Dictionary:

Catholicism

  (kə-thŏl'ĭ-sĭz'əm)

The faith, doctrine, system, and practice of a Catholic church, especially the Roman Catholic Church.

Catholicism emerged as a distinctive force in Ireland during the late 16th and 17th cents., when it became clear that the imposition of the new Anglican State Church had failed, and that the Counter-Reformation had put down roots among the majority population. Irish Catholics were politically impotent at the beginning of the 18th cent. because of the Penal Laws. An adversarial relationship with the State created an essentially domestic Church, deprived of the public dimension of Continental Catholicism. In a cultural milieu where social and religious behaviour was largely regulated by custom, the central religious events were communal occasions such as the wake, pattern (a celebration of a local patron saint's feastday), and station (when Mass was said in a house for which neighbours gathered). In the aftermath of the French Revolution the British and Vatican administrations moved to neutralize the threat of a Jacobinized Irish Catholic population. Catholic Relief Acts were passed in 1792 and 1793 and Maynooth College was opened in 1795. Daniel O'Connell channelled the national question into a Catholic stream. The rapid politicization of Irish Catholics paved the way for Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Catholicism would henceforth be a dominant force within Irish nationalist culture. Throughout the 19th cent. Irish Catholicism became more assertive and more Roman in character, as the institutional Church eclipsed its vernacular predecessor. The development of a heroic historiography of Irish Catholic resistance also permitted the Church to see itself as the historical, psychic, and societal core of Irish experience. With the emergence of the southern Irish State, the Catholic Church was accorded a ‘special position’ in the 1937 Constitution (a clause removed by referendum in 1972). Irish Catholicism increasingly became a target for oppositional intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, yet it remained resistant to modernizing influences in some respects.

Spanish and French explorers brought Roman Catholicism to what is now the United States in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spanish explorers founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and it became the site of the oldest Christian community in the United States. Missionary priests established mission towns that stretched from St. Augustine north to Georgia. Their goal was to Christianize and civilize the native population. The golden age of the missions was in the mid-seventeenth century, when seventy missionaries were working in thirty-eight missions. The missions then began to decline, and by the early eighteenth century St. Augustine was the only Catholic mission left in Florida. The mission era ended when the British gained control of Florida in 1763.

The French established a permanent settlement at Québec in 1608 that became the center of New France. Missionary priests traveled from Québec down the St. Lawrence River through the Great Lakes region seeking to evangelize the native population. This mission era endured through the first half of the eighteenth century, coming to an end when the British took over Canada in 1763. Throughout the Midwest, French missionaries and explorers left their mark in places like St. Ignace and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and St. Louis, Missouri.

The Catholic presence in the Southwest was quite widespread. Spanish explorers settled Santa Fe in 1610 and then branched into what is now Arizona and Texas. In the eighteenth century Spanish missionaries, led by the Franciscan friar Junipero Serra, traveled the Pacific coast and founded a chain of twenty-one mission towns stretching from San Diego to San Francisco. The Mexican government took over the missions in 1833 in what marked the end of the Spanish mission era. The dissolution of the missions, however, did not mean the end of frontier Catholicism. The church survived, ministering to the needs of Hispanic Americans and Catholic Indians. When northern Mexico became part of the United States in 1848 as a result of the Mexican-American War, the Catholic Church there entered a new chapter in its history.

In 1634 Cecil Calvert, an English Catholic nobleman, and a small group of English colonists founded Maryland. That colony became the center of the Catholic colonial presence in the English colonies. St. Mary's City in southern Maryland became the capital of the colony, where Jesuit missionaries from England and Europe established farms. Worship services took place at these farms, which also became the home base for traveling missionaries who ministered to the needs of a rural population scattered about southern Maryland. Catholics were always a minority in Maryland, but they were in a position of prestige and power so long as the Calvert family was in control. That all changed in 1689 when William and Mary ascended to power in England and the Catholic Calverts lost ownership of the colony. Since Maryland was now a royal colony, England's penal laws became law in Maryland. These statutes discriminated against Catholics by denying them such rights and privileges as voting and public worship. Nonetheless, the Catholic population continued to grow, mainly because of the large numbers of Irish immigrants. By 1765, twenty-five thousand Catholics lived in Maryland; while another six thousand lived in Pennsylvania.

One of the most prominent families in colonial Maryland was the Carroll family. Irish and Catholic, Charles Carroll of Carrollton became a distinguished figure in the American Revolution. A delegate to the Continental Congress, he fixed his signature to the Declaration of Independence. He also helped to write the new Maryland state constitution. Like Carroll, the vast majority of Catholics supported the Revolution of 1776.

The Early National Era and the Democratic Spirit

In 1790 John Carroll, an American-born and European-educated priest, was ordained as the first bishop of Baltimore. Only about 35,000 Catholics lived in the United States at that time. Carroll articulated a vision of Catholicism that was unique at this time. Together with many other Catholics he envisioned a national, American church that would be independent of all foreign jurisdiction and would endorse pluralism and toleration in religion; a church in which religion was grounded in the Enlightenment principle of intelligibility and where a vernacular liturgy was normative; and finally, a church in which the spirit of democracy, through an elected board of trustees, defined the government of parish communities.

The vital element in the development of American Catholicism was the parish. Between 1780 and 1820 many parish communities were organized across Catholic America. Perhaps as many as 124 Catholic churches, each one representing a community of Catholics, dotted the landscape in 1820. In the vast majority of these communities, laymen were very involved in the government of the parish as members of a board of trustees. The principal reason for such a trustee system was the new spirit of democracy rising across the land.

