CHAPTER XXXIX
The Popes and the Council
1517-65

I. THE POPES AT BAY

WE have left to the last the difficult task, for a non-Catholic, of understanding and impartially describing the reaction of the popes to the challenge of the Reformation.

It was at first a reaction of pained surprise. The popes of the Reformation period, with perhaps one exception, were good men, so far as statesmen are permitted so to be; not selfless or sinless, but basically decent, humane, and intelligent, and sincerely convinced that the Church was an institution not only magnificent in its achievements but still indispensable to the moral health and mental peace of European man. Granting that the human ministrants of the Church had fallen into serious abuses, were there not equivalent or worse defects in every secular administration? And if one should hesitate to over-throw civil government because of the greed of princes and the peculations of officials, should one hesitate any the less to subvert a Church that had been for a thousand years, through religion, education, literature, philosophy, and art, the nourishing mother of European civilization? What if some dogmas that had been found helpful in promoting morality and order seemed difficult of digestion by the historian or the philosopher—were the doctrines proposed by the Protestants so much more rational or credible as to warrant turning Europe upside down over the difference? In any case, religious doctrines were determined not by the logic of a few but by the needs of many; they were a frame of belief within which the common man, inclined by nature to a hundred unsocial actions, could be formed into a being sufficiently disciplined and self-controlled to make society and civilization possible. Let that frame be shattered, and another would have to be built, perhaps after centuries of moral and psychical disorder; for were not the Reformers agreed with the Church that a moral code would be ineffective unless supported by religious belief? As to the intellectual classes, were they any freer or happier under Protestant princes than under Catholic popes?* Had not art flowered under the leadership of the Church, and was it not withering under the hostility of reformers who wished to take from the people the images that fed the poetry and hope of their lives? What commanding reasons were there, to mature minds, for atomizing Christendom into countless sects, each vilifying and nullifying the others, and individually powerless against the instincts of men?

We cannot know that these were the sentiments of the Reformation popes, for the active leaders of men seldom publish their philosophies. But we may so imagine the mood of Leo X (1513-21), who found the papacy rocking under his feet so soon after he had been called to enjoy it. He was a man like many of us—guilty of sin and criminal negligence, but, all in all, forgivable. He was usually the kindest of men, feeding half the poets of Rome; yet he pursued the heretics of Brescia to the death, and tried to believe that disruptive ideas could be roasted out of mankind. He was as patient with Luther as could have been asked of a pope and a Medici; imagine the tables turned, and how Pope Martin would have blasted rebellious Leo from the earth! Leo mistook the Reformation as an unmannerly dispute among unsophisticated monks. And yet, early in 1517, at the very outset of his pontificate, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (nephew of the more famous Pico) had delivered before the Pope and the cardinals a remarkable address “painting in the darkest manner the corruption which had made its way into the Church,” and predicting that “if Leo .... refuses to heal the wounds, it is to be feared that God Himself will no longer apply a slow remedy, but will cut off and destroy the diseased members with fire and sword.”¹ Despite this warning, Leo absorbed himself in maintaining, for the protection of the Papal States, a balance of power between France and the Empire; “he never gave a thought,” says a Catholic historian, “to reform on the grand scale which had become necessary.... The Roman Curia remained as worldly as ever.” ²

The best proof that reform could come only by a blow from without was the failure of Adrian VI (1522-23). Candidly admitting the abuses, and undertaking to reform them at the top, Adrian was ridiculed and reviled by the Romans as threatening their supply of transalpine gold; and after two years of contending against this unenlightened selfishness Adrian died of frustration.

The accumulated storm burst upon the head of Clement VII (1523-34) Intellectually and morally he was among the best popes, humane and generous, defending the hounded Jews, taking no part in the sexual or financial looseness that surrounded him, and continuing to the end of his troubled life to nourish with discriminating patronage the art and literature of Italy. Perhaps he was too well educated to be a successful administrator; his intellect was keen enough to see good reasons for every course in every crisis; his knowledge sapped his courage, and his vacillations alienated power after power. We cannot withhold all sympathy from a man so well intentioned; who saw Rome sacked under his eyes, and himself imprisoned by a mob and an emperor; who was prevented by that Emperor from seeking a reasonable peace with Henry VIII; who had to make the bitter choice between losing Henry and England or Charles and Germany; who, when he protested against the alliance of Francis with the Turks, was told by that Most Christian King that if the Pope protested further, France would divorce itself from the papacy. Never had a pope drunk the cup of office to such bitter dregs.

