Paying Attention To The Sky

From the late 11th century onward, the power and wealth of the Catholic Church continued to grow. Not only was the Church in every nation a large landholder and an ally of princes, but the papacy itself was an armed state; and many men whose concerns and motives were anything but spiritual aspired to the papal crown. The 15th and 16th centuries were marred by several corrupt pontificates, and even the most pious Catholics could hardly be unaware that their Church was often in the hands of deplorable men. By the late 15th century there was a strong desire among many of the faithful for reform.

The call for reform was, in fact, first issued more than a century before the Protestant Reformation began. In England,JohnWycliffe (c. 1330-84) argued that the Church should surrender its riches, serve rather than profit from the poor and acknowledge scripture as its sole source of doctrinal authority His theology, moreover, was cast in the mould of that of the late Augustine: he believed firmly in predestination and in the impotence of human works to earn any merit before God. The latter position especially seemed to derogate certain of the Church’s penitential disciplines, as well as a practice increasingly common after the 11th century: the granting of indulgences. These were ‘certificates’ of remission of the ‘temporal punishment’ (the penance) due for sin, given in return for meritorious service or gifts made to the Church in a sincere spirit of contrition. The Bohemian theologian Jan Hus (c. 1370-1413), a leader of the Czech reform movement, was sentenced to the stake by the Council of Constance for propounding similar ideas, and for attacking the sale of indulgences in Bohemia in 1412.

A century later, however, circumstances were more propitious for the cause of reform. The steady growth of the middle class had produced a greater number of educated, financially independent and politically enfranchised Catholics. More importantly, the early modern period was the age of the full emergence of the nation state in Europe; monarchs began to claim ‘absolute’ power for themselves, and an inviolable sovereignty for their nations. Older, ‘feudal’ notions of overlapping spheres of authority with reciprocal responsibilities, and subject to a higher authority in spiritual matters, had become rather passé; and the princes of Europe had begun to resent the two transnational authorities that still presumed to interfere in their affairs: the Holy Roman Empire and the Church.

The French crown — the most absolutist of all European monarchies — effectively subdued the Church in its territories by forcing Rome to consent in 1438 and 1516 to concordats that, among other things, gave the king authority over ecclesial appointments in France and restricted papal jurisdiction over French bishops. In Spain, too, from 1486 on, the power of the crown over the Spanish Catholic Church was all but total. And much the same was true in Portugal. In lands, however, where the Catholic Church could not so easily be subdued — as in England or the German states — the idea of a Church establishment directly subordinate to the monarch exercised a very definite appeal; and in those lands, the cause of Reformation often thrived.

Martin Luther

Martin Luther
The one nun who can be called the father of the Protestant Reformation — at least, in its German variant — is the monk, priest and theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546). Luther came from a moderately comfortable bourgeois background, received sound schooling, took his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Erfurt, and in 1503 (supposedly to keep a vow he made when caught in a terrifying thunderstorm) joined the Order of Augustinian Hermits. In 1508, the Order sent him to the University of Wittenberg, where he encountered a number of scholars who were openly hostile to much of the metaphysics (and in particular the Aristotelianism) of Medieval scholasticism. In 1510, moreover, he visited Rome on behalf of his Order, and was deeply disturbed by the licentiousness of the superior hierarchy, the irreverence of the Roman clergy and the sheer worldliness of Italian Renaissance culture.

In 1512, he took his doctorate and assumed the chair in biblical theology but his professional eminence apparently brought him no great satisfaction. By his own account, he was haunted by an unendurable feeling of unworthiness and guilt, a sense of his own impurities of thought and will and a deep fear of God’s displeasure. He was delivered from his anxieties only when his readings of Paul led him to the conclusion that divine justice — unlike human justice — is a power that gratuitously makes the sinner just, and that it is not by works, but by faith, that one is justified. Here, he believed, he had discovered the true joyous tidings of the gospel: that human beings are not saved by their efforts to make themselves good in the eyes of God (an impossibility in any event), but by God’s free gift of forgiveness.

