HIST 102 #8 - The Catholic Reformation

Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. Um, our last lecture, we were still discussing the Reformation period in Western Civilization. Discussed Calvinism in Switzerland and France, and what his religion was. Talked a little bit about predestination. Dr. Price let us know about what that means. I find that very interesting how Calvin managed to, um, defend it. Dr. Price mentioned throughout his lecture with Calvin, the different questions that people ask, you know, well, if if I'm already predestined for heaven or hell, then why should I be good anyway? And so it was very interesting to see how John Calvin defended his doctrine. And of course, we realized that his doctrine of predestination will come over into the United States as well.

For our current lecture, our upcoming lecture by Dr. Robinson, we will discuss one more topic concerning the Reformation, and that is the Catholic Reformation. So you're probably going, wait a minute, Catholic Reformation? Well, isn't the Reformation because people were questioning Catholic practices? Well, yes, it was. But the Catholic Reformation, also, some people may call it Counter-Reformation. Dr. Robinson actually talks about that, the words, the titles for this, um, you know, Reformation or a Counter-Reformation, or is it both? He goes more in-depth about that.

The Catholic Church decided that maybe they need to clean house a little bit. Maybe they need to look at some of the practices, you know, some of the more flagrant abuses or corruption, and clean it up themselves. In doing so, I'm sure they're hoping that the, the Protestant movement, the the popularity of the Protestant Reformation that had been sweeping all over Europe, um, would lose wind, would lose its, its appeal, it would lose its appeal, and that people would either stay with the church or, of course, would come back to the Catholic Church. So they do look at some of their practices.

Um, in a previous lecture, Dr. Robinson had actually discussed the selling of indulgences. They looked at the practices where, um, a priest or a church official could hold more than one office. Um, also they could hold an office but never be there. And then Dr. Robinson, in a previous lecture, actually talked about simony, which means the selling of a church office. It's like, you know, I kind of like to be that. Let me go, how much, how much do I owe you? I want to be that church official, or, you know, I want to be in charge of that church office. So, you know, a lot of these practices, and as we know, of course, indulgences were a very important part of the arguments. A lot of reformers did not like these indulgences had become a bit out of hand, and they argued against the indulgences, and the Catholic Church made quite a lot of revenue from indulgences. So this is, um, not a practice that they were easily going to just simply give up.

So we have this, um, Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation, and Dr. Robinson will discuss some, uh, religious orders that come out of this. For example, he, he talks about the Jesuits. The Jesuits are created, um, they're missionaries. They not only spread the Catholic faith, the church doctrines, but they also are very responsible for building schools throughout Europe. By, you know, even Protestant families would send their kids to a Jesuit school. Still famous today, we still have some Jesuit schools in this area as well. And so these Jesuits, we'll hear more about them, they are very important to this Catholic Reformation as well. And Dr. Robinson will also talk about some of the popes, some of the reforming popes. He will also discuss Paul III, just to give you some. He'll go in-depth about the Council of Trent, which was a doctrine that the Catholic Church put together stating what their doctrine is, you know, after everything was looked at. So we'll have to see how much they reform themselves from start to finish with this Council of Trent. Um, in just a few minutes, we'll find that out, that answer, exactly what doctrines the Catholic Church came out of this whole process with. Okay. And of course, Dr. Robinson also will discuss the successes, the failures of the Catholic Reformation, the results of it, I guess you could say, and how, of course, it, you know, it definitely affects us today, most definitely.

This whole period, Renaissance and the Reformation, extremely important time in history. People who are only casually familiar with the 16th century often refer to the Reformation as the Protestant Reformation, as if that were the only aspect of the Reformation which occurred in the 16th century. Certainly, the Protestant Reformation is a major, major feature of the 16th century, but it's important to recognize that there was a Catholic Reformation as well, a Reformation that occurred among Catholics in response both to problems within the Roman Catholic Church and to the challenge posed by the Protestants. Consequently, there has been a long-running debate over what to call this. Those individuals who emphasize Catholic reform from within tend to call this the Catholic Reformation, and that's a fair term. Those who emphasize the Catholic resistance to Protestantism and the attempt to roll Protestantism back call it the Counter-Reformation, and that's a fair term too. In fact, the Catholic Reformation encompasses both, both reform from within and resistance to the Protestants.

