The Council of Trent, The Spiritual Exercises and The Catholic Reform

1965 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. McNally
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Order ◽  
Spiritual Exercises ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Catholic Reform ◽  
Francis I ◽  
The Church

Four hundred years ago, on December 4, 1563, the Council of Trent held its twenty-fifth and last solemn session. During eighteen difficult years it dominated the ecclesiastical affairs of Europe and its influence was felt far and wide even in the temporal order. No one in Christendom was indifferent to its proceedings, for the issues involved in this Council touched in one way or another the lives of all. In the course of the years it was supported and resisted in turn by their Catholic majesties, Charles V and Francis I, as well as by the Protestant Estates of Germany. Vituperated by Luther and Calvin and avoided by the evangelical theologians it became a wall of separation between the old and the new orders. United Christendom, which witnessed its convocation in 1545, had vanished as a reality before its closure in 1563. Assembled under trying conditions it was almost doomed to failure before it commenced; the task, which confronted this reform council, was gigantic. For it was asked to revitalize and renew the Church weighed down with the burden of the centuries. In effect, the reform, which the Fathers of this Council achieved, initiated the transformation of the medieval into the modern Church.

Purity and Pollution in Protestant Ritual Ethics

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-62
Author(s):  
Klaus C. Yoder
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Charles V ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Church

Purification of the Church is frequently invoked to narrate Protestant justifications for the break from Rome during the Reformation. It also functions to link the Reformation to a process of modern disenchantment. However, little attention has been paid to the rhetoric of pollution and precisely how the reformers articulated the dangers of polluted ritual. The historical location of the sources examined here is the middle decades of the 16th century when Protestants were dealing with political setbacks to the Reformation cause in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly the imposition of the Augsburg Interim by Charles V. This law was designed to find some middle ground between Catholics and Protestants until the schism would be settled at the Council of Trent. However, the debates about whether certain ceremonies, supposedly non-binding with respect to doctrinal commitments, could be used for politically expedient purposes, pushed Protestant thinkers to reassess the power and dangers of liturgical practices and paraphernalia. This article interprets the discourse of pollution in Protestant controversies about compromise in ritual matters by treating the responses of two theologians writing against the Interim from different parts of Germany: Joachim Westphal and Wolfgang Musculus. By laying out the causes of ritual pollution and its negative effects upon body and soul according to individuals who worked for reform in both their intellectual activity as well as their pastoral service, this article demonstrates the importance of ritual matters for Protestant moral thought.

Molding the Model Bishop from Trent to Vatican II

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-86
Author(s):  
Celeste McNamara
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Reform ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

The creation of new saints often has a political edge; the Catholic Church molds saints’ lives to fit its needs, and individual popes have particular priorities in saint-making. In the early modern Church, this was particularly important after the Council of Trent. The Tridentine decrees (1563) instructed bishops to reform the Church but provided few practical suggestions for how to do this. One solution was to hold up exemplary post-Tridentine bishops as models through beatification and canonization. Historians have noted the importance of model bishops but have not fully considered the process of creating them and its implication for the histories of Catholic Reform and of canonization. The case of Cardinal-Bishop Gregorio Barbarigo of Padua (bp. 1664–1697) tells a complicated and interesting story about the intersection of Catholic Reform and canonization. Barbarigo was beatified in 1761 during the Catholic Enlightenment and was finally canonized in 1960, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. Examining the construction of his image from 1699–1960, this article argues that the Catholic Church in both the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries molded Barbarigo into the model bishop needed at those particular times, in response to the issues facing contemporary bishops and clergy.

Culture and the Spanish Civil War - A Fascist View: 1936-1939

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kessel Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Scientific Investigation ◽  
Intellectual Freedom ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Spanish Inquisition ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Foreign Ideas ◽  
The Church

Almost from the inception of the Spanish Inquisition which sought to stifle scientific investigation and philosophical speculation while rejecting foreign ideologies, contrary currents existed in Spain. The liberal humanistic movement headed by Erasmus preached intellectual freedom and a defense of interior religión. This ideology never disappeared in Spain in spite of the formation of the Company of Jesus by Ignacio de Loyola and the efforts of Spanish theologians who promoted the Counter Reformation at the Council of Trent. Under Felipe II foreign ideas were forbidden as heretical and interpretations independent of the Church were stifled. Nevertheless, criticism of the status quo continued. Reginaldo González Montano wrote the first attack on the Inquisition, Sanctae Inquisitioms Hispanicae in 1567.

