International Catholic University
In today's lecture I would like to follow up on the lecture on the two main orders of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits and the Capuchins, then to use that as a lead in to a subject that was not much covered in the past, and that is the subject of sanctity or of sainthood. In any treatment of the Counter-Reformation today you will generally find a reference to the saints. This is mainly because of the work of Evennett, Delumeau, and Bossy, and you will find it in our text. In fact there are chapters in the text that are relevant to what I will be talking about this morning: they are chapters 2, 8, and 9. Chapter 2 is on The New Religious Orders, Chapter 8, Counter-Reformation Saints, Chapter 9 is Holy Women, Beatas, Demoniacs. But first, a word simply about the new religious orders.
The Jesuits were a new religious order; the Capuchins were a reform of an old or an already existing order. As Hsia remarks on page 27 in our text, "the Jesuits soon became the most important force in Catholic Renewal." So the religious orders play a critical role in the renewal of the Church through the program outlined by the Council of Trent and then by Tridentine bishops in their dioceses or sees.
There were new religious orders besides the Jesuits. There were the Theatines and the Barnabites, who were founded earlier than the Jesuits and who were, like the Jesuits, essentially a group of priests living together in common, living a common or a religious life. In the seventeenth century, especially in France, some new religious orders that sprang up were the Brothers of the Christian Schools, popularly called the De La Salle Brothers in England, and here in the United States called the Christian Brothers. Saint Vincent de Paul founded his Congregation of the Mission, popularly known or best known in the United States as the Vincentians. It was an order or a group of priests living together to educate candidates for the priesthood in the newly founded seminaries.
Along with these new orders there went a number of attempts to inculcate the program of Trent and to bring to fruition the program that was outlined by Trent. The one who was generally singled out in Italy as having attempted to make Trent a reality in the life of a particular region, in the life of his diocese, is Saint Charles Borromeo. When he became the Archbishop of Milan he was the first archbishop to live there for some eighty years, and he is generally mentioned as the model Tridentine bishop. There were other saints in Italy like Philip Neri, the Capuchin Saint Felix of Cantalice. There was a constellation, as it were, of saints in the newly founded Jesuit Order. And in Spain there was a renewal or revival or reform of some old orders. The Carmelite Nuns were reformed by Saint Theresa of Avila, the Carmelite Friars by Saint John of the Cross, and the Franciscan Friars by Saint Peter of Alcantera. And there were many others.
In seventeenth century France the best known saints are perhaps Saint Francis de Sales, Saint John Baptist de la Salle, and Saint Vincent de Paul. There were between the years 1540 and 1770, as Hsia points out in our text, some twenty-seven men and five women who were declared to be saints. Of the twenty-seven men six were Jesuits and five were Capuchins, and the overwhelming majority were religious, that is members of a religious order. So when we study the phenomenon of sanctity, especially at the time or the period of the Counter-Reformation, what we are looking at is the sanctity produced by the old or the new religious orders of the Church. Some authors when they come to the Counter-Reformation in the seventeenth century refer to France or the situation in France as the flowering of the saints. In other words what they see is that we had the Council of Trent, which outlined a program of reform and renewal or revitalization for the Church, and there was a lead time necessary, a generation or a generation and a half before the decrees of Trent could come to fruition or take effect -- or before men and women could see their effect, or feel their effect in their own lives and see it in the lives of others.
All the saints that I mentioned, with the exception of Theresa of Avila, were men. And speaking of the religious orders, all the religious orders were orders of men, either laymen and priests living together as with the Franciscans or the Dominicans or the Carmelites, or essentially a group of priests living together as the Jesuits and the Barnabites and the Theatines, one of the new religious orders in Italy in the sixteenth century. They all played a role in the life of the Church, and all contributed, each in its own way, to the revitalization of the Church's life under the guidance of the Council of Trent. Most of the new religious orders took as their model, either knowingly or perhaps instinctively we might say, the Jesuits. Because the Jesuits were enormously successful and quickly had won for themselves a reputation of being at the point of attack, being in the forefront of renewal and what today we would call evangelization in the Church.