By the middle of the 16th century, by the time there had been a generation of Protestants, of Lutherans, of Zwinglians, more recently of Calvinists, of Anabaptists, and so on, the Catholic Church found itself, interestingly enough, in a stronger position in many ways. It had a number of forces working to its advantage. One of these was what you might call persistent piety. Those people who remained Catholic by the middle of the 16th century were devoted to the church. They were pious Catholics. They were people who wanted to fix whatever might need to be fixed by the Catholic Church, but who were not attracted by leaving the church and becoming Protestant. If you think about it, those people who were the most dissatisfied, who were the least tied to the Catholic Church, who were the least loyal, had left. They had become Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, Anabaptists, or whatever. Therefore, the remnant of Catholics, which was still larger numerically than all the Protestants put together, were a much more tight-knit, much more devoted group of people.

Another factor that worked in favor of the Catholic Reformation was Christian humanism. If you remember, Christian humanism in many ways preceded a lot of the Protestant reforms. Many of the reformers, Martin Luther being a good example, started out heavily influenced by Christian humanism. The difference, though, with Catholic Christian humanists is that they remained Catholic. People like Erasmus, Thomas More, until his unfortunate death, and many others stayed in the Catholic Church because they were loyal, stayed in the Catholic Church because they believed in Catholic doctrine, but at the same time recognized that many of the abuses that Protestants had pointed out were real and needed to be addressed. And so you have a strong group of orthodox Catholic reformers who stay in the church and try to fix it.

A third thing is that there is a revival of the old medieval theology of scholasticism, which had been the dominant form of theology for much of the later Middle Ages, and which is reinvigorated and gives new strength to Catholics in the second half of the 16th century. And there was a new wave of mysticism among Catholics. Not all Catholics became mystics, just as not all Protestants became mystics, but part of the appeal of some branches of Protestantism was mysticism, and there was a similar movement in the Catholic Church that was mystical in nature, but that remained orthodox in terms of theology. So a number of things working to the Catholics' favor.

And another thing that that cannot be ignored is the fact that Protestantism had now been around for a generation, and it had problems of its own. Many Protestants had believed that the new Heaven and Earth was right around the corner when Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg. They expected the end of the world imminently, or they expected widespread reform, or they expected everyone to embrace their own particular way of looking at things. But that had not happened. Protestantism had splintered. Protestantism had proved, Protestants rather, had proved to be just as human as Catholics. Protestant rulers had been just proved to be just as venal as Catholic rulers, and in some cases, Protestant ministers just as problematic as Catholic priests. Humans are, after all, human.

Now, the Catholic Reformation was expressed in a number of different forms. One of these was in the reform of old religious orders, that is, old monastic orders like the Benedictines and the Cistercians and the Carthusians and others that had been around for hundreds of years, given a new lease on life, revivified, cleaned up, marshaled for war, so to speak, against the forces of heresy. Another was the reform and revival of the Friars, particularly of the Dominicans and the Franciscans. And this is especially important because one of the things that the Franciscans and the Dominicans were good at was preaching. This had been the whole rationale of the Friars in the first place, and one of the ways in which Protestants had far outpaced the Catholics in the first generation of the Reformation was in preaching. They had produced great preachers, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, many others, all wonderfully effective in the pulpit. Franciscans and Dominicans returning to their original purpose were able to counter that. This is not to say that one side proved the other wrong or vice versa, simply that they were now competing on a more even field, so to speak.

In addition, there was the rise of some new religious orders, and I'll talk in a minute about one of those in particular that is especially important. So they're going to be a number of Catholic religious orders, orders of monks, orders of Friars, orders of priests, that will be very, very effective in restoring the vitality of Catholicism. Another thing has to do with the papacy. Clearly, the papacy had been a big part of the problem. The late Renaissance papacy, unquestionably, was corrupt. The most devout Catholic historians acknowledge that. But the papacy itself undergoes major reform in the 16th century, and that too, not only eliminates a problem, it also creates a powerful new force for reform within Catholicism.

Now, you might recall that one of the things that popes had earlier vehemently opposed, vigorously resisted, was the calling of a church council. They had resisted it when the council was called for in the 14th and 15th centuries. They had resisted when Martin Luther suggested it early in his career. But midway through the 16th century, the papacy will become involved with a reforming council known as the Council of Trent, one of the most important expressions of the Catholic Reformation. Another weapon, if you will, of the Catholic Reformation, not one that we think too highly of now necessarily, but one which was quite effective, was the Inquisition. And the Inquisition was not always an instrument of brutality, although unfortunately it sometimes was. It had other functions as well, which I will explain as we go along.

