menu_book Chapter 16

Section 16 of Europe and Renaissance and Reformation by Mary A. Hollings. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 8. The Counter-Reformation, Part 1. The Council of Trent, 1545-1563, has been referred to several times during Charles V's reign. Its work must now be considered as a whole.

To meet the Emperor's wishes, it was held in German territory. Pope Paul III, 1534 to 1549, who has been called the last of the Renaissance Popes, as distinguished from those of the Catholic Revival, at last brought his mind to the formal summons of the Council in 1542. So few, however, were the bishops who arrived to attend it that the assembly was adjourned. The chief question before the second meeting of the council in 1545 was whether reform or the definition of dogma

should have the first place. The pope was a watchful guardian of church privilege. He was determined that doctrine should be considered before reform and kept in close touch with the Council's proceedings. By a compromise it was arranged that they should be considered simultaneously by different sections of the Council. The moderate Catholic party, led by Contarini and Pol, were quite prepared to join hands with the Lutherans in some matters of

doctrine, and with this end in view, the great questions of justification by faith, free will, and the sacraments were debated. At this point, however, some members of a hitherto little-known order, the Society of Jesus, came forward, and by their able and determined arguments, succeeded in upholding the Catholic standpoint. At this stage, the Pope became alarmed by Charles's success in Germany, and with the excuse that a slight outbreak of the plague in Trent made the

place unsafe, he removed the council to Bologna in 1547. Charles declined to recognize any further acts of the council. The Diet of Augsburg gave its support to the minority who remained at Trent, and the interim of Augsburg provided a temporary settlement of religious affairs in Germany. The Pope found it necessary to give way, though he died before any further stage of policy was reached, and his successor, Julius III, 1549 to 1555, whose chief aim was to live a quiet life,

summoned the council to reassemble at Trent in 1551. Much discussion of doctrine followed, revealing the deep differences which separated Protestants and Catholics. However, the untimely descent of Morris of Saxony in pursuit of Charles, scattered the members with all speed before a definite decision was made, relieving the Pope of much anxiety. Not long after, the latter was succeeded by Marcellus II, who was upright, wise, and enthusiastic for reform, but he unfortunately

only lived three weeks longer. His successor was Pope Paul IV, 1555 to 1559, the austere and rigid Carafa, who had founded the Order of the Teotines, a society of parish priests bound by monastic vows and upholding the doctrine and government of the medieval church. The new pope was therefore wholly opposed to the more enlightened party of Catholic reformers led by Contarini, and as an interval of ten years occurred in the work of the council after it was dispersed by

Morris, Paul IV applied himself to the reform of Rome itself. He thoroughly overhauled the government of the papal states and armed with the powers of the Inquisition on one hand, and with the new index of prohibited books on the other, his orthodox zeal triumphed over the champions of a more tolerant and liberal Catholicism. Yet, in attempting to recover from Europe a general acknowledgment of the papal claims, he defeated his own ends. Thus, he drove

Elizabeth of England to ally herself with the Protestant party in Scotland and practically assured the triumph of reform in Great Britain by insisting that the Queen should submit her claims upon the throne to his judgment. In the same way, his hostility to Ferdinand I obliged that emperor to rely on the support of the moderate party, with the result that many South German bishoprics passed into Protestant hands. Then, in 1559, he died, and the new pope,

Pius IV, pledged himself in response to a general wish that reform should not be left entirely to the Holy See to summon once more the Council of Trent. At this, the third and last session of the Council, no Protestants were present, and the reforms undertaken were simply those of the Church from within. There were many Catholics who desired a thorough reform in doctrine and practice, but their aims were defeated by the powerful and energetic Jesuit opposition. Thus the use of the

mother tongue and services, the marriage of the clergy, communion in both kinds, practices which would have united them to the Protestants, were all rejected. The doctrines of purgatory, indulgences, and invocation of saints, though defined in accordance with medieval belief, were for the first time completely defined. It is true that on some important questions, such as that of justification by faith, Protestant theories were not entirely excluded.

