Rome Reforms and Defines: Ignatius, Teresa, Trent and the Missions

In 1545 Western Christianity was split. Lutheran princes and cities held much of northern Germany and Scandinavia, Zurich and Geneva followed Zwingli and Calvin, and England had left papal obedience in 1534. Spain, Portugal, Italy, most of France, Bavaria, Austria and Poland stayed with Rome, and Spain and Portugal were building overseas empires with Catholic missions attached. The emperor, Charles V, wanted a general council to heal Germany. Popes had put one off for years, because earlier councils (Constance, Basel) had claimed authority over popes.

Calls for reform were older than Luther. Bishops held several dioceses and lived in none, priests were poorly trained, church offices were bought and sold, and the Renaissance popes lived as Italian princes. Historians therefore use two names for what followed. Catholic Reformation means the renewal of preaching, prayer, learning and clergy, much of it begun before 1517. Counter-Reformation means the organized answer to Protestantism: the Inquisition, the Index, the doctrinal canons, and political and military action. The historian Hubert Jedin argued that both names are needed, because both happened together and often in the same people.

Spain finished the conquest of Granada in 1492, expelled its Jews that year, and in 1502 ordered Muslims to be baptized or leave. Its Inquisition, founded in 1478, was run by the crown. Missionaries sailed on ships built for trade and conquest, and that mixture shaped the age as much as the council did.

The question under every other question was who may say what the Bible means, and what else binds the church. The reformers answered that Scripture is the final authority and clear enough on essentials. They pointed to Jesus' rebuke of teachers who set aside God's command for the sake of their tradition (Matthew 15:3-9), to Paul's statement that Scripture equips the believer for every good work (2 Timothy 3:15-17), and to the Bereans, who tested Paul's preaching against the Scriptures (Acts 17:11). Trent answered from the same book. It pointed to Paul's instruction to hold the teachings received 'by word or by letter' (2 Thessalonians 2:15), to Peter's warning that some things in Paul are hard to understand and are twisted by the unstable (2 Peter 3:16). One side trusted Scripture to interpret Scripture inside the believing community. The other held that the bishops judge the true sense.

Matthew 16 sits at the center of that quarrel. Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Jesus says he will build his church on 'this rock' and give Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 16:13-19). Catholics take the rock to be Peter, with an office that continues in Rome. Many Protestant readers take it to be Peter's confession, or Christ himself, a reading Augustine also allowed beside others. Orthodox readers, following Cyprian, hear the promise as given to Peter as the spokesman of all the apostles, and so to every bishop. In the same chapter Jesus tells his followers to take up a cross (Matthew 16:21-26).

Erasmus's Greek New Testament showed that the Vulgate's 'do penance' in Matthew 3:2 translated a Greek verb meaning 'change your mind', and both sides used the point. On justification the sides read Romans 3:28, James 2:24 and Galatians 5:6 in different orders. Luther and Calvin heard 'justify' in Paul as a verdict of acquittal (Romans 4:5). Trent heard it as acquittal and renewal together, because God's love 'has been poured out in our hearts' (Romans 5:5). Trent also called the Latin Vulgate 'authentic' for public lectures, sermons and debates. That ruled on which text to use in public, not that the Hebrew and Greek were inferior.

The renewal began in Spain and Italy before 1517. Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo, founded the University of Alcala and paid for the Complutensian Polyglot, a Bible with Hebrew, Greek and Latin side by side (1514-17). In Rome, the Oratory of Divine Love met from about 1517 for prayer and care of the sick, and two members founded the Theatines in 1524 to train disciplined priests. Erasmus (about 1466-1536) mocked clerical greed and urged plain reading of the Gospels. He never left the Catholic church and argued with Luther over free will in 1524. At Regensburg in 1541 Contarini and Protestants including Melanchthon and Bucer agreed on a formula for justification. Rome and Luther both refused it.