And one of the upshots of all of this, uh, reform that goes on both on the Protestant side and on the Catholic side, is that we see the creation in both Catholic nations and Protestant nations of state churches. Now, why is that a good thing or why is that a forceful thing? It's certainly not something that we would regard as good. We don't have a state church. We separate church and state so that Baptists and Catholics and Methodists and Jews and Muslims and everybody else can worship on an equal basis. But what state churches do in the 16th century is that they give the church a powerful patron. If the official religion in a state is Catholic, that means the king is going to back it up. If it's Protestant, that means the king is going to back it up, and that gives added impetus to both sides, both Catholic and Protestant.

Now, as I said, by this time, the Protestants themselves were having some difficulties. There was no longer strong dissatisfaction within the Catholic Church because the dissatisfied people had left. The Catholic Church began to eliminate many of the abuses that had driven Protestants out of the Catholic Church, and as I say, some of the same problems began to appear in the Catholic, in the Protestant churches as well. After the peasant revolt of 1524-25, and especially after the death of Martin Luther, Lutheranism became stagnant. It ceased to spread. The only place where there were large numbers of Lutherans was Northern Germany and in the Scandinavian states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Important, to be sure, but Scandinavia is very far north, has little influence on the rest of Europe in terms of religion, and has a relatively small population. So Lutheranism by mid-century had ceased to grow very much. Zwinglianism had ceased to grow with Zwingli's death in 1531, and most Zwinglian believers had been absorbed into the newer Calvinist version of predestinarianism. And in fact, it is Calvinism that in the second half of the 16th century would bear the brunt of the Catholic Revival, in the sense that the second half of the 16th century can be seen as a struggle between Catholic and Protestant. It is mostly a struggle between Catholic and Calvinist of one form or another. Calvinism itself, early on, had made strong inroads into France and also into Eastern Europe, but Catholics began to roll that influence back in the second half of the 16th century. There did remain a large Calvinist minority in France, the people known as the Huguenots, but they were definitely the minority. Where Calvinism was the most successful was in Switzerland, where it originated, in England, where both the main line Anglicans and the so-called Puritans were Calvinist in belief, in Scotland, where Calvinist Presbyterians became dominant, and in the Netherlands, where the northern half, Dutch half of the Netherlands, was Calvinist.

Now, let's talk about some examples of Catholic reform. Even before the Catholic Reformation got underway in a big way, there were reform movements within the Catholic Church. Christian humanism, we have discussed at some length already. Another example of this was an organization that originated in Rome in 1517 called the Oratory of Divine Love. This was founded by none other than Cardinal Cajetan, the very man that had debated with Luther in his early career. The Oratory of Divine Love lasted only for about 10 years. It was dedicated to reform, to emphasizing the role of God in individuals' lives, and if it was short-lived, its influence was not. Many of those who were members of, who followed the teachings of the Oratory of Divine Love, remained committed to reform long after it ceased to exist and continued to exercise an influence well into the 16th century.

One of the most important reformers, it's, it's almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of his role as a Catholic reformer, was Ignatius Loyola. It's no accident that all over the world you can find Catholic universities named after Ignatius Loyola, like the one in New Orleans, for example, or that all over the world you can find high schools and universities named after the religious order he founded, known as the Jesuits. So who is Ignatius Loyola and what is he up to? Loyola was a Basque, that is, he came from the border region of Northern Spain. And in his youth, the last thing on his mind was becoming a religious reformer, or for that matter, a priest, a monk, or any other sort of ordained cleric. What Loyola wanted to be as a young man was a soldier. He spent his youth reading medieval romances, and of course, this, this doesn't mean romance in the sense of love, it means romances in the sense of things like the tales of King Arthur, or the fabricated tales about Charlemagne, or Parsifal, or what have you. And he was fascinated with those. He wanted nothing more than to win glory on the battlefield. And he eventually became a soldier in the army of a tiny little kingdom that straddled the border between France and Spain called the Kingdom of Navarre. And as is often the case, Loyola discovered that the reality of warfare is a good deal less romantic than reading about it. In fact, he discovered this in the worst way possible. In 1521, he was almost killed, injured so badly that he almost lost a leg and was forced to be in recovery for months and months before he was able to get around. Well, with little to do but lie in bed, Loyola entertained himself by reading. But there were no medieval romances to hand, so he read what he could find. And most of what he read was religious literature. And in the same way that Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and others underwent a profound religious experience, a kind of conversion, Loyola did too. Not conversion to another faith, but conversion to greater devotion to his own Catholic faith. And as a result of that experience, he proceeded to develop something that we know as the Spiritual Exercises. Now, this is not involved calisthenics or anything like that. Rather, what it is, is a series of mental and spiritual steps that one takes to grow as a Christian, to enhance one's spiritual awareness and one's spirituality. And what is significant about this is that in doing this, Loyola emphasized the importance of the will, the importance of the human will, of human willpower, and he emphasized the importance of choice, or of what we call free will.