In emphasizing the influence of the democratic spirit on the Catholic parish, however, it is well to remember that tradition played a very important role in this development. When they sought to fashion a democratic design for parish government, American Catholics were attempting to blend the old with the new, the past with the present. The establishment of a trustee system was not a break with the past, as they understood it, but a continuation of past practices, adapted to a new environment. Lay participation in church government was an accepted practice in France and Germany, and English and Irish lay Catholics were also becoming more involved in parish government. Thus, when they were forced to defend their actions against opponents of the lay trustee system, Catholic trustees appealed to tradition and long-standing precedents for such involvement. This blending of the old with the new enabled the people to adapt an ancient tradition to the circumstances of an emerging, new society.

Mass Immigration and the Church

Once large-scale immigration began in the 1820s and 1830s, America's Catholic population increased dramatically. Many thousands of Irish and German Catholics arrived in the United States prior to the Civil War, marking the beginning of a new era in the history of American Catholicism. It was the age of the immigrant church. The republican model of Catholicism that defined the era of John Carroll went into decline as a more traditional, European model became normative as a result of the influx of foreign-born clergy who brought with them a monarchical vision of the church. Henceforth, the clergy would govern the parish.

In the closing decades of the century, Catholic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe settled in the United States. As a result, the Catholic population soared, numbering as many as seventeen million by 1920. It was a very ethnically diverse population, including as many as twenty-eight ethnic groups. The largest of these were the Irish, Germans, Italians, Polish, French Canadians, and Mexicans. Together they accounted for at least 75 percent of the American Catholic population. Each of these groups had their own national parishes. Based on nationality as well as language, these parishes became the hallmark of the urban church. A city neighborhood could have several different national parishes within its boundaries. Like separate galaxies, each parish community stayed within its own orbit. The Irish did not mix with the Poles. The Germans never mingled with the Italians. Some of these parishes were so large that their buildings (church, school, convent, and rectory) occupied an entire city block.

Because the public school culture was highly Protestant in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Catholics began to establish their own elementary schools. John Hughes, the Irish-born archbishop of New York City, and John Purcell, the Irish-born archbishop of Cincinnati, were the two most prominent leaders championing parochial schools. The women religious were the key to the success of the schools. Like the clergy, most of these women were immigrants who worked within their own national or ethnic communities. In 1850 only about 1,344 sisters were at work in the United States. By 1900 their number had soared to 40,340, vastly outnumbering the 11,636 priests. This phenomenal increase in the number of women religious made the growth of schools possible, since they were the people who staffed the schools. Their willingness to work for low wages reduced the cost of schooling and made feasible an otherwise financially impossible undertaking.

In addition to the school, parishes sponsored numerous organizations, both religious and social. These organizations strengthened the bond between church and people. Hospitals and orphanages were also part of the urban church and women religious operated many of these institutions.

The Ghetto Mentality Versus Americanization

In the antebellum period a Protestant crusade against Catholics swept across the nation. Anti-Catholic riots took place and convents as well as churches were destroyed. The crusade reached its height in the early 1850s when a new political party, the Know-Nothings, gained power in several states. Their ideology was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. During this period Archbishop John Hughes became a forceful apologist on behalf of Catholics. Because of the discrimination they encountered, Catholics developed their own subculture, thus acquiring an outsider mentality. Often described as a ghetto mentality, it shaped the thinking of Catholics well into the twentieth century.

Some Catholics wanted the church to abandon this outsider mentality and become more American, less foreign.

Isaac Hecker, a convert to Catholicism and a founder of the religious community of priests known as the Paulists, was the most prominent advocate of this vision in the 1850s and 1860s. Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, with support from James Gibbons, the cardinal archbishop of Baltimore, promoted this idea in the 1880s and 1890s. Advocating what their opponents labeled as an "American Catholicity," these Americanists endorsed the separation of church and state, political democracy, religious toleration, and some type of merger of Catholic and public education at the elementary school level. They were in the minority, however. Authorities in Rome were hostile to the idea of separation between church and state. They also opposed religious toleration, another hallmark of American culture, and were cool to the idea that democracy was the ideal form of government. As a result, in 1899 Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical letter, Testem Benevolentiae, which condemned what he called "Americanism." The papal intervention not only ended the campaign of John Ireland, but also solidified the Romanization of Catholicism in the United States.

Devotional Catholicism

A distinguishing feature of the immigrant church was its rich devotional life. The heart of this devotional life was the exercise of piety, or what was called a devotion. Since the Mass and the sacraments have never been sufficient to meet the spiritual needs of the people, popular devotions have arisen throughout the history of Catholicism. In the nineteenth century some of the more popular of them were devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, devotion to Jesus in the Eucharist through public exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, devotion to the passion of Jesus, devotion to Mary as the Immaculate Conception, recitation of the rosary, and of course, devotion to particular saints such as St. Joseph, St. Patrick, and St. Anthony. Prayer books, devotional confraternities, parish missions, Newspapers, magazines, and the celebration of religious festivals shaped the cosmos of Catholics, educating them into a specific style of religion that can be described as devotional Catholicism. This interior transformation of Catholics in the United States was part of a worldwide spiritual revival taking place within Catholicism. The papacy promoted the revival by issuing encyclical letters promoting specific devotions and by organizing worldwide Eucharistic congresses to promote devotion to Christ.

