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Early Modern Catholicism

Robert Bireley

Interest in the study of Catholicism of the early modern period began to burgeon in the 1970s and has continued to grow to the present day. In Trent and All That, John W. O’Malley has masterfully outlined the longer historiography of the subject. This recent study has displayed the Catholicism of the period as anything but the stereotypical monolith often found in textbooks, and has revealed a rich variety of colors both bright and dark. Spanish Catholicism under Philip II differed from that of France under the last Valois, and recusant Catholicism in England in the seventeenth century differed from that in the Habsburg Monarchy as it emerged from the Thirty Years’ War. How then does one denominate this period of Catholic history? The question has long stood out as a controversial one, and rightly so because terminology serves to reflect historical interpretation. Since at least the late nineteenth century “Catholic Reform” and “Counter-Reformation” have vied with each other as the two principal terms to define the period, with Catholics generally preferring the former and Protestants the latter. In Hubert Jedin’s classic 1946 essay, the great historian of the Council of Trent suggested a compromise. Both terms named essential elements of early modern Catholicism, he proposed, with Catholic Reform denoting its “soul” and Counter-Reformation its “body.”¹ His suggestion proved satisfactory to many, especially in an increasingly ecumenical age, yet it did not remain without its critics. Recently O’Malley himself, while admitting that both Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation do indicate important elements of the Catholicism of the period, has rejected them as inadequate to the rich reality. First of all, he argues, they define the period excessively with reference to the Protestant Reformation and so exclude developments like the missionary expansion across the seas in Asia and the Americas and the emergence of new spiritualities like that of the Jesuits. Secondly, for O’Malley the word “reform” seems to indicate that the church found itself in a state of notable decline at the end of the fifteenth century, a state of affairs he considers unsupported by recent research, which has tended to upgrade the status of the late medieval church. Nor did the early Jesuits, certainly a significant force in the Catholicism of the period, consider themselves as church reformers. O’Malley also finds a similar inadequacy in the term “Tridentine Catholicism” as exaggerating the role of the council, important though it was. Instead, he has endorsed the simple, prosaic, yet inclusive term “early modern Catholicism” to denote this period in the history of Catholicism. That his proposal currently is gathering acceptance is suggested by the very title of this essay.²

Periodization as well as terminology follows from interpretation. When did early modern Catholicism begin? To what extent did it represent continuity with medieval Catholicism? Ronnie Hsia, who does not use the term early modern Catholicism, titled his 1998 book The World of Catholic Renewal, dating this movement from 1540. Michael A. Mullett in his 1999 The Catholic Reformation points up the continuity of Trent with an earlier tradition of “reform in head and members” that gathered steam at the Council of Constance and continued throughout the fifteenth century into the sixteenth. Indeed, this issue of periodization overlaps with the still broader interpretative question of the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance or early modern times. In a pathbreaking essay first published in 1929, Lucien Febvre contended that the Protestant Reformation could not be explained as a reaction to decline and abuses within the medieval church, but must have resulted from a change in religious sentiment or mentality at a deeper level.³ H. Outram Evennett, then, in a series of insightful lectures delivered in 1951 (but only published in 1968) proposed that “if the Counter-Reformation was, at bottom, the total process of adaptation to new world conditions which Catholicism underwent in the first two centuries of the post-medieval age, a modernization, in the sense of the establishment of a new ‘modus vivendi’ of the Church with the world, then it would seem that this effort can be said to have reached an end somewhere in the age of Louis XIV.”⁴

Both these themes—adaptation and modernization—have subsequently been taken up and developed by others. Robert Bireley, in his 1999 The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700, has interpreted early modern Catholicism as a response to the changing world of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and as a continuation of the church’s tradition of adaptation, where the church both acts upon contemporary cultures and societies and is acted upon by them. Following Theodore K. Rabb’s classic The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe, Bireley has identified five changes that distinguish the transition from medieval to early modern Europe: (1) a decisive stage in the development of the modern state both in the larger monarchies of England, France, and Spain and in the territorial states of Italy and Germany; (2) demographic growth and economic expansion along with social dislocation that accompanied a growing imbalance between the rich and poor; (3) European expansion into Asia, the Americas, and to a lesser extent, Africa; (4) the Renaissance, including the new technology of printing; and (5) the Protestant Reformation. All these developments except the last began before 1500 or 1517.

