Why could the Council of Trent be considered a major watershed in modern European history?

When in All Saints Day 1517 Martin Luther posted on the door of Wittembergs Castle Church his 95 Theses he was probably little aware of the magnitude of the European-wide political and religious crisis which these theses would soon unleash. Protestantism was the last in a long list of challenges the Church had to face since the early days of Christianity. Calls for the summoning of a council to deal with Lutheranism had emerged from German quarters as early as the 1520s.1 This council, though, did not congregate until December 1545 in Trent, some 25 years after Luther posted his Theses.2 By then, Protestantism had grown sufficiently strong to make its easy removal from the scene difficult. The council which the Germans sought in the 1520s was a council of Germanic character, but due to the gravity of the Protestant challenge, it was essential that the council to deal with it convened the universal church.3 To call a universal council was not an easy task and this in a way explains the long delay before the Council of Trent took place. Further delay was nonetheless inflicted by the conflict of interests between the Emperor Charles V and the Papacy. While the Council was in principle to deal with the theological challenge posed by Luther and his Protestant supporters, the outcome of the Council would be decisive in terms of adapting the Catholic Church to the loss her monopoly on religious power in Europe and, as a consequence, this would determine a reshaping of the Old Continents political landscape. This is where vested political interests came into play. Charles was competing with Francis I of France for political hegemony in Europe, as well as dealing with the prospects of an invasion from the Ottoman Turks and the Algerian corsairs.4 His main concern with the Protestant Reformation was the likely severe weakening of the empire from within, caused by shortage of men and money from the Protestant hotspots. His intention was to convene a council with which to seek a compromise with the Protestants and thus reunite forces against his enemies. Hence it was essential for Charles that the council met within imperial territory.5 On the other hand, for Popes Clement IV (1523-34) and then Paul III (1534-49), the Reformation took place at a moment in which after many pains and struggles, the
1 2

Mullet (1999), p.30. Hsia (2005), p.10. 3 Mullet, p.31 4 Hsia, p.12. 5 Mullet, p.37

Why could the Council of Trent be considered a major watershed in modern European history?

Enrique Requero

institution of the Papacy was at last consolidating its position of power and prestige over the Church and as a European secular power. This was manifested in the administrative and financial strengthening of the Papal States in the formation of the so called Papal Monarchy.6 Memories of the challenges suffered by Eugene IV at the Council of Basel in 1431 were still fresh.7 Hence the Papacy was initially reluctant to call a council because it feared that the stability gained would be tested by a more than likely conciliarist movement. If there was to be a council at all, it would have to meet somewhere in Italian territory where it could be easily kept under control by the Pope.8 The formation of the Schmalkaldic League in 1531 meant a consolidation of Lutheran doctrine with the articles the League produced. It also meant a consolidation of Protestant political power because the League gathered together a group of German reformist princes which sought in this way to protect each other and to remove their alliance to the Holy Roman Empire.9 This, together with the failure of the Regensburg Talks of 1541, made it clear for both Pope and Emperor that the meeting of a Council could not be delayed any longer. The two rulers finally agreed for the Council fathers to meet at Trent, an Italian-speaking city on imperial soil.10 Charles also won some victories against the Protestant League and struck a truce with Francis I. This ensured that the Council could meet without a threat of Lutheran attacks and without being crippled by rivalry among Catholic rulers. The Council of Trent opened on 13th December 1545 and it was to last until 1563. Political factors had impeded an early meeting of the council, and they also prevented its swift conclusion. Ultimately however, despite all internal and external divisions, the Council survived two decades and the spirit of reform prevailed in the Catholic Church. Reforming and doctrinal decrees were approved. They ranged from theological aspects such as a declaration on the balance between justification by faith and the value of grace won through good works, and the biblical and traditional corroboration of the seven sacraments; to practical reforms to tackle corruption, such as the residence and benefices, the increase of disciplinary powers of bishops and their control over secular diocesan clergy with visitations, the formation of prospective clergymen in seminaries and reforms of religious orders.11 The decrees were approved because eventually all the key political and religious agents involved in one way or another with the
6 7

Hsia, p.12 Mullet, p.31 8 Hsia, p.12 9 Ibid., p.11. 10 Mullet, p.37 11 Hsia, pp.23-5; Mullet, pp.39-68.

Why could the Council of Trent be considered a major watershed in modern European history?