Devotional Catholicism shaped the mental landscape of Catholics in a very distinctive manner. The central features of this worldview were authority, sin, ritual, and the miraculous. The emphasis on authority enhanced the prestige and power of the papacy at a time when it was under siege from Italian nationalists. Bishops and clergy also benefited from the importance attached to authority. Being Catholic meant to submit to the authority of God as mediated through the church—its pope, bishops, and clergy. Such a culture deemphasized the rights of the individual conscience as each person learned to submit to the external authority of the church. Catholic culture was also steeped in the consciousness of sin in this era. Devotional guides stressed human sinfulness and a multitude of laws and regulations sought to strengthen Catholics in their struggle with sin. Confession of sins became an important ritual for Catholics and priests spent long hours in the confessional. The Mass was another major ritual along with other sacraments such as baptism and marriage. Various devotions were associated with public rituals in church or with processions that marched through the streets of the neighborhood. In addition to such public rituals, people practiced their own private rituals of devotion. Fascination with the miraculous was another trait of devotional Catholicism. Catholics believed in the supernatural and the power of their heavenly patrons. Religious periodicals regularly reported cures and other miraculous events. Shrines such as Lourdes in France attracted much attention. In the United States many local shrines were associated with the healing powers of certain statues, relics, or pictures.

Consolidation

From the 1920s through the 1950s the church underwent a period of consolidation. Many new churches were built, the number of colleges grew, and record numbers of men and women entered Catholic seminaries and convents. In these years Catholicism still retained many features of the immigrant era. At the parish level Catholicism remained very ethnic and clannish into the 1940s. Devotional Catholicism remained the dominant ethos. Within the educated middle class, which was growing, there was a strong desire for Catholics to become more involved in the public life of the nation. What contemporaries called a Catholic renaissance took place in these years as Catholics began to feel more confident about their place in the United States. Catholics supported the New Deal and many worked in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. Catholics also held influential positions in the growing labor movement. John Ryan, a priest and professor at the Catholic University of America, gained a national reputation as an advocate of social action and the right of workers to a just wage. Dorothy Day, a convert to Catholicism, founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933 and her commitment to the poor and underprivileged inspired many young Catholics to work for social justice. In the 1950s Catholicism was riding a wave of unprecedented popularity and confidence. Each week new churches and schools opened their doors, record numbers of converts joined the church, and more than 70 percent of Catholics regularly attended Sunday Mass. The Catholic college population increased significantly. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, an accomplished preacher, had his own prime time, Emmy Award–winning television show that attracted millions of viewers. In 1958 a new pope, John XXIII, charmed the world and filled Catholics with pride. The 1960 election of an Irish Catholic, John F. Kennedy, to the presidency of the United States reinforced the optimism and confidence of Catholics.

Reform

In the 1960s the Catholic Church throughout the world underwent a period of reform. The catalyst was the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Coupled with the social changes that were taking place in the United States at this time, the reforms initiated by the Council ushered in a new age for American Catholicism. Change and dissent are the two words that best describe this era. The most dramatic change took place in the Catholic Mass. A new liturgy celebrated in English replaced an ancient Latin ritual. Accompanying changes in the Mass was a transformation in the devotional life of the people. People began to question the Catholic emphasis on authority and sin. The popular support for devotional rituals and a fascination with the miraculous waned. An ecumenical spirit inspired Catholics to break down the fences that separated them from people of other religious traditions. Catholics emerged from the cultural ghetto of the immigrant era and adopted a more public presence in society. They joined the 1960s war against poverty and discrimination, and were in the forefront of the peace movement during the Vietnam War. Also, the Catholic hierarchy wrote important pastoral letters that discussed war and peace in the nuclear age along with economic justice. An educated laity became more inclined to dissent, challenging the church's teaching on birth control, clerical celibacy, an exclusively male clergy, and the teaching authority of the pope. Other Catholics have opposed such dissent and have strongly defended the authority of the pope and the hierarchy. Such ideological diversity has become a distinguishing trademark of contemporary Catholicism.

Changes in the Ministry and the New Immigration

The decline in the number of priests and nuns in the late twentieth century also changed the culture of Catholicism. In 1965 there were 35,000 priests; by 2005 their numbers will have declined to about 21,000, a 40 percent decline in forty years. Along with this came a decline in the number of seminarians by about 90 percent from 1965 to the end of the century. In 1965 there were 180,000 sisters in the United States; in 2000 they numbered less than 100,000. This demographic revolution has transformed the state of ministry in the church. Along with this has come the emergence of a new understanding of ministry.

This new thinking about ministry emerged from the Second Vatican Council. The council emphasized the egalitarian nature of the Catholic Church, all of whose members received a call to the fullness of the Christian life by virtue of their baptism. This undermined the elitist tradition that put priests and nuns on a pedestal above the laity. This new thinking has transformed the church. By 2000 an astounding number of laypeople, 29,146, were actively involved as paid ministers in parishes; about 85 percent of them were women. Because of the shortage of priests many parishes, about three thousand, did not have a resident priest. A large number of these, about six hundred, had a person in charge who was not a priest. Many of these pastors were women, both lay women and women religious. They did everything a priest does except say Mass and administer the sacraments. They hired the staff, managed the finances, provided counseling, oversaw the liturgy, and supervised the educational, social, and religious programs of the parish. They were in charge of everything. The priest came in as a special guest star, a visitor who celebrated the Eucharist and left.

