The Growth of the Secular Clergy and the Development of Educational Institutions in the Diocese of Novara (1563–1772)

1989 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Deutscher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
Diocesan Priests

The Counter-Reformation initiated a long period of growth in the numbers of the secular and religious clergy of Catholic Europe. Mario Rosa has observed that in Italy the clerical population reached its peak in the first half of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu described the peninsula as a ‘monk's paradise’, and that it declined thereafter as reformist governments attempted to curb the religious orders and restrict new ordinations to the priesthood. According to Rosa, in the early eighteenth century the Italian Church had a ‘plethora’ of poorly trained priests who lived on the meagre sums provided by their patrimony and sought to improve their lot by obtaining benefices and endowments. In spite of the efforts of the hierarchy to improve clerical education, Rosa continues, Italian seminaries lacked adequate resources to train the great numbers of clerics.Rosa's observations about the expanding ecclesiastical population before the mid-eighteenth century are borne out by statistical evidence to be found in the archive of the northern diocese of Novara, where numbers of secular or diocesan priests tripled between the early seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the composition of the Novarese priests and to test the applicability of Rosa's observations about the economic status and education of the Italian clergy to the diocese of Novara.

La dévotion mariale aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles en Provence

1986 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-64
Author(s):  
Bernard Cousin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
Cult Of The Virgin ◽  
Ancien Régime

The article assesses recent research which sheds light on the devotion to the Virgin Mary in Provence during the Counter- Reformation, and was spread by religious orders, and taken up by the secular clergy and pious laymen grouped together into brothe rhoods, Provence, which is close to Italy and the papal enclaves, was the favourite area for the blossoming of the cult of the Virgin Mary, the mainspring of pious fervour in the second half of the seventeenth century. This is shown by the number and naming of the brotherhoods (of the Rosary, of penitents...), the changing of the paintings in churches and chapels, which, from retable to ex- voto, give the Virgin a privileged position, and the setting up of new chapels of pilgrimage dedicated to Mary who is regarded as the universal protector in contrast with the very specialized thera peutic saints. The success of the devotion to the Virgin Mary in Provence during the last century of the Ancien Régime, significantly affects the choices made at important passages in life: an increase passages in the number of baby girls christened Mary, the genera lization of invocations to the Virgin Mary in the testaments, which declines however in the second half of the eighteenth century. But the devotion to the Virgin Mary will prove one of the main sup ports for the Catholic come-back in the nineteenth century

State intervention in disputes between secular and regular clergy in early seventeenth-century Ireland

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-326
Author(s):  
Mark Empey
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Initial Period ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
The Catholic Church ◽  
Episcopal Authority

The success of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy was a remarkable achievement. Between 1618 and 1630 Rome made a staggering nineteen episcopal appointments in a kingdom that was ruled by a Protestant king. Documenting the achievements of the initial period only paints half the picture, however. The implementation of the Tridentine reforms and the thorny issue of episcopal authority brought the religious orders into a head-on collision with the secular clergy. This protracted dispute lasted for a decade, most notably in the diocese of Dublin where an English secular priest, Paul Harris, led a hostile attack on the Franciscan archbishop, Thomas Fleming. The longevity of the feud, though, owed at least as much to the intervention of Lord Deputy Sir Thomas Wentworth as it did to the internal tensions of the Catholic Church. Despite Wentworth’s influential role, he has been largely written out of the conflict. This article addresses the lacunae in the current historiography and argues that the lord deputy’s interference was a decisive factor in exacerbating the hostilities between the secular and regular clergy in early seventeenth-century Ireland.

Dissent and Education

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Burden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Educational Activity ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Higher Educational Institutions ◽  
Legal Restrictions ◽  
Higher Educational ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Dissenting Academies

Much eighteenth-century Dissenting educational activity was built on an older tradition of Puritan endeavour. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the godly had seen education as an important tool in spreading their ideas but, in the aftermath of the Restoration, had found themselves increasingly excluded from universities and schools. Consequently, Dissenters began to develop their own higher educational institutions (in the shape of Dissenting academies) and also began to set up their own schools. While the enforcement of some of the legal restrictions that made it difficult for Dissenting institutions diminished across the eighteenth century, the restrictions did not disappear entirely. While there has been considerable focus on Dissenting academies and their contribution to debates about doctrinal orthodoxy, the impact of Dissenting schools was also considerable.

City of Women, City of God

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Demographic Shifts

Chapter 1 examines the hagiography of local holy woman Anna Guerra de Jesús who migrated to Guatemala’s capital in the late seventeenth century. While the early modern Catholic ideal of feminine piety prized enclosure, obedience, and virginity, Anna was neither nun nor virgin, but rather a poor abandoned wife and mother. And although Church decrees clearly required actively religious laywomen to live in cloistered communities, Anna became an independent beata (laywoman who took informal vows) and Jesuit tertiary. This chapter explores Anna’s lived religious experience as a poor migrant and abandoned wife and mother, her engagement with female mysticism and devotional networks, and her alliances with powerful priests and religious orders. It also places Anna’s story within the context of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, particularly urban demographic shifts and social tensions, as well as movements for spiritual renewal and enthusiastic lay female piety.

Early Modern Jansenism

2015 ◽  
pp. 435-450
Author(s):  
Ephraim Radner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Reformation Movement

This chapter presents Jansenism as an originally seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation movement with a key commitment to a certain theology of grace. This had several pastoral consequences that were broadly influential among both Catholics and Protestants, especially in the areas of scriptural study and devotion. Jansenist interest in the Augustinian tradition, however, proved a losing cause within the evolving modern church. Three papal bulls condemned certain Jansenist ideas and provided the impetus for the conflict with Rome, the French monarchy, and other institutions. The major political aspects associated with the movement in the eighteenth century eventually overwhelmed its theology and hopes. By the nineteenth century, the movement’s final political phase was seen as an amalgam of anti-papalism, anti-Jesuitism, conciliarism, republicanism, and nationalism.

