were twofold: to define Catholic doctrine in order to distinguish Protestant beliefs from Catholic orthodoxy and to reform the Church.

Examples of the first goal were the affirmation that all seven sacraments were necessary for salvation, the affirmation of the authority of apostolic interpretation alongside scripture or the affirmation that both faith and works were necessary for salvation. This last affirmation stood in sharp contrast to the Lutheran notion of justification by faith alone or the Calvinist insistence on predestination. The goals of Church reform were met by the affirmation that residency of bishops was of divine precept and by provision for diocesan synods each year and provincial synods every third year. Even more important for diocesan discipline was the insistence that bishops conduct an annual visitation of the entire diocese.

During the later sixteenth century, such bishops as St. Charles Borromeo of Milan and St. Juan de Ribera of Valencia would give the Christian world a remarkable example of long-term residency and service to their congregations. The council attempted to deal with the problem of poorly educated and poorly prepared parish priests by decreeing the establishment of seminaries in each diocese.

While this process took a great deal longer than the fathers at Trent had expected, it eventually resulted in a much better educated priesthood. The decrees and canons of the Council of Trent were promulgated by Pius IV in June 1564. The essence of Counter-Reformation Catholicism was to be found first and foremost in a renewed emphasis on the sacraments, particularly on the Eucharist, whose miraculous aspects had been confirmed by the council. The remarkable upsurge in the popularity of confession is one important indicator of the growing significance of the sacraments and a renewed Catholic world.

But under the inspired leadership of a remarkable new religious order of clerks; the Jesuits, the Church made great strides in catching up and even surpassing the Protestants in using education and the new media of communications. The Jesuit order founded by the Basque Ignatius Loyola in 1540 rapidly expanded throughout Europe. The Jesuits concentrated on education, founding many secondary schools all over Catholic Europe (444 Jesuit colleges by 1626), and they also became much sought after as spiritual advisers to the great. At the same time, they also undertook hundreds of missions into Protestant-held or contested areas in order to spread the faith and counter the Protestant movement. It was largely through their efforts that key areas of Poland, Hungary, and Austria were won back for the Catholic Church. The Jesuits also pioneered the use of theater to counteract Protestant theatrical productions. In one example, the Jesuit instructors at the Jesuit college in Augsburg put on a production using the students of the college. The Egyptian Joseph, as it was called, was a great success and even attracted many Lutherans to the theater.

The Jesuits, however, were not alone in their efforts. They were seconded by the Capuchins and Theatines in the missions and by such new waters as the order of missions found in by Vincent de Paul in 1625 which specialized in work among the poor. Jesuit educational efforts were also seconded by the work of the school’s of Christian doctrine and the Piarists founded in 1597.

Both of these orders worked extensively in poor urban areas. The Church also continued to grow outside of Europe, supported by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies and led by Jesuits and other missionaries. Columbus made his first voyage to the New World in 1492, and in 1508, Pope Julius II gave the Spanish monarchy control over ecclesiastical benefices in the New World in return for the Spanish monarchy’s support for the establishment of Catholicism among the native populations.

By 1511, the first three Episcopal sees were established in America. Missionary work in Spanish America began in 1523, shortly after the conquest of Mexico (1519 to 1521). In 1604, Robert de Nobili (a Jesuit priest) began the mission to India in Goa. Jesuit missionaries also arrived in China in the seventeenth century, and in 1656, the Holy Office gave its permission for accepting certain traditional Chinese religious rites as part of the religious practice of Chinese converts.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century the crisis posed by the Reformation had been largely overcome. Catholicism had won back much of what it had lost and become a world religion in the process, but it would now have to face perhaps an even greater long-term threat: the threat of skepticism and unbelief, which persists into our own time, that came with the scientific revolution.

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