In addition to the changes in ministry, Catholicism is experiencing the impact of a new wave of immigration ushered in by the revised immigration laws starting in 1965. The church became more ethnically diverse than ever before. In 2000 Sunday Mass was celebrated in Los Angeles in forty-seven languages; in New York City thirty languages were needed to communicate with Sunday churchgoers. The largest ethnic group was the Spanish-speaking Latino population. Comprising people from many different nations, they numbered about 30 million in 2000, of whom approximately 75 percent were Catholic. It is estimated that by 2014 they will constitute 51 percent of the Catholic population in the United States. The new immigration transformed Catholicism in much the same way that the old immigration of the nineteenth century did.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century Catholicism in the United States is entering a new period in its history. No longer religious outsiders, Catholics are better integrated into American life. Intellectually and politically they represent many different points of view. The hierarchy has become more theologically conservative while the laity has become more independent in its thinking. An emerging lay ministry together with a decline in the number of priests and nuns has reshaped the culture of Catholicism. The presence of so many new immigrants from Latin America and Asia has also had a substantial impact on the shape of the church. Continuity with the past, with the Catholic tradition, will be the guiding force as the church moves into the twenty-first century.

In 2002 a major scandal shocked the American Catholic community, when it was revealed that some priests in Boston's Catholic community had sexually abused children over the course of several years. The crisis deepened with the revelation that church leaders had often reassigned accused priests to other parishes without restricting their access to children. The same pattern of secretly reassigning priests known to be sexual predators was discovered in other dioceses across the country. This unprecedented scandal of abuse and cover-up severely damaged the sacred trust between the clergy and the laity.

Bibliography

Carey, Peter W. People, Priests, and Prelates: Ecclesiastical Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeism. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987.

Dolan, Jay P. The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985.

———. In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Dolan, Jay P., and Allen Figueroa Deck, eds. Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S.: Issues and Concerns. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.

Ellis, John Tracy. The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons: Archbishop of Baltimore, 1834–1921. 2 vols. Milwaukee, Wis.: Bruce Publishing, 1952.

Gleason, Philip. Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism, Past and Present. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987.

Greeley, Andrew M. The American Catholic: A Social Portrait. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

Hennesey, James, S.J. American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

McGreevy, John T. Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Morris, Charles R. American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church. New York: Times Books, 1997.

O'Toole, James M. Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859–1944. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992.

—Jay P. Dolan

The Roman Catholic Church established ties to the Russian lands from their earliest history but played only a marginal role. The first significant encounter came during the Time of Troubles, when the Catholic associations of pretenders and Polish interventionists triggered intense popular hostility toward the "Latins" and a hiatus in Russian - Catholic relations. Only in the last quarter of the seventeenth century did Muscovy, in pursuit of allies against the Turks, resume ties to Rome. Peter the Great went significantly further, permitting the construction of the first Catholic church in Moscow (1691) and the presence of various Catholic orders (including Jesuits).

But a significant Catholic presence only commenced with the first Polish partition of 1772, when the Russian Empire acquired substantial numbers of Catholic subjects. Despite initial tensions (chiefly over claims by the Russian government to oversee Catholic administration), relations improved markedly under emperors Paul (r. 1796 - 1801) and Alexander I (r. 1801-1825), when Catholic - especially Jesuit - influences at court were extraordinarily strong.

Thereafter, however, relations proved extremely tempestuous. One factor was the coercive conversion of Uniates or Eastern Catholics (that is, Catholics practicing Eastern Rites), who were "reunited" with the Russian Orthodox Church (in 1839 and 1875) and forbidden to practice Catholic rites. The second factor was Catholic involvement in the Polish uprisings of 1830-1831 and 1863; subsequent government measures to Russify and repress the Poles served only to reinforce their Catholic identity and resolve. Hence Catholicism remained a force to be reckoned with: By the 1890s, it had 11.5 million adherents (9.13% of the population), making it the third largest religious group in the Russian Empire. It maintained some 4,400 churches (2,400 in seven Polish dioceses; 2,000 in five dioceses in the Russian Empire proper). The 1905 revolution forced the regime to declare religious tolerance (the manifesto of April 17, 1905); with conversion from Russian Orthodoxy decriminalized, huge numbers declared themselves Catholic (233,000 in 1905-1909 alone).

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, however, brought decades of devastating repression. The Catholic Church refused to accept Bolshevik nationalization of its property and the requirement that the laity, not clergy, register and assume responsibility for churches. The conflict culminated in the Bolshevik campaign to confiscate church valuables in 1922 and 1923 and a famous show trial that ended with the execution of a leading prelate. That was but a prelude to the 1930s, when massive purges and repression eliminated all but two Catholic churches by 1939. Although World War II brought an increase in Catholic churches (mainly through the annexation of new territories), the regime remained highly suspicious of Catholicism, especially in a republic like Lithuania, where ethnicity and Catholicism coalesced into abiding dissent.

The "new thinking" of Mikhail Gorbachev included the reestablishment of relations with the Vatican in 1988 and relaxation of pressure on the Catholic church in the USSR. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 turned the main bastions of Catholicism (i.e., Lithuania) into independent republics, but left a substantial number of Catholics in the Russian Federation (1.3 million according to Vatican estimates). To minister to them more effectively, Rome, in February 2002, elevated its four "apostolic administrations" to the status of "dioceses," serving some 600,000 parishioners in 212 registered churches and 300 small, informal communities.

Bibliography

Zatko, James. (1965). Descent into Darkness: The Destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in Russia, 1917-1923. Toronto: Baxter Publishing.