Ignatius of Loyola was a Basque soldier whose leg was broken by a cannonball at Pamplona in 1521. While he recovered he read a life of Christ and lives of the saints. At Manresa in 1522-23 he began the Spiritual Exercises. At Paris he gathered companions, among them Francis Xavier, and on 15 August 1534 seven men took vows at Montmartre. Paul III approved the Society of Jesus in 1540. Its members lived outside monasteries and took a special vow of obedience to the pope about where they were sent. They ran schools without charging fees, beginning with the Roman College in 1551. At Ignatius's death the Society had about a thousand members. They were preachers, confessors to princes, teachers and missionaries, and Protestants saw them as the main force against the Reformation. Spain also produced the great writers on prayer. Teresa of Avila entered a Carmelite convent about 1535. In 1562 she founded the reformed, shoeless (Discalced) house of St Joseph and went on to found more than a dozen others. Her grandfather was a Jewish convert who had been made to do penance by the Inquisition, and her own writings were examined by it. John of the Cross (1542-1591) joined her reform. In 1577 Carmelites opposed to it jailed him in Toledo for nine months. He escaped in 1578. His poems became the Spiritual Canticle and the Dark Night.

Trent, a city in the Alps within the empire, was chosen because Charles V wanted a German site. It opened on 13 December 1545 with a few dozen bishops, mostly Italian and Spanish, and closed on 4 December 1563 after 25 sessions in three periods: 1545-47 under Paul III, 1551-52 under Julius III, and 1562-63 under Pius IV, when about two hundred bishops attended by the end. Votes were by head, not by nation, which favoured the Italian majority. In 1551-52 some Protestant delegations arrived and asked that earlier decisions be reopened, which was refused. Its canons condemn positions with the formula 'if anyone says ... let him be anathema' and do not name Luther or Calvin. Session 4 (8 April 1546) listed the biblical books, including those Protestants call the Apocrypha, and said saving truth is contained 'in the written books, and the unwritten traditions', both received with equal reverence. An earlier draft read 'partly in books, partly in traditions'. Catholic historians still argue whether dropping 'partly' left room for the view that Scripture contains all that is necessary. Session 6 (13 January 1547) gave sixteen chapters and thirty-three canons on justification. Sessions 7, 13 and 14 taught seven sacraments, transubstantiation and private confession. Session 22 taught the Mass as a sacrifice, kept it in Latin and ordered its meaning explained in the local tongue. Session 25 (December 1563) affirmed purgatory, prayer to the saints and the church's power to grant indulgences, and abolished all payments for obtaining them.

The reform decrees may have mattered more in the long run. Bishops had to live in their dioceses, preach, visit parishes and hold synods. Every diocese was to have a seminary (1563). Marriages were valid only before a priest and two witnesses. The council left the pope to publish a catechism, a missal and an Index; the Roman Catechism, for parish priests, appeared in 1566. Charles Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, became the model of a bishop who carried this out.

The missions ran on royal patronage (padroado in Portuguese, patronato in Spanish): the crown paid for missionaries and named bishops. Franciscans reached Mexico in 1524, and Jesuits reached Brazil in 1549 and Peru in 1568. The Dominican Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566) argued for decades that the Indians were free people with rights. Paul III's bull Sublimis Deus (1537) said they could not be enslaved, and the New Laws of 1542 tried to curb forced native labor. Colonists resisted. Disease killed most of the native population within a century. The Jesuit Peter Claver (1580-1654) served enslaved Africans landing at Cartagena. Francis Xavier reached Goa in 1542 and Japan in 1549. The Japanese church reached perhaps 300,000 by 1600 and was crushed after 1614, but hidden Christians near Nagasaki came into the open in 1865. Matteo Ricci reached Beijing in 1601 and held that honours to Confucius and ancestors were civil rites. Rome ruled against that view in 1704-15.

In Africa, the king of Kongo was baptized in 1491. His son Afonso I built churches and schools, and Afonso's son Henrique was consecrated a bishop in 1518. In 1526 Afonso wrote to Lisbon that Portuguese traders were seizing free Kongolese and asked for teachers and priests instead. The trade grew. Ethiopia had been Christian since the fourth century. Portuguese musketeers helped it survive Ahmad Gragn's invasion in 1541-43. Jesuits arrived from 1557 hoping to bring the church to Rome and made little progress until Pedro Paez, who reached Ethiopia in 1603, learned Ge'ez and Amharic and won Emperor Susenyos, who declared for Rome in 1622. Patriarch Afonso Mendes arrived in 1626 and ordered rebaptism, reordination of priests and a ban on Sabbath observance and circumcision. Rebellion followed and thousands died. Susenyos gave way in 1632, and his son Fasilides expelled the Jesuits and restored the Ethiopian church.