His errors were catastrophic. When he miscalculated the character and resources of Charles, and so invited the Sack of Rome, he dealt the prestige of the papacy a blow that emboldened northern Germany to renounce allegiance to Rome. When he crowned the man who had permitted that attack he lost the respect of even the Catholic world. He yielded to Charles partly through lack of material power to resist, partly because he feared that an alienated Emperor would call a general council of laity as well as clergy, would seize the reins of both ecclesiastical and secular authority, would complete the subjection of the Church to the rampant state, might even depose him as a bastard.³ If he had had the courage that his uncle Lorenzo de’ Medici had shown at Naples in 1479, Clement would have taken the initiative, and would have called a council that under his liberal leadership might have reformed the morals and doctrine of the Church, and saved the unity of Western Christendom.

His successor seemed at first sight to have all the requisites of both intellect and character. Born in. a rich and cultured family, instructed in the classics by Pomponius Laetus, maturing as a humanist among the Medici in Florence, favored by a pope whom his sister had entangled in her golden hair, made a cardinal at twenty-five (1493), proving his mettle in difficult diplomatic assignments, rising to unquestioned pre-eminence in the college of cardinals, and unanimously elected pope in 1534, Alessandro Farnese, as Paul III, was universally recognized as the right man for the highest office in the Christian world. The esteem in which he was held suffered little from his having begotten four children before his ordination as a priest (1519). Yet his character, like his career, showed uncertainty and contradictions, partly because he stood like a shaken pillar between the Renaissance that he loved and a Reformation that he could not understand or forgive. Frail in body, he survived fifteen years of political and domestic storms. Equipped with all the learning of his time, he regularly resorted to astrologers to determine the most favorable hour for a journey, a decision, even an audience.⁴ A man of strong feeling, and given now and then to bursts of anger, he was noted for his self-control. Cellini, whom he had to imprison, described him “as one who had no faith in God or aught beside”;⁵ this seems extreme; and certainly Paul had faith in himself until, in his final years, the behavior of his progeny weakened his will to live. He was punished where he had sinned; he restored the nepotism that had marked the Renaissance papacy, gave Piacenza and Parma to his son Pierluigi and Camerino to his grandson Ottavio, bestowed the red hat on his nephews, fourteen and seventeen years old, and promoted them despite their notorious immorality. He had character without morals, and intellect without wisdom.

He recognized the justice of the criticisms directed by the Reformers at the administration of the Church, and if ecclesiastical amendment had been the only obstacle to reconciliation he might have ended the Reformation. In 1535 he sent Pierpaolo Vergerio to sound out Protestant leaders about attending a general council, but he would not promise to allow any substantial change in the defined faith or in the authority of the popes. Vergerio returned from Germany worse than empty-handed, for he reported that Catholics there joined Protestants in doubting the Pope’s sincerity in proposing a council,⁶ and that Archduke Ferdinand complained that he could find no confessor who was not a fornicator, a drunkard, or an ignoramus.⁷ Paul tried again in 1536; he commissioned Peter van der Vorst to arrange terms with the Lutherans for a council, but Peter was rebuffed by the Elector of Saxony, and achieved nothing. Finally Paul made the culminating effort of the Church to reach an understanding with her critics: he sent to a conference at Ratisbon Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, a man of unquestioned sincerity in the Catholic movement for reform.

We cannot withhold sympathy from the old cardinal who braved the snows of Apennines and Alps in February and March 1541, eager to crown his life with the organization of religious peace. Everyone at Ratisbon was impressed by his modesty, simplicity, and good will. He mediated with saintly patience between the Catholic Eck, Pflug, and Gropper, and the Protestant Melanchthon, Bucer, and Pistorius. Agreement was reached on original sin, free will, baptism, confirmation, and holy orders, and on May 3 Contarini wrote joyfully to Cardinal Farnese: “God be praised! Yesterday the Catholic and Protestant theologians came to an agreement on the doctrine of justification.” But on the Eucharist no acceptable compromise could be found. The Protestants would not admit that a priest could transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; and the Catholics felt that to surrender transubstantiation would be to give up the very heart of the Mass and the Roman ritual. Contarini returned to Rome exhausted with failure and grief, only to be branded as a Lutheran by the rigidly orthodox followers of Cardinal Caraffa. Paul himself was not clear that he could accept the formulas that Contarini had signed; however, he gave him a friendly welcome, and appointed him papal legate at Bologna. There, five months after his arrival, Contarini died.