Now, what had Luther said? Luther had said that man does not have free will. Man is saved by faith alone. There is nothing that man can do to get faith. God either gives it to you or he does not. What had Zwingli and Calvin said? They had gone even farther than Luther in saying there is no free will. They had said that men and women are predestined to salvation or not, but that they don't have the free will to choose it. Loyola said just the opposite. He embraced the traditional Catholic doctrine of salvation, which emphasizes free will, that you are free to choose good or to choose evil, that you are free to do good works or bad works, and he emphasized the importance of using your human willpower, of strengthening your will, so that you will choose to do what is right.

After he had recovered, he began sharing these spiritual exercises with others. He was never able to return to the life of a soldier because he was simply too badly injured, but he wanted to become a soldier of Christ. And eventually, he wound up entering the priesthood. Now, to become a priest, he had to study for a number of years, and like many older people who go back to school, Loyola would have been a non-traditional student. If you think about it, he'd already had one career, so he was older than most of his fellow students, and he became a mentor to many of them. He began to attract a group of followers. He taught them the spiritual exercises, he brought them to the same conclusion about free will at which he had arrived, and by the time that Ignatius Loyola became a priest in 1537, he had a significant number of people who were his followers. Now, at this point, this is an informal thing. They're informal followers, but they're followers nonetheless.

Loyola decided that what he wanted to do was to combine his old vocation and his new one. He conceived the idea that his mission in life was to go to Jerusalem and to try to win Jerusalem back from Islam to Christianity. He hoped to do this not necessarily by fighting a war, he was really past that, not by conducting an old-style crusade, but through a combination of preaching, persuasion, and maybe a little force now and then. Before a Pope by the name of Paul III, Paul III, as you'll find out in a little bit, is the first great reforming Pope of the Catholic Reformation, Loyola went to him, presented him this idea, and Paul III stopped him and said, this might not be the wisest plan. Going to Jerusalem at a time when Jerusalem is part of the Ottoman Empire, an empire that is ruled by Suleiman the Magnificent and immensely powerful Turkey Sultan, is probably a losing cause. It's probably a suicide mission. And what he persuaded Loyola to do instead was to stay in Europe. He argued, there are people who need your ministry right here, rather than going to Jerusalem on what is probably a fool's errand, stay in Europe and help to convince Catholics to remain Catholic and convince Protestants to convert back to the traditional Church. And Loyola agreed to do that. Therefore, with the authority of Pope Paul III, he founded an organization that incorporated himself and his many followers, and that came to be known as the Society of Jesus, or as it's known for short, the Jesuits.

The Jesuit order was a very, very effective tool of the Catholic Reformation. Under the Jesuits, first, first of all, the Jesuits owed their loyalty only to the Pope. Secondly, they did not live in monasteries. They did not wear any distinctive dress, just plain black robes. They did not develop elaborate rituals. They devoted all of their efforts and all of their energies and all of their work to just two things: preaching and teaching. In order to be an effective preacher, it helps to know what you're talking about, especially if you are going to be working against or competing with, so to speak, Protestant preachers who are deeply versed in scripture, who know their theology, and who are very formidable opponents in theological debate. So Loyola, who's very well-educated himself, began to emphasize the importance of education for all Jesuit priests. It was hard to become a Jesuit priest. You had to go through a lengthy, years-long, arduous process that involved four different stages of initiation before you became a full-fledged Jesuit. The process was meant to weed out anybody who was not strong enough, anybody who was not dedicated enough, anybody who did not have the appropriate abilities. And so, those who made it all the way through were extraordinarily good at what they did. It was sort of like a boot camp for Jesuits, if you want to look at it that way.

