International Catholic University
In this lecture I want to talk about the causes of the Reformation. This is a rather standard approach to the Reformation because it is admitted by all that the Reformation did not just happen or come like a bolt from the blue. With the gift of hindsight we can see that for more than a century conditions were building up in the Church, conditions that clamored for, cried for something to be done, some kind of reform or change to be effected. And that change came. It was acknowledged by almost everyone in Christendom or the then Western World that the person or the man from whom reform had to come was the pope. Throughout the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth there was a cry for reform and a reform in head and members -- meaning a reform in the papacy itself and in the Church itself. Part of the tragedy of the Reformation is that the Church before 1517 was unable to reform itself or to set in motion events or changes that would have led to a reform in the Church that would have satisfied its members and really affected change.
It is possible to go back deep into the Middle Ages when enumerating or toting up the causes of the Reformation. I would like to start simply with the fourteenth century. All of the events or things that I am going to talk about made some kind of contribution to what we call the Reformation and therefore to the Counter-Reformation.
The first thing to note is that in the fourteenth century there was a period of approximately seventy years, from 1309 to 1377, when the pope was not living or residing in Rome. He was living and residing in Avignon. Avignon is today part of France. In the fourteenth century it was papal territory, but nevertheless it was felt that since it was part of French culture that the pope was somehow or other at least under the influence of the King of France, if not under his thumb. To make matters worse in the eyes of non-Frenchmen, all of these popes at Avignon were French. It is universally agreed that they were good popes. They were not bad popes, and they did not do anything to damage the Church intentionally, except not live in Rome where Christendom, except for the French, felt the pope should be. They were all good administrators. They were all very very orthodox. But it was just that they were living in a place where they should not have been.
In the midst of the pope living outside of the Italian peninsula, outside of Rome, there occurred one of those events in European history that mark an age forever, and that was the infamous Black Death. It was called the plague, and there were three waves of it between 1348 and 1369. The important thing for us to note is that it decimated the population of Europe. We do not have any hard and fast figures, but it's safe to say that it probably removed one third of the population, or reduced the population of Europe by a third, and removed one half of the clergy, that is reduced the population of the clergy by one half. The latter was critical, not so much because they were clergy but because of the steps that were taken to make up the losses. The common opinion is that dioceses or bishops and religious orders also felt their losses very keenly and they tried very hard to make them up. They went out and beat the highways and the byways and brought in and kept unworthy candidates. In other words they lowered their standards. You cannot see this immediately; it takes a generation or so for this to appear, but appear it does, so that we can see that there is a different type of cleric around in 1400 from those who were there in 1300. Of all the causes of the Reformation, the Black Death is most likely the greatest.
Not too long after the Black Death there occurred something that was far worse than the popes living in Avignon. Under the prodding and the influence of Saint Catherine of Sienna among others, finally the pope pulled himself up from Avignon and went back to Rome. But through circumstances that we don't have to detail, the cardinals thought that they had elected the wrong man, and they proceeded to elect a counter-pope in 1378 to the pope who was then living in Rome. This counter-pope was French. He went back to Avignon. The man already resident now in Rome stayed in Rome, and Christendom now had the spectacle of not one pope living where he shouldn't have been, but of two popes each claiming to be the rightful pope, one living in Avignon, the other in Rome.
This brought untold evils in its wake at the very top. I think it's enough simply to take one thing, and that is the effect that it had on the popes and their search for money, because the pope was a monarch and he had a court, and if we have two popes then we have two courts. It cost more money to run two courts than one, and so during this schism generally the popes were always in need of money, and eventually they took steps that were wrong. Quite simply what they did in some instances was that they sold offices, they became venal, corrupt, and the primary consideration, frequently for a bishopric, perhaps simply for what they call a benefice, was not the worthiness of the candidate or the man but how much could he pay for it. To one of the popes of the time, Boniface IX, goes the unenviable distinction of probably having begun the papal sale of offices.
In addition to that there was simply the scandal that was given to Christendom. Avignon could have been a scandal, but probably not. The Schism is, where you have two popes each vying for the loyalty, the affection, and the revenue of the faithful. There were a number of schemes for ending this schism; it got worse before it got better. There was a period when Christendom ended up with three, not two, popes, but there was agreement that the best way to end this schism would be through a council of the Church. So they called a council, it was at Constance, and to make a long story short they got the three popes to resign, they elected a new one, and the election held. That was in the year 1417. The new pope was Pope Martin V, and he was the duly elected and honored and acknowledged pope.