The politics of religion became ever more cloudy and confused. Paul wondered if reconciliation of the Protestants with the Church would give Charles V so united and peaceful a Germany that the Emperor would be free to turn south and connect his north and south Italian realms by appropriating the Papal States and ending the temporal power of the popes. Francis I, likewise dreading the pacification of Germany, charged Contarini with having shamefully surrendered to heretics, and he pledged his full support to Paul if the Pope would firmly reject peace with the Lutherans⁸—with whom Francis sought alliance. Paul seems to have decided that a religious understanding would be politically ruinous. In 1538, by brilliant diplomacy, he brought Charles and Francis to sign a truce at Nice; then, having made Charles secure in the west, he urged him to fall upon the Lutherans. When Charles neared victory (1546) Paul withdrew the papal contingent that he had sent to him, for again he trembled lest an Emperor with no Protestant problem in his rear would be tempted to subdue all Italy. The Pope became a pro-tempore Protestant, and viewed Lutheranism as a protector of the papacy—much as Suleiman had been a protector of Lutheranism. Meanwhile his other shield against Charles—Francis I—was allying himself with Turks who repeatedly threatened to invade Italy and attack Rome. Some vacillation may be forgiven to a pope so harassed and beset, armed with a handful of troops, and defended by a faith that only the weak seemed to cherish. We perceive how small a role religion played in these struggles for power when we hear the comment of Charles to the papal nuncio on learning that Paul was turning to France: the Pope, said the Emperor, had caught in old age an infection usually acquired in youth, the morbus gallicus, the French disease.⁹

Paul neither stopped Protestantism nor effected any substantial reforms, but he revitalized the papacy and restored it to grandeur and influence. He remained to the end a Renaissance pope. He encouraged and financed the work of Michelangelo and other artists, beautified Rome with new buildings, embellished the Vatican with the Sala Regia and the Cappella Paolina, took part in brilliant receptions, welcomed fair women to his table, received musicians, buffoons, female singers and dancers, at his court;¹⁰ even in his eighties this Farnese was no spoil-sport. Titian transmitted him to us in a series of powerful portraits. The best (in the Naples Museum) shows the seventy-five-year-old Pontiff still strong, his face furrowed with problems of state and family, but his head not yet bowed to time. Three years later Titian painted an almost prophetic picture (also in Naples) of Paul and his nephews Ottavio and Alessandro; the Pope, now bent and weary, seems to question Ottavio suspiciously. In 1547 Paul’s son Pierluigi was assassinated: in 1548 Ottavio rebelled against his father, and entered into an agreement with Paul’s enemies to make Parma an Imperial fief, The old Pope, defeated even by his children, surrendered himself to death (1549).

Julius III (1550-55) misnamed himself; there was nothing in him of the virility and power and grandiose aims of Julius II; rather, he resumed the easy ways of Leo X, and enjoyed the papacy with amiable prodigality, as if the Reformation had died with Luther. He hunted, kept court jesters, gambled for large sums, patronized bullfights, made a cardinal out of a page who took care of his monkey, and, all in all, gave Rome its last taste of Renaissance paganism in morals and art.¹¹ Outside the Porta del Popolo he had Vignola and others build for him the pretty Villa di Papa Giulio (1553), and made it a center of artists, poets, and festivities. He accommodated himself peacefully to the policies of Charles V. He suffered inopportunely from gout, and tried to cure it by fasting; this papal epicurean seems to have died of abstemiousness,¹² or, said others,¹³ of dissipation.

Pope Marcellus II was almost a saint. His moral life was blameless, his piety was profound, his appointments were exemplary, his efforts for Church reform were sincere; but he died on the twenty-second day of his pontificate (May 5, 1555).

As if to make clear that the Counter Reformation had reached the papacy, the cardinals now raised to power the soul and voice of the reform movement in the Church, the ascetic Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, who took the name of Paul IV (1555-59). Already seventy-nine, he was immovably fixed in his views, and dedicated himself to their implementation with a firmness of will and an intensity of passion hardly becoming a man of his years. “The Pope,” wrote the Florentine ambassador, “is a man of iron, and the very stones over which he walks emit sparks.”¹⁴ Born near Benevento, he carried the heat of southern Italy in his blood, and fire seemed ever burning in his deepsunken eyes. His temper was volcanic, and only the Spanish ambassador, backed by Alva’s legions, dared to cross him. Paul IV hated Spain for having mastered Italy; and as Julius II and Leo X had dreamed of expelling the French, so the first goal of this energetic octogenarian was to liberate Italy and the papacy from Spanish-Imperial domination. He denounced Charles V as a secret atheist,¹⁵ a lunatic son of a lunatic mother, a “cripple in body and soul”;¹⁶ he branded the Spanish people as Semitic scum,¹⁷ and vowed never to recognize Philip as Viceroy of Milan. In December 1555, he concluded a treaty with Henry II of France and Ercole II of Ferrara to drive all Spanish or Imperial forces from Italy. If victorious, the papacy was to acquire Siena, the French were to get Milan, and to hold Naples as a papal fief; and both Charles and Ferdinand were to be deposed for having accepted the Protestant terms at Augsburg.¹⁸