But such concession was deceptive since the Pope's authority was declared to be supreme in all doctrinal matters in the future. The resolve of the French to settle the question of the superiority of councils to the Pope and the Spanish prejudice in favor of making bishops independent of the Holy See, were defeated by successful papal diplomacy at the two courts concerned. There was, however, a real reformation in morals. The popes undertook to set their house

thoroughly in order. They gave up the pursuit of family interests, and Pius V decreed that church property should never be alienated from the Holy See. The education of the clergy was carefully provided for. The breviary and the canon law were revised, and the florid church music of the period met with its own much-needed reform at the hands of the great and austere genius Palestrina. A radical change in the character of the popes enabled them to recover much of their lost

influence in Europe, with the aid of the new order of the Jesuits and the Inquisition, the brain and arm of the papacy. The papal inquisition as set up in 1542 is adapted from the system of the inquisition as formerly worked by the Dominicans in the suppression of heretics, notably of the Albigenses in the 13th century. Having accomplished its work only too well, it would naturally have disappeared. Had not Ferdinand and Isabella gained leave to introduce

it into Spain as a weapon against both Jews and Moors. From this time, the Spanish Inquisition, so-called because it was after 1497 independent of papal interference, continued to flourish, not without dire results as will be seen before long in the Netherlands. The papal Inquisition, however, which dated from the Council of Trent, confined its attentions to Italy. The second great prop of the Holy See was the Society of Jesus. The founder of this famous

order was Ignatius Loyola, the son of a noble Spanish house of Basque origin. As an enthusiastic young soldier, he had been lamed for life at the siege of Pampluna and had had to renounce his chosen profession of arms. During his slow recovery, he resolved to enlist his services in the cause of Christ and the Virgin, and began his career by a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which inspired him with the idea of a lifelong warfare against the infidel.

Realizing, however, his lack of knowledge, he devoted himself to study in Paris, where he won over to his views three fellow students, Lefebvre, Xavier, and Lainesse. This little band took vows of poverty and celibacy and placed themselves at the Pope's disposal for work among the Mohammedans in the Holy Land. Paul III, however, took the view that heretics at home, rather than infidels abroad, needed their labors, and accordingly they formed

themselves in 1540 into the Society of Jesus for the special service of Christ and of the Pope, under Loyola as the first general of the order. Every member of the order was bound to surrender all personal judgment, and to become as wax in the hands of his superiors. It was the business of those superiors to acquaint themselves intimately, by an elaborate spy system, with the characters, actions, and thoughts of those whom they directed, that all gifts might

be turned to account for the order in the choice of careers. A priest must hold himself in readiness to go to the ends of the earth at the bidding of his superiors, not delaying even to complete the letter of the alphabet he might be writing. The order had six divisions of which the professed of four vows were the only fully privileged members in whose hands lay the election of the general. They were without a fixed place of abode and took a fourth vow of obedience to the pope.

The order was forbidden to accept ecclesiastical preferment. No monastic habit was worn, nor did the rules of the society permit the powers of mind and body to be worn out by excessive asceticism or long-continued religious exercises. Into the work of education and of missions, the Jesuits threw themselves with the utmost zeal and heroism. They made themselves indispensable as confessors. Their learning seated them in the professors' chairs at the

universities. They mixed in politics and in society. All their work was performed gratuitously, for the order was enriched not only by the property surrendered to it at admission, but by many gifts bestowed upon it. In sixteen years it numbered over two thousand members. The Order has been well named the Brain of the Holy See. It may be imagined how great was the influence of a highly trained body of men, acting with the obedience of perfectly regulated machines

at the bidding of some of the most intellectual and resolute minds of the times. But in the individual it must be admitted that the absolute surrender of private judgment and the acceptance of the doctrine that the end justifies the means tended to undermine independence of character and moral judgment. In summing up the work of the Catholic reaction, the following results will be noticed. The Church, purified of abuses, inspired by new enthusiasm, and carrying the

war into the enemy's country, encountered Protestantism at a time when its first zeal was spent and disunion had begun to appear. The revived papacy made Rome once more the center of southwestern Europe, as it had been under the Roman emperors, and once more brought under its sway the recently revolted regions on the Danube and the Rhine. At the same time, in the political world, two great agencies of the Catholic revival were the Spanish monarchy under Philip II