But there was a price that had to be paid. The council fathers were afraid that once they left that the cardinals might proceed again to elect a counter or a rival pope. They wanted to make it so that councils would meet frequently, and they began to promote the doctrine that a council was above the pope, and that is known in Church history as conciliarism. The council concluded that the way to forestall multiple popes in the future was to have more councils, or to have councils more often. So they passed a decree saying that five years after they broke up there should be a council, and seven years after that there should be a council, and then ten years after that another council. And every ten years there should be a council of the Church.
The pope agreed, and he had no intention of fulfilling that, but he prorogued or dismantled the council. But this movement stayed on through the 1420s, the 1430s, the 1440s, when there was another council of the Church of Basle where the council was jockeying with the pope and acting at times as if it were pope, even going so far as to declare the pope deposed. But through tactful policy and diplomacy the pope won out, and by the year 1447 we can say that the immediate danger of conciliarism or of a council asserting itself over the pope was past -- not definitively past, but the worst part was over. We can see that with the virtue of hindsight.
1447 is usually taken as the year that began or marked the appearance of what we call the Renaissance Papacy, or the Renaissance Popes. The Italian Renaissance was in full swing at this time, and when we speak of the Renaissance Popes what we mean more than anything else is that these popes were more men of culture or rulers than popes. Some may have been bad, some corrupt; they were all duly elected, but they had other interests, other things on their minds besides being pope. It's possible just to go through and name them and give one characteristic of them. The first Renaissance Pope would be Nicholas V. He was learned; he was a very cultured man, and he was pious. His successor Cailistus III was a very mortified man and a good man, but he was followed by Pius II, who led a very wild youth, an irresponsible youth (he had an illegitimate child) but a sound manhood, and he is one of the great scholars of history.
His successor was a worldly man or a worldling, and his successor Sixtus IV was completely a worldling. He is best known perhaps for the chapel that he built which was later decorated by Michelangelo, the Sistine Chapel. His successor Innocent VIII had an illegitimate family. Alexander VI, who was Spanish, was perhaps the worst of them all. He had many illegitimate children, but he was a good political candidate. But his reign as pope did more to weaken the moral prestige of the papacy than almost anything imaginable. He was succeeded by Julius II, who didn't cause scandal, but he was more a soldier than a pope. If any of you have ever seen the movie The Agony and the Ecstacy you may remember the beginning of it where Michelangelo comes to the field of battle to see the general there, and the general comes up in full armor, lifts up his visor and starts to talk to Michelangelo. a\And Michelangelo says, "Yes, your Holiness". The pope led his own army in battle. Finally there came Leo X, a Medici who was worldly, magnificent, but who was totally unaware of what was happening around him in the Church. He had no conception at all of the danger that was threatening the Church and Church unity.
Now going beyond this, beyond the head, if we go down into the members we might say that there were a number of abuses that called for reform. And if we go to the clergy, to what we can call the lower clergy or the ordinary priests, we can say that one vice that many of them had was immorality. Many of them had women that they kept in their rectories by whom they had children, so they had families to support. Sometimes they were supported by their flock or their parish, at other times they were not. Of all the evils that infected the clergy at this time, to the men and women of our day this is probably the most glaring, or the one that would cry out the most for reform.
To the men and women of the time it wasn't. The next one was worse in their eyes, and historically I think we can say it was worse. That was nonresidents or absentee clergy. What do we mean by that? Absentee clergy or nonresidents means simply that the priest, and we can take it a level higher, the bishops also, were not obliged to live in their parish or their diocese. They were obliged but they didn't, and the system then in force allowed them to do that.
This led then to a vice that was universal and acknowledged as a vice and something to be uprooted. It took the longest time to attack and to come to grips with. And that is plurality of benefices. In ecclesiastical law a diocese or a parish is a benefice, and what Church law means by that is that is the means of support for the priest or for the bishop. In other words, there is money or revenue attached to being the pastor of this church in this town or in this village. There is money attached to being the bishop of this diocese in Italy or in Germany or in England. That is fine, and as it should be, because the priest and the bishop is entitled to material support. But when you have the practice of plurality of benefices you can have one man being bishop of three different dioceses, perhaps not even speaking the language of the people in one of his dioceses. You can have a man being pastor or in charge of three parishes. What did they do? Frequently what they did was they farmed them out if the diocese was worth $50,000 the bishop could find somebody to be the bishop in the diocese for $10,000, or the same thing in the parish. You can see that money is there and you can see what Scripture means when it says that the desire of money is the root of all evil.