By one of those comedies that can be seen, from a safe distance, in the tragedies of history, Philip II, the most zealous supporter of the Church, found himself at war with the papacy. Reluctantly he ordered the Duke of Alva to lead his Neapolitan army into the Papal States. In a few weeks the Duke, with 10,000 seasoned troops, overwhelmed the weak forces of the Pope, took town after town, sacked Anagni, seized Ostia, and threatened Rome (November 1556). Paul sanctioned a treaty between France and Turkey, and his secretary of state, Cardinal Carlo Caraffa, appealed to Suleiman to attack Naples and Sicily.¹⁹ Henry II sent an army into Italy under Francis, Duke of Guise; it recaptured Ostia, and the Pope rejoiced; but the defeat of the French at Saint-Quentin compelled Guise to rush back to France with his men, and Alva, unresisted, advanced to the gates of Rome. The Romans moaned with terror, and wished their reckless Pontiff in his grave.²⁰ Paul saw that further hostilities might repeat the terrible Sack of Rome, and might even drive Spain to secession from the Roman Church. On September 12, 1557, he signed a peace with Alva, who offered lenient terms, apologized for his victory, and kissed the foot of the conquered Pope.²¹ All captured papal territory was restored, but the Spanish domination of Naples, Milan, and the papacy was confirmed. So complete was this victory of the state over the Church that when Ferdinand took over the Imperial title from Charles V (1558), he was crowned by the electors, and no representative of the Pope was allowed any part in the ceremony. Thus ended the papal coronation of the Holy Roman Emperors; Charlemagne at last won his argument with Leo III.

Freed willy-nilly from the burdens of war, Paul IV gave the remainder of his pontificate to the ecclesiastical and moral reforms already recorded. He crowned them by tardily dismissing his licentious secretary, Cardinal Carlo Caraffa, and banishing from Rome two other nephews who had disgraced his pontificate. Nepotism, which for a century had flourished there, was at last evicted from the Vatican.

II. CENSORSHIP AND INQUISITION

It was under this iron Pope that censorship of publications reached its greatest severity and scope, and the Inquisition became a terror almost as inhuman in Rome as in Spain. Probably Paul IV felt that censorship of literature and suppression of heresy were unavoidable duties of a Church whichin Protestant as well as Catholic opinion—had been founded by the Son of God. For if the Church was divine, her opponents must be agents of Satan, and against these devils perpetual war was a religious obligation to an insulted God.

Censorship was almost as old as the Church herself. The Christians of Ephesus, in the age of the Apostles, burned books of “curious arts” to the alleged value of “50,000 pieces of silver,”²² and the Council of Ephesus (150) forbade the circulation of the uncanonical Acta Pauli. ²³ At various times the popes ordered the burning of the Talmud or other Jewish books. Wyclifite and later Protestant translations of the Bible were forbidden, as containing anti-Catholic prefaces, notes, and emendations. Printing heightened the anxiety of the Church to keep her members uncorrupted by false doctrines. The Fifth Council of the Lateran (1516) ordered that henceforth no books should be printed without ecclesiastical examination and consent. Secular authorities issued their own prohibitions of unlicensed publications: the Venetian Senate in 1508, the Diet of Worms and the edicts of Charles V and Francis I in 1521, the Parlement of Paris in 1542; and in 1543 Charles extended the ecclesiastical control of publications to Spanish America. The first general index of condemned books was issued by the Sorbonne in 1544; the first Italian list by the Inquisition in 1545.

In 1559 Paul IV published the first papal Index auctorum et librorum prohibitorum. It named forty-eight heretical editions of the Bible, and put sixty-one printers and publishers under the ban.²⁴ No book that had been published since 1519 without bearing the names of the author and the printer and the place and date of publication was to be read by any Catholic; and hereafter no book was to be read that had not obtained an ecclesiastical imprimatur—“let it be printed.” Booksellers and scholars complained that these measures would handicap or ruin them, but Paul insisted on full obedience. In Rome, Bologna, Naples, Milan, Florence, and Venice thousands of books were burned—10,000 in Venice in a day.²⁵ After Paul’s death leading churchmen criticized his measures as too drastic and indiscriminate. The Council of Trent rejected his Index, and issued a more orderly proscription, the “Tridentine Index” of 1564. A special Congregation of the Index was formed in 1571 to revise and republish the list periodically.

It is hard to judge the effect of this censorship. Paolo Sarpi, ex-monk and anticlerical, thought the Index “the finest secret ever discovered for ., . making men idiotic.” ²⁶ It probably shared in causing the intellectual decline of Italy after 1600, of Spain after 1700, but economic and political factors were more important. Free thought, according to its most virile English historian, survived better in Catholic than in Protestant countries; the absolutism of the Scriptures, enforced by Protestant divines, proved, till 1750, more damaging to independent investigation and speculation than the Indexes and Inquisition of the Church.²⁷ In any case the humanist movement faded out, in Catholic and Protestant countries alike. The accent on life subsided in literature; the study of Greek and the love of the pagan classics declined; and the triumphant theologians denounced the Italian humanists (not without reason) as arrogant and dissolute infidels.

