The sale of indulgences in church; woodcut from the title page of Luther's pamphlet On Aplas von Rom, published anonymously in Augsburg, 1525.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, John R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.
Until his excommunication Luther had regarded himself as a loyal Roman Catholic and had appealed “from a poorly informed Pope to a Pope who ought to be better informed.” He had, moreover, retained a Roman Catholic-like perspective on most elements of Christian doctrine, including not only the Trinity and the two natures in the person of Christ but also baptismal regeneration and the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. (He did, however, reject the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation in favour of what has come to be called consubstantiation.)
Many of the other Protestant Reformers were considerably less conservative in their doctrinal stance, distancing themselves from Luther’s position no less than from the Roman Catholic one. Thus, Huldrych Zwingli lumped Luther’s sacramental teaching together with the medieval one, and Luther in turn exclaimed: “Better to hold with the papists than with you!” John Calvin was considerably more moderate than Zwingli, but both sacramentally and liturgically he broke with the Roman Catholic tradition. The Anglican Reformation strove to retain the historical episcopate and steered a middle course, liturgically and even doctrinally, between Roman Catholicism and continental Protestantism, particularly under Queen Elizabeth I.
The polemical Roman Catholic accusation—which the mainline Reformers vigorously denied—that these various species of conservative Protestantism, with their orthodox dogmas and quasi-Catholic forms, were a pretext for the eventual rejection of most of traditional Christianity, seemed to be confirmed by the emergence of the radical Reformation. The Anabaptists, as their name indicates, were accused by their opponents of “rebaptizing” those who had received the sacrament of baptism as infants (the Anabaptists advocated adult baptism and held that infant baptism was invalid); this was, at its foundation, a redefinition of the nature of the church, which they saw not as the institution allied with the state and embracing both the good and the wicked but as the community of true believers who had accepted the cost of Christian discipleship by a free personal decision. Nevertheless, the Anabaptists retained, in their doctrines of God and Christ, the historical orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed. Those Protestants who went on to repudiate orthodox Trinitarianism as part of their Reformation claimed to be carrying out, more consistently than Luther or Calvin or the Anabaptists had done, the full implications of the rejection of Roman Catholicism, which they all had in common.
The challenge of the Protestant Reformation became also an occasion for a resurgent Roman Catholicism to clarify and to reaffirm Roman Catholic principles; that endeavour had, in one sense, never been absent from the life and teaching of the church, but it was undertaken now with new force. As the varieties of Protestantism proliferated, the apologists for Roman Catholicism pointed to the Protestant principle of the right of private interpretation of Scripture as the source of this confusion. Against the Protestant elevation of Scripture to the position of sole authority, they emphasized that Scripture and church tradition are inseparable and always have been. Pressing this point further, they denounced justification by faith alone and other cherished Protestant teachings as novelties without grounding in authentic church tradition. Echoing the Letter of James (2:26) that “faith without works is also dead,” they warned that the doctrine of “faith alone, without works” as taught by Luther would sever the moral nerve and remove all incentive for holy living.
Yet these negative reactions to Protestantism were not by any means the only—perhaps not even the primary—form of participation by Roman Catholicism in the history of the Reformation. The emergence of Protestantism did not exhaust the reformatory impulse within Roman Catholicism, nor can it be seen as the sole inspiration for Catholic reform. Rather, to a degree that has usually been overlooked by Protestant and Catholic historians alike, there was a distinct historical movement in the 16th century that can only be identified as the Roman Catholic Reformation. The Roman Catholic Reformation The Council of Trent
The most important single event in the Catholic Reformation was almost certainly the Council of Trent, which met intermittently in 25 sessions between 1545 and 1563. The papacy’s bitter experiences with the conciliarism of the 15th century made the popes of the 16th century wary of any so-called reform council, for which many were clamouring. After several false starts, however, the council was finally summoned by Pope Paul III (reigned 1534–49), and it opened on December 13, 1545. The legislation of the Council of Trent enacted the formal Roman Catholic reply to the doctrinal challenges of the Protestant Reformation and thus represents the official adjudication of many questions about which there had been continuing ambiguity throughout the early church and the Middle Ages. The “either/or” doctrines of the Protestant Reformers—justification by faith alone, the authority of Scripture alone—were anathematized, in the name of a “both/and” doctrine of justification by both faith and works on the basis of the authority of both Scripture and tradition, and the privileged standing of the Latin Vulgate was reaffirmed against Protestant insistence upon the original Hebrew and Greek texts of Scripture.
No less important for the development of modern Roman Catholicism, however, was the legislation of Trent aimed at reforming—and at re-forming—the internal life and discipline of the church. Two of its most far-reaching provisions were the requirement that every diocese provide for the proper education of its future clergy in seminaries under church auspices and the requirement that the clergy, and especially the bishops, give more attention to the task of preaching. The financial abuses that had been so flagrant in the church at all levels were brought under control, and strict rules requiring the residency of bishops in their dioceses were established. In place of the liturgical chaos that had prevailed, the council laid down specific prescriptions about the form of the mass and liturgical music. What emerged from the Council of Trent, therefore, was a chastened but consolidated church and papacy, the Roman Catholicism of modern history. New religious orders
Some of the outcome, and much of the enforcement, of the Council of Trent was in the hands of newly established religious orders, above all the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, founded in 1534 by the Basque noble Ignatius of Loyola, and officially established by the papacy in 1540. Unlike the Benedictine monks or the Franciscan and Dominican friars, the Jesuits swore special obedience to the pope and were specifically dedicated to the task of reconstructing church life and teaching in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. They thus came to be called the “shock troops of the Counter-Reformation.” In pursuit of that mission they became especially active in scholarship and education, above all in the education of the nobility; through their pupils they sometimes wielded as great an influence in affairs of state as they did in affairs of the church. Although they were by no means the only religious order in the foreign missions of the church, their responsibility for regaining outside Europe the power and territory that the church had lost within Europe as a result of the Protestant Reformation made them the leading force in the Christianization of newly discovered lands in the Western Hemisphere, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. At the beginning of the 17th century, for example, the Jesuits established a virtually autonomous colony in Paraguay.