Counter Reformation

7 Key excerpts on "Counter Reformation"

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  The Essential History of Christianity

  • Miranda Threlfall-Holmes(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SPCK Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Second in this classification is the Radical Reformation. This is the name given to a whole disparate range of sects, alternative churches and experiments with alternative worshipping and lifestyles which sprang up in the ferment of debate and dissent that existed at this time. Many of these were disowned, and even occasionally persecuted, by the leaders of the Magisterial Reformation because they were perceived as going too far and being at risk of discrediting the main reforming impulses.

  Third, there is the Counter- or Catholic Reformation. This describes the reforming from within of the Roman Catholic Church, partially in response to the same impulses that drove the initial Reformers, and partially in an attempt to respond to the criticisms of those Reformers.

  Background

  There has been considerable academic debate over whether the movements within Roman Catholicism to reform itself should be described as the Counter-Reformation (the implication being that they were a response to Protestantism), or the Catholic Reformation (the implication being that they were an internal impulse that would have happened anyway). To some extent such a debate is irrelevant, as it is equally arguable that Luther himself initially intended to reform Catholicism from the inside, and only became a ‘Protestant’ when the Roman authorities condemned his criticisms rather than responding positively to them. It is certainly the case that Luther and the other early Reformers were part of a movement of internal criticism and renewal that had been gathering pace for some years.

  Renaissance literature of the period 1500–20 had lampooned and critiqued aspects of religion and the Church. Particularly notable are Erasmus’ works, such as In Praise of Folly

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  The Reformation

  • Williston Walker(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER IX. THE COUNTER-REFORMATION. f <» ^ m ': |T was pointed out, in speaking of the Spanish Awakening, that the Reforma-tion age beheld a struggle between two great types of Reform rather than a contest between active revolution and passive inactivity. At the same time, it was re-marked that, had it not been for the stimulus of the Protestant revolt, a general Reformation of the Roman Church from within might never have been effected. The lines which that Roman Reformation were to take were, indeed, clearly marked out, a generation before Luther began his work, in the Spanish Awakening—itself but the most thorough-going and extensive of several conservative attempts to purify the Church. It aimed to fill clerical offices with men of piety and churchly zeal. It sought to limit the worst of papal abuses, often by increasing the power of the crown in ecclesiastical matters. It endeavored to use the results of the revival of learn-ing in the service of the Church, and to foster the education of the clergy. It strove to make the theology of the best period of the middle ages once more a living science. It stimulated missionary 356 Aims of the Movement. 35 7 zeal. But it was fiercely intolerant of modifications in doctrine or of separations from the Roman com-munion, and would repress them by every effective means. The Inquisition—developed in its intense Spanish form before Protestantism was thought of— was its characteristic instrument. Yet, had it not been for the ferment of the Protestant revolt there is no reason to suppose that a restoration of the strength of the Roman communion from within would have become a counter-Reformation coex-tensive with Latin Christendom. Many of the steps of that conservative Roman movement have already been noted in this narrative. Its strenuous beginnings in Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, ably assisted by Ximenes, have been described.

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  With Their Backs to the Mountains

  A History of Carpathian Rus' and Carpatho-Rusyns

  • Paul Robert Magocsi(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Central European University Press

    (Publisher)

  This was the invention of the printing press in 1454. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the early religious reformers were also linguists (Hus translated the Bible into Czech and Luther into German), and that wherever Protestantism spread it was accompanied by the establishment of printing presses and schools. The Protestant Reformation reached its height in the sixteenth century, by which time most European states north of the Alps had become officially Protestant or had large Protestant communities within their borders. Among those states was Poland, which, while remaining officially Roman Catholic, did under some of its tolerant kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty allow large numbers of Lutherans, Reformed Calvinists, Bohemian Brethren, and Anti-Trinitarians (Socinians) to function within its borders. In fact, many Polish nobles became Protestants, especially of the Reformed Calvinist variety. The Catholic Counter-Reformation The Church of Rome was not, however, about to allow the Catholic faithful to slip from its grasp. During the second half of the sixteenth century (in large part as a result of decisions reached at the Council of Trent, 1545–1563), the Catholic Church launched a counteroffensive against the Protestants which came to be known as the Counter -Reformation. The administrative struc-ture of the Catholic Church was strengthened by establishing a clear line of authority starting with the pope in Rome and extending to archbishops and bishops at the head of each diocese, and through them down to individual priests at the parish level. To maintain contact with particularly problematic regions in Europe, Rome sent papal legates known as nuncios to represent the pope. The papal nuncios resided permanently in countries that were in the front line of the Counter -Reformation, in particular in central Europe.