The censorship of books was laxly enforced until Paul IV entrusted it to the Inquisition (1555). That institution, first established in 1217, had lapsed in power and repute under the lenience of the Renaissance popes. But when the final attempt at reconciliation with the Protestants had failed at Ratisbon, and Protestant doctrines appeared in Italy itself, even among the clergy, and entire towns like Lucca and Modena threatened to go Protestant,²⁸ Cardinal Giovanni Caraffa, Ignatius Loyola, and Charles V joined in urging the restoration of the Inquisition. Paul III yielded (1542), appointed Caraffa and five other cardinals to reorganize the institution, and empowered them to delegate their authority to specific ecclesiastics throughout Christendom. Caraffa proceeded with his accustomed severity, set up headquarters and a prison, and laid down rules for his subordinates:

Paul III and Marcellus II restrained Caraffa’s ardor, and reserved the right of pardon on appeal. Julius III was too lackadaisical to interfere with Caraffa, and several heretics were burned in Rome during his pontificate. In 1550 the new Inquisition ordered the trial of any Catholic clergyman who did not preach against Protestantism. When Caraffa himself became Paul IV, the institution was set in full motion, and under his “superhuman rigor,” said Cardinal Seripando, “the Inquisition acquired such a reputation that from no other judgment seat on earth were more horrible and fearful sentences to be expected.” ³⁰ The jurisdiction of the inquisitors was extended to cover blasphemy, simony, sodomy, polygamy, rape, procuring, violation of the Church regulations for fasting, and many other offenses that had nothing to do with heresy. To quote again a great Catholic historian:

At the height of this fury (May 31, 1557) Paul ordered the arrest of Cardinal Giovanni Morone, Bishop of Modena, and on June 14 he commanded Cardinal Pole to surrender his legatine power in England and come to Rome to face trial for heresy; the College of Cardinals, said the Pope, was itself infected with heresy. Pole was protected by Queen Mary, who prevented the papal summons from being delivered to him. Morone was charged with having signed the Ratisbon agreement on justification by faith, with having been too lenient with heretics under his jurisdiction, and with having been friendly with Pole, Vittoria Colonna, Flaminio, and other dangerous characters. After eighteen days as a prisoner in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, he was pronounced guiltless by the inquisitors, and was ordered released, but he refused to leave his cell until Paul acknowledged his innocence. Paul would not, and Morone remained a prisoner until the Pope’s death freed him. Flaminio cheated the Inquisition by dying, but, said Paul, “we have had his brother Cesare burned in the piazza before the church of the Minerva.”³² With impartial resolution the mad Pontiff pursued his own relatives with suspicions of heresy. “Even if my own father were a heretic,” he said, “I would gather the wood to burn him.”³³

Fortunately, Paul was mortal, and went to his reward after four years of rule. Rome celebrated his death with four days of joyful rioting, during which the crowd tore down his statue, dragged it through the streets, sank it in the Tiber, burned the buildings of the Inquisition, freed its prisoners, and destroyed its documents.³⁴ The Pope would have retorted that only a man of his inflexible austerity and courage could have reformed the morals of Rome and the abuses of the Church, and that he had succeeded in that enterprise where his predecessors had failed. It was a pity that in reforming the Church he had remembered Torquemada and forgotten Christ.

All Western Europe was relieved when the conclave of 1559 chose Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici to be Pope Pius IV. He was no Medici millionaire, but the son of a Milanese taxgatherer. He practiced law for a living, won the admiration and confidence of Paul III, was made a cardinal, and gained a reputation for intelligence and benevolence. As pontiff he kept clear of war, and reproved those who counseled aggressive policies. He did not end the Inquisition, but he let the inquisitors know that they “would better please him were they to proceed with gentlemanly courtesy than with monkish harshness.”³⁵ A fanatic who thought him too lenient set out to assassinate him, but was palsied with awe when the Pope passed by tranquil and defenseless. Pius enforced with polite firmness the ecclesiastical reforms established by his predecessor. He proved his conciliatory spirit by allowing the Catholic bishops of Germany to administer the Eucharist in both bread and wine. He reconvened the Council of Trent, and guided it to an orderl – conclusion. In 1565, after a pontificate that had peaceably consolidated the Counter Reformation, he passed away.

III. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT: 1545-63

A thousand voices, long before Luther, had called for a council to reform the Church. Luther appealed from the pope to a free and general council; Charles V demanded such a synod in the hope of getting the Protestant problem off his hands, and perhaps of disciplining Clement VII. That harried Pope could find a hundred reasons for postponing a council until he should be beyond its reach. He recalled what had happened to the papal power at the councils of Constance and Basel; and he could not afford to have hostile bishops, or Imperial delegates, pry into his policies, his domestic difficulties, or his birth. Besides, how could a council help the situation? Had not Luther repudiated councils as well as popes? If the Protestants were admitted to a council and were allowed freedom of speech, the consequent dispute would widen and embitter the schism and would disturb all Europe; and if they were excluded they would raise a rebellious furor. Charles wanted the council held on German soil, but Francis I refused to let the French clergy attend a gathering subject to Imperial domination; moreover, Francis wanted to keep the Protestant fires burning in the Imperial rear. It was a witches’ brew.