The theory of confessionalization as first developed chiefly by Ernst Walter Zeeden, Wolfgang Reinhard, and Heinz Schilling has influenced the study of early modern Catholocism. Its focus on the similar and parallel features of the three principal confessions or churches—Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic—as they developed in the sixteenth century constitutes its strength.⁵ When does Catholic confessionalization begin, and does it overlap with the emergence of early modern Catholicism? Working with Germany as a model, Reinhard, in his 1989 article “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State,” proposed that the first years of the Protestant Reformation (from 1517 to 1525) be viewed as an evangelical period that ended with the Peasants’ Revolt and the intervention of the princes. The era of confessionalization began properly with the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg of 1530, the first of the confessions of faith that make up the initial step in the formation of a confession or church. The Calvinists and the Catholics then followed (the decisive years being the 1550s and 1560s), with the Catholic equivalent of the Confession of Augsburg being the Tridentine Profession of Faith that followed the Council of Trent in 1564. The recent multivolume French Histoire du Christianisme takes over this interpretation, breaking at 1530 between the seventh volume, De la réforme à la Réformation (1450–1530), and the eighth volume, Le temps des confessions (1530–1620) rather than at 1517, as might have been expected.

Yet a solid argument exists for beginning the process of confessionalization earlier, especially when Reinhard closely associates it with the growth of the state, as does Paolo Prodi. In fact, Prodi finds the start of confessionalization in the middle of the fifteenth century with the advance of territorial states in Germany and Italy, the extension of their control over the church, and the alliance of the papacy with states through concordats aimed at checking the conciliarist movement, for example the Concordat of Vienna of 1448 between the pope and Emperor Frederick III.⁶ The year 1450 also saw the permanent return of the pope to Rome after the long absences of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a new policy aimed at the restoration of the city of Rome, and a new emphasis on the pope’s role as ruler of an Italian state that became the principal source of papal revenue with the decline of income from the European states. For Prodi, this signaled an increasing secularization of the church and sacralization of the state. In sum, one can propose provisionally that both early modern Catholicism and Catholic confessionalization started in the middle of the fifteenth century, and lasted well past the traditional endpoint of 1648, the year of the Peace of Westphalia, into the eighteenth century and perhaps up to the cataclysm of the French Revolution. Any more precise date, it seems, is open to question.

In a seminal article of 1977, Wolfgang Reinhard argued that the Counter-Reformation in its accommodation to contemporary culture and society—to be sure, an anachronistic concept but one that fits reality—constituted a force for modernization in the Western world. So he rejected the long-standing Whiggish stereotype that the Protestant Reformation represented progress in the West and the Counter-Reformation the forces of reaction.⁷ Ever since, the issue of the “modern” character of the Counter-Reformation has remained a lively one especially since the term “modern” has many and varying connotations. In 1996, Il concilio di Trento e il Moderno, a significant volume edited by Reinhard and Prodi, took up the issue with a narrower focus on the council itself. In his contribution, Prodi made an important controversial argument for the modern character of the council, whose decrees have now been published anew in Latin and English.⁸ According to Prodi, Trent marked a transition from the medieval respublica Christiana to the world of the modern states. The older medieval universalism saw Europe as one society with two forces competing for leadership: the spiritual (the pope) and the temporal (the emperor or other rulers). This conception was well represented in the late medieval councils of Constance and Basel, which were both strongly conciliarist in sentiment. The councils met in nations that were still cultural groups rather than states and not only bishops, but also members of corporations like cathedral chapters and universities, took an active role. Representatives of governments played a major part. Indeed, these were assemblies of Christendom.

