Book: A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

C >> Carlton J. H. Hayes >> A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.




[Sidenote: Protestantizing the Church of England: Edward VI]

The Church of England, separated from the papacy under Henry VIII,
became Protestant under Edward VI (1547-1553). The young king's
guardian tolerated all manner of reforming propaganda, and Calvinists
as well as Lutherans preached their doctrines freely. Official articles
of religion, which were drawn up for the Anglican Church, showed
unmistakably Protestant influence. The Latin service books of the
Catholic Church were translated into English, under Cranmer's auspices,
and the edition of the _Book of Common Prayer_, published in 1552,
made clear that the Eucharist was no longer to be regarded as a
propitiatory sacrifice: the names "Holy Communion" and "Lord's Supper"
were substituted for "Mass," while the word "altar" was replaced by
"table." The old places of Catholic worship were changed to suit a new
order: altars and images were taken down, the former service books
destroyed, and stained-glass windows broken. Several peasant uprisings
signified that the nation was not completely united upon a policy of
religious change, but the reformers had their way, and Protestantism
advanced.

[Sidenote: Temporary Roman Catholic Revival under Mary Tudor]

A temporary setback to the progress of the new Anglicanism was afforded
by the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-1558), the daughter of Catherine of
Aragon, and a devout Roman Catholic. She reinstated the bishops who had
refused to take the oath of royal supremacy and punished those who had
taken it. She prevailed upon Parliament to repeal the ecclesiastical
legislation of both her father's and her brother's reigns and to
reconcile England once more with the bishop of Rome. A papal legate, in
the person of Cardinal Reginald Pole, sailed up the Thames with his
cross gleaming from the prow of his barge, and in full Parliament
administered the absolution which freed the kingdom from the guilt
under Mary incurred by its schism and heresy. As an additional support
to her policy of restoring the Catholic Church in England, Queen Mary
married her cousin, Philip II of Spain, the great champion of
Catholicism upon the Continent.

But events proved that despite outward appearances even the reign of
Mary registered an advance of Protestantism. The new doctrines were
zealously propagated by an ever-growing number of itinerant exhorters.
The Spanish alliance was disastrous to English fortunes abroad and
distasteful to all patriotic Englishmen at home. And finally, the
violent means which the queen took to stamp out heresy gave her the
unenviable surname of "Bloody" and reacted in the end in behalf of the
views for which the victims sacrificed their lives. During her reign
nearly three hundred reformers perished, many of them, including
Archbishop Cranmer, by fire. The work of the queen was in vain. No heir
was born to Philip and Mary, and the crown, therefore, passed to
Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, a Protestant not so much from
conviction as from circumstance.

[Sidenote: Definite Fashioning of Anglicanism: the Reign of Elizabeth]

It was in the reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603) that the Church of England
assumed definitely the doctrines and practices which we now connect
with the word "Anglicanism." By act of Parliament, the English Church
was again separated from the papacy, and placed under royal authority,
Elizabeth assuming the title of "supreme governor." The worship of the
state church was to be in conformity with a slightly altered version of
Cranmer's _Book of Common Prayer_. A uniform doctrine was likewise
imposed by Parliament in the form of the _Thirty-nine Articles_,
which set a distinctively Protestant mark upon the Anglican Church in
its appeal to the Scriptures as the sole rule of faith, its insistence
on justification by faith alone, its repudiation of the sacrifice of
the Mass, and its definition of the Church. All the bishops who had
been appointed under Mary, with one exception, refused to accept the
changes, and were therefore deposed and imprisoned, but new bishops,
Elizabeth's own appointees, were consecrated and the "succession of
bishops" thereby maintained. Outwardly, the Church of England appeared
to retain a corporate continuity throughout the sixteenth century;
inwardly, a great revolution had changed it from Catholic to
Protestant.

Harsh laws sought to oblige all Englishmen to conform to Elizabeth's
religious settlement. Liberty of public worship was denied to any
dissenter from Anglicanism. To be a "papist" or "hear Mass"--which were
construed as the same thing--was punishable by death as high treason. A
special ecclesiastical court--the Court of High Commission--was
established under royal authority to search out heresy and to enforce
uniformity; it served throughout Elizabeth's reign as a kind of
Protestant Inquisition.