Now I would like to say something about this attempt to model oneself on the Jesuits, or to point out something missing from the Jesuits that we would find in previous religious orders and that some tried to make up on their own. Perhaps the best way to do it is to show how Saint Ignatius and his order was a development in the life of religious orders in the Church, some might say an advancement, but at least it's a new form of religious life. Religious life had started originally in the desert and then came from the desert into the monastery, and then in the Middle Ages went from the monastery out onto the streets and the town squares with the Friars or the mendicant orders. Now in the sixteenth century with the Jesuits we're going to see a new form of religious life, or a new understanding of religious life and what religious life meant, and of what the men who vowed themselves to this life could do.
Saint Ignatius broke with the traditions of religious life in the Church in at least three ways. In other words there are three things that we can pick which are external that differentiate or distinguish the Jesuits from other religious orders of the time. The first was that the Jesuits wear no distinctive religious habit, no distinctive garb as I am wearing. No religious garb is simply the black soutaine of the secular priest. Saint Ignatius did not want his men to stand out by virtue of what they were wearing.
A second distinguishing mark of the Jesuits is that they do not recite the Divine Office in common -- or you can say that there is no choral recitation of the Divine Office. This doesn't mean that they don't pray; it simply means that the Jesuits pray privately in their room or in the chapel on their own. Here Saint Ignatius is in tune with one of the distinguishing characteristics or marks of Counter-Reformation: spirituality with less emphasis on the communal or the common and greater emphasis on the individual or private life -- private devotions, private prayers. Hitherto in religious life it was just taken for granted that if a man or a woman was a religious that they prayed the Divine Office together in the choir or the chapel of their convent, monastery, friary or priory. It was a solemn obligation laid upon all by virtue of the solemn vow that they took. Saint Ignatius did not want his men to be tied to or obliged to do that, and he knew something of the history of religious life and that the Divine Office was sometimes a cause not of union but of division, and that frequently when religious orders started to decay or to go into decline one sign was that they were not being faithful to the Office. Saint Ignatius laid the obligation directly and squarely on the individual follower of his way of life.
Finally there is a third distinguishing characteristic: there are no female Jesuits. There are female Dominicans, there are female Benedictines, there are female Franciscans, but there are no female Jesuits. Saint Ignatius wanted it that way, and he would not allow there to be any women associated with his religious endeavor. So we can say that the three distinguishing characteristics of the Jesuits are no religious habit, no choral recitation, and no female counterparts. This does not mean that there were not some women who wanted to associate themselves with the Jesuits; there were, and I want to say a few words now about one of those women. She is the English woman, Mary Ward. When we talk about Mary Ward, or really almost any religious woman in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century who is founding a new order, what we are dealing with is the vision that the woman has of religious life for her and for the women who would associate themselves with her in that form of religious life.
The second element is what the Church required of any woman who entered religious life. Quite simply it boils down to this. In the sixteenth century it was assumed that any woman who entered religious life would be a nun and that all nuns were enclosed. That they were strictly enclosed means that they went into the monastery and stayed there. Or to put it in modern terms, they did not have any active apostolate or ministry. In the Middle Ages or up into the sixteenth century it could have been said, and was said, that when a woman came to maturity she had two choices facing her. The phrase used to summarize these two choices is either the wall or a husband. In other words she could enter religious life, become a nun, or she could marry and have a family. But it was just assumed and taken for granted that women did not have active apostolates or ministries.
The story of how women gained for themselves the right to apostolates and ministries or the right not to be strictly cloistered or enclosed was really played out in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Most of the women in these times who wanted to be able to be religious also wanted to do good works, and most of them failed in their endeavor. Some succeeded partially, not completely. Saint Angela Merici, founder of the Ursulines would fall in between a sixteenth century saint. In the seventeenth century there was Saint Jane Frances de Chantelle and in the early seventeenth century there was this English woman, Mary Ward. She was from Yorkshire, and as a young woman she entered and became a poor Claire, but then she had an ardent desire not just to do good works but to associate herself in some way with the Jesuits. She wanted to use the Jesuit rule, to adopt the rules of the Society of Jesus in other words, for her order. She wanted her Sisters to be uncloistered nuns, to wear no distinctive habit and to be mobile, that is to be able to go about, not to be tied or vowed to life in one place or one house and to be under a superior general. In other words she was trying to set up a full fledged female equivalent of one of the male religious orders, the Franciscans or the Dominicans or the Jesuits. The desires that I just mentioned, what Mary wanted, uncloistered, no distinctive habit, mobile, and under a superior general certainly fit the Jesuits. And if we would drop the no distinctive habit that is the Friars, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Augustinians.
