International Catholic University
In our last lecture we treated the Council of Trent and what it did to reform Catholic life and to define Catholic Doctrine. In effect what Trent was doing was calling for a new type of Christian, a new type of Catholic man and woman who would be aware of and alert to the teachings of the faith and would be practicing. In other words doing their best to keep themselves in a state of grace. But the decrees of the Council of Trent have life only if they are translated into action, and that was the work then that was facing the Christian world once the council had disbanded. One of the worst mistakes we can make is to think that because the council declared something to be so, or because the council ordered something to happen, that it was actually so or that it actually happened. The history of the Church is full of instances where councils declared and Christians or popes or bishops ignored. So in this lecture today I want to treat what the popes in the immediate aftermath of the council did to translate it into action. And as was to be expected, the council did not treat every single thing or did not produce every document that it wanted to see. It left certain things to their successors, or the successor popes who would come on the scene.
For the period immediately after the council there are three popes who are of special significance and importance. The first is Pius V; he is a saint, and he was pope from 1566-1572. The second is Gregory XIII who was pope from 1572-1585. The last is Sixtus V, pope from 1585-1590. We will be treating a period roughly of 25 years of what we can call the immediate aftermath of the council. It was to the good fortune of the Church that she was blessed by three Counter-Reformation popes, three good popes, each with great strengths and each with weaknesses. All three contributed greatly to carrying on the work of the council. It may be of significance that two of them were members of religious orders. Pope Saint Pius V was a Dominican, and Pope Sixtus V was a Franciscan. We will take them in order starting with Pius V, who became pope in 1566 and died in 1572. There are a number of things that he had to do in the immediate aftermath of the council. Perhaps the best thing to do is simply to list them and then to say a word or two about each. There is an index of forbidden books in 1564, there is the Roman Catechism, or it is popularly called The Catechism of the Council of Trent, in 1566. The Breviary was revised and published in 1568, and the Missal was revised and published in 1570.
Now to take them in order. The Index. This really stems from Paul IV, Carafa, who was pope in the 1550s and had set up an index of forbidden books -- books that were forbidden to Catholics to read without special dispensation. This is a subject for study in and of itself. It's doubtful if we would have had something like the Index if there had been no printing press, in other words if books were still be produced by hand. But books could be multiplied, and by the standards of the time multiplied and published quite quickly, and both Protestants and Catholics made use of books to propagate or to spread or to defend their faith and their beliefs. The council thought it right and the pope here thought it right to declare certain books as being dangerous to the faith. In other words it would be better for Catholics not to read them.
In 1566 the Catechism of the Church was published, and this comes directly from the council, the idea behind it being to put into the hands of the ordinary parish priest a manual -- something that he could use wherein he would find Catholic doctrine clearly stated and Catholic morality clearly stated along with reasons given for it. This was found in The Catechism of the Church or as it is popularly called The Catechism of the Council of Trent. Something similar happened after Vatican II; catechisms began to appear, so that while Christians, Catholics and non-Catholics, could see the effects of the council incorporated in the catechism as well as the tradition of the Church laid out in her teaching in the catechism.
Then the events of 1568. The Breviary was revised, the official prayer book of the Church, and the official prayer book for the priests of the Church. So it's an instrument to promote priestly piety, priestly sanctity. And finally in 1570 the Missal was revised and published. Both of these had a long run in the Catholic Church, but these would be tangible results of the council, something we could pick up, hold in our hands and look at.
Now the pope did other things, things that reflect his own personality. If you've ever seen pictures of him, he was a hard and a grim-faced man, and strict with himself and strict with others. He had worked for the Roman Inquisition at one time, and he tended not to be too tolerant. And we should repeat here that the popes were not tolerant; the Protestants were not tolerant. Toleration was not considered a virtue. Pius V took steps through decrees and other means to enforce clerical residence. He was very much against the French Protestants, who were called Huguenots, and very much then in favor of the Catholic cause.
His greatest achievement as pope was to put together a coalition. I guess it would not be out of place to say that the coalition could be in some ways, in some ways only, compared to the coalition that President Bush put together in 1990 and 1991. This coalition that the pope and Philip II, the King of Spain, put together was to fight the Turk, and to fight the Turk on the seas in the Mediterranean, and it led to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, which was the great victory of the Christian fleet over the Ottoman fleet. It meant that the Mediterranean would not become an Islamic lake. And in gratitude for the victory of the Christian troops at Lepanto Pius V inaugurated the feast of the Holy Rosary.