Paul III had all of Clement’s fears, but more courage. In 1536 he issued a call for a general council to meet at Mantua on May 23,1537, and he invited the Protestants to attend. He assumed that all parties in attendance would accept the conclusions of the conference; but the Protestants, who would be in a minority there, could hardly accept such an obligation. Luther advised against attending, and the congress of Protestants at Schmalkalden returned the Pope’s invitation unopened. The Emperor still insisted that the council should meet on German soil; on Italian soil, he argued, it would be crowded with Italian bishops and become a puppet of the Pope. After many negotiations and delays Paul agreed to have the council meet at Trent, which, though predominantly Italian, was in Imperial territory and subject to Charles. The council was summoned to meet there on November 1, 1542.

But the King of France would not play. He forbade the publication, in his realm, of the papal summons, and threatened to arrest any French clergyman who should try to attend a council held on his enemy’s terrain. When the council opened, only a few bishops, all Italian, were present, and Paul adjourned the meeting to some time when Charles and Francis would allow a full assembly. The Peace of Crépy seemed to clear the way, and Paul called for the council to reconvene on March 14, 1545. But now the renewal of danger from the Turks compelled the Emperor again to conciliate the Protestants; he asked for another postponement; and it was not till December 13, 1545, that the “Nineteenth Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church” began its active sessions at Trent.

Even that beginning was unpropitious, and far from “half the deed.” The Pope, nearing eighty, stayed in Rome, and presided, so to speak, in absentia; but he sent three cardinals to represent him—Del Monte, Cervini, and Pole. Cardinal Madruzzo of Trent, four archbishops, twenty bishops, five generals of monastic orders, some abbots, and a few theologians made up the gathering; it could hardly claim as yet to be “ecumenical”—universal.³⁶ Whereas at the councils of Constance and Basel priests, princes, and certain laymen, as well as prelates, could vote, and voting was by national groups, here only the cardinals, bishops, generals, and abbots could vote, and the voting was by individuals; hence the Italian bishops—most of them indebted or for other reasons loyal to the papacy—dominated the assembly with their numerical majority. “Congregations” sitting in Rome under the supervision of the Pope prepared the issues which alone could be submitted for debate.³⁷ Since the Council claimed to be guided by the Holy Ghost, a French delegate remarked that the third person of the Trinity regularly came to Trent in the courier’s bag from Rome.³⁸

The first debate was on procedure: should the faith be first defined and then reforms considered, or vice versa? The Pope and his Italian supporters desired first a definition of dogmas. The Emperor and his supporters sought reform first: Charles in the hope of appeasing, weakening, or further dividing the Protestants; the German and Spanish prelates in the hope that reforms would reduce the power of the Pope over the bishops and the councils. A compromise was reached: concurrent commissions would prepare resolutions on dogma and reform, and these would be presented to the Council alternately.

In May 1546, Paul sent two Jesuits, Laynez and Salmerón, to help his legates in matters of theology and papal defense; later they were joined by Peter Canisius and Claude Le Jay. The unequaled erudition of the Jesuits soon gave them paramount influence in the debates, and their unbending orthodoxy guided the Council to declare war against Reformation ideas rather than seek conciliation or unity. It was apparently the judgment of the majority that no concessions to the Protestants would heal the schism; that Protestant sects were already so numerous and diverse that no compromise could satisfy some without offending others; that any substantial alteration of traditional dogmas would weaken the whole doctrinal structure and stability of Catholicism; that the admission of priestly powers in the laity would undermine the moral authority of the priesthood and the Church; that that authority was indispensable to social order; and that a theology frankly founded on faith would stultify itself by submitting to the vagaries of individual reasoning. Consequently the fourth session of the Council (April 1546) reaffirmed every item of the Nicene Creed, claimed equal authority for Church tradition and Scripture, gave the Church the sole right to expound and interpret the Bible, and declared the Latin Vulgate of Jerome to be the definitive translation and text. Thomas Aquinas was named as the authoritative exponent of orthodox theology, and his Summa theologica was placed on an altar only below the Bible and the Decretals.³⁹ Catholicism as a religion of infallible authority dates in practice from the Council of Trent, and took form as an uncompromising response to the challenge of Protestantism, rationalism, and private judgment. The “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of the Renaissance Church with the intellectual classes came to an end.