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  The Global West: Connections & Identities

  • Frank Kidner, Maria Bucur, Ralph Mathisen, Sally McKee(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  A hundred years after the Council of Trent, that world had been largely transformed. The Catholic Church was more centralized than ever before. Vigorous leadership after 1534 strengthened the position of the Roman popes, while centralized and dynamic orders like the Capuchins and Jesuits spread new ideals and practices to Catholic communities all over the globe. Religious devotion intensified as Teresa of Ávila’s treatises on prayer were more and more widely read. Finally, a reformed Catholic identity was fur-ther advanced when the church issued new books for worship services that put Catholics literally on the same page throughout the year; all over the Catholic world, on any given day, people in church read and heard the same words during worship. The Council of Trent, 1588-89 (fresco), Cati, Pasquale (1550-1620) / Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome, Italy / Bridgeman Images Council of Trent This fresco of the Council of Trent shows the attending bishops seated in a semi-circle before cardinals in red who serve as presiding officers. ❯❯❱ What do you make of the alle-gorical figures in the lower right portion of the fresco? In particular, what do you make of the female figure personifying the Catholic church and wearing the triple crown of the pope? Hint: The Latin word for “church,” “ecclesia,” is grammatically feminine. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 395 14-4 Catholic Reform, 1500–1570 came from the old Indian elite, converted fairly eas-ily to both Christianity and European customs.

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  The European Reformations

  • Carter Lindberg(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  15 Catholic Renewal and the Counter-Reformation

  Men must be changed by religion, not religion by men.

  Giles of Viterbo to the fifth Lateran council, 3 May 1512

  Despite Pope Leo X’s initial dismissal of the Reformation as nothing more than a drunken brawl among German monks, there was a growing realization even in the papacy that renewal and reform of the church could not be lightly brushed aside. Indeed, the rapidity of the reform movements throughout Europe raised apocalyptic visions in more than one curial mind. Pope Clement VII, who suffered the trauma of the sack of Rome in 1527, had a medal struck that depicted Christ bound to a column with the inscription Post multa, plurima restant – “After many things, even more remain.” Just before his death, he commissioned Michelangelo to portray the last judgment on the front wall of the Sistine Chapel (Spitz 1971: 469).

  Late Medieval Renewal Movements

  It is important to recall here our earlier historiographical comments regarding the terms Catholic Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The Catholic renewal movement was not merely a reaction – a Counter-Reformation – to the Reformation. Before Luther, there was already sharp criticism of the church that may be illustrated by the Italian proverb that the person who goes to Rome will lose his or her faith, and by the acrostic for Rome, R[adix] O[mnium] M[alorum] A[varitia]: “love of money is the root of all evil.” As Giles of Viterbo proclaimed to Pope Julius II and the some 100 or so prelates assembled for the opening of the Fifth Lateran council (1512–17): “Unless by this Council or by some other means we place a limit on our morals, unless we force our greedy desire for human things, the source of evils, to yield to the love of divine things, it is all over with Christendom” (Olin 1990: 57).