His greatest failure, or perhaps better to say his greatest mistake, was that he excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England. He did that by a Bull called Regnans in Excelsis in 1570, and as I said it was a mistake. We can see this quite clearly now: he would have been far better off leaving events in England unfold. But the queen, when she became queen after the death of Queen Mary, played things close to the vest, and it was not clear whether she was a Catholic or a Protestant. Year by year it became more clear that she was not Catholic and that she favored the Protestant side, or at least the side that would be resisting the Catholics. Perhaps with bad advice the pope decided to excommunicate her to release her subjects from obedience to her, and this gave rise to a very serious and unfortunate debate among the Jesuit missionaries and the other Catholic missionaries in England. At one time it was even said that there was a plot to assassinate the Queen.
Pius V was followed by Gregory XIII, who was pope from 1572-1585, and he is probably one pope who is known to most people today even if they are not Christian. But they may not know how he is known to them or why they know about him. He is the man who reformed the calendar in the year 1582, and it is the calendar that is universally practiced or followed today, but it was not always followed in his day. The calendar that was in use up until the year 1582 was the Julian calendar -- in other words the reform of the calendar that was done by Julius Caesar some 1600 years earlier. It was a good calendar, but it had faults or defects, and it had a major fault by the year 1580, and the astronomers and scientists knew this. It was behind; it had fallen behind by ten days, and the longer nothing was done the further behind it would get, so the pope through astronomers decided that he would reform the calendar and publish the reform. This was published in the year 1582, and it went into effect in 1582. An easy way to remember this is to take the two dates, October 4 and October 15. What happened was that men and women in the Papal States went to bed on the fourth of October; they woke up in the morning and it was the fifteenth of October. And that is the way the calendar was rectified.
Now we are in the heart of the Reformation or the heart of the Counter-Reformation. This reformation of the calendar was not accepted by everyone. Quite simply put, Catholic states tended to accept the reform, Protestant states did not. That meant that England did not accept the reform of the calendar, and that meant that when English Colonists came to what is now the United States or to Canada, they were following not the Gregorian calendar but still following the Julian calendar. It was not until the year 1752 that this calendar was accepted in England and in English-speaking lands. As pope, Gregory is also known for the support that he gave especially to the Jesuits and the Capuchins. For instance, he allowed the Capuchins to cross the Alps and to go into Switzerland and France and Germany in the year 1574. But this will be the topic of the next lecture, the work of the Jesuits and the Capuchins.
Gregory is also known for the work that he did with papal nuncios, or taking steps to put himself in touch through nuncios with what was going on in other countries. He saw by this time in the 1570s that Protestantism was not going to go away, no matter how much Catholics may have wanted it to. The pope wanted to have his finger on and to know what was going on, so he began to train formally men in the service of the Church through diplomacy. In other words, this is the beginning of the Vatican Diplomatic Service. To this day the Vatican Diplomatic Service is a first-rate diplomatic service, and the men who are in it, generally they are priests or bishops, are very well trained.
Gregory also took steps to implement or to promote the implementation of the decree of the Council of Trent on seminaries. Trent called for each bishop to have a seminary in his own diocese. It's strange in the sixteenth century and to the men and women of that time, it was the modern times, say in 1550, the Church had nothing specific in place for the training of her clergy. By our standards the training was haphazard: it might be well done, it might not be well done. By those who saw what was at stake and took it seriously, the training would be well done. There is no doubt that the best trained priests in the period before the Reformation and in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period were the priests in the mendicant orders. They all had houses in their provinces where their members or their young members, the recruits, studied first philosophy and then theology and then after ordination might go on, the selected ones, to get higher degrees in theology, so that they could preach and teach. These were the frequently called clericates or study houses especially of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, also of the Augustinians and the Carmelites. What Trent did in its decree on seminaries was to take the practice of the mendicant orders and to adopt it for herself. In other words she told each bishop to set up this seminary, or this seedbed, which is the meaning of the word seminary, so that you will have good priests serving the people in your diocese. It takes almost a hundred years for this decree of the Council of Trent to really take full effect. It takes effect immediately in some places, but to say that seminaries are in place and producing a certain type of priest, we cannot say that until we get well into the seventeenth century, around 1650 or so.