[Sidenote: English Dissent from Anglicanism]

While the large majority of the English nation gradually conformed to
the official Anglican Church, a considerable number refused their
allegiance. On one hand were the Roman Catholics, who still maintained
the doctrine of papal supremacy and were usually derisively styled
papists, and on the other hand were various Calvinistic sects, such as
Presbyterians or Independents or Quakers, who went by the name of
"Dissenters" or "Non-conformists." In the course of time, the number of
Roman Catholics tended to diminish, largely because, for political
reasons which have been indicated in the preceding chapter,
Protestantism in England became almost synonymous with English
patriotism. But despite drastic laws and dreadful persecutions, Roman
Catholicism survived in England among a conspicuous group of people. On
the other hand, the Calvinists tended somewhat to increase their
numbers so that in the seventeenth century they were able to
precipitate a great political and ecclesiastical conflict with
Anglicanism.


THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION

We have now traced the origins of the Protestant Revolt against the
Catholic Church, and have seen how, between 1520 and 1570, three major
varieties of new theology--Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism--
appeared on the scene and divided among themselves the nations of
northern Europe. The story of how, during that critical half-century,
the other civilized nations retained their loyalty to the Catholic
Church virtually as it had existed throughout the middle ages, remains
to be told. The preservation of the papal monarchy and Catholic
doctrine in southern Europe was due alike to religious and to political
circumstances.

It must not be supposed that pious critics of ecclesiastical abuses
were confined to countries which subsequently became Protestant. There
were many sincere Catholics in Italy, Austria, France, and Spain who
complained of the scandals and worldliness that afflicted the Church at
the opening of the sixteenth century: they demanded sweeping reforms in
discipline and a return of the clergy to a simple apostolic life. They
believed, however, that whatever change was desirable could best be
achieved by means of a reformation within the Catholic Church--that is,
without disturbing the unity of its organization or denying the
validity of its dogmas--while the critics of northern Europe, as we
have seen, preferred to put their reforms into practice by means of a
revolution--an out-and-out break with century-old traditions of
Catholic Christianity. Even in northern Europe some of the foremost
scholars of that period desired an intellectual reformation within
Catholicism rather than a dogmatic rebellion against it: with Luther's
defiance of papal authority, the great Erasmus had small sympathy, and
Sir Thomas More, the eminent English humanist, sacrificed his life for
his belief in the divine sanction of the papal power.

Thus, while the religious energy of northern Europe went into
Protestantism of various kinds, that of southern Europe fashioned a
reformation of the Catholic system. And this Catholic reformation, on
its religious side, was brought to a successful issue by means of the
improved conditions in the papal court, the labors of a great church
council, and the activity of new monastic orders. A few words must be
said about each one of these religious elements in the Catholic
reformation.

[Sidenote: Reforming Popes]

Mention has been made of the corruption that prevailed in papal affairs
in the fifteenth century, and of the Italian and family interests which
obscured to the Medici pope, Leo X (1513-1521), the importance of the
Lutheran movement in Germany. And Leo's nephew, who became Clement VII
(1523-1534), continued to act too much as an Italian prince and too
little as the moral and religious leader of Catholicism in the contest
which under him was joined with Zwinglians and Anglicans as well as
with Lutherans. But under Paul III (1534-1549), a new policy was
inaugurated, by which men were appointed to high church offices for
their virtue and learning rather than for family relationship or
financial gain. This policy was maintained by a series of upright and
far-sighted popes during the second half of the sixteenth century, so
that by the year 1600 a remarkable reformation had been gradually
wrought in the papacy, among the cardinals, down through the prelates,
even to the parish priests and monks.

[Sidenote: The Council of Trent]

The reforming zeal of individual popes was stimulated and reinforced by
the work of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). The idea of effecting a
"reformation in head and members" by means of a general council of the
Catholic Church had been invoked several times during the century that
preceded the Protestant Revolt, but, before Luther, little had been
accomplished in that way.

With the widening of the breach between Protestantism and the medieval
Church, what had formerly been desirable now became imperative. It
seemed to pious Catholics that every effort should be made to reconcile
differences and to restore the unity of the Church. The errors of the
manifold new theologies which now appeared might be refuted by a clear
statement of Catholic doctrine, and a reformation of discipline and
morals would deprive the innovators of one of their most telling
weapons against the Church.