Zugger, Christopher. (2001). The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Empire from Lenin to Stalin. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

—GREGORY L. FREEZE

In 1520, Martin Luther (1483–1546) explained—in his famous open letter to Pope Leo X (reigned 1513–1521)—that he considered the Roman Curia "more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom ever was," and that it was "characterized by a completely depraved, hopeless and notorious godlessness." For hundreds of years thereafter, Luther's remarks were construed as an indictment not just of the Curia, but of the entire Catholic Church. With this picture of corruption and depravity, he established one side of a polemical divide over ways to describe Catholicism in early modern Europe that has endured to this very day. The argument over whether or not Luther's picture of the church was realistic has been engaged by historians for generations, from Cesare Baronio (1518–1607) and Paolo Sarpi (1562–1623) in the late sixteenth century to Massimo Firpo and John W. O'Malley in the late twentieth century. The debate has been clouded by ahistorical commitments—at first simply religious, then political and cultural as well—that serve as an obstacle to a true comprehension of the past. Since roughly 1945, the argument has turned on whether the terms "Counter-Reformation" or "Catholic Reform," or any of a host of other related terms, can describe the period, or if something more innocuous, like "early modern Catholicism," might be better. No matter where one stands on this battle over historical terminology, all agree that Catholicism in this era was variegated, fascinating in its complexity, and riddled with internal and external conflicts that make simple categorization of this institution quite impossible.

Catholicism between 1500 and 1789 has commonly been defined through the conflict between Protestant reformers and Christians who remained loyal to Rome. Luther, like John Calvin (1509–1564) and many Anglican and Anabaptist thinkers who followed, was not so different from medieval reformers who called for change in Christian practices. He may have insisted initially on reconsideration of the best way to explain the necessity of penitence, not just penance, in the process of salvation. The challenge to common church teaching expressed in his Ninety-Five Theses (1517), however, increasingly came to be understood as a threat to papal authority. This perception, which was reinforced by Luther's own words in the three great Reformation treatises of 1520–1521 and by the rallying of other critical voices at his side, encouraged members of the Catholic hierarchy to see him as the latest in a long line of medieval reformers. They could then treat him, as they did his predecessors, as one who would eventually go away without leaving any substantial impact upon the structure of ecclesiastical authority.

The Papacy and the Council of Trent

The common definition of Catholicism in early modern Europe as hinging on the challenge of Luther and other Protestant reformers, and on Roman reaction to that challenge, has obscured the complexity and multiform nature of the institution. First, consider the complexity of the papacy itself. Popes from Alexander VI (1492–1503) through Pius VI (1775–1799) exhibited many characteristics, but consistency and uniformity were not among them. At the beginning of this era, the papacy was an institution competing for the loyalty of the European people against secular powers attempting to extend the reach of their authority. Fifteenth-century papal claims to absolute power, both spiritual and temporal, were defined in practice during the pontificates of Julius II (1503–1513) and Leo X as an effort to secure the integrity and independence of the Papal State. They used both diplomatic and military resources to do so. By the end of the early modern era, however, the papacy had become quite ineffective in political terms, having been pushed to the periphery of contemporary political society. For example, Clement XIII (1758–1769) and Clement XIV (1769–1774) were unable to save one of the largest religious orders in the church, the Society of Jesus, from its European enemies. Early modern popes attempted to consolidate their religious and governmental authority in a rapidly changing world, but they did so with inconsistent policies and performance. The popular imagination of today often views early modern popes as warriors against heresy. This may have been true of popes like Paul IV (1555–1559) and Pius V (1566–1572), who personally presided over inquisitorial meetings. But later popes, like Innocent XI (1676–1689), saw devotional and theological developments like Jansenism and Quietism as dangerous and still disapproved of the use of force to deal with them. An even later pope, Benedict XIV (1740–1758), had no trouble reconciling the apparent contradiction between support for clerical education and scientific investigation on the one hand, while at the same time continuing prohibitions on reading with a new Index of Prohibited Books. Similar levels of inconsistency exist when examining the actions of popes in artistic patronage, in promotion of church reform, in support for scholarship, and in creation of public services for the Papal State.

Pope Paul III(1534–1549), anindividualwhose actions were filled with inconsistencies, might be seen as one who epitomized the early modern papacy. He is considered by many to be the first pope of the Catholic Reformation (or the Counter-Reformation). He not only appointed cardinals who presented him with a stinging indictment of the evils in the contemporary church, known as the Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia (1537), but he also convened the Council of Trent in 1545. In addition, he procured the legitimization of three of the four children he fathered before becoming a priest and bestowed enormous ecclesiastical incomes and properties upon one son and upon the two grandsons he appointed as cardinals. This unreformed approach to the enrichment of his family was contradicted by his generous artistic patronage and by his promotion of reform-minded clerics. Among the latter was a Spaniard, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), whose new religious order, the Society of Jesus, Paul formally approved in 1540. Paul revived the Roman Inquisition in 1542, but designed it to operate with a lenience and moderation that some of his successors rejected. He was a pope like many others in this period: a "reformer" who could never fully break away from the traditions of corruption. They were richly human, defying simple categorization.