Theological Differences
Over the next few years, Luther’s hostility to scholastic method increased, his preference for Augustine’s theology became more pronounced and his theology of justification by grace alone became more emphatic. But none of this would necessarily have led to a rupture within the Church had it not been for the ‘indulgences controversy’. In 1476, the pope had allowed the merit vouchsafed by an indulgence to be applied to the soul of a person enduring ‘temporal punishment’ in Purgatory. The idea of Purgatory — that the soul undergoes a period of purgation after death for undischarged venial sins — had deep roots in Western Catholic tradition and had been given clear definition at the Councils of Lyon and Florence. But the proclamation that one might secure remission from such punishment in exchange for financial contributions was obviously little more than a cynical scheme for generating revenue. Reacting to the especially shameless methods of one seller of indulgences, Luther in 1517 wrote his ‘Ninety-Five Theses’, a series of academic propositions for debate that suggested, rather cautiously, that such indulgences reflected a defective theology of grace.

The dispute that followed was unexpectedly fierce, in part because some of Luther’s colleagues and allies were somewhat less circumspect than he was. Luther enjoyed the favor and protection of the Elector of Saxony Frederick III (1463-1525), but even so was obliged to go into hiding when it seemed he might be extradited from Augsburg — to which he had been summoned to defend his theses — to Rome. But the debate he had sparked could not now be extinguished, in large part because the new technology of the printing press had made his views known well beyond the close confines of the world of academic theology. In 1520, Rome issued a papal bull condemning a number of Luther’s teachings. Luther responded by writing three especially provocative treatises — one calling on the secular princes of Germany to convene a council of reform, one denouncing a variety of Catholic teachings regarding the number of sacraments, the power of the pope and the authority of scripture, and one proclaiming the freedom of the Christian conscience — and by burning the bull in public. In January 1521, Rome promulgated a second bull, excommunicating Luther. Frederick III, however, convinced the Holy Roman emperor to allow Luther to defend himself before the Imperial Diet in Worms before recognizing the bull; and Luther — despite the apprehension of many of his friends — obeyed the emperor’s summons.

Christian and Human Freedom
Thomas Müntzer (1490-1525) – a contemporary and, briefly, an admirer of Luther – was a priest and scholar who had himself begun agitating for reform as early as 1519, but who believed that the reformation of which Luther spoke could be complete only if it included a programme of social amelioration. Luther, after all, wrote movingly of the freedom of the Christian from the burden of the law; but such freedom surely involved more than mere spiritual consolation.

Müntzer soon became convinced that his pastoral vocation obliged him to act as an advocate for the poor against the abuses of the rich and increasingly he came to believe that the highest authority for the Christian was not the Church, or even simply scripture, but the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking to the individual conscience. And by 1522 he became convinced that it was the will of God that a holy war should be waged by the poor against the social and political order. Ultimately, when a large peasant revolt broke out in Thuringia in 1525 — one that briefly established a fairly large alliance of ‘commoners’ and even took control of certain towns — Müntzer was among its leaders.

Luther was deeply shaken by the teachings of Müntzer and other of the radical reformers. In 1523, he.wrote a short treatise titled “Of Worldly Governance in which he firmly asserted that civil authority is instituted by God, and rebellion against that authority is a grave sin. He was not by any means unsympathetic to complaints of the rebels even if his own views were  not particularly egalitarian; over many years, the peasants of Germany had been deprived of many of the common rights that had been theirs since the early Middle Ages and had  consequently been left it the mercy of userers and landlords.  But when the revolt began,  Luther nevertheless exhorted the peasants to desist from rebellion and when they did not, he wrote a scorching tract — ‘Against the Murdering and Thieving Hordes of Peasants — in which he encouraged the legal authorities to slaughter the rebels without pity.

On 15 May 1525, at the Battle of Frankenhausen the revolt was decisively defeated . Müntzer was captured tortured, tried and executed. He did not recant his teachings, however; and Luther did not mourn his passing.

The Growth of the Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was an immense but not a unified — religious, social and political movement. The spectrum of Protestant theology admitted of countless variants and intensities, from the most moderate and cautious to the most extreme and reckless.

The Magisterial Reforms — that is, the Lutheran and the Calvinist — rejected certain practices and doctrines of the Catholic Church but still affirmed all the classic dogmas and practices of the early Church: the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, infant baptism and so on. Both, moreover, were profoundly Augustinian in their theologies. But other reform movements were not so bound to tradition.