It was no easy task, in that troublous time, to hold an ecumenical
council. There was mutual distrust between Catholics and Protestants.
There was uncertainty as to the relative powers and prerogatives of
council and pope. There were bitter national rivalries, especially
between Italians and Germans. There was actual warfare between the two
chief Catholic families--the Habsburgs of Germany and Spain and the
royal house of France.

Yet despite these difficulties, which long postponed its convocation
and repeatedly interrupted its labors, the Council of Trent [Footnote:
Trent was selected largely by reason of its geographical location,
being situated on the boundary between the German-speaking and Italian-
speaking peoples.] consummated a great reform in the Church and
contributed materially to the preservation of the Catholic faith. The
Protestants, whom the pope invited to participate, absented themselves;
yet such was the number and renown of the Catholic bishops who
responded to the summons that the Council of Trent easily ranked with
the eighteen oecumenical councils which had preceded it. [Footnote: Its
decrees were signed at its close (1563) by 4 cardinal legates, 2
cardinals, 3 patriarchs, 25 archbishops, 167 bishops, 7 abbots, 7
generals of orders, and 19 proxies for 33 absent prelates.] The work of
the council was twofold--dogmatic and reformatory.

Dogmatically, the fathers at Trent offered no compromise to the
Protestants. They confirmed with inexorable frankness the main points
in Catholic theology which had been worked out in the thirteenth
century by Thomas Aquinas and which before the appearance of
Protestantism had been received everywhere in central and western
Europe. They declared that the tradition of the Church as well as the
Bible was to be taken as the basis of the Christian religion, and that
the interpretation of the Holy Scripture belonged only to the Church.
The Protestant teachings about grace and justification by faith were
condemned, and the seven sacraments were pronounced indispensable. The
miraculous and sacrificial character of the Lord's Supper (Mass) was
reaffirmed. Belief in the invocation of saints, in the veneration of
images and of relics, in purgatory and indulgences was explicitly
stated, but precautions were taken to clear some of the doctrines of
the pernicious practices which at times had been connected with them.
The spiritual authority of the Roman See was confirmed over all
Catholicism: the pope was recognized as supreme interpreter of the
canons and incontestable chief of bishops.

[Sidenote: Reformatory Canons of the Council of Trent ]

A volume of disciplinary statutes constituted the second achievement of
the Tridentine Council. The sale of church offices was condemned.
Bishops and other prelates were to reside in their respective dioceses,
abandon worldly pursuits, and give themselves entirely to spiritual
labors. Seminaries were to be established for the proper education and
training of priests.

While Latin was retained as the official and liturgical language,
frequent sermons were to be preached in the vernacular. Indulgences
were not to be issued for money, and no charge should be made for
conferring the sacraments.

[Sidenote: Index and inquisition ]

The seed sown by the council bore abundant fruit during several
succeeding pontificates. The central government was completely
reorganized. A definite catechism was prepared at Rome and every layman
instructed in the tenets and obligations of his religion. Revisions
were made in the service books of the Church, and a new standard
edition of the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, was issued. A list, called the
Index, was prepared of dangerous and heretical books, which good
Catholics were prohibited from reading. By these methods, discipline
was in fact confirmed, morals purified, and the scandal of the immense
riches and the worldly life of the clergy restrained. From an unusually
strict law of faith and conduct, lapses were to be punishable by the
ancient ecclesiastical court of the Inquisition, which now zealously
redoubled its activity, especially in Italy and in Spain.

A very important factor in the Catholic revival--not only in preserving
all southern Europe to the Church but also in preventing a complete
triumph of Protestantism in the North--was the formation of several new
religious orders, which sought to purify the life of the people and to
bulwark the position of the Church. The most celebrated of these
orders, both for its labors in the sixteenth century and for its
subsequent history, is the Society of Jesus, whose members are known
commonly as Jesuits. The society was founded by Ignatius Loyola
[Footnote: Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556).] in 1534 and its constitution
was formally approved by the pope six years later.