When Mary came forward with her proposals and her ideas she was not well received, in fact she was considered to be a dangerous woman, an innovator. They were very wary of innovators, especially because of the Reformation. Many of the Protestant reformers were referred to as innovators. What Mary wanted was considered to be too radical, but she managed to get the approval of the Bishop of Saint Omer in 1612, and her order began to enjoy some success. But as happens at times, she and her sisters soon ran afoul of some ecclesiastical authority, and they were suppressed in 1629, temporarily suppressed, and that suppression was made definitive in 1631.
Even with this Mary would not give up and she managed to get permission for a few of her sisters to continue their way of life under private vows. When a religious makes a vow it is considered a public act just as your marriage vow is a public act. The Church has always recognized private vows, vows that have no public force or effect. Mary gained permission for some of her sisters to live this way, and then she returned to England where she died in 1639, and to all intents, purposes and appearances Mary was a failure. But her institute carried on, or the women carried on with their private vows, and received final approbation or approval from the Church for the work that they were doing, in other words public recognition and public acknowledgment by the Church in 1877.
There were at least two things that militated against Mary and what she wanted to do. The first was that she wanted to be associated with the Jesuits and to use the Jesuit rules and regulations and also to use the Jesuit name. Some members of the Society in the seventeenth century, true to the wishes and the intention of Saint Ignatius, said Saint Ignatius did not want this and we don't want this. So they were opposed to the program that Mary was proposing. They were opposed to what she wanted to do. The other thing is that Mary was simply ahead of her time. In some ways Saint Ignatius was ahead of his time. Frequently innovators, if they managed to have their way to do what they intend, come in for severe criticism. It happened to the Franciscans and the Dominicans in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. They were written against or opposed in varying degrees by the monks. In the sixteenth and the seventeenth century the Jesuits were opposed because they were seen to be innovators in their way and doing something that was out of the ordinary or not in keeping with tradition. The same thing happened to Mary Ward and her sisters. And with the perspective of time and of history we can see that what Mary and other women like her were trying to do was to win for themselves a place, a niche in the active ministerial apostolic evangelical life of the Church.
Another thing that worked against Mary and her intention was that she really wanted to use the Jesuit name. That also was responsible for a Jesuit opposition. But sometimes you will see reference in books or elsewhere to the Jesuitesses or the Jesuitines. In fact in English the name Mary's women is the English Ladies, in German the anglische Damen, and in French the Dames Anglaises or Jesuitines. Her enemies, those who were opposed to her, did the same thing to her that the enemies of the Jesuits did to them. They took the name and used it as a term of opprobrium or to help to do her in. They referred to her ladies as Jesuitesses. But the correct name in English for the women who followed Mary Ward, or who take Mary Ward as their inspirer and foundress, the correct name is the English Ladies, and the English Ladies are active in the Church today.
In this lecture today I would like to talk about the fortunes of the Catholic or the Counter-Reformation forces or countries and also in some way the fortunes of the Reformation forces. The Reformation was a spiritual movement, a movement to effect reform in the Church. The Counter-Reformation was a spiritual movement reaching back before the Protestant Reformation but definitely reacting to and being shaped in some way by that Protestant Reformation. In other words, we have two spiritual forces at work and in conflict in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The fundamental question that everyone asks is who is going to win? Will the Catholic forces be triumphant or will the Protestant forces be triumphant? Will it be a Protestant theology or a Catholic theology? And if we lived in an ideal world we could say that while the Protestant forces have this on their side, therefore they are going to win, or they may win in certain places. On the other hand the Catholic forces thought Catholic theology is the true theology therefore the truth will win out in the end. But we know that it did not work out that way because something else entered in, and that is the power of the state, or power politics, or simply politics. There is a very pertinent and relevant paragraph in R.R. Palmer's, History of the Modern World, pages 95 and 96, and I would like to read a bit of it to you right now. In this paragraph Palmer is telling how Protestantism succeeded where it succeeded, or how Catholicism succeeded. In other words, one of the things that helped them it is this:
In the machinery of enforcing religious belief no engine was to be so powerful as the apparatus of state, of political sovereignty. Where Protestants won control of government people became Protestant. Where Catholics retained control of government Protestants became in time small minorities. It was in the clash of governments which is to say in war for about a century after 1560 that the faith of European religion was worked out.