But if faith was so vital was it also sufficient of itself to merit salvation, as Luther claimed? The fifth session (June 1546) heard violent debates on this point; one bishop clutched another by the beard and plucked out a handful of white hairs; hearing which, the Emperor sent the Council word that if it could not quiet down he would have a few prelates thrown into the Adige to cool them off.⁴⁰ Reginald Pole argued for a view so dangerously close to Luther’s that Cardinal Caraffa (the future Paul IV) branded him as a heretic; Pole retired from the battle to Padua, and excused himself, on the ground of illness, from continued attendance at the Council.⁴¹ Cardinal Seripando defended the compromise formula that Contarini, now dead, had offered at Ratisbon; but Laynez persuaded the Council to stress, in full opposition to Luther, the importance of good works and the freedom of the will.

Measures of ecclesiastical reform moved less actively than definitions of dogma. The Bishop of St. Mark had opened the session of January 6, 1546, by painting a somber picture of the corruption prevailing in the world, which he thought posterity would never surpass, and he had attributed this degeneration “solely to the wickedness of the pastors”; the Lutheran heresy, he said, had been caused chiefly by the sins of the clergy, and the reform of the clergy was the best way of suppressing the rebellion.⁴² But the only substantial reform accomplished in these early sessions was one forbidding bishops to reside away from their sees, or to hold more than one. The Council suggested to the Pope that the reform of the Dataria should advance from theoretical recommendations to actual directives. Paul, however, wished matters of reform to be left to the papacy; and when the Emperor insisted on greater speed in reform discussions at the conference, the Pope ordered his legates to propose the removal of the Council to Bologna—which, being in the Papal States, would allow a more expeditious control of conciliar actions by Rome. The Italian bishops agreed; the Spanish and Imperial prelates protested; a minor plague conveniently appeared in Trent and killed a bishop; the Italian majority moved to Bologna (March 1547); the rest stayed at Trent. Charles refused recognition to the Bologna sessions, and threatened to convene a separate council in Germany. After two years of argument and maneuvering Paul yielded, and suspended the Bologna assembly (September 1549).

The situation was eased by Paul’s death. Julius III came to an understanding with the Emperor: in return for Charles’s promise to withhold support from any measure that would reduce papal authority, he summoned the Council to meet again at Trent in May 1551, and agreed that the Lutherans should be given a hearing. Henry II of France, resenting this rapprochement between Pope and Emperor, declined to recognize the Council. When it met it was so meagerly attended that it had to adjourn. It assembled again on September 1, with eight archbishops, thirty-six bishops, three abbots, five generals, forty-eight theologians, Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg, and ambassadors from Charles and Ferdinand.

The thirteenth session of the Council (October 1551) reaffirmed the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: the priest, in consecrating the bread and wine of the Eucharist, actually changes each of them into the body and blood of Christ. Thereafter it seemed useless to hear the Protestants, but Charles insisted on it. The Duke of Württemberg, Elector Maurice of Saxony, and some south German towns chose the members of a Protestant delegation, and Melanchthon drew up a statement of Lutheran doctrine to be submitted to the Council. Charles gave the delegates a safe-conduct, but these, remembering Constance and Huss, required also a safe-conduct from the Council itself. After much discussion this was granted. However, a Dominican friar, preaching on the parable of tares, in the very cathedral in which the sessions were held, pointed out that the heretic tares might be endured for a time, but in the end they would have to be burned.⁴³

On January 24,1552, the Protestant deputies addressed the assembly. They proposed that the decrees of the Councils of Constance and Basel on the superior authority of councils over the popes should be confirmed; that the members of the present body should be released from their vows of fealty to Julius III; that all decisions hitherto reached by the Council should be annulled; and that fresh discussions of the issues should be held by an enlarged synod in which the Protestants would be adequately represented.⁴⁴ Julius III forbade consideration of these proposals. The Council voted to postpone action on them till March 19, when additional Protestant delegates were expected.

During this delay military developments supervened upon theology. In January 1552, the King of France signed an alliance with the German Protestants; in March Maurice of Saxony advanced toward Innsbruck; Charles fled, and no force could prevent Maurice, if he wished, from capturing Trent and swallowing the Council. The bishops one by one disappeared, and on April 28 the Council was formally suspended. By the treaty of Passau (August 2) Ferdinand conceded religious freedom to the militantly victorious Protestants. They took no further interest in the Council.