The Council of Trent (1545–1563), whose decrees—not to mention the drumbeat of anathema within them—epitomized Catholic reaction against Protestant thought, was a richly complicated event riddled with conflict. According to the standard interpretation, popes controlled the assembly through the papal legates who set the agenda for each session, and through Jesuit theologians who, over those eighteen years, ensured that doctrinal and disciplinary decrees were secured that were acceptable to the popes. From the very beginning, however, legates like Marcello Cervini (1501–1555), Giovan Maria de' Ciocchi del Monte (1487–1555), and Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) struggled to persuade prelates to attend, to remain once they had arrived, and to get along, sometimes in ways that were much more practical than dogmatic. When they were not breaking up shoving matches among the bishops, legates mediated, rather than dictated, among members of the papal, imperial, and French factions that emerged at Trent, while attempting to promote papal plans. Popes themselves varied widely in their commitment to the gathering as a means to solve the problem facing the church. Paul III convened the council, but he clearly feared the conciliarist leanings of some of the prospective council members. Julius III (1550–1555) and Pius IV (1559–1565) moved the Tridentine assembly vigorously toward completion. In between those two, however, Paul IV insisted categorically that the meeting remain in suspension, convinced that he could carry out the reform on his own through the Roman Inquisition, over whose meetings he presided, and through his personal Index of Prohibited Books. In the end, the decrees were formulated by conciliar bishops, who put themselves in charge of bringing the documents from Trent to life in Catholic practice.

Implementing Trent

Implementation of the decrees of the Council of Trent—a series of clarifications of doctrine, disciplinary decrees, and directives on such matters as clerical education—should have brought a uniform church into existence in short order, but local realities made this impossible. Papal authority was not strong enough to effect any change as broad-ranging as that outlined at Trent. In France, implementing the decrees was especially slow, as royal control restricted even the publication of the decrees. Bringing clerical behavior there into something resembling conformity with the decrees took centuries, not decades. Recent scholarship on the Netherlands reveals that seventeenth-century bishops faced opposition to their reform plans not just from local constituents, but from Rome as well. They engaged in especially complex negotiations to try to secure claustration of nuns, that Tridentine rule most often cited as evidence of effective, centralized, disciplining control, in local convents. In the end, Netherlandish nuns determined the characteristics of their own common life, apparently at least as much as bishops. In Italy, prelates had the example of Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584), archbishop of Milan, not to mention precedents like Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543) in Verona, Bartolomeo de Martyribus (1514–1590) in Braga, and Marcello Cervini in Gubbio, to follow. Borromeo became the model Tridentine bishop, holding diocesan synods, enhancing catechetical instruction, and conducting pastoral visits. But even in Italy the process was relatively slow, as bishops elsewhere butted up against the many cathedral chapters, and monastic institutions that asserted their independence from episcopal control and appealed to Rome any challenge to that independence.

Effective implementation of the decrees was a complicated matter. The process hinged not just on the ability of bishops to operate freely over those at least theoretically under their control, but also upon the determination of some rulers to control their national churches. The papal prerogative of simply naming bishops, let alone controlling their activity, was decidedly limited, especially in Spain, France, and England. The tradition of royal leadership in religious matters in Spain continued throughout the early modern period and was already well established in 1478, when Ferdinand (ruled 1474–1516) and Isabella (ruled 1474–1504) convinced Rome of the need for a Spanish Inquisition controlled by the monarchs. Spanish monarchs retained the right to appoint bishops in the Netherlands, as well as across the so-called New World. Such an arrangement within France was created in the Concordat of Bologna (1516) between Leo X and King Francis I (ruled 1515–1547). Behind these and similar practices—such as monarchical control of appointments to ecclesiastical benefices in England—was a concern over the distribution of revenues that was more financial than religious. When viewed in the context of Tridentine decrees insisting on the appointment only of properly trained clerics who would take seriously the cura animarum, 'care of souls', these facts illustrate that Roman determination to control the reform process, as well as the practical ability to do so, varied considerably.

Some of those who drafted the Tridentine decree on seminaries may have desired a highly centralized clergy obedient to Roman doctrine and leadership, but recent research suggests implementation of this directive was desperately slow, and that any such desire went largely unfilled. In places like Milan, seminary training after Trent was anything but uniform. Many candidates studied in multiple institutions, and only some of those were under the control of the archbishop. Diocesan seminaries there were part of a larger system that included schools run by some of the new Catholic religious orders. In Fiesole, the first attempt to found a seminary did not occur until nearly a generation after the assembly at Trent completed its work. Formal seminary instruction in Fiesole did not commence until 1635. Even if trained, the reshaping of local priests into a professional class through episcopal visitations and instructions may have been the intention of early modern bishops, but they apparently made little progress in this era. In Milan, during the archiepiscopal administrations of Carlo and Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), the majority of priests resembled the superstitious, worldly, sinful laity they served far more than the confessional interrogators the archbishops had in mind.

Religious Revival

The intention of all Catholic reformers was to revive religious life generally, but locally support for revival and opposition to it were both common. Hence, real change was limited. Seminary education and pastoral visits were supposed to create a consistently well-educated and attentive clergy. Local records suggest that the members of the laity supported such an intention, but in practice, some established members of the clergy challenged the change. Giambattista Casale, a carpenter and late-sixteenth-century diarist in Milan, enthusiastically praised the reform work of Carlo Borromeo. Casale related popular support both for the attention Borromeo devoted to his personal pastoral responsibilities, and for his initiatives to improve the quality of local priests. Clerics there, however, were not so favorably impressed. In 1569 and 1570 they assaulted the archbishop, first verbally and then physically, as his reforming ideals were threatening their clerical positions and income. One can find many examples of ecclesiastical and civic leaders developing new institutions and enhancing the power of old ones, designed to enforce religious orthodoxy, proper notions of political sovereignty, and moral purity. At the same time, crime statistics, court records—including the recently opened central archive of the Roman Inquisition—and other forms of documentation all reveal that the goal of conformity was far from achieved. Archbishops and parishioners in the Netherlands in this era did not completely agree on what constituted a good pastor, but one thing was sure: neither were satisfied with those they observed. The well-noted crackdown on questionable belief and behavior among upper-ranking clerics did not preclude behavior by one—Reginald Pole (1500–1558, the cardinal archbishop of Canterbury and papal legate to the early sessions at Trent)—that led his most recent biographer to assert that he was, for all practical purposes, married to his longtime companion, the Venetian noble and cleric Alvise Priuli (d. 1560).