Italian Wars, 1494–1559

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Military History ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Art Of War ◽  
Kingdom Of Naples ◽  
Italian Wars ◽  
Francis I ◽  
Official Records ◽  
War Art

According to the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini, Italy enjoyed peace and plenty in the years around 1490. From 1494 it was plunged into what he and others regarded as a series of “calamities,” triggered by the French kings Charles VIII (r. 1483–1498) and Louis XII (r. 1498–1515), who claimed to rule the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan, respectively. Francis I (r. 1515–1547) retained the claim to Milan, and the wars themselves continued through the reign of Henry II (r. 1547–1559). Rule over Naples was contested and secured by Ferdinand II of Aragon (r. 1479–1516) and maintained by his Iberian successors. Milan was an imperial fief, so was contested by Ferdinand’s grandson Charles V in his capacity as Holy Roman emperor (r. 1519–1556). The conflicts waged in Italy in the names of these various princes between 1494 and 1559 are collectively known as the Italian Wars. They include the War of the League of Cambrai (1508–1516), that of the League of Cognac (1526–1530), and the War of Siena (1552–1559). This article approaches the wars by means of Reference Works and Overviews specifically devoted to the Italian Wars, though it is also worth teasing information from histories of Renaissance Warfare. Contemporary Sources provide innumerable angles on a subject that can be difficult to define beyond events on the battlefield or the besieged city and are therefore subdivided into four types: Memoirs and Chronicles, Histories, Official Records, and cultural evidence, the last of which appears under the heading Art of War, Art and War. Some publications deal with individual episodes or short spans of time and therefore feature in a Chronology of War, itself subdivided at the death of Louis XII/accession of Francis I, 1494–1515 and 1515–1559. The biographical genre—Lives and Times—is the most obvious way of dealing with the leading protagonists, who tended to be Princes, but group studies are also relevant when one turns to Subjects and Citizens who contributed to the conflicts in some form or other. Some authors have confined their research to military history, including the recruitment of soldiers, their pay, and provisions, as well as their activities on the battlefield, but the Italian Wars witnessed so much overlap between the lives of Soldiers and Civilians that they are brought together in the penultimate section of the article, which then concludes with the miscellanies that are Collections of Papers.

7. Modern Mary—Reformation to the present

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-146
Author(s):  
Mary Joan Winn Leith
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Religious Ideals ◽  
The Church

‘Modern Mary—Reformation to the present’ looks at the Virgin Mary from the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century to the present. During this period Mary was often at the centre of conflicts over religious ideals that contributed to the Enlightenment. The Catholic Council of Trent reaffirmed Mary’s perpetual virginity, intercession, pilgrimage, and relics. Catholic Marian beliefs were shaped by some of the misgivings that Protestants had voiced about Catholic views of Mary. The rosary and apparitions of Mary illustrate Catholic views of Mary after the Council of Trent. The so-called ‘Marian Century’ began in 1854 with Pope Pius IX’s declaration of Mary’s Immaculate Conception effectively ended in 1965 with the church reforms of Vatican II. Marian spirituality in the 21st century have taken often surprising directions.

Recent Narratives on Galileo and the Church: or The Three Dogmas of the Counter-Reformation

2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 489-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rivka Feldhay
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
Galileo Affair ◽  
Catholic Reform ◽  
The Church

The ArgumentThis article confronts an old-new orientation in the historiographical literature on the “Galileo affair.” It argues that a varied group of historians moved by different cultural forces in the last decade of the twentieth century tends to crystallize a consensus about the inevitability of the conflict between Galileo and the Church and its outcome in the trial of 1633. The “neo-conflictualists” — as I call them — have built their case by adhering to and developing the “three dogmas of the Counter-Reformation”: Church authoritarianism is portrayed by them as verging towards “totalitarianism.” A preference for a literal reading of the Scriptures is understood as a mode of “fundamentalism.” And mild skeptical positions in astronomy are read as expressions of “instrumentalism,” or “fictionalism.” The main thrust of the article lies in an attempt to historicize these three aspects of the Catholic reform movement. Finally, the lacunae in insufficiently explored historiographical landscape are delineated in order to tame the temptation to embrace the three dogmas, and to modify the radical conflictualist version of the story of Galileo and the Church.

Bullfighting, the Basque Clergy, and Tridentine Reform

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 489-526
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Court System ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Catholic Reform

The post–Council of Trent court records for the diocese of Pamplona (northern Iberia) record numerous and ongoing incidents of clergy accused of running with and fighting bulls. Placed within the context of efforts to implement Tridentine and Catholic reform in the diocese, contemporaneous lay legal actions, and conflicting ideas of appropriate gendered behavior and professionalism of the clergy, these episodes illuminate how parishioners effectively used the court system and crafted accusations to promote local interests and punish unpopular priests.

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