Trent, on the other hand, was an ecclesiastical council where only bishops, superiors general of religious orders, and abbots were allowed to vote. Representatives of governments, though present, had much less influence than in previous councils. Both the council and the church were clericalized. The Council of Trent envisioned, not one universal Christendom, but interlocking societies where the church stood as the respublica Christiana, in its own right a “perfect society.” The new dualism was not of one society with two leaders but of two competing societies, one with the goal of man’s temporal welfare, the other with the goal of his eternal well-being. Crucial for this development, according to Prodi, was the council’s decision not to publish the planned decree on the reform of princes, which would have required them also to take an oath to uphold the council’s doctrinal decisions, and instead merely to issue a simple call for the cooperation of rulers. So the council recognized the new sovereignty of the princes, and the church, for its part, took on features of a state, such as expanding the tasks of nuncios to include church reform. Canon law, apart from marriage, now applied for the most part only to clerics. The church no longer sought to influence society through law; that it left to the states, though it certainly continued to defend clerical privileges. Instead, it aimed to influence society through the establishment of moral standards and the use of the internal forum and the confessional (see the discussion of confession below). Intellectually, this position of the council was influenced by the theory of the pope’s indirect power in temporal affairs that was first outlined by Dominican theologians Pedro de Soto and Francisco Vitoria in the early part of the century, and developed later by the Jesuits Francisco Suarez and Robert Bellarmine. This theory recognized explicitly the temporal sovereignty of princes but allowed for papal intervention in the event that a prince obstructed the pursuit of his subjects’ eternal goal. It is against this backdrop of the Council of Trent, Prodi maintains, that one must view the subsequent jurisdictional conflicts between state and church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The extent to which his position about the modern character of Trent wins acceptance remains to be seen.⁹

French historian Alain Tallon finds in Trent’s complete neglect of contemporary millenarianism one feature of its modernity.¹⁰ But his major contribution, a marvelous volume of 821 pages, investigates the relationship of France to the Council of Trent and so fills a gap that Jedin himself recognized. Tallon looks at France’s policy toward the council, the French understanding of the council, and finally the role of the French at Trent itself and only briefly its impact on the kingdom. “In the dramatic situation of religious crisis,” he concludes, “despite all the faults one might find with it, the Council of Trent seemed to be the plank of salvation for Gallicanism, for it permitted the invocation of authority of a general council, so dear to the French, to defend the old faith against any compromise with the innovators without at the same time yielding completely to Roman absolutism.”¹¹ Furthermore, adherence to the council secured a greater independence for the French church from the crown and helped create a national consciousness apart from the monarchy. According to Joseph Bergin’s thorough study, “the years from Henry IV to the death of Mazarin represent a crucial stage in the emergence of an episcopate which by the later seventeenth century had in many ways become a model for much of Catholic Europe.”¹²

The papacy continues to attract scholarship. According to Prodi’s Papal Prince, the Papal States initially led the way to the formation of a modern state with its administrative structure and system of taxation, a further example of the church’s adaptation to a changing world. Jean Delumeau considered the Papal States at the end of the sixteenth century to be administratively “the equal, if not the superior of any other state in Europe,” and it had in the course of the century developed from the lowest taxed to “probably the most heavily taxed” state in Italy.¹³ But subsequently it faltered for a number of reasons. Among them were the demands on the papal treasury by Catholic governments engaged in the religious wars and the replacement of laymen with temporal authority by clerics, and the resulting reduction in the pool of officeholders and failure to nurture a class of lay civil servants. The College of Cardinals declined in influence as it increased in numbers from twenty-four at the conclusion of the Council of Constance to an increasingly Italianized seventy under Sixtus V. By the early seventeenth century, the college provided the central figures of a model baroque court where the chief concern of the cardinals often became family power and wealth. Studies by Volker Reinhardt, Wolfgang Reinhard, and more recently Brigit Emich¹⁴ have looked from different perspectives at Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Paul V (1605–21). Additional biographies of the early modern popes would be useful and valuable; for many, there seems to be more than enough material at hand. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia have edited a valuable volume of essays on the early modern papal court.¹⁵

The nunciature reports (the correspondence between the papal secretariat of state and its nuncios in the field) are a major source for the papacy; however, all the historical institutes in Rome save the German Historical Institute have suspended or greatly reduced their publication. A major innovation took place in 1984 with the publication of the Hauptinstruktionen Clemens VIII für die Nuntien und Legaten an den europäischen Furstenhöfen (1592–1605) edited by Klaus Jaitner. Until then, the various series of the correspondence of the nuncios had been published in great detail for individual courts, with a volume rarely covering more than two or three years. This continues for nunciatures in Germany. Usually these series aimed to serve as sources primarily for the history of the state to which the nuncio was posted and only secondarily for papal policy. The Hauptinstruktionen publish all the principal instructions for nuncios and legates of a pontificate; they tell much more about the general policy of a particular pope, but they do not so easily reveal the compromises and modifications made as policy was implemented. As with the earlier series, they contain a mine of references to primary and little-known secondary sources. In 1997, Jaitner published the Hauptinstruktionen for the papacy of Gregory XV (1621–23). In 2003, Silvano Giordano published the three-volume Le instruzioni generali di Paolo V ai diplomatici pontifici (1605–1621), and he has begun work on the principal instructions of Urban VIII (1623–44). Scholars navigating the Vatican Archives will find Francis X. Blouin’s Vatican Archives: An Inventory and Guide to Historical Documents of the Holy See extremely valuable.