Where Catholic religious practice was effectively reformed in early modern Europe, it often came through leadership from members of a variety of religious orders. The members of long established orders, like the Franciscans, Benedictines, and Augustinians, initiated reforms to improve adherence to the religious rule each followed, but the reform movements frequently resulted in division and the creation of new branches of these orders. This operation followed a well-established pattern in the Franciscan order, for example. The new Capuchin group founded by Matteo di Bassi (1495–1552) was not unlike the so-called spirituals from an earlier age in its call for stricter observance of the rule of Saint Francis. Their emphasis on preaching and identification with common people, especially in towns, contributed to the spread of reformed Catholicism. Angela Merici of Brescia (1474–1540) and Ignatius of Loyola founded brand new orders, the Ursulines and the Society of Jesus, respectively, whose inspiration turned as much on the goal of serving the needs of others as on the pursuit of perfection among its own members. The Ursulines became educators, especially in catechism, as well as servants of orphans and women in need of shelter. The Jesuits engaged in a wide variety of ministries, but like the Ursulines, their principal influence on the European community came through work in education. They were central to the development of secondary schools that prepared young men for university study, and to the beginnings of seminary education. These were just a few of the many new and newly reformed orders of the early modern period.

Members of the secular (that is, diocesan) clergy on the one hand, and members of religious orders (both clerics in religious orders and nuns) on the other, engaged in disputes that further complicate the picture of Catholicism in this age. In general terms, members of religious orders tended to assert their independence from episcopal control based upon their foundations and authorizations that came directly from the papacy. This was a traditional position for religious orders to take. But when they did so in the early modern period, especially after the Council of Trent, they butted up against bishops armed with the decrees of Trent. Many of these bishops intended to exercise their authority to examine clerics and grant permissions to preach and to hear confessions in their dioceses, whether they were secular or regular clergy. Members of religious orders could often, through appeals to the papacy, gain exemption from such episcopal authority. There was not, however, any general position of the papacy in favor of the independence of regular clergy. Paul IV, to take a notable example, was decidedly suspicious of the devotional innovations designed by Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits to facilitate their pastoral activities. For a time, he even insisted that they recite the divine office in unison, in violation of the Jesuit constitutions established under preceding popes. We ought not to think of this distrust of religious orders as a position taken up exclusively by belligerent popes like Paul IV. When questions were raised concerning the propriety of the independence of the Ursulines and their activities outside the convent, the push to cloister them came not just from authorities in Rome, but also from parents of the sisters and other family members.

European members of both branches of the Catholic clergy increasingly engaged in preaching, a fact that undermines one of the most common stereotypes about Catholicism in this era. A common assumption is that, to the Catholic clergy of this period, preaching was either completely marginal or used only for unjust fundraising operations such as the sale of indulgences. But the historical record of preaching in the early modern period is much more complicated. At the beginning of the period, members of religious orders, like Franciscan and Dominican friars, were exceedingly popular preachers. They delivered well-attended sermons on a daily basis during Lent and Advent. In fact, civic leaders vied to secure the best known preachers among them. The popularity of these preachers was based, at least in part, on the lack of preaching by members of the secular clergy, who were largely absent from their pastoral duties. After the Council of Trent, short homilies within the Eucharistic celebration became increasingly common. There was a veritable explosion of publications related to preaching in the early modern period. The explosion included simple instructions by bishops, handbooks of forms for the composition of sermons, and collections of the work of celebrated preachers, in addition to formal treatises on the topic. This literature reveals that theorists recommended explicitly the utilization of humanist rhetorical ideals and clear explication of basic doctrine in sermons. Court preachers speaking before popes and heads of state retained the prominent characteristic of their medieval predecessors. Preaching held a central place in the religious culture of all early modern Europe, not just Protestant lands.

Popular Piety

Preachers touched local Catholic communities whose common experience of the religion varied considerably. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Milan was a very different place compared to a city in a Protestant territory, like Amsterdam. In the former, priests were on the lookout for both clerics and members of the laity who deviated from the newly defined norms of Trent. They spent the bulk of their time trying to form Catholic identity around those norms, often with minimal success. In the latter, and in many other towns and cities in the British Isles, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch Republic, Catholics created religious spaces in places where such were officially proscribed, but in practice they were tolerated by neighbors and officials who knew well of their existence. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Catholics controlled twenty such semi-secret churches (schuilkerk) in Amsterdam. One was a narrow row house whose third-floor church could hold some 150 persons in pews and galleries. Catholics in early modern Spain probably experienced religion in a manner that was closer to that of the Milanese. They surely were the subjects of a plan for orthodox indoctrination. For some, especially in rural areas, their practice may have become outwardly Christian, even approaching Catholic, but it was mixed with appeals to the supernatural through spells and potions that illustrate the difficulty with which "pagan" superstitions died in this era. Moreover, the divide between Christians and Jews in European communities was often anything but complete. Paul IV set up an enclosed ghetto in Rome that is still widely seen as a precursor of Nazi versions in Eastern Europe. But emphasis on this episode encourages ignorance of the more tolerant policy that both preceded and followed his administration. It also hides the fact that, as recent scholarship has shown, Jews and members of the Catholic laity in Rome shared a good deal in common, and that the ghetto had few negative effects on the religious and cultural identity of Jews in Rome.

