Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (113 page)

During the 1540s, Ignatius delicately finessed the Society's constitution so that it was clearly understood that the Superior-General and not the pope was responsible for directing Jesuit mission policy.
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Jesuits were very determined to keep their own identity. They resisted amalgamation with Carafa's Theatines, even though in many ways they resembled that organization. When Carafa became Pope Paul IV on the death of Marcellus III in 1555, he was intent on settling many old scores, especially against remnants of the
Spirituali
like the Society of Jesus. He began remodelling it into a conventional religious order, but fortunately for the Jesuits, the pontificate of this choleric and vindictive old man proved brief. In the wake of that trauma came a quiet reshaping of the Society for the service of the Church. Central was a new stress on a mission which seemed urgent after the Peace of Augsburg had recognized the existence of Lutheranism in 1555 (see p. 644). In a revised statement of purpose in 1550, the Society had added to 'propagation of the faith' the idea of 'defence' - that is, confronting Protestants. The programme this implied was accelerated after Ignatius Loyola's assistant Jeronimo Nadal visited Germany in 1555. Protestantism's dominance there profoundly shocked him, and convinced him that the Society must devote itself to reversing the situation. This represented a major change in direction: Nadal, prominent in Jesuit rebranding, now deliberately promoted the idea that the Society had been founded to combat the Reformation.
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COUNTER-REFORMATIONS AFTER TRENT: ENGLAND, SPAIN AND THE MYSTICS

The Jesuits thus moved into an era which can truly be styled 'Counter-Reformation', the aftermath of the Council of Trent's final session. Paul IV had refused to summon the council, disinclined to share decision-making with others, so Trent was not convened between 1552 and 1562, by which time Pope Paul had been safely dead for three years. By the end of 1563 it had completed its work, producing a coherent programme for a Catholicism conveniently labelled 'Tridentine', from the Latin name for Trent. The work was sealed with a uniform catechism of the Catholic faith, and a uniform liturgy: this uniformity of worship had no precedent in the history of the Western or indeed any other branch of Christianity, with the recent but significant exceptions of England and some Lutheran Churches. Naturally the Tridentine liturgy remained in Latin and not, like Protestant worship, in vernacular languages, but here there was a major complication, in the shape of the Greek, Eastern or Armenian Churches affiliated to Rome, all of which had long enjoyed their worship in their own various languages. So with a brevity and restraint which did not reflect any concern for Protestants, but rather a consciousness of that other expanding field of papal concern on the frontier with Orthodoxy, the Council had commended Latin mainly by deploring the assertion that liturgy should always be in the vernacular. The equally muted tone in the council's commendation of obligatory celibacy for the clergy is likely to have had the same diplomatic motivation in regard to the Eastern Churches, with their tradition of married clergy. Greater flexibility and imagination in implementing the celibacy requirement would greatly have helped the Church's world mission in societies where an insistence on celibacy was countercultural and baffling.
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Everything nearly collapsed over one issue: where ultimate authority lay in the Church. This began with attempts to compel bishops to reside in their dioceses, and by a general and rather necessary debate about the nature of ordination - had the office of bishop been constituted by Christ or by the Church in its early development? If the latter, it implied that the authority of bishops came from the pope, successor of Peter, chosen by Christ to be the rock on which he built his Church (Matthew 16.18), rather than that every bishop was a direct representative of Christ's authority. Prince-bishops in the empire were only the most prominent members of the episcopate to feel unenthusiastic about an exclusive affirmation of the pope's position. The issue was too explosive to resolve, and it took some masterly drafting to create a formula which would not definitively place exclusive divine authority in either the papacy or the general body of the episcopate. In practice, many centralizing reforms later in the century put the advantage in the hands of the papacy, particularly because these reforms gave the pope and his officials prime responsibility for interpreting what the decrees and canons of Trent actually meant. In the very different situation of the nineteenth century, the first Vatican Council of 1870 formally made the resolution in favour of papal primacy which had been impossible in the 1560s (see pp. 824-5).