Reformation In Germany
When Luther arrived in Worms in April 1521 to appear before the Imperial Diet, not only was he greeted by crowds of supporters, his entourage included a large number of German knights. If, though, Emperor Charles V (1500-58) was impressed by this display of popular support, he did not show it; instead he simply instructed Luther to recant. Luther, in the presence of the Diet, refused, saying that, unless it could be proved to him from scripture that he had erred, he was bound by conscience to hold firm. Debate could not move him, and the Diet (no doubt noting that many of Luther’s companions were ‘men of action’) allowed him to depart; in his absence, however, the Diet declared him an outlaw — a decision that forced him to go into hiding for almost a year. He continued to write during this time, however, and began his German translation of the Bible. The Reformation — or ‘Evangelical Movement’ — in the German principalities was now an inexorable force. From 1526 onwards, with some predictable vacillations, the emperor was increasingly obliged to concede the princes of Germany the right to govern the churches in their domains as their consciences dictated. In 1531, moreover, the Protestant princes formed the Schmalkaldic League, a defensive alliance, and in 1532, anxious over a possible Turkish invasion, the emperor agreed to an official truce with the Reformers (which lasted until 1544).

Under the pen of Luther, the principles of the movement became ever clearer: the ‘priesthood of all believers’, the complete dependency of the soul on God’s grace, unmerited election to salvation, the ‘bondage of the will’ of fallen humanity (either to the devil or to God), the ‘freedom of the Christian’. salvation by faith and not by works, and the uselessness of such Catholic forms of ‘works righteousness’ as penance, the ‘sacrifice of the mass’ and clerical celibacy. One distinctive feature of Luther’s theology — and so of the Evangelical Church — was his insistence on the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, a position he defended on the Christological grounds that, in the incarnation, Christ’s humanity came to share perfectly in all the attributes of his divinity (including omnipresence). He preferred to speak of this presence, though, as occurring ‘with’ the substances of the bread and wine (a position known as ‘consubstantiation’) rather than as displacing those substances with the substances of Christ’s body and blood (‘transubstantiation’).

With the help of intellectual allies such as Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), the brilliant humanist scholar who reformed the German educational system, Luther was able to create a genuinely Evangelical culture for the Protestant German states and Scandinavia. He remained a controversialist to the end, attacking enemies with the same zeal with which he preached the free gift of divine grace. His denunciations of the papacy — an institution ‘founded by the devil’ — of radical reformers and of Jews became, if anything, more intemperate as he aged. But at his death he left behind him a distinct, independent and doctrinally cogent Protestant Church.

Swiss Reformation
The other major stream of the ‘Magisterial Reformation’ is that which flowed from Switzerland, now principally associated with John Calvin (1509-64).A more important figure, though, for the rise of the Reformed tradition in Switzerland was Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531), the priest and humanist scholar who, as early as 1516, began preaching against clerical abuses, and whose sermons ‘from true, divine scripture’, starting in 1520, inaugurated a popular movement in Switzerland against such practices as priestly celibacy and the keeping of fasts. In Zurich, from 1523, he succeeded in bringing about liturgical reforms, the stripping of the churches of images and of organs, the institution of Bible study and the taking of wives by many of the clergy (including Zwingli himself). He taught that doctrinal authority lies in the Bible alone, that the Church has no head but Christ, that prayers for the dead are of no avail, that the doctrine of Purgatory is unscriptural and that the Eucharist is in no sense a ‘sacrifice’. His understanding of original sin was rather like that of the Greek fathers, in that he denied that it involved any inheritance of aboriginal guilt. Like Luther, he taught that justification is a free gift of God’s grace alone. Unlike Luther, he denied the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the elements of the Eucharist, and argued that the human and divine natures in Christ remain eternally distinct in their attributes and operations. And Zwingli’s teachings had spread to other cantons within Switzerland, and had helped to give form to a distinctively Swiss Reformed Church well before his death in battle, as a military chaplain, in 1564. 

Portrait of John Calvin, 19th Century

Calvin
The most important figure in the next generation of Reformers was, of course, John Calvin. As a young man in Paris, Calvin was active in the movement for reform within the Catholic Church, as a result of which he found it prudent to leave France in 1533. He went to Basel in Switzerland, where he came to adopt a more purely Protestant view of things. From 1536 to 1538 he lived in Geneva, where he worked on behalf of the city’s nascent reformation until the (Protestant, but tepidly so) city council expelled him. He sojourned in Strasbourg, Germany until 1541,when Geneva invited him to return to help overcome the city’s resistance — or indifference to the Reformed cause.