Finally it should be noted that we know that the occasion for the Reformation was the preaching of an indulgence for the building of Saint Peter's Basilica. In 1582 the dome of Saint Peter's was finished, but there was more work still to be done. One thing that we can see, it works after the Council of Trent, in Pius V to some extent, in Gregory XIII was a little more, and then the next man to come Sixtus V, is what they do to Rome. Sixtus V, who was pope from 1585-1590, was a Friar Minor Conventual. His Pontificate is the height of the Counter-Reformation Papacy. Perhaps it would be best to say something that Sixtus did that was not too good: he really botched the edition of the Vulgate. One thing called for by the Council of Trent was a new edition of the Vulgate so that the faithful could be sure that they had the true Scriptures in their hands. Sixtus interfered in the work that was done, had it published early or did work on it himself and did not do a good job, and it was out, and it was making the Church in one sense almost a laughing stock. So his successor, Clement VIII, recalled it and then reissued it in 1592. Once it was issued in 1592 then translations could be made from it.
What we associate with Sixtus V above all is the reform that he made in the Romana Curia. He reorganized it and set it up as congregations. His reform of the Romana Curia in the 1580s has been called perhaps the greatest administrative reform in history. He reined it in, and he began then to establish papal control over the Curia. Something similar was done after Vatican II by Paul VI, who was in one way a child or a product of the Curia and knew it inside out. He reformed or made significant changes in the Curia. What Sixtus did was to set up what became the famous Roman Congregations. Congregations to deal with various aspects of both Church and state government -- in other words, ecclesiastical government and secular government. There would be a congregation for the fabric of Saint Peter's, maintaining the buildings. There would be a congregation for bishops.
The most famous congregation of all was not set up by Sixtus V, though it came only later in the year 1622, and that was the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for the Spread of the Faith. By an odd twist it has given to us in English our word propaganda, but the original meaning of the word was to preach and to spread the Faith. There was a special congregation set up because of the New World and the new lands where they had not heard the Gospel and where the Gospel had to be preached.
He also took steps to control the proliferation of cardinals. It was Sixtus V who set the number of cardinals at seventy, and that number held on until the lifetime of most of us today, that there would never be more than seventy cardinals. Sixtus was a very energetic man and worker and the modern city of Rome; the Rome that most of us love if we have seen it is his creation. It's not that of the Renaissance. Many people think that the Rome we know came from the Renaissance. The Rome that we know and that we see when we visit it is Counter-Reformation Rome, and more than any one man or pope Sixtus is the one responsible for that. He took steps also to revive Rome as a Christian city; in other words he took to heart some of the comments and the recommendations of the Concilium. But he laid it out. He laid out the streets. He leveled buildings and began the transformation of the city which would be continued by his successors. In his book on the Counter-Reformation Marvin O'Connell titles the section on him Sixtus The Great, and I think that O'Connell is on the mark when he says that Sixtus has not received his due as a great pope. One historian has said that he was the greatest practical organizer ever to occupy the papal throne. I think it's significant that he achieved so much in so short a time. His Pontificate was short, five years, but we are still feeling the effects of it today. And more than that, we can still see with our eyes the effects of some of the changes that Sixtus V wrought in the city of the popes, Rome.
There is a very wide and vast literature on the Jesuits, much of it in English, and I simply want to mention a few items that you might find helpful. The best history of the Society of Jesus in English is by William Bangert, and it's called A History of the Society of Jesus, second edition published in St. Louis, 1986. Also published in St. Louis in 1970 was St. Ignatius of Loyola: The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, translated and edited by George E. Ganss. A recent work is by Joseph Munitiz and Philip Endean, they are translators, and the title of the work is, Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings. It was published in London by Penguin, 1996. Joseph Munitiz is an English Jesuit of Basque extraction, in other words the same nationality as Ignatius Loyola himself. John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits, was published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Harvard University Press, 1993. Finally this one I think would be rather hard to come by in this country. but it's good, by J.J. Scarisbrick, The Jesuits and the Catholic Reformation. It's a pamphlet published by the Historical Association in London in 1989.
