Counter-Reformation

• 1. Introduction

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  The Counter-Reformation was a sweeping Catholic resurgence that grew in response to, and in parallel with, the Protestant Reformation. At its center stood the Council of Trent, which met sporadically from the 13th of December 1545 to the 4th of December 1563. The effort it produced reached into nearly every corner of Catholic life: theology, art, music, politics, the training of priests, and the frontiers of empire. What drove a centuries-old institution to this dramatic internal reckoning? And what does it mean that the movement took its name not from its own ambitions, but from the movement it was reacting against? Those two questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. A Name in Dispute

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  The word Gegenreformation, from which Counter-Reformation is translated, was coined by German historians in the late eighteenth century as a negative concept describing Catholic repressions. Leopold von Ranke helped popularize it through the mid-nineteenth century. Protestant historians used it to stress reaction and resistance to Protestantism, largely setting aside the genuine reform impulse within Catholicism. Catholic historians understandably shunned the term. When the Protestant historian Wilhelm Maurenbrecher introduced the alternative phrase "Catholic Reformation" in 1880, German historiography remained confessionally divided: Catholic historians embraced the new label, while Protestant historians rejected it because they did not want the word "Reformation" applied to anything outside Protestantism. The French historian Henri Daniel-Rops argued that the term "counter-reformation" was misleading: in his view, the awakening within the Church had begun long before Luther rose to fame at Wittenberg, driven not by Protestant pressure but by loyalties fundamental to the Church's own tradition. The Italian historian Massimo Firpo sharpened the distinction further, characterizing the broader "Catholic Reformation" as centered on the care of souls, episcopal residence, and the renewal of the clergy, while the narrower "Counter-Reformation" was founded on the defence of orthodoxy, the repression of dissent, and the reassertion of ecclesiastical authority.

• 3. Roots Before Trent

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  Gregorian reforms in the late eleventh century had already begun redirecting the Church away from dynastic and royal control of religious life. Those reforms reached Ireland about thirty-five years after leaving Rome, arriving with the Irish Synod of Ráith Breasail in 1111, which placed the episcopal system above the aristocracy-dominated monasteries and eventually led to the dissolution of many monasteries, including the Abbey of Kells. Reform energies reached Germany in 1122 with the Concordat of Worms. Across the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, a spiritual revival gathered strength through preaching friars, lay movements such as the devotio moderna, and the examples of figures including Catherine of Bologna, Antoninus of Florence, Rita of Cascia, and Catherine of Genoa. A series of reforming councils convened, including the Council of Constance in 1415, the Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence running from 1431 to 1449, and the Fifth Council of the Lateran from 1512 to 1517. Yet reform talk in those councils often lacked enough specificity to produce effective programs. The problems that resisted resolution for generations were well understood: papal nepotism, the wealth and diocese-absenteeism of important bishops, and the preoccupation of senior clergy with secular power. In the half-century before the Council of Trent, evangelical Catholic leaders had already experimented with changes later associated with Protestants. Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, working with his former teacher Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples in Paris, had statues other than Christ removed from his churches, replaced the Hail Mary with the Pater Noster, and made vernacular French versions of the Gospels and Epistles available to the laity.

• 4. New Orders, New Mission

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  Philip Neri, then a layman, founded a Confraternity of the Most Holy Trinity of Pilgrims and Convalescents in 1548, which developed into the relatively free religious community known as the Oratorians; they received their constitutions in 1564 and were recognized as a religious order by the pope in 1575. Their signature was the use of music and singing to attract the faithful. The Theatines, founded in 1524 by Gaetano and Cardinal Gian Caraffa, were the first congregation of regular clergy in Italy, and they took on the task of checking the spread of heresy while working toward a regeneration of the clergy. The Capuchins, growing from Matteo de Bascio's 1526 proposal to return the Franciscan rule of life to its original purity, were recognized by the pope in 1619. They were well known to the laity and played an important role in public preaching; Capuchin-founded confraternities took special interest in the poor and lived austerely. The Ursulines, founded in 1535, took on the special task of educating girls, the first order of women dedicated entirely to that goal. The Jesuits, canonically recognized in 1540, were organized along military lines. Their founder Ignatius of Loyola's masterwork Spiritual Exercises showed the emphasis on handbooks characteristic of Catholic reformers before the Reformations. After recovering from a serious wound, Loyola had taken a vow to serve only God and the Roman pontiff. The Jesuits participated in the expansion of the Church in the Americas and Asia through missionary activity. Members of orders active in overseas expansion expressed the view that rural parishes often needed Christianizing as much as the peoples of Asia and the Americas.

• 5. The Council's Decrees

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  Pope Paul III, who served from 1534 to 1549, is considered the first pope of the Counter-Reformation, and it was he who initiated the Council of Trent. The council upheld the basic structure of the medieval Church, its sacramental system, religious orders, and doctrine. It rejected all compromise with Protestants, restating basic tenets of the Catholic faith, including the position that salvation was appropriated by grace through faith and works of that faith, not by faith alone. Transubstantiation was reaffirmed, as were the traditional seven sacraments and practices such as pilgrimages, the veneration of saints and relics, the use of images and statuary, and the veneration of the Virgin Mary. In the Canon of Trent, the council officially accepted the Vulgate listing of the Old Testament Bible, including the deuterocanonical works that Protestants called apocrypha. The council also commissioned what became known as the Roman Catechism, issued in 1566, which served as authoritative Church teaching until the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992. On the question of reform in practice, the council combated "absenteeism," the practice of bishops living in Rome or on landed estates rather than in their dioceses. It gave bishops greater power to supervise all aspects of religious life. The Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, who lived from 1538 to 1584 and was later canonized as a saint, set an example by visiting the remotest parishes in his charge and instilling high standards. The worldly excesses of the secular Renaissance Church, epitomized by the era of Pope Alexander VI from 1492 to 1503, and intensified under Pope Leo X from 1513 to 1521, had provided the impetus for Martin Luther's 95 Theses. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, issued in 1559, catalogued prohibited books across three classes and was updated twenty times over the following four centuries before being suspended on the 29th of March 1967.