[Sidenote: Ignatius Loyola]

In his earlier years, Ignatius followed the profession of arms, and as
a patriotic Spaniard fought valiantly in the armies of Emperor Charles
V against the French. But while he was in a hospital, suffering from a
wound, he chanced to read a Life of Christ and biographies of several
saints, which, he tells us, worked a great change within him. From
being a soldier of an earthly king, he would now become a knight of
Christ and of the Church. Instead of fighting for the glory of Spain
and of himself, he would henceforth strive for the greater glory of
God. Thus in the very year in which the German monk, Martin Luther,
became the leading and avowed adversary of the Catholic Church, this
Spanish soldier was starting on that remarkable career which was to
make him Catholicism's chief champion.

After a few years' trial of his new life and several rather footless
efforts to serve the Church, Ignatius determined, at the age of thirty-
three, to perfect his scanty education. It was while he was studying
Latin, philosophy, and theology at the University of Paris that he made
the acquaintance of the group of scholarly and saintly men who became
the first members of the Society of Jesus. Intended at first primarily
for missionary labors among the Mohammedans, the order was speedily
turned to other and greater ends.

[Sidenote: The Jesuits]

The organization of the Jesuits showed the military instincts of their
founder. To the three usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience,
was added a fourth vow of special allegiance to the pope. The members
were to be carefully trained during a long novitiate and were to be
under the personal direction of a general, resident in Rome. Authority
and obedience were stressed by the society. Then, too, St. Ignatius
Loyola understood that the Church was now confronted with conditions of
war rather than of peace: accordingly he directed that his brothers
should not content themselves with prayer and works of peace, with
charity and local benevolence, but should adapt themselves to new
circumstances and should strive in a multiplicity of ways to restore
all things in the Catholic Church.

Thus it happened that the Jesuits, from the very year of their
establishment, rushed to the front in the religious conflict of the
sixteenth century. In the first place, they sought to enlighten and
educate the young. As schoolmasters they had no equals in Europe for
many years. No less a scholar and scientist than Lord Francis Bacon
said of the Jesuit teaching that "nothing better has been put in
practice." Again, by their wide learning and culture, no less than by
the unimpeachable purity of their lives, they won back a considerable
respect for the Catholic clergy. As preachers, too, they earned a high
esteem by the clearness and simplicity of their sermons and
instruction.

It was in the mission field, however, that the Jesuits achieved the
most considerable results. They were mainly responsible for the
recovery of Poland after that country had almost become Lutheran. They
similarly conserved the Catholic faith in Bavaria and in the southern
Netherlands. They insured a respectable Catholic party in Bohemia and
in Hungary. They aided considerably in maintaining Catholicism in
Ireland. At the hourly risk of their lives, they ministered to their
fellow-Catholics in England under Elizabeth and the Stuarts. And what
the Catholic Church lost in numbers through the defection of the
greater part of northern Europe was compensated for by Jesuit missions
among the teeming millions in India and China, among the Huron and
Iroquois tribes of North America, and among the aborigines of Brazil
and Paraguay. No means of influence, no source of power, was neglected
that would win men to religion and to the authority of the bishop of
Rome. Politics and agriculture were utilized as well as literature and
science. The Jesuits were confessors of kings in Europe and apostles of
the faith in Asia and America.

[Sidenote: Political and Economic Factors in the Catholic Reformation]

It has been pointed out already that the rapid diffusion of
Protestantism was due to economic and political causes as well as to
those narrowly religious. It may be said with equal truth that
political and economic causes co-operated with the religious
developments that we have just noted in maintaining the supremacy of
the Catholic Church in at least half the countries over which she had
exercised her sway in 1500. For one thing, it is doubtful whether
financial abuses had flourished as long or as vigorously in southern as
in northern Europe. For another, the political conditions in the states
of southern Europe help to explain the interesting situation.

[Sidebar: Italy]

In Italy was the pope's residence and See. He had bestowed many favors
on important Italian families. He had often exploited foreign countries
in behalf of Italian patronage. He had taken advantage of the political
disunity of the peninsula to divide his local enemies and thereby to
assure the victory of his own cause. Two popes of the sixteenth century
belonged to the powerful Florentine family of the Medici--Florence
remained loyal. The hearty support of the Emperor Charles V preserved
the orthodoxy of Naples, and that of Philip II stamped out heresy in
the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

[Sidenote: France]

In France, the concordat of 1516 between pope and king had peacefully
secured for the French monarch appointment of bishops and control of
benefices within his country,--powers which the German princes and the
English sovereigns secured by revolutionary change. Moreover, French
Protestantism, by its political activities in behalf of effective
checks upon the royal power, drove the king into Catholic arms: the
cause of absolutism in France became the cause of Catholicism, and the
latter was bound up with French patriotism to quite the same extent as
English patriotism became linked with the fortunes of Anglicanism.