For the Capuchins it's much harder to come by material in English. The only history of the Capuchins in English is that by Father Cuthbert Hess titled The Capuchins: A Contribution to the History of the Counter-Reformation. It's in two volumes published originally in 1928, reissued in 1971. If you look at J.C. Olin's, The Catholic Reformation: Savonorola to Ignatius of Loyola you will find in there a complete edition of the Capuchin Constitutions of 1536, which lays out not just their way of life but the ideals of the Order. There is a vast literature on the Capuchins in Italian. The Italian form of the name is well known now with the popularity of cappuccino in this country -- Cappuccino being the Italian word for both the Friar and the coffee. You may also want to look at articles on either the Jesuits, or the Capuchins, or their members in the New Catholic Encyclopedia and in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation.
It's appropriate, I think, to begin any lecture in a course on the Counter-Reformation, any lecture on the Jesuits and the Capuchins, by saying that customarily both orders, Jesuits and Capuchins, are viewed as and treated as Counter-Reformation Orders by historians on both confessional sides, Protestant and Catholic. So it's only right to say at the very beginning that neither order was founded to counteract or to oppose the Reformation. There were other causes or things at work which brought the Jesuits into existence and which brought the Capuchin reform into existence. Once they were in existence and had proven themselves to be loyal to the pope, to the Church, then the popes reached out, and the members of the orders themselves reached out, and began to do work that would promote the Church not just in Catholic lands, but would oppose the inroads of the Protestants in lands such as Germany, France, Poland, the Empire.
We can start with the Jesuits. Their founder was Saint Ignatius of Loyola. He was a Basque and born about the year 1491. His early life parallels somewhat the early life of Saint Francis of Assisi. Ignatius was a soldier, Francis was a soldier, or he wanted to be a soldier. Francis was captured in battle and put into prison; Ignatius was wounded in battle and put into a room where he was laid up because of a wound that he received at the Battle of Pamplona. He had time on his hands, the story is well known, there was nothing there where he was staying except the lives of the Saints. So literally for want of something better to do, he started to read these lives. He was especially struck by the life of Saint Francis, and then he went on and he decided that he wanted to be a priest.
He was at Pamplona in 1521; that means he was already thirty years old, which is advancing in age for the early sixteenth century. But he decided that he would be a priest, and what many men today are doing at an older age, he went to school and studied philosophy and theology to prepare himself for ordination to the priesthood. At the same time he saw himself called to a specific form of life, and it was a form of life in which he would be doing missionary work, but above all he would put himself at the feet of the pope -- at the service of the pope and the service of the Church. And that is what Saint Francis had done some 300 years earlier in Italy. Ignatius went and studied his theology in Paris, he gained some recruits, they gathered around him, and they went to Rome and received the approval of the pope. They had hoped to go to the Holy Land; they were prevented because of the inroads being made by the Turks. In 1543 they were given permission to take in recruits and to expand, and the basis of the way of life that Ignatius was founding was in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, chapter ten, and the Gospel of Saint Luke, chapter nine. That's the same foundation that served for Francis of Assisi and his way of life. But Ignatius gave a certain military cast to the order that he was founding. And he was founding an order really of clerics; the canonical or legal term for them later is clerks regular -- priests living together by a rule. One of the characteristics of the Jesuits was that they took a special vow of obedience to the pope, and this helped their success very much.
Then in the year 1548 they began to teach schools called colleges, and missionary work and teaching quickly became two of their main works or jobs, part of their vocation for the Church. Right before the Council of Trent ended but after the death of Saint Ignatius, in the year 1560, the order began their crusade. They went out literally putting themselves at the service of the Church and going into Holland, France, Hungary, Germany, Bohemia, England and Poland promoting the faith, preaching the faith. And it has been said that they saved Poland for the faith. The name Jesuit is derisive. It is a nickname, the true name of the order that Saint Ignatius founded was the Society of Jesus. He wanted to avoid having the order named after himself because no founder of a religious order would do that. But historically it has happened. The order that Saint Dominic founded is called the Order of Preachers, but it's popularly known as the Dominicans. The order that Saint Francis founded is the Order of Friars Minor, popularly called Franciscans. Saint Ignatius wanted to avoid that, and so he called it the Society of Jesus. It reflects obviously a devotion, a devotion on the part of Saint Ignatius to the name of Jesus. Calvin and then others began to use this Jesus as a term against the Jesuits, and they came up with the word Jesuit. Universally today that is the name that is used for it. The formal name remains the Society of Jesus.