Now in 1560 we might say that circumstances favored or certainly seemed to favor the Catholic forces. This is Palmer again.
In 1560 the strongest powers of Europe, Spain, France, Austria were all officially Catholic. The Protestant states were all small or at most middle sized. The Lutheran states of Germany like all German states were individually of little weight. The Scandinavian monarchies were far away. England, the most considerable of Protestant kingdoms, was a country of only four million people with an independent and hostile Scotland to the north, and with no signs of colonial empire yet in existence. In the precedence of monarchs as arranged in the earlier part of the century the King of England ranked just below the King of Portugal and next above the King of Sicily.
Clearly had a great combined Catholic crusade ever developed Protestantism could have been wiped out. And then Palmer says, "To launch such a crusade was the dream of the King of Spain, Philip II. It never succeeded." And why? We will be seeing why in the next chapter, which is chapter 3 of his textbook. That is the end of the quotation.
But humanly speaking, in 1560 the close or the end of the Council of Trent three years away if one looked at a map of Europe or at the constellation of forces and powers in Europe one would have said that the Catholics were going to win. But they did not. To see in some way why they did not is certainly very much part of the history of the spiritual movement that we call the Counter-Reformation. There are three relevent chapters in our text on this. They are chapters 3, 4 and 5. Chapter 3 Hsia calls "The Triumphant Church", Chapter 4, "The Militant Church", and Chapter 5, "The Martyred Church". In "The Triumphant Church" he treats those countries, Spain, Portugal, Italy where the Church clearly triumphs and Protestantism made little or no inroads. And "The Militant Church" where they are fighting out a battle and what will happen at the end is not clear, and usually what happens is that the country ends up divided. The Germanies are divided and Holland comes out of the Reformation a Protestant country but with a large Catholic minority. Then we have "The Martyred Church", the Church in England, the Church in Scotland, the Church in Ireland to some extent. So those chapters should be looked at and for the remainder of this lecture I want to say simply a few words about Catholic Spain and Catholic France. In the next lecture we'll talk about the situation in Germany in the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years War.
To speak of Catholic Spain involves it somewhat with England and there is one name, the Gunpowder Plot, which I would imagine that most of you had heard of in some way, or Guy Fawkes Day. I could also have written on the board the Armada. Those are two events in English history which are directly part of or tied to the Reformation. The Armada was Philip II's plan or attempt to conquer England and to bring her back to the faith, and we know that it failed. The Gunpowder Plot was the discovery of a plot by some to blow up Parliament and the leader of this little group that was plotting to do this was named Guy Fawkes. They were caught and executed and they wanted to remember this, and to this day the English celebrate in some way, not as intensely as they did in the past, Guy Fawkes Day, which is the fifth of November. If you are in England and walking along the street in the days leading up to Guy Fawkes Day you may be approached by a small child with what looks to you like a rag doll and he will ask you for a penny for the guy and the guy is Guy Fawkes. Then on the fifth of November the people will gather in some part of the village or the town, pile up all these effigies or dolls of Guy Fawkes and burn them celebrating the triumph of England or of Protestant England over the Catholics who had planned to blow up their Parliament. It had, at one time, a very religious tone to it; now it is more simply a social event, an occasion for children to get something for nothing from adults.