Enrique Requero

Council, were able to give way and favor compromise. As for Protestants, the decrees of the Council made plain that their separation had become unbridgeable.12 This, together with the fact that the Church depended on the assistance of Catholic rulers to implement the Tridentine decrees as part of the Counter-Reformation movement against Protestantism, was to become a highly determining factor in socio-political developments in Europe. Reinhard has rejected the traditional dialectic historiography of the period, which sees the Protestant Reformation as the thesis, the Catholic Counter-Reformation as the antithesis, and the emergence of apparently religiously neutral absolutist states as the synthesis.13 For him, Protestant and Catholic movements of reform occurred simultaneously and had similar political manifestations. Both confessions carried out conservative operations with secular powers to establish themselves as stable institutional churches in different countries.14 Hence, while Calvinist texts were in Geneva as supportive of the secular regime as were Jesuit texts in Iberia; Jesuit writings of political resistance in Protestant countries like England could go further in their radicalism than anything Calvinists had ever written.15 The Council of Trent gave way to movements of confessionalization in most European countries, as both Protestants and Catholic religious leaders collaborated with states so as to prevail over the rival confession and ensure a position of influence for the country in the European stage.16 The confessionalization of states enabled both religious and secular powers to develop and consolidate institutionally. Confessionalization of the state could be said to have been most extreme in Portugal, where Cardinal Henrique was crowned after his nephew King Sebastian was killed in 1578 when leading a crusade in Morocco. Royal and ecclesiastical Lusitanian powers were thus combined (in the Protestant world, something similar took place in England in 1535) and their blending was continued during the 1580-1640 union of crowns with Spain. Cardinal Albert firstly, and then Pedro de Castilho (bishop of Leiria) subsequently served simultaneously as Viceroys and Inquisitor Generals. 85% of Portuguese bishops were of noble blood and new religious foundations always had royal or noble patronage.17 Post-Tridentine religious fervor was combined in Portugal with messianic movements like Sebastianism, which made use of

12 13

Hsia, p.17. Reinhard (1999), p.107. 14 Ibid, p.114. 15 Ibid, p.110. 16 Ibid. 17 Hsia, p.43

Why could the Council of Trent be considered a major watershed in modern European history?

Enrique Requero

Christianity to portray de Portuguese crown as the Fifth Monarchy, destined to spread the faith over the globe before a hypothetical imminent end of time.18 The tremendous religious popular fervor which had always characterized Spain was also used after Trent by the crown to reinvigorate its power as a staunch defender of Catholicity. In fact, Spain helped the papacy defend Catholic interests by intervening in the Netherlands, sending the Armada against England and defeating the Ottomans at Lepanto.19 This won the Spanish King the right to nominate all bishops and heads of religious orders in his territories. Increased intervention in Church affairs was allowed to the Spanish state after the Council, so as to reform and promote Catholic orthodoxy, as well as boosting central royal power. Italy was politically dominated by Spain, so no monarch was in place to take advantage of the post-council period to enhance his personal power. Nonetheless, the need of secular assistance to implement Tridentine decrees still helped to consolidate administrative structures and gave birth to the early modern Italian state. New ecclesiastical administration turned complex social groupings into uniform units in parish registers. Local devotions gave way to more universal ones and sacramental life was encouraged to move from family chapels into parishes.20 Consequently, all religious activity and participation was integrated into parish life and this into the ecclesiastical jurisdiction.21 This framework also served to consolidate state power due to the church-state alliance to implement reforms, which in actual fact enabled the state to supervise religious activities. The Italian case shows how Tridentine Catholicism reinforced all forms of institutionalized central authority at the expense of informal social power.22 A clear consequence of the Council of Trent and of the confessionalization of the states which followed it, was that, more than ever, to be a good Christian meant to be a good citizen; and vice versa. This is why both Protestant and Catholic European states seized a monopoly over religious power23 which until then had always been in the hands of the pre-Reformation Church. Control over peoples beliefs facilitated the formation of group identity and granted secular powers a new dimension in which to keep in check peoples political alliance to the regime in power.24

18 19

Ibid., p.44 Ibid., pp.47-8 20 Hsia, pp.54-9 21 Rowland (1990), p.175 22 Ibid. 23 Bethencourt (1990), p.408 24 Reinhard, p.123.

Why could the Council of Trent be considered a major watershed in modern European history?