The other thing that they did was preach, and by limiting themselves to these two activities, they were extremely good in both. In fact, if you think about it, teaching and preaching are really almost two sides of the same coin. They also were willing to sacrifice a great deal, to travel great distances, to risk considerable danger in order to confront what they regarded as heretics, the Protestants, or, or in order to confirm the beliefs of those who might be wavering Catholics.

Now, one of the unanticipated side effects of the Jesuit order is that they became so good at education that other people, non-Jesuits, began to seek them out. If you are a well-to-do person, if money is no object, and you want your children to have the best possible education, you're going to go wherever you can get it. And in many Catholic countries, this meant employing a Jesuit tutor for your son or daughter. Among the other people who did this were kings and princes, who often employed Jesuits to teach their children. And of course, those children were not only taught history and math and astronomy and so on, they also were imbued with a deep devotion to the Catholic Church. Jesuits, because they had a reputation for integrity, often also became the confessors of kings and their families, which gave them an extraordinary influence over the policy-making of kings. And in Catholic countries, Jesuits often were effective in persuading rulers to take harsher measures against Protestants, to provide more support for the Catholic Church, and so on. So they are extremely effective. They play a major role in regaining Poland for the Catholic Church. There's hardly a more Catholic nation in the world than Poland. Now, John Paul II was a Polish priest, but in this early 16th century, it almost became a holy Protestant nation. The same is true of parts of Hungary, the same is true of other parts of Europe, the same is true of parts of the New World, like Brazil, where the Jesuits had enormous amount of influence. And they were among the first Catholic missionaries to go to the Far East, to places, for example, like Japan.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about Pope Paul III. Like so many of the reformers on both the Protestant and the Catholic side, Paul III is not someone you would look at early in life and say, here's a reformer in the making. His name before he became Pope was Alessandro Farnese. He belonged to a powerful Italian political family. It was not a family necessarily noted for the uprightness of its dealings. It was fairly corrupt, in other words, and he himself had a rather wild and undisciplined youth. But he underwent a conversion, and by the time that he became Pope, he had become convinced that reform of the Catholic Church from within was a necessary thing. He became Pope in 1534. By 1537, he had set up a Papal Reform Commission to begin investigating what areas of the church needed work, and in 1545, after some urging from various secular Catholic rulers, he summoned the first session of the Council of Trent, a session that met from 1545 to 1547, and about which we'll have more to say momentarily. He was followed, Paul III was, by Pope Julius III, who called the second session of the Council of Trent in 1551, and which met 1551-1552. Julius was Pope from 1549 to 1555, and after a very short-lived and relatively inconsequential Pope named Marcellus III, he was succeeded by Paul IV. Paul IV was something of a reactionary, kind of a blip in this whole direction of reform. Paul IV not only disliked Protestants, which is not surprising, he also was deeply suspicious of many of the reformers within the Catholic Church itself. For example, there was a cardinal from England, Cardinal Reginald Pole, one of the earliest Catholics to be forced to leave England under Henry VIII's Reformation, a man who was distantly related to the Tudor family and who became the chief advisor of Queen Mary, the, the queen who briefly restored Catholicism in England. Paul, however, had reforming ideas, and Paul IV suspected him of being a heretic. Had there been more, more Paul IVs, things might have gone differently. But Paul IV was followed in 1559 by another reforming Pope, Pius IV, who called the third and final session of the Council of Trent in 1562, which wrapped up its work the following year in 1563. And thereafter, something interesting happens. For the rest of the 16th century, we have popes who come from comparatively humble backgrounds, a far cry from the days in the late 15th and early 16th century when the papacy seemed to be the playground of powerful families like the Medici and the Della Roveres and the Borgias. Those who came from a humble background were more likely to slide into the reforming practice than to be tempted by the attraction of power and wealth.

Now, what does the Council of Trent actually do? What does it actually accomplish? Well, initially, it looked like it would not accomplish much. Early on, when the first session was called, the hope was that Protestants would send representatives as well. The Lutherans were invited, the Calvinists were invited, the Anabaptists were not, because everyone persecuted the Anabaptists. But the hope was that Catholics from all over Europe and Lutherans and Calvinists would come together and work out some sort of concord. That did not happen. Very few Protestants showed up at the Council of Trent. By and large, they were distrustful of the Catholics, not without reason. They had seen what almost happened to Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521. They knew what had happened to John Huss at the Council of Constance in 1415, and they were fearful of being arrested, imprisoned, and burned at the stake. So right off, one of the goals of the council is not really brought to fruition.