Paul IV thought it prudent to let the Council hibernate during his pontificate. Pius IV, a kindly old man, played with the thought that the granting of communion in both kinds might appease the Protestants, as it had done the Bohemians. He summoned the Council to reconvene at Trent on April 6, 1561, and invited to it all Christian princes, Catholic or Protestant. To this new session the French delegates brought an imposing list of the reforms they desired: Mass in the vernacular, communion in bread and wine, the marriage of priests, the subordination of the papacy to general councils, and an end to the system of papal dispensations and exemptions;⁴⁵ apparently the French government was for the moment in a semi-Huguenot mood. Ferdinand I, now Emperor, seconded these proposals, and added that “the Pope .... should humble himself, and submit to a reform in his own person, his state, and the Curia”; the legends of the saints should be purified of absurdities, and monasteries should be reformed so “that their great wealth might no longer be expended in so profligate a manner.” ⁴⁶ Matters loomed perilous for Pius, and his legates looked with some trepidation to the opening of the session,

After leisurely or strategic delays the seventeenth session of the Council convened on January 18, 1562, with five cardinals, three patriarchs, eleven archbishops, ninety bishops, four generals, four abbots, and sundry lay representatives of Catholic princes. At Ferdinand’s request a safe-conduct was offered to any Protestant delegate who might care to attend; none came. The Archbishop of Granada and Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, led a movement to reduce the prerogatives of the pope by asserting that the bishops held their power not through him but by direct “divine right”; and the Bishop of Segovia repeated one of Luther’s heresies by denying that the pope was supreme over the other bishops in the early Church.⁴⁷ This episcopal uprising was snuffed out by the parliamentary skill of the papal legates, the loyalty of the Italian and Polish bishops to the Pope, and some timely papal courtesies to the Cardinal of Lorraine. In the end the papal authority was not lessened but enlarged, and every bishop was required to take an oath of complete obedience to the Pope. Ferdinand was appeased by the promise that on the termination of the Council the Pope would allow administration of the Eucharist in both kinds.

This basic quarrel over, the Council quickly dispatched its remaining business. Clerical marriage was forbidden, and severe penalties were decreed against priestly concubinage. Many minor reforms were enacted to improve the morals and discipline of the clergy. Seminaries were to be established where candidates for the priesthood could be trained to habits of austerity and piety. The powers of the Curia were curbed. Rules were laid down for the reform of Church music and art; nude figures were to be sufficiently covered to avoid stimulating the sensual imagination. A distinction was drawn between the worship of images and the worship of the persons represented by them; in the latter sense the use of religious images was upheld. Purgatory, indulgences, and the invocation of the saints were defended and redefined. Here the Council frankly recognized the abuses that had sparked Luther’s rebellion; one decree read:

Pope and Emperor agreed that the Council had now reached an end of its usefulness; and on December 4, 1563, it was finally dissolved amid the happy acclamations of the wearied delegates. The course of the Church had been fixed for centuries.

The Counter Reformation succeeded in its principal purposes. Men continued, in Catholic as much as in Protestant countries, to lie and steal, seduce maidens and sell offices, kill and make war.⁴⁹ But the morals of the clergy improved, and the wild freedom of Renaissance Italy was tamed to a decent conformity with the pretensions of mankind. Prostitution, which had been a major industry in Renaissance Rome and Venice, now hid its head, and chastity became fashionable. The authorship or publication of obscene works was made a capital offense in Italy; so Niccolo Franco, secretary and enemy of Aretino, was hanged by order of Pius V for his Priapeia.⁵⁰ The effect of the new restrictions on art and literature was not indisputably harmful; baroque art is emerging timidly from disrepute; and from a purely literary standpoint Tasso, Guarini, and Goldoni do not fall precipitately from the level of Boiardo, Ariosto, and the dramatist Machiavelli. Spain’s greatest age in literature and art came in the fullness of the “Catholic Reaction.” But the joyous character of Renaissance Italy faded; Italian women lost some of the charm and exhilaration that had come from their pre-Reformation freedom; a somber and conscious morality produced an almost puritan age in Italy. Monasticism revived. From the point of view of the free mind it was a loss to mankind that the comparative Renaissance liberty of thought was ended by ecclesiastical and political censorship; and it was a tragedy that the Inquisition was restored in Italy and elsewhere just when science was breaking through its medieval shell. The Church deliberately sacrificed the intellectual classes to the pious majority, which applauded the suppression of ideas that might dissolve its consoling faith.

The ecclesiastical reforms were real and permanent. Though the papal monarchy was exalted as against the episcopal aristocracy of the councils, this was in the spirit of the times, when aristocracies everywhere, except in Germany, were losing power to the kings. The popes were now morally superior to the bishops, and the discipline required for ecclesiastical reform could be better effected by a centralized than by a divided authority. The popes ended their nepotism, and cured the Curia of its costly procrastinations and flagrant venality. The administration of the Church, according to non-Catholic students of the matter, became a model of efficiency and integrity.⁵¹ The dark confessional box was introduced (1547) and made obligatory (1614); the priest was no longer tempted by the occasional beauty of his penitents. Indulgence peddlers disappeared; indulgences, for the most part, were reserved for pious devotions and works of charity rather than for financial contributions. Instead of retreating before the advance of Protestantism or free thought, the Catholic clergy set out to recapture the mind of youth and the allegiance of power. The spirit of the Jesuits, confident, positive, energetic, and disciplined, became the spirit of the militant Church.

All in all it was an astonishing recovery, one of the most brilliant products of the Protestant Reformation.