Enrique Requero

This in a way explains the establishment of inquisitorial tribunals in Italy and Portugal around the period, and the resuscitation and tightening of state control of the Spanish Inquisition which had been established in 1483 at the request of the Catholic Monarchs.25 Prosecution of Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity (New Christians) comprised 85% of cases processed by the Portuguese Inquisition.26 New Christians were harassed to ensure the orthodoxy of their faith and thus were always tried for serious offences such as heresy, which came to be considered also as political treason. Protestants and Catholics were equally persecuted in countries ruled by the rival confession. Witchcraft prosecutions also peaked. Reinhard argues that increasing secular control of religious power augmented the pressure the state applied onto people, which in turn gave rise to stress and latent aggressiveness, and ultimately forced an unconscious collective picking on victims provided by traditional superstitions.27 Rowland explains how the Council of Trent facilitated a fusion of Church, state and society; and that at this point witches started being feared as the common enemy of the three. Prospective witches went through the three-stage process of apostasy, Sabbath and malefice, which were ritualized negations of faith, social alliance and communal solidarity.28 Religious dissidents were thus seen as political ones too, and the state had a lot to do with the ritualization almost to a liturgical level of the inquisitorial auto da fe. The autos denoted a struggle for institutional prestige and to make visible in whose hands the monopoly over religious and political power was.29 The post-Tridentine Church-state relation of dependence was only unidirectional and the Church eventually had to pay the price for it as secular power grew stronger and more absolutistic. The Church lost autonomy over revenues, much of its property was expropriated and the legal leveling of subjects sought by governments meant the disappearance of clerical privileges. Moreover, as secular powers grew more and more absolutistic, conflicts of interests became detrimental for the Church. Spanish and Portuguese regalism aimed to strip Church leaders of their autonomy, which was seen as a limitation of royal power. The Marquis of Pombal, for instance, expelled Jesuits from Portuguese dominions in 1759 and broke diplomatic relations with the Vatican.30

25 26

Hsia, p.48. Ibid, p.45. 27 Reinhard, p.121. 28 Rowland, pp.164-71. 29 Bethencourt (2009), pp.248-316. 30 Reinhard, p.126; Hsia, p.46

Why could the Council of Trent be considered a major watershed in modern European history?

Enrique Requero

The repercussions of the Council also affected the spiritual life of the Church, of whose mending the Council was theoretically primarily concerned with. Jedin denied that the CounterReformation was merely a reactionary movement lacking an internal dynamic of its own.31 For Evennett, it was a positive movement which could hardly have occurred had it been no more than the hastily improvised defense of the vested interests of an archaic ecclesiastical corporation bereft of contemporary or future spiritual significance.32 The Council of Trent was the final materialization of a movement of Catholic Reform which had started at grass-root level way before Luther but which vested interests had impeded it to conquer the centre stage the papacy from which to carry out reforms.33 The conquering of the centre was facilitated by the Protestant reformation, which opened the eyes of decisionmakers to the presence of a new spirit in the Church and the need for new methods and men to save it.34 The development of the Council of Trent demonstrated continuity with the fundamental ideas of the reform memoranda of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries none of the reforms emerging from the Tridentine decrees referred to anything that had not been talked about by reformers since the late Middle Ages.35 The Council of Trent supposed a significant change in the life of the Church because it animated a process of Catholic renewal which had already quietly started. In the context of the Catholic Reformation, the Counter-Reformation was just a particular aspect concerned with how to deal with Protestant dissent. Nonetheless, Catholic Renewal was also manifested in many other ways. The main agencies for the rekindling of spiritual fervor in the Church were the reformed established orders (Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians) and the myriad of new religious orders and associations which had been emerging since the fifteenth-century.36 These new organizations gathered a vast diversity of charismas and involved in them lay and clergy, married people and celibates, peasants and nobles. Associations such as the Oratory of Divine Love, the Theatines, or the Discalced Carmelites testified of how the Faith, far from corrupting and decaying, was still fruitfully germinating.37 Among all religious associations, there stand out as agents of Catholic Renewal the Society of Jesus, founded in 1534 by Ignatius of Loyola, a converted soldier; and the Capuchins, a split away branch of the Observant Franciscans.

31 32

Jedin (1999), p.22 Evennett (1999), p.49 33 Jedin, p.34-6 34 Ibid., p.37 35 Ibid., p.37-9 36 Evennett, p.50-51 37 Ibid., 49-52; Hsia, pp.27-30.

Why could the Council of Trent be considered a major watershed in modern European history?