But there was an even more serious problem from within Catholic ranks, and that is the Catholics of different nationalities got along very badly. At the first session, Italian Catholics, French Catholics, Spanish Catholics, German Catholics quarreled among themselves and accomplished very little. Anyone who leaned too far toward reform was suspected of incipient Protestantism and was branded as a heretic. Anyone who didn't go far enough was seen as perpetuating the old problems, and there could be a very, very fine line here. Often there wasn't much difference among those at the Council of Trent, but the tiniest little differences were magnified by the tensions of the time, and so they accomplished relatively little. It didn't help that many of the nations which sent representatives to the Council of Trent had been at war with each other recently, or were still at war, or soon would be. The same thing was true in the second session in 1551-52. No Protestants at all showed up at this one. Nobody really expected them to. But the Catholics who did show up continued to quarrel among themselves. They did manage to hammer out some reforms, but no final program. And so after the first session, there was not a lot of hope. After the second session, there was not a lot of hope that the council would produce much. If you think back to the earlier history of church councils in recent centuries, not going back to the ancient world, but the Council of Pisa, which tried to solve the papal schism, had failed miserably. The Council of Constance, which had ended the papal schism, had nevertheless failed to carry out any reforms, and the long-running Council of Basel, which moved all over the place in the mid-15th century, had accomplished nothing at all. So many people began to feel that the Council of Trent was headed down the same road.

But then, under Pius IV, a third session was called in 1562, and that session did accomplish a great deal. It took what had been done in the earlier sessions, it added to them, and it laid out two very important bodies of reform. One of these had to do with doctrine, the other had to do with discipline, that is, with behavior. Here's what they did on the side of doctrine. They, for the most part, stuck to their guns. For the most part, adhered to traditional Catholic doctrine, although in many cases, they explained it, spelled it out, refined it much more clearly, much more sharply than had been done before. In the case of discipline, they attacked abuses head-on. Many of the same abuses that Luther and others had complained about, they dealt with and dealt with very sharply.

So let's take a look at what they had to say in the final decrees of the Council of Trent. With respect to doctrine, the Council of Trent declared that scripture, that is the Bible, and church tradition, that is the teachings of the early church fathers and the continuing decisions, official decisions of the church, have equal authority. Now, that's obviously not a position that's going to win over Protestants, but it is a clear, efficacious statement of the Catholic position. It is a courageous statement. It would have been easier, perhaps, to waffle on this one. They chose not to do so. Again, whether it's the Protestants or the Catholics who are right, you pay your money and you take your choice, but they make a clear stand on the question of who interprets scripture. They argued that the church is the sole interpreter. Now, again, this is not a view that's going to win over Protestants, but by this time, the Catholics had a rhetorical advantage, so to speak, or a practical advantage, if you want to look at it like that. The Catholics had always argued that the church was the sole interpreter of scripture. Luther had said that there should be a priesthood of all believers, that all men and women should read scripture for themselves and come to their own conclusions. Of course, Luther had assumed that people who read scripture would come to the same conclusions that he did. Zwingli had made the same assumption. Calvin had made the same assumption. The various Anabaptist leaders had made the same assumption, but they'd all been wrong. Protestants had come to all sorts of different conclusions, which explains the splintering of the Protestant movement into so many denominations. Catholics, right or wrong, were in the position to say, I told you so.

Another thing that Catholics did was to come down firmly on the side of free will. Now, predestination, as argued by Calvin, is a very tightly, legalistically argued theology. It has a very strong internal logic, but it's not very appealing. It's not very appealing to think that your fate has already been decided, that you have no say about it. It seems to go against human experience. Human experience certainly seems to suggest that individual humans have the ability to choose to do good or to choose to do evil, and it certainly seems to suggest that what you choose makes a difference in terms of your salvation. So, in a way, this seemed like a more practical, if less intellectually refined, point of view, and one that has a greater appeal to an awful lot of people. This doesn't mean that they won over a lot of Calvinists, they certainly did not, but it is a strong position to take.