Back in the Middle Ages, in the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III remarked of a bishop of his own time, "His heart is a bank." That was the case with too many clergy on the eve of the Reformation -- that they were interested in money, more interested in money than in the cure or the care of souls. So the nonresidence and all the evils that came in its train was much worse than the individual sins, no matter how gross, of a parish priest , and we will see when we come to the Council of Trent that the heart of the reforms for which Trent was called, the heart of the reform of the Church, was requiring bishops and equally priests to live in their diocese and their parish. If Trent had been unable to enforce that then the Counter-Reformation would not have succeeded or would not have had the degree of success that it had.
This brings us to the eve of the Reformation itself, and there are other evils that we could mention, but I think the ones that I've talked about show pretty generally that the condition of the Church was not good. What made it worse was that the people knew that things were not right, and the popular indignation or the popular discontent was there, and all it needed was for someone to strike a spark to give the people a chance to vent their indignation, primarily at the clergy, who were the prestige-enjoying class, at the pope himself, or at the bishops, or at the cardinals, or at the priests. The occasion for that was Martin Luther's nailing of the ninety-five theses to the Church door at Wittenberg.
Before going into the Counter-Reformation proper I think it is only fair to note that there was more than an awareness in the Church of the need of reform. There were also some attempts made at reform, and that will be the subject of my next lecture, Catholic attempts at reform. After that we will go to the Council of Trent itself.
In last week's lecture we were talking about the causes of the Reformation. The next logical subject in our treatment of the Counter-Reformation would be Catholic attempts at self-reform. But before going into that there are a few more things I would like to say about the causes of the Reformation, or we could put them under the general rubric of the decline of the Church.
An addendum to the Renaissance Papacy would be that one consequence of this, or the way these popes acted during the Renaissance, popes who were as much humanists as men of the Church, or ecclesial men, treated the papacy itself as a kind of petty Italian princedom. They came to be viewed in the eyes of many as just that -- just another Italian prince. Along with this went actions that were really unbecoming the papal office and unbecoming to any office. The sale of offices and frequently or usually the sale of Church offices was done through the Roman Curia, or the bureaucracy by which and through which the pope governed the Church. It was universally recognized and acknowledged that the Curia was corrupt and in need of reform. Another side to this Italian princedom would be that some of the leading families of Italy viewed the papacy as almost a family office or affair. You had Italian families competing or presenting candidates for the papacy. The Medici, the della Rovere, the Colonna, and there were others. But they considered the papacy almost to be a family possession and vied for election as pope, and the elections were not always above board and as upright as they should have been.
A further facet or aspect of this would be that in some ways the popes acted like the other Italian princes. They promoted their own; the word for this in ecclesiastical parlance is that they indulged in nepotism. They promoted their nephews or they took care of their nephews, and during the late fifteenth century and into the sixteenth century sometimes it was a case of a pope promoting or taking care of his own illegitimate children. This is as late as the 1530s when a truly reform-minded pope was on the throne of Saint Peter. He had led a wild and irresponsible youth and had children and felt that he was obliged to take care of them. Nepotism goes back deep into the Middle Ages within the Church, and in the Middle Ages there arose a saying that summarized not just what was afoot or going on but the problem of dealing with it. The saying was this, "When God deprived bishops of sons the devil gave them nephews." Which meant that they took care of their own, they preferred them and made it really papal policy or episcopal policy if they were bishops or whatever to see to it that their sister's sons or their brother's sons were well taken care of to the detriment of the Church.
Now having said that we can go on to Catholic attempts at reform which leads us logically then into the reaction, or what the Church did when the Reformation came on. This brings us up against a number of problems or questions, and at the very beginning, when we speak of Counter-Reformation or Catholic Reformation, we come up against a problem of nomenclature. What do we call the Catholic attempts at reform? A second question is: when do we date the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation? The first question is: what is the right or proper best name to call the Catholic attempts at reform? This course is titled Counter-Reformation. At one time it was said that Counter-Reformation was the term that was preferred by German historians and frequently by non-Catholic historians, and that Catholics preferred to call it the Catholic Reformation or Catholic reform. The book that I recommended very highly at the beginning of this course, R.R. Palmer's History of the Modern World calls the Catholic attempts at reform once Martin Luther has come onto the scene as Catholicism Reformed and Reorganized. Now that's not so much a name as a description, but it's very apt.