If we cross the channel from England into France the situation is very different. If we look at France in the seventeenth century, France becomes the champion of the Catholic cause, and there is really a flowering, a beautiful flowering of Catholicism, of spirituality, of theology in seventeenth century France. But in the sixteenth century the story was very different, and really from 1560 on to 1598 it's not so much questionable, it's just doubtful, one cannot tell what is going to be the religious situation in France. France is wracked at this time with a series of wars, civil wars. If you look at a text like Palmer, Palmer treats the civil wars in France from the political viewpoint and he titles his chapter, "The Disintegration of France". France was literally falling apart, and the forces that were tearing France apart were religious forces.
There were on the one side the Catholics who were more or less united under the leadership of a family named the Guises, and on the other hand there were the Protestant forces who were led by the believers in Protestantism who were called the Huguenots. And the battle went back and forth. The Catholics were certainly the overwhelming majority of the people. The Huguenots on the other hand were many of the nobles, and the Huguenots had a military power, some political power and more social power, all out of proportion to their numbers. In this period from 1560-1590 or to 1598 they fight, but they do not fight regular orderly battles. You cannot say here is the Protestant army gathered on this side and on the other side say of a river are the Catholic forces. It's more like marauders or bands that just simply run the countryside promoting the one cause or the other. To make matters worse they are given to assassination. They assassinate one another, the leaders of one another. The great families are involved in this. But it's this senseless killing that is eventually going to bring these wars to an end.
There is an event that occurred in the midst of these wars that has burned itself into Protestant memory, it happened on the twenty-third of August in the year 1572, and that is the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or to give it its full name of Saint Bartholomew's Day. The twenty-third of August is the feast day of Saint Bartholomew. Somehow or other the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, who was Catholic, helped someone to decide to take advantage of a gathering of the Huguenots in Paris to have them massacred or shot. But whatever was behind it, whatever were the causes of this, the effect of Saint Bartholomew's Massacre was to affect France in a number of ways. These Protestant leaders were massacred, and this becomes one of the holy days or holy events in Protestant memory -- and Catholics on the other hand reacted against it, or tried to play it down or to forget about it. Just last year, in his pastoral visit to France, the Holy Father Pope John Paul publicly apologized for Catholic participation in this massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day. Something that contributed to the intensity of the feelings on both sides was that when word of it arrived in Rome the Church bells were rung and if you were on the Catholic side, joy for a Catholic victory or the preservation of the Catholic forces; if you were a Protestant for the massacre of the Huguenots. Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre can be taken as typical of what was going on.
You had Protestant forces on the one side, Catholic on the other, and there began to appear a third force in the middle between them, neither Catholic nor Protestant in this sense that they were fighting for the triumph of Catholicism or Protestantism, but rather men and women who became tired of the killing and who went by the name of politique or politicians. The politique thought that what had to be done above all was to gain peace, and the way peace was gained in France during these civil religious wars was through an innovative act, a far seeing act really, but one that was vastly misunderstood in its time and deep down really never accepted by either side. I'm referring to what is known as the Edict of Nantes. The Edict of Nantes was the attempt of the King of France, who was Henry IV, to bring this senseless fighting to an end and somehow or other to enable the Catholics and the Huguenots to live together in peace of a kind without killing each other, without being at each others throats.
This document, the Edict of Nantes, is of capital importance in the history of France and highly significant for the Reformation because what the King could see was that nothing was being gained by the civil wars. France was being destroyed or consumed in senseless killing and of some concern to the King she was losing her prestige abroad, or had less and less prestige outside her borders. Henry IV, or Henry of Bourbon, had been a Protestant and he had converted to Catholicism. That led eventually to problems for him. But he saw both sides and he knew both sides, so he was determined to effect peace of some kind, and he did that through the Edict of Nantes, which gave broad rights to the Huguenots. They had their own towns, they could fortify them, they could have their own armies, they were free to take part fully and completely in the social and the public life of the realm of France. And it worked. It brought peace; the killing stopped. Unfortunately for France Henry IV himself was the victim of an assassin a few years later. A few years after the assassination of the King, Cardinal Richelieu will come on the scene and begin to deal with what we might call the Huguenot question again, and that gets us involved in what will be the subject of the next lecture, the Thirty Years' War in the Germanies.