Trent bequeathed the Church a programme which had first been tried out in the kingdom of England in the reign of Queen Mary, after her unexpected accession in 1553 (see p. 632). Mary's reign has not often been seen as a Tridentine experiment, partly because it hardly had time to get going in the five years of life left to her, so it has been treated by Protestant English historiography as a sterile interlude in a smoothly developing Protestant Reformation. Mary deserves pity for the disappointment of her passionate hopes for a son who would carry on her work, making her believe in pregnancies long after it was sadly obvious to all those around her that they did not exist. She did not improve her historical legacy by sponsoring the burning of Protestants as heretics, a campaign whose intensity was, in comparison with other parts of Europe, a decade or two out of date. It only bred a celebration of martyrs to which English Protestantism rallied for centuries. At the same time the Queen was not helped by Pope Paul IV, who after his accession, among his many efforts to settle old scores, tried to bring down his old adversary Cardinal Pole, as a pestilential survivor of the
Spirituali
. Pole was now back in his native land, having succeeded the executed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. Julius III had very sensibly chosen Pole as papal legate (representative) to the newly Catholic England, but now Paul summoned the Cardinal Archbishop to Rome to face charges of heresy. Pope Paul also declared war on Mary's husband, King Philip II of Spain. Poor Mary, devout daughter of the Church, found herself in the crazy position of defying the Pope and forbidding Pole to leave her realm for what would almost certainly have been a heretic's death in Rome. The equally Catholic King of Poland had a similar experience of Paul's paranoia.
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Yet if we look past the ghastly mistake of the burnings and the dismal relations with the papacy, creative re-examination reveals Mary's Church as a forerunner of much which happened in the Tridentine world, led after all by an archbishop who had devoted his career to meditating on Church reform.
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England undertook a remarkably efficient operation to discipline clergy who had married in King Edward VI's reign, in no more than a couple of years separating them from their wives and successfully redeploying most of them in new parishes; Rome spent the next half-century trying to secure such uniform clerical celibacy in central Europe. In the synod of the English Church which he was able to summon as papal legate, Pole sorted out decades of deteriorating Church finance and pioneered new eucharistic devotions; his bishops encouraged preaching and published official sermons to match those of Protestants, and crucially set out to implement a programme of clergy training schools, seminaries, for each diocese: the first time that the Catholic Church had seriously addressed the problem of equipping a parish clergy to equal the developing articulacy of Protestant ministers.

In the five years of Mary's reign, the Jesuits did not begin work in England. For the time being they left the task to distinguished Spanish Dominicans imported by King Philip, since they had much else to do and currently had no trained English members for the Society - but an English version of Ignatius's
Exercises
went on sale, and Jesuits actually arrived in 1558 poised for action, only to be pre-empted by Mary's death.
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English Catholicism now faced a disaster, since Philip could only have succeeded to the English throne if Mary had borne him an heir, under the stringent terms of the marriage deal of 1554, negotiated by English politicians whose suspicion of Habsburg acquisitiveness had outweighed their Catholic sentiment. Instead, the new queen, last of the Tudors, was Protestant Elizabeth, who did not expend great energy in responding to some rather unconvincing courting from her half-sister's widower. Now the Jesuits were banned from the realm, together with all other Catholic clergy trained abroad, facing execution if they arrived in England and were captured, yet Catholics still felt an urgent need to sustain the minority who wanted to remain loyal to Rome. In the face of often savage though inconsistent repression (and also amid some bitter internal disagreements about future strategy), Jesuit and non-Jesuit clergy alike patiently and heroically built up a community of Catholics, led by gentry families scattered throughout England and Wales. It survived Elizabeth's death in 1603 and persisted through seventeenth-century persecutions and eighteenth-century marginalization, embodied in a formidable set of discriminatory legislation, into modern times.
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In Elizabethan Ireland, Franciscan friars led a parallel mission which was able to enjoy far wider success, partly because the Protestant Reformation there quickly became fatally identified with Westminster's exploitation of the island and made little effort to express itself in the Gaelic language then spoken by the majority of the population. Ireland became the only country in Reformation Europe where, over a century, a monarchy with a consistent religious agenda failed to impose it on its subjects: an extraordinary failure on the part of the Tudors and Stuarts. Yet there is irony in that exceptional story. It was Catholic Queen Mary who implemented a policy of planting settlements of English incomers in Leix and Offaly, counties which were officially known until the revolution of 1918-22 as King's and Queen's Counties, a commemoration of both Mary and her husband, Philip of Spain, already the proprietor of the spectacularly successful Spanish colonies in Central and South America. If the English monarchy had remained Catholic, perhaps Ireland would have become as Protestant as the Dutch Republic in reaction to this alien colonial occupation; but as it was, Mary's early death and Protestant Elizabeth's accession made it increasingly easy for both the Gaelic- and English-speaking Irish to identify Catholicism as a symbol of Irish difference from the English.