Early modern Catholicism saw the birth of numerous religious orders, both male and female, with an intensified commitment to new types of pastoral ministry as well as to traditional apostolic works, and they created new forms and styles of religious life to support that commitment. Pastoral practice diversified and extended its reach as preachers, missionaries, and confessors were supplemented by writers, hospitalers, “social workers,” catechists, and, above all, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. Education became for the first time a major work of many religious congregations. Until recently, traditional histories have not adequately noticed this development, perhaps because they were little connected directly with Trent and Tridentine reform on which historians have generally concentrated.¹⁶

Richard Demolen’s Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation continues to serve as a fine introduction to the new male religious orders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Jesuits have been well served by the literature. Of great importance for their history is the long-awaited four-volume Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jésus edited by Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquin M. Dominguez, which appeared (unfortunately, in Spanish only) in 2001. John O’Malley’s prizewinning The First Jesuits and The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture, 1573–1580, thirty essays written by a variety of scholars and edited by Thomas McCoog, carry the narrative of Jesuit history nearly up to 1600. Contributions in The Mercurian Project often extend beyond the narrow limits indicated in the title, and the volume is also rich in both primary source material and bibliography. Robert Bireley in The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts and Confessors, has investigated Jesuit activity in politics from the perspective of the Jesuit superior general in Rome, Muzio Vitelleschi. The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, thirty-two essays edited by a team headed by John O’Malley, appeared in 1999 and a sequel (The Jesuits II) followed in 2005. Along with Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany, these volumes represent an increasing scholarly attention to the arts as a feature of Jesuit activity.

The publication of the three-volume I Frati Cappuccini: Documenti e Testimonianze del primo secolo, edited by Costanzo Cargnoni, will, it is hoped, stimulate the study of the Capuchins, the new branch of the Franciscan order that first received papal approbation in 1528. The Capuchins exercised an enormous influence on early modern Catholicism, especially in the seventeenth century, their golden age, when their numbers increased to 30,000. But there is much work to be done on the other orders that emerged in the sixteenth century and especially on the older orders, both the monastic orders like the Benedictines and Cistercians and the mendicants like the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, who still vastly outnumbered the new orders. For all religious orders and congregations, old and new, male and female, the ten-volume Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione edited by Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca remains an indispensable research tool. The first volume of a welcome new multivolume series dealing with male and female religious orders in Germany in the early modern period appeared in 2005; it treats principally the Benedictines and Cistercians.¹⁷

Two new phenomena of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that deserve attention are the societies of common life and male, nonclerical congregations. The former were associations primarily of priests who wished to live in community according to the evangelical counsels, but without taking vows. They omitted vows principally, it seems, because of a desire to identify with and provide a model for secular priests who were recognized to be in need of reform. Generally speaking, their spirituality focused on the priesthood itself, and not surprisingly, they became deeply involved with the education of priests. Apart from the Roman Oratory of Philip Neri, which first received papal recognition in 1575, they were concentrated in France. Pierre de Berulle founded the French Oratory in Paris in 1611. By 1702, it comprised seventy-eight communities with 581 priests. Under pressure from Pope Paul V, the French Oratorians undertook the work of secondary education and by 1631, conducted thirty-one colleges.¹⁸ Vincent de Paul’s Congregation of the Mission (or Lazarists after the hospital complex of Saint Lazaire given them on the outskirts of Paris) first came into existence in 1625 for the purpose of conducting missions in rural areas and educating the secular clergy, and by 1660 it counted 229 members in twenty-five houses, chiefly in France.¹⁹

Two important nonclerical male congregations originated during this period, the Hospitalers of St. John of God, who were devoted to ministry to the sick, and the Brothers of Christian Schools, committed to the growing ministry of education. The Hospitalers continued a medieval tradition of aid to the sick. Founded by the Spaniard John of God, who has been called “the creator of the modern hospital” after his construction of a hospital in Granada just prior to his death in 1550, the society had 288 hospitals spread over most of Catholic Europe as well as Latin America and Canada by the early eighteenth century.²⁰ The Brothers of the Christian Schools founded by John Baptist de la Salle devoted themselves to free elementary education for poor boys, opening their first school at Rheims in 1679. They were recognized by Rome in 1725, and by 1789 they opened 116 schools, thus creating “the first program of national primary education in France.”²¹ They developed a spirituality of the Christian teacher, which drew on the resources of baptism and confirmation for their pastoral mission. Other groups would follow in the traditions of both the Hospitalers and the Brothers of the Christian Schools.