When the Church does react or deal with the questions raised by Luther and Calvin and others, and questions raised from within by reforming cardinals, two things are necessary. There has to be reform, and at the same time reform is going to entail some kind of reorganization. If we look through the reforms that were done and the reorganizing that was done what we come up with at the end is a revitalized Catholicism. Some might want to say that it's Catholicism revitalized. Or some might say that it is a Catholic restoration. In other words through the actions at Trent and through reforming popes and through the help of religious orders, Catholicism was brought back to what it should have been, or at least was put on the road to being better than it had been before the advent of the Reformation. That's the first question that comes up when we deal with Catholic attempts at reform.
A second question that comes up and that has to occupy us is: when do we date the Catholic Reformation, or the Counter-Reformation? Do we date it from Martin Luther? Or before Luther? Or after Luther? We might say that there are almost as many dates given for beginning the Catholic or Counter-Reformation as there are historians writing about it. We run up against the same problem at the end. When does the Catholic Reformation end?
I will simply now give you a number of dates that have been presented or used for the beginning of the Catholic Reformation, and then a number of dates that have been used for the end, with a brief explanation of a few. Our co-text Greengrass, The Longman Companion to the European Reformation starts it at 1500. Some would suggest that a better date would be 1512 when there was the Fifth Council of the Lateran. Others would say 1537, the year in which a special committee presented its plan of reform to the pope. Our text Hsia starts his treatment of Catholic Reformation or Restoration with the year 1540. Others would start it at 1545 when the Council of Trent actually convened and met and deliberated. Others would go a step further and start it at 1555, and some even start it as late as 1559. O'Connell starts it at 1559.
Sometimes these dates are chosen because the book that is being written as a textbook or as part of a series is controlled by the dates assigned to them by the general editor. For instance O'Connell had little choice: the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation for him had to start at 1559, it had to end in 1610. That's when he ends it, and that's when the New Cambridge Modern History would end the Catholic Reformation or Restoration. Others would end it at 1618 with the start of the Thirty Years War, still others would say no, 1648 the date of the Peace of Westphalia when the Thirty Years War is over and both Catholics and Protestants in Europe are too exhausted to fight anymore. The religious wars then come to an end. Others like John Bossy would put it at 1700. The author of our text, Hsia, puts it as late as 1770, and he has his eye on the suppression of the Society of Jesus of the Jesuits by the pope. So we have the Counter-Reformation in the eyes of historians starting as early as the year 1500 and ending as late as the year 1770. I should say that our text, through the dates chosen by the author, takes us a full hundred years beyond where most historians would stop. But Professor Hsia's treatment is indicative of changing currents in the study of both Reformation and Counter-Reformation today. It is written under the influence of historians like Evenett, like Bossy, and like Delumeau.
That said we can now begin to look directly at what we can call Catholic attempts at reform or what we could call pre-Counter-Reformation attempts at reform by the Church. These all come from within the Church and are done by men who are and remain loyal to the Church. Some are explicitly and intentionally reformers, men who recognize the state of the Church and the need for some kind of action on the part of the Church. Others simply come from private or personal devotion. And I think a logical place to start in the fifteenth century is the low countries, today's modern Holland and Belgium. There was a movement there that was very intense and had profound effects within the locale in which it worked. It would be the Netherlands, Holland, Belgium and the Rhine, along the Rhine River. This movement is usually given or known by its Latin name, The Devotio Moderna (The Modern Devotion). Modern refers to late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. This movement, The Devotio Moderna, began with the reform of a congregation in the town of Windesheim, and throughout the fifteenth century it was the center of the Modern Devotion.
We wouldn't be speaking of The Modern Devotion today, or at least be saying as much about it as we do, were it not for the fact that one of the members, or one of those who was part of the Modern Devotion, wrote a book, and almost every Christian is acquainted with that book. It has been said to be the most popular Christian book, after the Bible, ever written. It's a classic of Christian spirituality, The Imitation of Christ, sometimes called The Following of Christ. There is some question to the authorship; the traditional author is Thomas à Kempis. It inculcates a combination of monastic and somewhat secular spirituality, or spirituality that acknowledges the world but is primarily monastic in its origins and in its focus.