• 6. Art Under New Rules

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  Michelangelo's Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel, painted between 1534 and 1541, came under persistent attack during the Counter-Reformation for nudity, for not showing Christ seated or bearded, and for including the pagan figure of Charon. Italian painting after 1520, with the notable exception of Venice, had developed into Mannerism, a highly sophisticated style striving for effect that concerned many Churchmen as lacking appeal for ordinary people. The decrees of the final session of the Council of Trent in 1563 included short passages on religious images; these were few in words but large in consequence. The decree confirmed that images only represented the person depicted and that veneration was paid to the person rather than the image, and it instructed that all lasciviousness be avoided, nothing profane be seen, and no unusual image be placed in any church without the bishop's approval. Ten years after the decree, Paolo Veronese was summoned by the Holy Office to explain why his Last Supper contained what the Holy Office called "buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs and other such scurrilities." Veronese's solution was simply to change the title to The Feast in the House of Levi, still an episode from the Gospels but a less doctrinally central one, and no more was said. Books by Flemish theologian Molanus, by Charles Borromeo, and by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti amplified the decrees, often going into minute detail about what was acceptable. Much traditional iconography considered without adequate scriptural foundation was effectively prohibited, as was the inclusion of classical pagan elements in religious art and almost all nudity, including that of the infant Jesus. The great medievalist Emile Male called this "the death of medieval art," though it did not apply to secular paintings. Among the painters and sculptors active in this period that the source names are Titian, Tintoretto, Federico Barocci, Scipione Pulzone, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Guido Reni, Anthony van Dyck, Bernini, Zurbaran, Rembrandt, and Bartolome Esteban Murillo.

• 7. Music, Polyphony, and a Famous Legend

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  Church reformers had spoken out against perceived abuses in Mass music long before the Council of Trent took up the question formally in 1562. The manipulation of the Creed and the use of non-liturgical songs was addressed in 1503, and secular singing was raised as a concern as early as 1492. The delegates at the council were, as the source notes, just a link in a long chain of clergy who had pushed for musical reform reaching back as far as 1322. The compositional technique that drew particular objection was the parody mass, which borrowed melodies, usually the tenor line, and sometimes the accompanying texts from secular compositions including madrigals and chansons that could be, and often were, on sensual subjects. Multiple voices singing different texts in different languages made any words difficult to distinguish. The 22nd session of the Council of Trent, held in 1562, required that secular elements be kept out of Mass music while leaving polyphony implicitly allowed. The most severe measures proposed during the council appear in the draft Canon 8, submitted on the 10th of September 1562, which called for music calculated "not to afford vain delight to the ear, but so that the words may be comprehensible to all"; that draft was never officially accepted. The legend that the composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, born around 1525-26 and died in 1594, saved polyphony by performing his Missa Papae Marcelli before the council delegates and winning them over is unfounded. The saviour-myth was first spread by an account from Aggazzari and Banchieri in 1609. What is verifiable is that Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli was performed for the Pope in 1564, after the 22nd session, while reforms were being considered for the Sistine Choir. Pope Pius IV, upon hearing Palestrina's music, made Palestrina by Papal Brief the model for future generations of Catholic composers. A figure less celebrated but also named by the source as influential is the Flemish composer Jacobus de Kerle, born around 1531-32 and died in 1591, whose four-part composition Preces marks what the source calls the official turning point of the Counter-Reformation's a cappella ideal.

• 8. Wars, Refugees, and Outcomes

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  In the Habsburg hereditary lands, which had become predominantly Protestant except for Tyrol, Counter-Reformation pressure began with Emperor Rudolf II, who started suppressing Protestant activity in 1576. The Bohemian Revolt of 1620 ended in defeat for the Protestants; the Protestant nobility and clergy of Bohemia and Austria were expelled or forced to convert. Among those exiles were poets including Sigmund von Birken, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, and Johann Wilhelm von Stubenberg, and their displacement shaped the development of German Baroque literature, especially around Regensburg and Nuremberg. In France, from 1562, Catholics and Huguenots fought a series of wars resulting in millions of deaths until the Edict of Nantes brought religious peace in 1598. That edict affirmed Catholicism as the state religion but granted Protestants considerable toleration and political and military privileges. Those privileges were stripped at the Peace of Ales in 1629, and the religious toleration itself lasted only until Louis XIV abolished the right to Protestant worship with the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685. In the Netherlands, Alexander Farnese served as Governor-General of the Spanish Netherlands from 1578 to 1592 and led a campaign in which Antwerp surrendered in 1585; some sixty thousand citizens, representing sixty percent of the pre-siege population, fled north. New towns called Exulantenstädte were founded across Germany as homes for Protestant refugees, among them Freudenstadt, meaning Joy Town, and Gluckstadt, meaning Happy Town. In terms of outcomes, the Counter-Reformation succeeded in drastically diminishing Protestantism in Lithuania, Poland, France, Italy, and the vast Habsburg lands, including Austria, southern Germany, Bohemia, the Spanish Netherlands, Croatia, and Slovenia. It did not succeed as completely in Hungary, where a sizeable Protestant minority remains today. Joseph II's Patent of Toleration in 1781 can be regarded as the end of the political Counter-Reformation, though smaller expulsions of Protestants continued after that date, including the Zillertal expulsion.