In Geneva, Calvin was able — despite occasional conflict arid failure to create a Church organization and social order consonant with his theological vision. Churches were run by elders, duly constituted pastors preached and taught, and deacons looked after the needs of the community. Moreover, the Genevans’ morals were now matters not only of social concern hut of criminal law: licentiousness, dancing, gambling, profane speech, improprieties of dress or comportment, irreverence or blasphemy, absence from church and all other forms of moral laxity were to be reported by community invigilators and punished by magistrates, often in a vividly public way. And false doctrine was not to be tolerated. These measures point to certain profound differences between the Lutheran and Calvinist understandings of grace. Luther might well have regarded many of Calvin’s vice laws as signs of an excessive anxiety regarding personal righteousness, and even as a form of justification by works. Calvin, though, believed that the gift of justification really makes men and women righteous, and that any society made up of the elect should reflect the sanctity instilled in human hearts by grace, as evidence of God’s workings.

In most respects, the elements of Calvin’s theology were typically Protestant: the unique authority of scripture, the absolute gratuity of justification, the impotence of the human will to merit salvation, the uselessness of fasts and penances, and predestination. In this last case, though, Calvin’s emphasis differed from that of Luther. No other theologian ever put so great a stress upon the sheer sovereignty of God, as an explanation of the mystery of God’s actions in creation and redemption. He went so far as to assert that God eternally foreordained even the original fall of humanity from grace, that he might by the working of his will display the glory of his sovereignty in the gratuitous salvation of the elect and in the fitting damnation of the derelict. This theology of absolute divine sovereignty became one of the most characteristic features of the high Reformed tradition.

The Curious Case of Michael Servetus
Whatever the Magisterial Reformation was, it certainly was not a movement for greater freedom of conscience — much less freedom of religion. The aim of reform was a stricter adherence to the rule of scripture (as interpreted by reforming theologians) and a renewal of piety and moral purpose among the faithful. But Protestant regimes were no more tolerant of aberrant theological opinions than were their Catholic counterparts.

Prime evidence of this would be the case of Michael Servetus (c. 1510-53), the Spanish physician, scholar of science, astrologer, discoverer of blood circulation and amateur theologian who — though a Catholic and attracted to the cause-of reform — offended against Protestant and Catholic orthodoxy alike by publishing two books (the first in 1531 ,the second in 1532) attacking the doctrine of the Trinity. and proposing in its place a kind of complex Unitarianism.

In 1534, a proposed debate in Paris between Servetus and John Calvin failed to -materialize, but Servtus clearly came in the years that followed to regard Calvin as his natural theological interlocutor. In 1546, he sent the manuscript of his treatise ‘The Restoration of Christianity’(which attacked Nicene theology as extra biblical) to Calvin in Geneva and attempted to initiate a dialogue by post. After a few exchanges, however; Calvin terminated the correspondence and even refused to return the manuscript: he also vowed to his fellow Genevan reformer Guillaume Farel (1489-1565) that, if Servetus ever came to Geneva, he would not be allowed to leave alive.

Calvin was as good as his word. In 1553, Servetus fleeing the inquisitor in Lyon entered Geneva where he was recognized, arrested and put on trial for heresy. Calvin argued forcefully in favor of execution, and — enraged by Servetus’ defense of his positions before the court — peevishly remarked that he would have liked to see the Spaniard’s eyes scratched out by chickens.

Servetus was convicted and sentenced to be burned at the stake. To his credit, perhaps, Calvin expressed a preference for quick and merciful decapitation. This did not prevent him later, however, from mocking Servetus’ cries of torment amid the flames.

‘For I do not disguise it that I considered it my duty to put a check  so far as I  could, upon this most obstinate and ungovernable man, that his contagion might not spread further.
John Calvin. Letter Regarding Servitus 
September 1553

The Anabaptists and the Catholic Reformation
Though it is not uncommon to think of the Reformation as a movement more or less exhausted by the two main schools of the ‘Magisterial Reformation’ — the Lutheran and the Calvinist — it was in fact a larger and more diverse historical phenomenon. Not only was reform not limited to the institutions of the German and Swiss Protestant churches; it was not confined to Protestantism. If Lutheranism and Calvinism together constituted the ‘broad middle’ of the Reformation, to their ‘left’ lay a number of more radical Protestantisms, and to their ‘right’ the reform movement within the Catholic Church.