The influx of male religious into ministry had an effect on church structures that bears further study. In particular, the founding of the Capuchins and the Jesuits, who were particularly favored by the papacy, strengthened Rome vis-à-vis bishops and national churches. With their centralized international organizations and their continued widespread exemptions, these two groups generally supported papal authority at a time when Trent had emphasized the role of bishops and aimed to regulate exemptions from episcopal authority. Their allegiance to Rome would cost both orders dearly as the papacy became embattled in the eighteenth century. The full story of the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 remains to be told, but a recent translation of an account by the eighteenth-century Jesuit Giulio Cesare Cordara has made it more accessible.²² The new involvement of religious in the church’s pastoral mission also exacerbated rivalry between regulars and seculars over their respective roles. In 1601, Clement VIII assigned to the Congregation for Bishops and Religious the mediation of disputes between the two and between religious orders themselves. Massimo Carlo Giannini has edited Religione, conflittualità e cultura, which deals with these issues regarding the regular clergy of Europe in the early modern period.

Interest in the women religious of the early modern period has grown apace with the popularity of women’s history. Olwen H. Hufton’s The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe describes succinctly the situation of religious women against the general background of women’s history. During this period, the number of women religious surpassed that of men and Elizabeth Rapley writes of the “feminization” of religious life in France in the course of the seventeenth century.²³ Female religious life acquired a new style and an apostolic spirituality often related to that of the Jesuits with whom the women were frequently associated. The many new active congregations represented a novel phenomenon as they sprouted in Italy, France, the Netherlands, and the Rhineland. Indeed, a question that needs further investigation is the extent to which these new foundations were rooted in the medieval period, that is, in third orders and in lay congregations. Gabriella Zarri, in “From Prophecy to Discipline,” has taken up this issue for Italy, and Craig Harline, in “Actives and Contemplatives,” for the Netherlands. These developments took place, if not in spite of, then certainly not because of the Council of Trent or the papacy. At its close, the council issued reform measures for female monasteries, insisting in particular on the observance of enclosure. Pius V followed this up in 1566 with a rigorous bull, Circa Pastoralis, in which he required that all female monasteries accept enclosure, even where entrants had not foreseen this as a part of their way of life, and that all third orders with simple rather than solemn vows either take solemn vows and accept enclosure or remain as they were. Should they choose the latter, they could accept no new novices and so were sentenced to extinction. Eventually however, with social change, some episcopal support, and a clever strategy, female religious congregations with simple vows and at least modified cloister came to be tolerated by Rome, as Rapley has shown for the many female congregations that sprouted in France in the seventeenth century.²⁴ Of all the women’s congregations, the Ursulines (founded in 1535 by Angela Merici [1474–1540], a laywoman of Brescia) were undoubtedly the most numerous and probably the most influential. Though many of their convents in France accepted enclosure willingly due to the enthusiasm for the contemplative life engendered by the Carmelite reform of Teresa of Avila coming from Spain, they became the first women’s congregation vowed to the apostolate of education and in France “the feminine teaching congregation par excellence,” where they reportedly numbered nearly ten thousand in 1750.²⁵ Henriette Peters’s 1994 biography describes the life of Englishwoman Mary Ward (1585–1645). As founder of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (or “English Ladies” as they were called in South Germany), an order modeled on the Jesuits, Ward encountered many difficulties with church authorities and met only limited success.