and France under the influence of the Guises. In the reign of Philip II, 1556 to 1598, the aims and methods of revived Catholicism are fully illustrated. The king regarded himself as the divinely appointed leader of the chosen people, whose dominion of the world was to be the guarantee of its recovery to the Church. Not one of the many disasters that marked his ill-starred reign ever shook Philip's faith in his twofold mission as champion of the church

and of Spanish supremacy. Yet, like a blight, his reign rests upon the history of Spain. He crushed all power of initiative in the court and in the nation at large. The king's family heritage was one of gloom and bigotry. The slow, secret, and cautious policy which was his by circumstances and education hid him like a mask, even from those nearest to him. He grew old before his time and trying to keep pace with the thousand petty details which are the proper business of

subordinates. No clerk ever toiled more industriously at his papers. Hours were passed in making marginal notes on affairs that might have been settled in conversation lasting perhaps as many minutes. But Philip shunned interviews. He never realized that statesmanship is the most human of occupations, based on a knowledge of men in a world of men. He clung to his purposes, blind to things as they really were, conscientious as far as his cruel bigotry allowed.

He strove to grapple unaided with problems too big for him to solve, cold except to the very few for whom he felt any affection, frugal and secluded in his habits, constantly disillusioned throughout his reign yet never turning aside from the goal he had marked out for himself. There is something of the relentlessness of fate about this mysterious, inhuman figure in whose service men broke their hearts and sacrificed their lives.

Yet at the end of a long reign as he lay slowly dying in great bodily anguish, no visions of the persecuted and oppressed arose to disturb his mind, which indeed was sustained and comforted by the thought of services he had rendered to God. By a freak of fortune, Philip's reign opened with a collision with the Pope. Paul IV, the Neapolitan Carafa, had family leanings to the Angevin cause in Italy

and disliked the Spaniard. As Julius II had called in the House of Aragon to drive out the French, he determined to call in the French to drive out the House of Aragon. Henry II agreed to send an army under the Duke of Guise, and the Duke of Alva, of all men, found himself in the position of leader of His Catholic Majesty's Army Against the Pope, 1556 to 1559. By bribing Otario Farnese with Piacenza and Cosmo de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany with Siena, Philip gained their support

in Naples, where the war was marked by the gallant resistance of Civitella to Guise. and in the papal states, Alva carried all before him, and but for religious scruples, might indeed have taken Rome. The Pope was obliged to come to terms, but they were of his own choosing, and in Philip's name, Alva asked and received absolution in 1557 for the crime of resisting an unprovoked attack. Meanwhile, war had broken out on the northeastern border of France,

and Philip II had prevailed upon his English wife, Mary Tudor, in spite of an express understanding to the contrary, to engage English troops on his behalf. The Spanish and English forces were under the command of the dispossessed Duke of Savoy, who claimed his duchy from France. The blunders of the Marshal Montmorency gave them a complete victory at Saint-Quentin, and the town itself, though bravely defended by Coligny, fell into their hands. They would have been better employed

in taking Paris, but this enterprise, though it had every chance of success, did not commend itself to the cautious Philip. Early in 1558, Guise more than avenged the defeat by falling unexpectedly on Calais, of whose weak defenses the English government had repeatedly been warned, and thus the last English stronghold on French soil was lost to the great grief of Queen Mary. A brilliant victory won by Count Egmont over the French at Gravelines had no practical result,

though it may have enabled Philip to make peace. Proceedings were somewhat delayed by the death of Queen Mary and Elizabeth's reluctance to accept the terms. In 1559, at the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresi, she agreed at last to the surrender of Calais for a term of eight years. The Duchy of Savoy was restored to its duke. France retained the three bishoprics taken by Henry II, but gave up all other conquests except five Piedmontese fortresses, and Philip in return

surrendered his captures in Picardie. By this arrangement, Philip, however, recovered far more than he lost. Henry and Philip agreed to summon a general council and to root out heresy in their dominions. Philip was to take as his third wife Henry II's daughter Elizabeth, the girl princess who had been bespoken for Don Carlos his son, while the Duke of Savoy was to marry her aunt, Margaret of Valois. At a tournament held in honor of the two weddings, Henry II distinguished rather

as an athlete and pleasure-seeker than for more kingly qualities, was, in a final bout, pierced in the eye by a lance, and the wound proved fatal. His son Francis II, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, succeeded him. End of Section 16.