  Giles’s appeal for personal renewal as the key to reform and renewal of the church was characteristic of the Catholic reform efforts both before and after Luther. “Catholic spirituality at this time was highly individualistic and activist. … The stress was on the individual’s interior religious experience – on private prayer and meditation, self-discipline, personal sanctification and spiritual growth” (Olin 1990: 11). The late English Roman Catholic historian H. O. Evennett (1965: 61) emphasized the individualism of the Catholic reform movement. “What unites the various forms of Counter-Reformation spirituality can be said, I think, to be the stress on the individual’s relation to God, … whose first object was not to ‘reform the Church’ … but to order their own lives to the doing of God’s will and the bringing of benefit to their neighbor.” Also: “It was exacting, in that it demanded continuous heroic effort at prayer and self-control and self-improvement and good works. … It closely linked active good works and self-improvement, and assumed the placing of a high value on the former in the sight of God for Justification” (Evennett 1970: 41). Individual saints became the norm in place of the collective of saints of the Middle Ages. The great individual saints, led by Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila, came to the fore even in the cosmos of village religiosity. These modern saints show a new way to God and to human perfection in personal and solitary discipleship (Schilling 1994: 21–2). “Thus the well-springs of the medieval spirit of asceticism in the religious orders continued to inspire conventual renewal well into the sixteenth century and beyond” (Mullett 1999: 69). It is of interest that what the early Catholic renewal movement perceived as the virtue to be inculcated and developed appeared to Luther as the very thing that needed reform. As argued earlier, to Luther the only gospel response to a failed piety of achievement was not its intensification but its abolition. Like ships passing in the night, Luther hammered at theological reform and Roman Catholic reformers hammered at ethical renewal. Catholic reformers, including the Jesuits, were convinced “that the primary means of healing the religious division was to instill in Catholics the desire for a more devout life” (O’Malley 1993: 278).

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  Western Civilization

  A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500

  • Jackson Spielvogel(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  This was by no means the first crisis in the church’s fifteen-hundred-year history, but its consequences were more far-reaching than anyone at Worms in 1521 could have imagined. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Christian church continued to assert its primacy of position. It had overcome defiance of its temporal authority by emperors and kings while challenges to its doctrines had been crushed by the Inquisition and combated by new religious orders that carried its message of salvation to all the towns and villages of medieval Europe. The growth of the papacy had paralleled the growth of the church, but by the end of the Middle Ages, challenges to papal authority from the rising power of monarchical states had resulted in a loss of papal temporal authority. An even greater threat to papal authority and church unity arose in the sixteenth century when the unity of Christendom was shattered by the Reformation. The movement begun by Martin Luther when he made his dramatic stand quickly spread across Europe, a clear indication of dissatisfaction with Catholic practices. Within a short time, new religious practices, doctrines, and organizations, including Zwinglianism, Calvinism, Anabaptism, and Anglicanism, were attracting adherents all over Europe. Although seemingly helpless to stop the new Protestant churches, the Catholic Church also underwent a reformation and managed to revive its fortunes by the mid-sixteenth century. All too soon, the doctrinal divisions between Protestants and Catholics led to a series of religious wars that dominated the history of western Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century. Prelude to Reformation Q F OCUS Q UESTION : What were the chief ideas of the Christian humanists, and how did they differ from the ideas of the Protestant reformers? Martin Luther’s reform movement was by no means the first in sixteenth-century Europe.

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  Reformation England 1480-1642

  • Peter Marshall(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  93 4 Mary I’s Counter-Reformation 1553–8 Overview For a handful of years in the 1550s, England was Catholic England once more; the Edwardian Reformation was stopped in its tracks and thrown into reverse. Not so long ago the interpretation of this development seemed clear-cut. The endeavour by Queen Mary and her principal religious advisor, Cardinal Reginald Pole, to reverse the Protestant advances of the preceding decades was simply destined to fail, an attempt to fly in the face of history. The wave of nationalist and anticleri-cal sentiment which Henry and Edward had ridden could not be held back by the Canute-like pronouncements of a Catholic Queen, and the cruel persecution which her regime initiated merely strengthened the resolve of the Protestant movement and helped swing the uncommitted behind it. In essence, this was the view formulated by the first and greatest historian of the reign, John Foxe, whose accounts of heroic martyrs in the fires of Smithfield in his Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church (first published 1563) exercised for centuries a magnetic hold on the English imagination. 1 The intense denomi-national passions fed by Foxe’s stirring narrative have now largely (though not entirely) abated, but historical views of Mary’s reign have not become less con-troversial as a result. Revisionist scholars have rejected a prevailing interpreta-tion which saw Marian religious policy simply as ‘reaction’, a backward-looking attempt to restore the Church of the early 1520s through an unimaginative blend of legalistic pronouncements and harsh persecution. A. G. Dickens’s stern con-clusion that Mary ‘failed to discover the Counter-Reformation’, that her Church didn’t understand the need for positive and enthusiastic Catholic evangelism, has come under sustained attack. 2 The English Church of the mid-1550s, revisionists 1 This text (in all its sixteenth-century editions) is now available in a superb online version: www.johnfoxe.org.

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