Traditional contemplative nuns remained the great majority of women religious and they continue to be a popular subject of research, which often takes up their struggle with the new emphasis on enclosure as well as the attempt of church officials to acquire greater control over their houses in the wake of Trent. Charlotte Woodford and K. J. P. Lowe provide insights into the nuns’ understanding of themselves through studies of their chronicles from Germany and Italy, respectively.²⁶

The Catholic Church, however one might define it, in this period (as always) saw its principal aim as leading its members and those beyond to a deeper faith, hope, and charity, and thus preparing them for eternal life. Historians in recent years have used different terms to name this overall process; before looking at the methods or procedures employed to achieve the goal, it is crucial to clarify the terms applied to the process. As these overlap in varying degrees, but reveal vastly different historical outlooks, it is important that scholars remain aware of the differences as they go about their work. French historians have frequently employed the terms “evangelization” or “Christianization”—clearly religious terms that envision growth in faith, hope, and charity. Such growth is difficult to determine since one cannot directly measure these virtues, though it is possible to draw some conclusions from religious observance and knowledge. The second term (or pair of terms)—confessionalism or confessionalization—has rather an ecclesiastical ring, looking more to the formation of the church as an institution; their elaboration has been closely associated with the emergence of the modern state, so they also connote the political. The third term, “social discipline,” rather social and political in tone, is farthest removed from the religious. It derives from sociological modernization theory via Gerhard Oestreich’s understanding of the rise of absolutism.²⁷ Social discipline implies an understanding of religion chiefly as a means of social control. In this essay, for convenience, evangelization and confessionalization are used interchangeably.

Scholarship has now generally retreated from a sharp distinction between elite and popular religion as well as a rigid top-down model for confessionalization, as Marc Forster has illustrated in The Counter-Reformation in the Villages and Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque. But there remains much to be investigated about the negotiation between authorities and communities. Craig Harline and Eddy Put’s A Bishop’s Tale tells poignantly the story of a conscientious Flemish bishop’s efforts to apply church norms to a sometimes recalcitrant flock. Who was ultimately the responsible agent for confessionalization from above? Was it the pope, the bishop, or the prince who took his religious responsibility seriously and who, as Philip II is supposed to have asserted, considered “religion too important to be left to the pope”? At a local level, was it the parish priest or the Jesuit missionary preacher? Issues of jurisdiction regularly plagued efforts at confessionalization. Catholics differed sharply from Protestants in this regard, in that they also looked to the pope in Rome as well as to local or national authorities. One thinks of the conflict from 1605 to 1607 between Paul V and Venice that provoked the famous interdict over the Most Serene Republic.

Researchers have looked at the many means used to confessionalize or evangelize: preaching, education, the administration of the sacraments (especially penance), confraternities, inquisitorial prosecution, and censorship, to name a few. The last four come in for comment here.²⁸ Confession, or the sacrament of penance, has attracted considerable attention recently. W. David Myers (in “Poor, Sinning Folk”) has found that, in Counter-Reformation Bavaria, confession became more frequent—often monthly and even weekly among the devout—and more private with the introduction of the confessional box in 1600; he finds no evidence in the pre-Reformation era of the widespread anxiety some scholars have attributed to confession. According to John O’Malley, the early Jesuits, who considered the hearing of confessions a principal ministry, stressed its consolatory features, and others have seen the regular use of confession and the examination of conscience as a source of developing individualism and sense of the self.²⁹ On the other hand, Wietse de Boer has emphasized the use of the sacrament as a means of social control, especially by Archbishop Carlo Borromeo in Counter-Reformation Milan. This was done by the imposition of public penances and by the archbishop’s reservation to himself or his cathedral penitentiaries of absolution from certain public sins such as participation in popular entertainments. In a famous incident of 1579, the Jesuit preacher Giulio Mazarino clashed with the archbishop over his alleged rigorism and the event escalated into a jurisdictional dispute involving eventually Pope Gregory XIII and Philip II.³⁰ Adriano Prosperi has contended that in the 1560s and 1570s, the church in Italy used confession in its campaign against heresy by requiring penitents to denounce suspect heretics to the Inquisition and, in the process, infringed on the secrecy of confession.³¹ Prodi argues that the church, with the development of moral theology and casuistry and the emphasis at Trent on the judicial character of confession, created an alternative system of justice to both the law of the state and the canon law of the church and so fostered the distinction between sin and crime.³² Many of these issues come to the fore in Penitence in the Age of Reformations, a series of essays edited by Katherine Jackson Lualdi and Anne Thayer.