Now intimately connected with the Modern Devotion, or the Devotio Moderna, was a new order, the Brothers of the Common Life, which was founded by Gerard Groote in the Netherlands and would soon have branch houses in various parts of the Rhineland and Germany itself. The members shared a common life, but they remained laymen and they took no binding religious vows. They opened schools and dedicated themselves then to the instruction of boys in reading and writing and Christian idealism, or the Christian ideal, and good character and conduct. By the end of the fifteenth century there were thousands of laymen in the Netherlands and along the Rhine, in the Rhine Valley, had received their schooling from the Brothers. Their outstanding student was the Christian humanist and priest Erasmus of Rotterdam. But the effect of this movement, the Devotio Moderna, was limited because it had no great or outstanding leader. There was no great moral reformer who was able to undertake and effect a wider reform within the Church. So it is really of historical importance, but historical importance in the sense in which we sometimes use that of the past, and it did not have the effect that one would have hoped that it would have on the men and women of the time.
There were two other specific movements of reform that came: the one was local and the one was national. The local reform was that of the Dominican, Geronimo Savonarola, who was a Florentine Dominican and who became disgusted with the secularism and the loose living that he saw around him. He became quite well known as a preacher and reached a point where he had a great following and enmeshed himself in the politics of Florence to the point where he became a political leader of Florence and was actually the ruler for a while. He was able to try to put into effect a very strict, some would say a kind of puritanical, Christianity. One thing that he was famous for was his preaching to women to abandon their vanities and having bonfires of the vanities in which women would bring their fancy dresses and clothes and their makeup and pile it up in the town square and there would be literally a bonfire. But Savonarola made enemies, and they set about overthrowing him, and he was executed in the year 1498. But he was a man who saw clearly that there was something wrong with Christian society of his day.
Another man who was just as clear headed but went about reform in a slightly different way was in Spain. He was a cardinal, a Franciscan friar; he was the Archbishop of Toledo and the Primate of Spain. And his name is Jimenez. He had been for a while confessor to Queen Isabella, and he was fortunate to have her as a monarch because in many ways she saw eye to eye with him and supported him in his efforts at reform. He had been a secular priest before he became a Franciscan, and he lived most of his life in a friary, but then he was called to be with the Queen, at her side as it were, at court where he was her spiritual director. And from that time on his influence with her and within the country was very, very great. From 1495 on he and the Queen were working to reform the Church in Spain. In 1507 he was made a cardinal and Grand Inquisitor, and for awhile in 1516, when Ferdinand, the husband of Isabella, had died, he was a secular as well as the ecclesiastical or spiritual ruler of Spain until the young Emperor Charles V arrived there.
But Jimenez was known for seeing quite clearly what was wrong in the Church and then making attempts at reform. It could be perhaps his own order is the place to start. He was quite strict, and he insisted on the friars in the various friaries throughout Spain beginning to reform their lives and to lead good lives, and if they would not he would take steps to see to it that the friary would be removed, or if it was another order, in fact one order he had suppressed. He was also a great promoter of education or of study and especially of study of the Bible, and he founded the University of Alcala to provide for clerical education. He was responsible then for a great polyglot edition of the Bible. This was something that was being done in the wake of the printing press.
Side by side with reform in Spain was zeal for the missions, or missionary zeal in the New World and missionaries were sent with all expeditions that went to the New World. Jimenez died just as the Reformation was beginning, but we have, I think, to conclude that what he and Queen Isabella between them had done was largely responsible for the fact that Spain held for the Catholic faith, the fullness of the faith, during the Reformation times and was really not receptive to Protestantism, at least not receptive in the way Italians or Poles or Germans or Frenchmen were. The Pyrenees Mountains have something to do with this, but we should not overlook the work of Jimenez and his Queen, Isabella.
The next name that we should take was actually the most famous man in Christendom when the Reformation broke, and that was Erasmus of Rotterdam. We will begin our next lecture, then, with Erasmus and follow that up with the report of the special papal committee on conditions in the Church and what to do about reforming or correcting the abuses in the Church. Then from there we will go directly into the Council of Trent.