Enrique Requero

Encouraged by the invigorating post-Tridentine spirit, these new foundations set to work to serve the Church and societies all over the world. The religious orders helped spreading the new spirituality emerging in the Church and qualified by Trent. A more intense mysticism was characteristic of this period, with figures such as St Teresa of vila and San Juan de la Cruz. The laity was introduced to this new spirituality through a more frequent access to the sacraments and their instruction in the practice of mental prayer, as well as with sermons and religious publications.38 More Eucharistic devotions sprang up and more regular confession provided people with the benefits of spiritual direction, leading to a sharp development of moral theology.39 The new spiritual fervour was not merely the product of Italian and Iberian Mediterranean cultures, as influences from Northern Europe also played a big role. It was from Germany where the Benedictine revival, the Canons of Windesheim and the Brethren of the Common Life originated.40 The Ejercitario de la Vida Espiritual by Cisneros, was an entirely original work, but its substance was almost entirely taken from North European authors of the previous century.41 All over Catholic Europe, new foundations initiated charitable works for repairing the social fabric of corporate societies, torn by religious wars.42 Many, especially the Jesuits, put an emphasis on providing free, rigorous and prestigious education to poor and rich alike, including many European leaders.43 The aftermath of the Council also engendered a new spirit of Catholic universalism in the Church. This led to the creation of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1622. It sought to re-evangelize Europe, to bring the Gospel to new peoples in America, Africa and Asia, to form indigenous churches accommodating the faith to their cultures and to improve the formation of missionaries.44 Impressive missionary work was also carried out by Jesuits under Portuguese Padroado and Spanish Patronado. Figures like Francis Xavier or Matteo Ricci brought the Faith for the first time to places as remote as Japan and China. A new enlightened spirit characterized post-Tridentine missionary work. Missionaries learned native languages and carried out the first ethnological and anthropological studies of previously little known cultures.45 Through their studies, missionaries were also able to succeed in their defense of the rights of the natives they worked with, against
38 39

Evennett, pp.56-60 Ibid., p.60 40 Ibid., p.52 41 Ibid., p.57 42 Hsia, p.28 43 Ibid., pp.31-3 44 Bireley., p.148. 45 Ibid., pp.148,152,165

Why could the Council of Trent be considered a major watershed in modern European history?

Enrique Requero

the abuses of European settlers, as was the case with figures such as Barlolom de Las Casas in the Spanish Empire, or of Antonio Vieira in the Portuguese.46 All the developments briefly mentioned throughout the essay show why the Council of Trent could be considered a major watershed which determined future developments in European and global history. Politically, the Council was significant because it took place in a context of political division prompted by religious disagreement to an extent the continent had never experienced before. The outcomes reached at Trent also played a considerable part in the construction of the state as we know it today. This was done both in Catholic and Protestant countries through the confessionalization of the state and the formulation of confessional national identities. Finally, post-Tridentine developments on the religious side showed that the Council of Trent was also a source of good, and not just for Catholics in Europe. Charitable works run by Catholics armed with a new zeal, served people of all social conditions and religious adherence. Many of the most prestigious educational institutions and hospitals today have their roots in this time in history. Ultimately, the Council of Trent secured and encouraged a rebirth of the Faith, by harnessing and steering desires for change whose antecedents stretched back far beyond that All Saints Day of 1517.

(for bibliography, please turn over)

46

Ibid., p.163

Why could the Council of Trent be considered a major watershed in modern European history?

Enrique Requero

Bibliography H.G. KOENIGSBERGER et al, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (1989). R.P. HSIA, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540-1770 (2005). M.A. MULLETT, The Catholic Reformation (1999). D.M. LUEBKE (ed.), The Counter-Reformation (1999) H. JEDIN, Catholic Reformation of Counter-Reformation?, pp.19-47. H.O. EVENNETT, Counter-Reformation Spirituality, pp.47-65. W. REINHARD, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment, pp. 105-29. R. BIRELEY, The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450-1700 (1999). B. ANKARLOO and G. HENNINGSEN (eds.), Early modern witchcraft: centres and peripheries (1990). R. ROWLAND, Fantastical and devilish persons: European witch-beliefs in comparative perspective. G. HENNINGSEN, The ladies from the outside: an archaic pattern of the witches Sabbath. F. BETHENCOURT, Portugal: a scrupulous Inquisition. F. BETHENCOURT, The Inquisition. A Global Perspective 1478-1834 (2009).