The religious, social, and charitable organizations called confraternities have elicited substantial interest in recent years; in 1989 the Society for Confraternity Studies was founded, and it now publishes its own bulletin and regularly organizes sessions at historical conferences. Nicholas Terpstra, a leading scholar of confraternities, has shown that many of the early modern orders and congregations started out as groupings at least similar to confraternities, and he calls for the study of analogous confraternal organizations in the Protestant and even Jewish and Muslim milieu. Terpstra writes, “As we absorb the implications of recent works and look ahead, how can we plot an agenda for future research into confraternities that takes these brotherhoods—and the scholars studying them—out of the institutional niche and captures their character as a form of spiritual community which is ubiquitous, fluid, and even provisional?”³³

Two questions seem key for the role of confraternities in early modern Catholicism. To what extent was there a continuity between the late medieval confraternities with their normal lay leadership and early modern confraternities, especially after the Tridentine measures subordinating confraternities to the control of the hierarchy? And more important still, how did confraternities, often associated with religious orders, relate to the parish after Trent’s vigorous assertion of the importance of the parish as the basic unit of church organization? Christopher Black takes up these issues with regard to Italy in his “Confraternities and the Parish in the Context of Italian Catholic Reform.” According to Black, early modern confraternities grew out of their medieval forerunners, contributed significantly to the nascent religious revival in Italy in the early sixteenth century, and continued to represent a vigorous lay piety. But he qualifies this statement with a reference to the wide variety of confraternities and the complexity of the situation in Italy. John Patrick Donnelly and Michael Maher, editors of Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain, in which Black’s article appears, imply the same when they remind us that if all politics is local, so much the more is church reform, and that generalizations “must pay close attention to the local conditions that encouraged, discouraged, and shaped the direction of reform efforts affecting confraternities.”³⁴

The study of the confraternities has implications for both the role of the layperson in the church and the often tense relationship between religious and secular clergy, both issues of major significance for early modern Catholicism. Louis Châtellier’s Europe of the Devout remains the key study of the principal confraternity conducted by the Jesuits, the Marian congregations, and Lance Lazar’s recent study of Jesuit confraternities in Italy, Working in the Vineyard of the Lord, stands out as a major contribution.

The Inquisition, or better, Inquisitions (that is, the medieval, the Spanish, the Portugese, and the Roman) have long stimulated both scholarship and curiosity. Recent work has tended to demythologize them, making them more understandable as instruments of confessionalization and social discipline and perhaps even evangelization in light of their alleged ultimate pastoral purpose; generally, toward the end of the sixteenth century, they turned more to the prosecution of moral offenses, magic, and superstition rather than strict heresy. Only Francisco Bethencourt, in L’inquisition à l’époque moderne, has attempted a comparative study of the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Roman Inquisitions. Henry Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision synthesizes much recent research on this fearsome institution and generally revises downward its impact on Spanish society. The 1998 opening of the archives of the Holy Office in Rome has undoubtedly given new impetus to the study of the Roman Inquisition, and already the contributions to two symposia marking the event have been published, an October 1998 symposium sponsored by the Vatican and another in June 1999 sponsored by the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei.³⁵ Closely associated with the Inquisition was the Roman Congregation of the Index, which assumed censorship and control of books in 1571. Important to the study of this body, as well as of all the Indices of Prohibited Books issued by various authorities in the early modern period is the multivolume series Index des livres interdits edited by J. M. De Bujanda and colleagues at the Centre d’études de la Renaissance at Quebec’s University of Sherbrooke. In La Bibbia al rogo, Gigliola Fragnito has demonstrated the different attitudes of church authorities in southern and northern Europe toward the publication of the vernacular Bible. For example, no vernacular Bible was published in Italy between 1567 and 1773, while translations did appear in areas inhabited by Catholics and Protestants.

The Inquisition did not function in the Habsburg lands in central Europe where, apart from pockets of crypto-Protestantism, Catholicism was restored by 1700 by a mixture of peaceful evangelization and forced confessionalization; the degree to which each was involved in the process remains controverted. Significant contributions to the discussion have come from Joseph Patrouch for Upper Austria, Regina Pörtner for Styria, and Thomas Winkelbauer for the Austrian lands and Bohemia; the last-named deftly applies the concept of confessionalization to the landed estates of the nobility.³⁶