The Spanish Inquisition pursued converts from Judaism and Islam suspected of false conversion and, after 1559, Protestants in Seville and Valladolid. The Roman Inquisition, set up in 1542 at the urging of Gian Pietro Carafa, drove out or silenced Italian reformers. As Paul IV, Carafa imprisoned Cardinal Morone. Pietro Carnesecchi was burned in 1567 and Giordano Bruno in 1600. Galileo was forced to recant in 1633 and lived under house arrest. Methods included secret denunciation, torture and seizure of goods. The Index of 1559 was followed by a milder one in 1564. In Spain and Italy the rules limited vernacular Bibles, though Catholic ones were printed elsewhere, such as the Douay-Rheims in English. One study of Spanish records for 1540-1700 counted about 44,000 trials and about 800 executions in person; historians dispute the totals. Protestants also killed for belief: Calvin's Geneva burned Servetus in 1553, Mary I burned about 280 Protestants, and Elizabeth's government executed more than a hundred Catholic priests.

The Peace of Augsburg (1555) let each German prince choose Lutheranism or Catholicism for his subjects and left Calvinists out. The French Wars of Religion (1562-98) included the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 24 August 1572, when Catholic mobs and soldiers killed thousands of Huguenots in Paris and across France. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) began in a religious dispute in Bohemia and became a struggle for power: Catholic France under Cardinal Richelieu fought beside Protestant Sweden against the Catholic Habsburgs. In some German regions a third or more of the people died. The Peace of Westphalia (24 October 1648) restored the religious map of 1624, added Calvinists to the legal churches and gave minorities the right to private worship. Pope Innocent X condemned it.

Three questions divided the sides.

• The first was authority, described above.
• The second was how a sinner is made right with God. Protestants read Romans 3:21-28, Romans 4:5 and Ephesians 2:8-9 as saying that God declares the ungodly righteous through faith in Christ apart from works, and that Christ's righteousness is counted as the believer's. Trent read the same chapters with James 2:14-26, Galatians 5:6 and Romans 5:5 and taught that God makes the believer righteous by pouring grace and love into the heart, that faith begins this and good works done in grace increase it, and that no one can know with the certainty of faith that he has been given grace. Protestants answered from Romans 8:15-16 and 1 John 5:13. Each side described the other unfairly. Catholics called imputation a legal fiction. Protestants said Trent made salvation a joint project of God and human merit. Protestant writers answered that renewal follows justification as its sure fruit, and Trent that all merit is a gift of grace with Christ's passion as its only cause.

The third question was the means of grace. Trent taught seven sacraments that give the grace they signify, citing passages such as John 3:5, John 6:53-56 and John 20:23. It taught the Mass as the sacrifice of the cross offered in an unbloody way, citing Malachi 1:11, and it taught purgatory, citing 1 Corinthians 3:13-15 as one text. Protestants answered from Hebrews 7:27, 9:25-28 and 10:10-14, where Christ's sacrifice is made once for all, and from 1 Timothy 2:5, one mediator between God and humanity. They kept two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, because Christ himself instituted them with a promise (Matthew 28:19; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26).

Every party named Christ as the only redeemer. Trent began its doctrinal work in 1546 by confessing the Nicene Creed. It named Christ's passion as the cause of justification and called him our only Redeemer and Saviour. The dispute was whether the way Christ's work is received ever stands between the believer and him. Protestants thought priests, saints, merits, indulgences and the Mass as a repeated offering did. Catholics replied that Christ acts in the sacraments himself and that the saints pray as fellow Christians do.

The new spiritual writers kept Christ in view with force. The Spiritual Exercises have the person at prayer picture the Gospel scenes and ask to know Christ closely in order to follow him. Teresa insisted that even the highest prayer must not leave Christ's humanity behind. John of the Cross argued that in Christ God has already said everything, so no one needs further visions. Ignatius's rules for 'thinking with the church' also bind judgment to the hierarchy, which Protestants thought left Scripture too little room to correct the church.

The record is mixed where Christ's name joined power. Las Casas argued that the Indians were people for whom Christ died. Afonso of Kongo asked Lisbon for priests and not merchants. Yet the same ships carried the slave trade, and Gregory XIII ordered a Te Deum in Rome when the news of the St Bartholomew's Day killings arrived. Protestant magistrates also killed in Christ's name. Jesus' words on the cross and the sword (Matthew 16:24; Matthew 26:52) are the standard by which this history is held.