The church reaffirmed its view of the seven sacraments. Again, there is no question that three of those are, two of those sacraments, baptism and communion, have a much stronger basis in scripture than do the others. But the Catholic Church argued with some evidence that all of the other sacraments had been practiced from early, early in the church's history, and they believed that that gave them legitimacy. Once more, not going to convince all Protestants, but it will reaffirm for Catholics that this is the right way to do things, and it may influence those who might be wavering. And one of the things that having seven sacraments does is it means that the church has a sacramental presence at every important stage in your life. You're born, you're baptized. You reach the age of six or seven, you start going to communion and confession. You reach the age of 12 or 13, you're confirmed. You reach the age of adulthood, you get married, or you're ordained. You die, you get extreme unction. The church is there with the sacrament at every juncture. And while it's not true that even the most devout Catholic went to communion every Sunday, Catholics were expected to go regularly, even if regularly meant once or twice a year, at Christmas and or Easter.

Another thing that the church reaffirmed was transubstantiation. Now, this is a harder sell for a lot of people. Transubstantiation, if free will seems to go along with common sense, transubstantiation seems to go against it. The notion that, say, the Zwinglians had, or the Anabaptists had, which is that the bread and wine are simply the symbol of Christ's body and blood, seems to be a more common-sensical point of view. Transubstantiation requires a more mystical attitude. Nonetheless, it was a mystical attitude that many people were prepared to embrace. And if you look at it in terms of either or, transubstantiation was a much stronger statement about the real presence of Christ in communion than Luther's consubstantiation, which seemed to hedge a little, or Calvin's view, which was even more amorphous. So if you were picking between the bread and wine being merely representative, or the bread and wine being really containing the body and blood of Christ, transubstantiation was the most forthright, most extreme statement of that.

Another thing that the church reaffirmed was belief in purgatory. Now, again, scripturally, this is difficult to back up. It's easiest to back up heaven. Hell is a bit more problematic. Purgatory is even harder to find scriptural justification for. But it's an appealing notion. Purgatory is not a place that anybody wanted to go, but Purgatory seemed to represent a way out for most people. The, the thinking among many Catholics remained as it always been, that most people are probably not good enough to go straight to heaven, but not bad enough to go to hell. And so Purgatory, a place where you would be punished for your sins, but from which you would eventually be released, made sense.

The church reaffirmed its belief in celibacy for priests, an idea that remained controversial and that remains controversial today. Uh, practically speaking, there was less sacrifice in becoming a Protestant minister because you could marry, have a wife, have children, and so on. Catholic priests couldn't do that. But once again, the church could muster a strong argument that the priest was married to the church, that the priest devoted all of his time to doing his priestly duties, and that, in fact, Saint Paul had suggested that marriage was not the ideal state. So again, not going to convince everybody, but it makes a strong statement.

To a lesser extent, the Council of Trent reaffirmed devotion to the saints, but it was very careful to try to strip that of any sort of idolatry that would lead people to regard their local patron saints as being somehow more important than Christ or God the Father. And they also reaffirmed a strongly modified belief in indulgences, not one where you could sin enthusiastically and then buy your way out of thousands of years in purgatory, but one whereby you could obtain forgiveness for sins in this life.

So doctrinally, a strong, better explained, clear theology, not for everybody, but well stated. When it came to discipline, one of the things that the church did in the Council of Trent was to provide for better teaching. The Jesuits had sort of shown the way here. One of the complaints that Protestants had often made about Catholics is that priests were not very well educated, and in some cases, that was true. The Council of Trent made it a goal to ensure that all priests were well-educated, well-versed in theology, well-versed in scripture, knew what they were doing. There was also an attempt to regulate preaching, to make sure that preachers were better at what they did, not only so that they could confront the Protestant preachers more effectively, but also because they could so they could deliver the Catholic message more effectively. There was an attempt to regulate almsgiving, that is, offerings made to the church, so that alms that were intended for the poor ended up in the hands of the poor and not in the pockets of some bishop. Simony was abolished. Paying for a church office was forbidden. Pluralism, holding more than one church office at a time, was forbidden. Being absent from your post was forbidden. And remember that simony, pluralism, and absenteeism were three of the, the abuses that the Protestants had most criticized in the beginning. It's also a great, great deal of emphasis upon building schools to train clergy, not only for existing Catholic parishes, but clergy to send into other countries that had become Protestant and try to win them back. Later on, we'll find out, for example, that a number of Jesuits were trained to go into England to try to win England back, and that's true in other places as well.