The name commonly applied to the majority of ‘radical’ or ‘free’ Protestant reformers was ‘Anabaptists’, which means ‘Re-baptizers’. The name derives from the fact that these reformers taught that baptism — being the emblem of a sincere conversion of the heart to faith in Christ — could be undertaken only by adults; hence they performed baptisms on persons who had already been baptized as infants. (This was, incidentally, a capital crime for baptizer and baptized alike.) They rejected the term Anabaptist, however, on the not unreasonable grounds that, according to their beliefs, they had never truly been baptized before they themselves freely consented to the ritual. As a rule, this branch of the Reformation — at least in its earliest forms — was deeply influenced by Zwingli’s theology Its followers therefore felt no great anxiety in withholding baptism from their own children, since they believed that no guilt could attach to the soul before the age of reason. Unlike Zwingli, however, Anabaptist communities tended towards political and social separatism, and regarded civil allegiances, litigations, military service and civil oaths as contrary to genuine Christian adherence. Some of them were political radicals as well, inspired by a theocratic Messianism, but in general they were non–violent on principle. And, inasmuch as their views were repugnant to Catholic and Protestant authorities alike, they were persecuted by both. If any 16th century Western communion could identify itself with the ‘Church of the martyrs’, it was theirs.

The Swiss Brethren
One of the earliest Anabaptist communities was the Swiss Brethren, founded in Zurich by the humanist scholar Konrad Grebel (c. 1498–1526), an early admirer of Zwingli who became disenchanted with the graduality and moderate nature of the latter’s reforms (and his acceptance of infant baptism). In January 1525, in defiance of the admonitions of the city council, Grebel began administering baptism to persons ‘already’ baptized, His movement spread, but he was twice prosecuted and jailed, was constantly harassed and died young. His example, though, inspired Balthasar Hubmaier (1485-1528), a German Anabaptist who in 1521 became one of the leaders of the Swiss movement — only to be arrested in Zurich in 1525 and forced to recant — and then became a leader of the Anabaptist movement in Moravia (where conditions were not so adverse). He was burned at the stake in Vienna in 1528.

A more radical and less peaceful strain of Anabaptism drew inspiration from the teachings of Melchior Hoffman (c. 1495-1543), the German lay theologian — originally an ally of Luther and promoter of the German Reformation — whose conviction that he was living at the end of time led him to evolve a particularly eschatological interpretation of the reform movement, and finally to embrace Anabaptism. His beliefs, however, were eccentric even among the Anabaptists: he prophesied that Christ would return in 1533, and that he — Hoffman — would establish the New Jerusalem in Strasbourg.

That very city evidently insensible of the honor it had been accorded, placed Hoffman in prison, where he died a decade later. Nevertheless, his teachings won some particularly zealous adherents, with occasionally violent consequences — such as the brief, bloody history of the ‘kingdom’ founded by Anabaptist radicals in Münster in 1534 — which served only to provoke fiercer persecutions of the Anabaptists in both Catholic and Protestant lands.

Yet the Anabaptists were, by overwhelming majority convinced pacifists. Typical of the movement was Menno Simonsz (1496-1561), the Dutch founder of the Mennonites. Menno was ordained a priest in 1524, but by 1528 had become convinced of the validity of many Reformation principles, and ultimately came to embrace the doctrine of adult baptism. There were radicals among the Dutch Anabaptists, however, some of whom were involved in insurrectionary activities leading, in 1535, to an engagement with Dutch soldiers that left several persons dead. Menno openly denounced the behavior of the radicals, arguing that violence was forbidden to Christians, and that all baptized men and women were called to lives of charity, even under persecution.

Menno himself probably submitted to ‘re-baptism’ in early 1537. About the same time, he was ordained as an Anabaptist pastor and took a wife. Thereafter, branded a heretic in every nation, he lived the life of a fugitive. Men could be executed if convicted of sheltering him. In 1542, Emperor Charles V put a price on his head. And yet Menno continued to write and preach with a rare eloquence, and died of natural causes 23 years after his ‘apostasy’.

Münster
After Meichior Hoffman s imprisonment in Strasbourg, one of the few German cities to which his followers and other Anabaptists could safely retreat was Münster in Westphalia The influential Lutheran preacher in the city, Bernhard Rothman (1495—1535), had Anabaptist leanings, and as a result of his teachings the city council became a majority Anabaptist assembly in 1533

The radicals who came to Munster were led by two Dutch Anabaptists, Jan Mathijsz (d 1534) and John Beuckelszoon (d 1536) — better known as ‘John of Leiden’ — who declared the city the New Jerusalem and introduced adult baptism in January 1534. The next month, the radicals seized control of the city hail appointed one of their own — Bernhard Knipperdolling (c 1495-1535) — as mayor expelled many infidels instituted a theocracy and began to proclaim their intention of conquering the world (with God’s help, of course).