With England lost, and most of northern Europe in Protestant hands, Tridentine Catholicism looked to Habsburg power. Charles V on his abdication as emperor in 1556, exhausted by the effort of governing his vast empire, had divided his family inheritance: his younger brother Ferdinand had been elected Holy Roman Emperor and took the other Habsburg territories of central Europe, while Charles's son Philip had received Spain and all its overseas dominions. Although both branches of the family were determined to uphold papal Catholicism, their priorities differed, and the Austrian Habsburgs were themselves divided. Ferdinand I was mindful of the Habsburgs' recent defeat at the hands of Lutheran princes of the empire which had forced him to sign the Peace of Augsburg (his brother Charles could not bring himself to do this). He was ruler over three powerful varieties of Western Christianity: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Bohemian Utraquist Hussitism. Both Ferdinand and his son Maximilian II sought accommodations with Lutherans, wheedled a reluctant pope into allowing Catholic laity into receiving the Eucharist Hussite-style in both bread and wine, and maintained a Court in Vienna sheltering a remarkable variety of religious belief. Maximilian's younger brother Archduke Ferdinand felt very differently, and he implemented an aggressive Catholic agenda in the various family dominions which he administered in the course of a long life. A further brother, Karl, joined the Archduke Ferdinand in his intransigence, and entered a marriage alliance with the one prominent imperial princely family who had remained Catholic, the Wittelsbach Dukes of Bavaria.
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In concert they encouraged the Jesuits to set up institutions in towns and cities under their control, and they also made sure that important bishoprics of the empire did not slide into the hands of Lutherans in the manner pioneered by the Hohenzollern Grand Master of the Teutonic Order (see p. 615).

King Philip II of Spain, freed by bereavement from his unexciting and ultimately embarrassing marriage to Queen Mary of England, returned to Spain in 1559 to sort out a rising tide of turbulence and financial chaos; in tackling this, he saw the Spanish Inquisition as a chief ally. Ruling from a monumental but bleak new monastery-palace, the Escorial, which also incorporated his future tomb, Philip brought his temperamental workaholism to the task of being a world ruler as significant in God's plan as his father before him - the Escorial's grid-pattern plan was based on Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, although it is not surprising that visitors commonly supposed it to have been based on the gridiron which legend said had been the instrument of torture and death for the palace's patron saint, Lawrence.
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Philip and his government committed themselves to the proposition that there was only one way to be a Spaniard: a traditionalist Catholic, untainted by unsupervised contact with alien thought, now Protestant as well as Islamic or Jewish. The King was readily persuaded to back the Spanish Inquisition's busy efforts to achieve this end.

Some unlikely figures became victims of the Inquisition's implementation of the policy. The Society of Jesus was still as much an object of suspicion as the young Inigo de Loyola, and the nobleman who had pioneered Jesuit general education projects, no less a figure than Francisco de Borja, Duke of Gandia, former Viceroy of Catalonia now turned Jesuit, was hounded out of the country before becoming an outstanding Superior-General for the Society.
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The Inquisition even ruined the career of Bartolome Carranza, Archbishop of Spain's primatial see of Toledo, and a distinguished Dominican theologian. He had been an important assistant to Cardinal Pole in the English Marian experiment, but he had made the mistake of learning too much about Protestant heresy during his conscientious efforts to refute it. As a result Carranza spent nearly seventeen years in prison deprived even of attendance at Mass, and although briefly rehabilitated, he died a broken man when he might have been an ideal Counter-Reformation leader for Spain. Moreover, Carranza's arrest had been triggered by the Inquisition's alarm at the content of the Catechism which he had drafted for use in Marian England, and which was eventually to appear as a banned book in the Indexes issued by both the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. Carranza's Catechism was nevertheless taken up to form the basis for the Tridentine Catechism authorized by the Pope after the Council of Trent, a final touch of black comedy in this dismal affair.
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