The English Secular Clergy and the Counter-Reformation

1983 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Spiritual Direction ◽  
European Language ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
History Of

The century from the calling of the Council of Trent to the conclusion of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle stands out as one of the most creative in the pastoral history of Christian Europe. The great number of new apostolic orders, the devotional flowering in France which tamed and domesticated the mysticism of Spain for everyman, the renovation of the parish and the priestly life aspired to by Carlo Borromeo, Pierre Berulle and Vincent de Paul are all aspects of a transformation which is the spiritual face of the baroque. The practice of confession stands somewhere near the centre of this transformation. From an annual social rite concerned essentially with the restoration of peace and the guaranteeing of restitution, it became a monthly or even weekly private rite of reconciliation of the penitent with God. It became, too, the focus for the direction of souls which was now seen, supremely in the work of Francis de Sales, as a central part of the work of the priest. The Salesian tradition was to dominate the flood of devotional manuals published in every European language in the seventeenth century, and in it the practice of confession was developed beyond the juridical and canonical framework of Trent, and turned into a subtle and highly personal instrument of spiritual direction.

Commercial Society and Christian Virtue: The Mandeville-Law Dispute

1989 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Nieli
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Bernard Mandeville ◽  
Material Progress

From earliest apostolic and patristic times, Christian writers have generally been suspicious of the common human desire to improve one's economic status. In Britain, however, by the end of the seventeenth century, this suspicion had all but vanished as most Christians began to accommodate themselves to the exigencies of an increasingly dynamic commercial society. This article takes up the early eighteenth-century controversy over the compatibility of traditional Christian moral virtues with the demands of economic and material progress as reflected in the writings of the two most important antagonists in the controversy, Bernard Mandeville and William Law. Although both Mandeville and Law spoke the language of Christian rigorism and perfectionism, and proclaimed attachment to the full austerity of the Christian Gospels, Mandeville, it is explained, was really a hedonist in disguise who feigned attachment to traditional Christian and Stoic ascetic principles merely to be able to discredit those principles. Law, it is explained, was a man of uncommon piety and devoutness who was shocked by the increasing secularism and materialism of his age, and who sought to recall his contemporaries to a life of true Christian holiness. The article concludes with an evaluation of the relative merits of the positions of each of the two thinkers.

Ecclesiastical Politics and the Counter-Reformation in Ireland, 1618–1648

1960 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. F. Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
European Country ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Irish Question

The internal politics of the Counter-Reformation varied in accordance with the individual circumstances of each European country. Nevertheless, many of the problems raised were common to all. The reception of the Tridentine decrees, the clash of regular and secular clergy, the pressure of local, ecclesiastical, and secular interests, the influence of the Spanish monarchy, and the part played by changing conditions in the structure of the Curia itself, especially the foundation of the Congregation of Propaganda in 1622—these affected societies as disparate as the Holy Roman Empire and Ireland. Against this background, Irish ecclesiastical history is of more than parochial or diocesan interest, and its disputes during the early seventeenth century throw light, by analogy, upon wider European developments. Indeed, so far as the British Isles are concerned, the Counter-Reformation was mainly an ‘Irish question’, much as Catholic Emancipation was to be later, although it was to throw up no figures of the same calibre as Campion or Parsons.

Ecclesiastical Reform of Nunneries in New Spain in the Eighteenth Century

1965 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asunción Lavrin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Ecclesiastical Reform ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Large Numbers

During the second half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth century relaxation of the morals of religious orders, especially the masculine ones, and of the priesthood was notable in Spain and her American dominions. That this situation also existed in New Spain was reported in detail by several contemporary Viceroys in the Instrucciones to their successors. This relaxation also extended to feminine orders, though in their case it did not lead to a similar moral looseness, but to a lack of proper observance of their Rules and Constitutions. Among the main charges against nunneries were: the possession of large numbers of servants; the constant demands made upon the families of nuns for money to be spent on the needs of convents; quarrels, both among members of communities and with their Superiors, leading to appeals to civil authorities and frequent contacts with the outer world, which deteriorated the spiritual character of these institutions.

The Church and Culture in Spanish America

1958 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillermo Lohmann Villena
Keyword(s):  
Spanish America ◽  
The Other ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
University Professors ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
The University ◽  
Title Pages ◽  
The Church

For more than three centuries in the territories dependent upon the Spanish crown, the shields of bishops or of religious orders dominated the façade of the universities and of the institutions of learning; during that same period, the title pages of books of any scientific merit almost invariably carried the name of a tonsured author; architectural monuments of every class proclaimed the patronage of prelates or the protection of saints recognizing thereby their origin and purpose; schools, colleges and institutions of letters of every kind flourished in the shadow of the parishes and of the monasteries; music and theatrical functions confessed their origin in sacred ceremonies; the prirlting presses began their function under the auspices of ecclesiastics and their entire production during those centuries bears this seal. In short, the names of the university professors and of the teachers in the other educational institutions form an almost unending list of dignitaries, either of the secular clergy or of the regular, so that any summary of the outstanding figures of the intellectual life of that period shows a tremendous percentage of individuals who wore the clerical garb. It is an axiom, indeed, that the Church was in Spanish America the active patron of culture and the sponsor of knowledge almost from the day following that of the discovery. Today, fortunately, such a statement is again commonly accepted, although it was not an easy task to reach this agreement.

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