The region’s prince bishop. Franz deWaldeck, laid siege to the rebellious city. In April, on Easter Sunday, Mathijsz prophesied that God would use him as an instrument of heavenly justice against the enemies of the New Jerusalem, and with a retinue of 30 men rode out against the besieging army. He and his men were all promptly killed. — His body was decapitated and castrated, his head impaled on a pole outside the city wails, and his genitals nailed to the city gate.

Undeterred, John of Leiden declared Münster a ‘kingdom of a thousand years’ and the new Zion of God, proclaimed himself its king (after the order of King David and instituted such ‘Christian’ ordinances as the dissolution of all private property. in favor of a community of goods, and polygamy. He himself took 16 wives (one of whom, however, he was obliged to behead with his own hands in the public square; on account of some transgression or other).

In June 1535, the city was taken by a combined force of Catholic and Lutheran soldiers. The following January. three of the Anabaptist leaders of the city — including King John of Leiden -. were hideously tortured and put to death: their flayed bodies were then displayed in iron cages suspended from the steeple of St Lambert’s Church. and left there until only bones .remained.

The Catholic Reformation
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Catholic Church instituted changes in Church discipline, undertook liturgical reforms, rooted out internal corruption and abuses, and promulgated a number of clarifications of its doctrines and practices. This movement for spiritual and institutional renewal is often spoken of as the ‘Counter—Reformation’, but this is a misleading term; for, though many of the Catholic doctrinal pronouncements of the time were responses to Protestant theological claims, the movement for reform in the Church antedated the schisms of the 16th century, and the advocates of reform within the Church had riot disappeared as a result of those schisms. Many in the Catholic hierarchy and in the ranks of the educated laity deplored clerical malfeasances, ‘superstitions’, hypocrisies and spiritual sloth no less than the Protestant Reformers, but did not share the latter’s theological convictions or understanding of the Church.

Men like the Dutch Catholic humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536) and his friend the English humanist and statesman Sir Thomas More (1477-1533) — both contemporaries of Luther — were strong champions of Church reform, but were equally strong opponents of schism and of the severe late Augustinianism of Luther’s understanding of sin and grace. Erasmus was inspired especially by the writings of the Greek Church Fathers, and by their spiritual exegesis of scripture. He detested the corruption of the papacy, excessive clericalism, sectarian persecution, ecclesial peculation and the obscurantism of many established forms of Catholic piety but he disliked fanaticism and division as well. He and Luther were early admirers of one another, but they disagreed fundamentally in their reading of St Paul and on the issue of the freedom of the fallen will. Thomas More — famously ‘martyred’ under King Henry VIII (1491-1547) — shared Erasmus’ enthusiasm for biblical and patristic scholarship and for Church reform, but was far more censorious of Luther and his fellow ‘schismatics’.

The work of Church reform, however, was largely the work not of humanists, but of monks and nuns. New religious orders and renewals of existing orders were the chief engines of a spiritual regeneration that spread throughout the Catholic world in the 16th century, producing men such as St Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1536) or the great Spanish Carmelite mystic (and Spain’s greatest lyric poet) St John of the Cross (1542-91) or the Jesuit spiritual writer St Francis de Sales (1567-l622).And the great zeal for missions abroad inspired by this revival ultimately helped lead to the global ubiquity and immense demography of the modern Roman Catholic Church.

The great institutional renewal of the Roman Church, though, began when Pope Paul III (1468-1549) convoked the Council of Trent in 1545.This council continued (with occasional interruptions) under a number of popes until 1563. It instituted a massive reform and regularization of the ‘Western liturgy, dealt systematically with a number of clerical abuses, forbade the sale of indulgences, prescribed the proper pastoral duties of bishops and priests, established definitively the canon of the Bible and dictated the sort of education to be provided for priests. The council also, however, reaffirmed many doctrines controverted by the Protestant reformers: Purgatory, Christ’s real presence in the Eucharistic elements (by ‘transubstantiation’ rather than by ‘consubstantiation’), the existence of seven sacraments, the supremacy of papal authority and so on. Most importantly, the council rejected Luther’s teachings on justification, asserting the reality of human freedom in the work of redemption, the indispensability of good works and the need for the co-operation of the will set free by grace. Moreover, it did this with so thorough and plenteous an exposition from scripture that no Protestant theologian — however much he might disagree with the council’s conclusions — could plausibly doubt the centrality of the Bible in its deliberations.