Consciousness of belonging to a now worldwide church added a decidedly new element to the sense of identity of early modern Catholics, as seen in the colonnades outside Saint Peter’s in Rome reaching out to embrace the world and in the American Indian headdress worn by a cherub above a choir stall in the baroque Praemonstratensian church at Steingaden in Bavaria. With its missionary expansion into Asia and the Americas, Catholicism had become a global religion. The letters of Francis Xavier (1506–52) from the East were copied, recopied, translated, and circulated widely throughout all Catholic Europe; the first (from India) was dated 15 January 1544. According to the German Jesuit Peter Canisius and the French Jesuit Edmond Auger writing in the middle of the sixteenth century, Francis Xavier’s letters encouraged Catholics who underwent reverses at the hands of Protestants in Europe.³⁷ Often, the gains for the church across the seas were interpreted as providential compensation for the losses in Europe. An enormous literature exists on this missionary outreach of the early modern era, but is beyond the scope of this essay. It should be noted, however, that access to and exploitation of indigenous sources as well as the application of sophisticated anthropological methods has made it increasingly possible to learn about the impact of the missionary advance from the side of the local peoples themselves, as can be seen in the work, for example, of Nicholas Standaert for China and Sabine MacCormack for the Inca civilization in Peru.³⁸ The mission field also provided opportunities for evangelization, confessionalization, and social discipline. The 1999 publication of Relazione delle Quattro parti del mondo provides a vision of the missions as seen from Rome. This report dating from 1649 is now clearly attributed to Francesco Ingoli, a longtime advocate of the foreign missions and secretary of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith from its establishment in 1622 until his death in 1649.

Theology and spirituality deserve greater recognition and integration into the study of early modern Catholicism, especially since they emphasize its distinctiveness. Despite a renewed insistence on doctrinal orthodoxy following Trent and expressed in the Tridentine Profession of Faith, the Catholicism of the period displayed a remarkable variety of spiritualities or ways of living the Christian life. In major European cities and towns and even in colonial centers, one could find churches of various religious orders each representing a particular approach to God. In the late seventeenth century, Guadalajara, Mexico, hosted communities of Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Mercedarians, Oratorians (of Philip Neri), and Jesuits, plus four convents of nuns—two Dominican, one Carmelite (of the Teresian reform), and one Augustinian—and two hospitals, one conducted by the Hospitalers of St. John of God and another by the Bethlehemites, a congregation first founded as a confraternity in Guatemala City in 1663. Early modern Catholicism was characterized by the conviction that the Christian life could be lived in the world, despite a vigorous Augustinian view to the contrary represented after the mid-seventeenth century by Jansenism. A paradigmatic figure for the age, Niccolò Machiavelli, had asserted or was understood to have asserted, in his 1513 The Prince, that the moral Christian could not succeed in politics and, by extrapolation, in the world. His theory was, in the words of German historian Friedrich Meinecke, “a sword which was plunged into the flank of the body politic of Western humanity, causing it to shriek and rear up.”³⁹ The reaction was not long in coming, rooted in a world-affirming Thomism that predominated in early modern theology. An extensive anti-Machiavellian literature struck back, led by Giovanni Botero’s 1589 Reason of State, which claimed that an intelligent, moral politics generated political success and that an immoral politics brought, in the long run, only failure.⁴⁰ Francis de Sales, the saintly Bishop of Geneva, contended in his immensely popular Introduction to the Devout Life (1609) that one could live the Christian life to the full in any state of life, and Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises pointed in the same direction.⁴¹ A bevy of books appeared in the seventeenth century attempting to show how one could live the Christian life in varying states, like Nicholas Caussin’s Holy Court, which first came off in the press in 1624 and went through many editions and translations into all the major European languages. The often vilified casuistry of the seventeenth century aimed to help the Christian live in the world, and it may at times have gone too far. But an underappreciated legacy of early modern Catholicism is its positive evaluation of the world, and its influence on the coming Enlightenment deserves investigation.

Bibliography

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

Internet sites devoted to early modern Catholicism run in the hundreds, if not thousands. Sites are dedicated to individuals as well as movements. Some recommended sites are:

Vatican Library and Archives: http://www.vatican.va/

Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation: http://solomon.dlcr.alexanderstreet.com

The Jesuit Portal (directs users to other sites on Jesuit history): http://www.sjweb.info/

PRINTED SOURCES

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Bireley, Robert. The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

——. The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts and Confessors. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

——. The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter-Reformation. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999.

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——. The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

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