[Sidenote: Spain and Portugal]

In Spain and Portugal, the monarchs obtained concessions from the pope
like those accorded the French sovereigns. They gained control of the
Catholic Church within their countries and found it a most valuable
ally in forwarding their absolutist tendencies. Moreover, the
centuries-long struggle with Mohammedanism had endeared Catholic
Christianity alike to Spaniards and to Portuguese and rendered it an
integral part of their national life. Spain and Portugal now remained
fiercely Catholic.

[Sidenote: Austria]

Somewhat similar was the case of Austria. Terrifying fear of the
advancing Turk, joined with the political exigencies of the Habsburg
rulers, threw that duchy with most of its dependencies into the hands
of the pope. If the bishop of Rome, by favoring the Habsburgs, had lost
England, he had at least saved Austria.

[Sidenote: Poland and Ireland]

Ireland and Poland--those two extreme outposts of the Roman Catholic
Church in Europe--found their religion to be the most effectual
safeguard of their nationality, the most valuable weapon against
aggression or assimilation by powerful neighbors.


SUMMARY OF THE RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

By the year 1570 the profound religious and ecclesiastical changes
which we have been sketching had been made. For seventy-five years more
a series of wars was to be waged in which the religious element was
distinctly to enter. In fact these wars have often been called the
Religious Wars--the ones connected with the career of Philip II of
Spain as well as the subsequent dismal civil war in the Germanies--but
in each one the political and economic factors predominated. Nor did
the series of wars materially affect the strength or extent of the
religions implicated. It was prior to 1570 that the Protestant Revolt
had been effected and the Catholic Reformation achieved.

[Sidenote: Geographical Extent of the Revolt]

In the year 1500, the Roman Catholic Church embraced central and
western Europe; in the year 1600 nearly half of its former subjects--
those throughout northern Europe--no longer recognized its authority or
practiced its beliefs. There were left to the Roman Catholic Church at
the close of the sixteenth century the Italian states, Spain, Portugal,
most of France, the southern Netherlands, the forest cantons of
Switzerland, the southern Germanies, Austria, Poland, Ireland, large
followings in Bohemia and Hungary, and a straggling unimportant
following in other countries.

Those who rejected the Roman Catholic Church in central and western
Europe were collectively called Protestants, but they were divided into
three major groups. Lutheranism was now the religion of the northern
Germanies and the Scandinavian states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
Calvinism, under a bewildering variety of names, was the recognized
faith of the majority of the cantons of Switzerland, of the northern
Netherlands, and Scotland, and of important followings in Germany,
Hungary, France, and England. Anglicanism was the established religion
of England.

[Sidenote: Doctrines Held in Common by Catholics and Protestants]

The Protestants retained a large part of Catholic theology, so that all
portions of western Christianity continued to have much in common. They
still believed in the Trinity, in the divinity of Jesus Christ, in the
sacredness of the Jewish scriptures and of the New Testament, the fall
of man and his redemption through the sacrifice of the Cross, and in a
future life of rewards and punishments. The Christian moralities and
virtues continued to be inculcated by Protestants as well as by
Catholics.

[Sidenote: Doctrines Held by all Protestants Apart from Catholics]

On the other hand, the Protestants held in common certain doctrines
which separated all of them from Roman Catholicism. These were the
distinguishing marks of Protestantism: (1) denial of the claims of the
bishop of Rome and consequent rejection of the papal government and
jurisdiction; (2) rejection of such doctrines as were supposed to have
developed during the middle ages,--for example, purgatory, indulgences,
invocation of saints, and veneration of relics,--together with
important modifications in the sacramental system; (3) insistence upon
the right of the individual to interpret the Bible, and recognition of
the individual's ability to save himself without the interposition of
ecclesiastics--hence to the Protestant, authority resided in individual
interpretation of the Bible, while to the Catholic, it rested in a
living institution or Church.

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