Yet another thing that the Council of Trent did was to clean up the monasteries. Now, when it comes to monastic abuses, monks who lived in luxury, who enjoyed carnal pleasures, nuns who did the same thing, monastics that violated their vows, in other words, Protestants tended to exaggerate how bad that was, Catholics tended to underemphasize how bad that was, but with the Council of Trent, the church faced the fact that some monastic orders and some monasteries in particular needed reforming, and they did it, thereby removing another major source of trouble.

Now, there are a couple of other things that the Council of Trent does that might not appeal to us very much. I would like to think that the whole notion of fighting over religion, of Catholics and Protestants going to war against each other, which will be the subject of our next couple of lectures, is something that we would not do today. Nonetheless, these are ideas that made sense in the context of the 16th century, even if we might not find them very appealing.

Now, one of the things that the Council of Trent did was to strengthen the Roman Inquisition. Now, that's the Roman Inquisition, the one headquartered in the city of Rome. The, the Spanish Inquisition, which enjoys, you know, so much notoriety, uh, is a separate entity. It, it exists only in Spain, but the Roman Inquisition was strengthened. Now, there's a downside to this. The Roman Inquisition used some methods that we absolutely would not accept today. You could be arrested for heresy on the charge of a single witness. You could be condemned for heresy on the charge of only two witnesses, and the normal punishment for heresy, unless you recanted, was to be burned at the stake. Even if you did recant, you often were strangled and then burned after you were dead.

Now, another thing that the Inquisition did is that it allowed the accused no representation. You could not have a lawyer. You were on your own, and the inquisitorial methods were far from gentle. The Inquisition often, although not always, used torture as a way of ringing confessions from confused heretics or accused heretics. They're probably confused too, uh, in cases. It used torture to get heretics to name other heretics, and in the wrong hands, of course, this could bring confessions from people who were not guilty. It could get people who were not guilty named as other heretics. In short, it could be abused, and it's not by any means the best way of dealing with heresy, if one even acknowledges that heresy exists. But it is also true that the Inquisition tried to persuade people to give up what they saw as heresy because they believed that heresy would lead heretics to a life in hell, and that other heretics might follow them there. Not excusing it, just explaining it.

The final thing that the Council of Trent did, and again, this is one that would probably not appeal to us much, is that they created something called the Index of Prohibited Books. There were a lot of books, not surprisingly, books written by Protestants, that were considered to be dangerous for ordinary people to read, and therefore they were put on the index. Now, in order to have a book approved, you're supposed to get what is called the imprimatur of the Catholic Church, saying that your book contained no heretical or false doctrine. Books that did not that might end up on the index and be banned. Personally, I'm no fan of banned books myself. Whenever I find out that a book has been banned, I try to get a copy. But it does make sense if you take the viewpoint that heresy can be spread by books, and that heresy leads to eternity in hell.

Now, another way in which the Catholic Reformation expressed itself was on the battlefield. The 16th century saw numerous religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, especially Catholics and Calvinists, and we'll turn to that in the next couple of lectures. Well, I hope you enjoyed the lecture, the Catholic Reformation. Our next lecture in this series is also given by Dr. Robinson, and he will discuss religious wars in Germany and France. Now, as you can imagine, when you have the Protestant Reformation and you have the Catholic Reformation, and you have, uh, these people that do not agree, and then you mix religion into, that's not a good thing. So we're going to see quite a few of these religious wars taking place in Europe around the same time. Dr. Robinson discusses the war that takes place, um, in France. Even France experienced a kind of a civil war between the Protestants, who were known as the Huguenots. These Protestants in France, known as the Huguenots, were influenced by John Calvin, and the Catholics there. He will discuss that incident, and it affected the kings and, and how France will develop as a nation, and how its monarchy will develop because of religion. Okay, we're not seeing at this time, we're not seeing the, very limited kind of warfare. It's much more when you involve religion into fighting, we, we notice that it could continue on and on. For example, say if I said that, hey, I own that piece of land, and someone says, no, I do, and we fight about it, and then it's settled, it's limited, it's settled, it's over, it's done, whoever gets it. But religion, you, you get that emotion mixed in there. So Dr. Robinson, in our next lecture, upcoming, will discuss some of the key treaties that result from these religious warfares, such as the Peace of Augsburg, very important, we'll learn the definition of that. And he also, of course, discusses things like the Anglo-Spanish War and the Dutch Revolt. Henry IV, Henry IV is the French King, and he comes to power as a result of those French religious wars that take place during this time. So I can't wait to hear about the wars of religion. Until next time.