The other order involved in the Counter-Reformation to a large extent is the Capuchins. The Capuchins had nothing to do with the Reformation in their origin. They spring from one of those movements, some might say quarrels, that seem to have been endemic for the Franciscans over the centuries, and with the dissatisfaction that a number of men had with the way Franciscan life was being lived in Italy. They began then to push for reform. They thought that the best thing for them to do was to break away from the order that they were in and see if they couldn't reform themselves. There were three of them involved. They got the permission of the pope to do that, and the order took off from there.
It had a very dicey history at the beginning. The Franciscan group from which they broke away did its best to suppress them, and because members of the order were transferring to the new group the chances were good that they would have been suppressed had it not been for the interference or the patronage of two women. The first was a woman named Catarina Cibo who happened to be the niece of the pope. And she told the pope that she liked these men and that he shouldn't touch them, so they survived. Another woman who promoted them, especially when some were out again to suppress them in the 1530s, was Victoria Colonna, who was a bluestocking and well known in certain circles in Italy. Probably the most distinctive thing about the Capuchins is the name itself. People will say: what does the name Capuchin mean? Some would say it comes from cappuccio, the cowl or the capuche that the Friars wear. It gives rise then to the name Cappuccino or in English Capuchin. But we're not sure. All we know is that the people, and probably the children, on the streets started to call men who were dressed this way Cappuccini and the name stuck. And so the Capuchins are a branch of the Franciscans, but they do not have the word Franciscan as part of their identity. In Europe you simply say Capuchin; in the United States and Canada it's necessary for the most part to add Franciscan.
The reform movement was opposed quite naturally by the order from which they were breaking away. The Franciscans went to the pope and got the pope to do two things: to restrict the Capuchins to Italy and to forbid members of their order to transfer to the Capuchins. That was in the 1530s, and it had unforeseen results; it meant that the Capuchins had to fall back on their own to elaborate quite clearly what their goals were. They did that in their constitutions of 1536, which are found in Olin's work. Then they were restricted to Italy until the year 1574, when they were allowed to cross the Alps. From that time on they are at work throughout Europe. In fact you might say that wherever the Jesuits are you are likely to find the Capuchins, wherever the Capuchins are you are likely to find the Jesuits.
The Capuchins were especially noted for their missionary work in France, Austria and Germany, for their work among the poor, and also in a special way for their work during the plagues. That's really what impressed Catarina Cibo who said that these were good men. Their work in the plagues appears in a classic novel of Italian literature called, The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. They also were connected with certain royal families especially with the Hapsburgs. In general we might say there are always exceptions. The Jesuits were working with the Kings and with the Queens and with the courts, realizing that the best way to influence the people was through their rulers. It would be the equivalent today of working with the media and getting your message out through the media. The Jesuits influenced through their teaching, through schools. A very interesting exercise would be to get a book that would list the European universities in existence today and to see how many of them were originally Jesuit colleges. Then the Jesuits were popular preachers also. The Capuchins were more generally popular preachers although they did work also with the royal families.
In some ways if you want to see what is happening in the Counter-Reformation, not in the classroom, or not in Rome, or not in a chancery of a diocese, but among the people, get statistics and find out if there were Jesuits there or if there were Capuchins there. They were generally seen as the principle arm of the pope or of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits especially, but both of them. It's interesting that throughout the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century as far as recruitment goes they are about neck and neck. Generally there are a few more Capuchins than there are Jesuits, but they both quickly became very large orders, over approximately 20,000 members. They were both, each in its own way, at the service of the Church. One way that we might gain insight into the reputation, and some might say the fame or the acclaim, or the name enjoyed by these two orders in the seventeenth century, can be found in one of the poems of the English poet, John Donne. John was reared a Catholic but he became an Anglican and was ordained and eventually became the Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London. He is a major English poet, as we know. Among his poems is one called The Will in which he singles out different parts of society to receive his property, or to receive some aspect of his character, or some of his personal belongings. The poem is filled with irony. But what I find interesting is that only two religious orders are mentioned by name in the poem, the Jesuits and the Capuchins, and here is part of the poem, it's titled The Will and he is bequeathing:
My constancy I to the planets give,
my truth to those who at the court do live,
my ingenuity and openness to Jesuits,
to buffoons my pensiveness,
my silence to any who abroad have been,
my money to a Capuchin.