Believers, especially in urban areas, organized themselves into confraternities, a vast array of diverse organizations that belied the image of contemporary Catholicism as uniform. Confraternities had existed as devotional organizations promoting piety and social service, mainly in the towns of the medieval period. In the early modern period, when centralizing tendencies in the organization of Catholicism allegedly held sway, such organizations and their independence from hierarchical control should, logically, have disappeared. They did not. Instead, they tended to become stronger. Whether their increased strength was based upon enhanced devotion to more clearly defined dogmas, on the Eucharist, or upon an increasing charitable need in contemporary cities is unclear. Some of these institutions seemed on the surface to cooperate with growing states and their centralization of charity. In some places, however, like Bologna, confraternities that took on a more political role allowed patricians to maintain secure hold on certain elements of administration in the Papal State (specifically over the prison system) against centralization under the papacy.

Individual Catholic believers, and not just those in confraternities, seem to have experienced religion much more through their devotional practices than through any conscious adherence to dogma, whether orthodox or heterodox. Popular religious practice varied widely despite the hope of some Catholic leaders to regularize devotional life. Throughout the sixteenth century, there is little evidence to suggest that instruction in dogma went far beyond practice in the memorization of basic prayers and foundational formulas like the Nicene Creed. Later, increasing expansion of the Confraternities of Christian Doctrine and the publication of the Catechism of the Council of Trent in 1566 surely facilitated the spread of the doctrines defined at Trent. But real work on that document did not begin at least until late in 1562, if not 1563. Once it was completed under Pius V in 1566, priests had to learn and translate the contents of the massive Latin edition before the process of explaining the ideas in terms accessible to common people could begin. Popular cults honoring the mostly unofficial but locally recognized patron saints continued. Pilgrimage sites that had developed in the Middle Ages, such as Loreto, location of the house in which Mary allegedly grew up—miraculously transported from Palestine to the Adriatic coast—maintained their popularity, along with the sacramentals that attended their use. Popular piety found expression throughout Europe, but frequently outside the confines of standard religious instruction, outside of new Tridentine liturgical parameters, and outside of the sacraments. Processions were often more boisterous than devout, the majority of Catholics received Communion infrequently, and clerical reform rarely touched rural areas in large portions of Europe before 1650. Popular piety could be found in other forms, however, as in the well-attended theatrical productions presented in towns, especially the university towns, of northern Europe. Jesuit colleges were famous for presentations that dramatized the spiritual life with scenes of both angels and hell, and these remained popular, especially in southern Germany, through the middle of the eighteenth century. Some earlier religious dramas produced in the Low Countries during the reign of Emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) included presentation of varying religious positions from contemporary theological debates.

Missionary Activity

Efforts to spread the faith through missionary activity in Europe and beyond have received scant attention, but consideration of this activity exposes still more variations in the Catholic experience. The revival of Catholicism represented by reform initiatives that predate Luther, as well as those initiatives designed to counteract his work and that of other Protestant reformers, spurred action to spread Catholicism throughout Europe, not to mention the New World. The Jesuits led an attempt to recover believers in the German-speaking territory who were "lost" to the Protestant movement. They were active in cities like Cologne and Vienna in the Holy Roman Empire in the 1550s, where their schools enrolled large numbers and where they attempted to prepare better trained clergy who might help in the recovery process. They tried to do the same in Slavic-speaking lands at approximately the same time, but with much less success. The English crown attempted to thwart Jesuit efforts to spread Catholicism in Britain after the Reformation. Jesuit missionary work there was complicated by the political and theological controversy over the divine right of kings during the age of King James I (ruled 1603–1625). Catholic clerics from a number of religious orders took part in efforts to spread the faith in Spanish and Portuguese holdings in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific islands. The standard image of these missionaries arriving on the heels of the conquistadors and forcing adherence to the new religion, armed with an ideology that permitted coercion, is only partly true. While mass conversions were frequently carried out, missionaries often faced a hostile initial response from local populations, especially in Asia. When they did, some—like Francis Xavier (1506–1552), for example—simply moved on to other towns and regions where they hoped for better luck. Our image of the character of Catholic proselytism in this era must be able to explain not just the mass conversions, but also the retention of Roman doctrine over the long term. It must explain not just those instances where the value of native culture was discounted, but also Catholic missionary work that accommodated local practices. The latter was so extensive in China, for instance, that Jesuits there like Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) were considered promoters of paganism by some Roman authorities.

Art, Science, and Religion

Perhaps the most enduring image of early modern Catholicism is that of an institution that systematically shut down emergent local culture and freedom of thought. Exploration of the activity of Catholics in art, literature, music, and science demonstrates the inadequacy of that image: the reality was far more complex. In the arts—including sculpture, painting, poetry, drama, prose, oratory, and music—there is no doubt that anti-Protestant ideology contributed to new Catholic production. The Protestant attack on art, not to mention the development of new notions of Christian heroism, certainly influenced the way biographers, preachers, painters, sculptors, and composers expressed themselves. But they looked for effective techniques and for attention-grabbing flourishes to impress audiences and to demand an active response. There is no doubt that rules for propriety in various forms of art, notably oratory and painting, reflect an attempt by church leaders to control. The Tridentine decree on sacred images from the twenty-fifth session (1563) and the discourse on sacred and profane images published in 1582 by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597) are the texts most frequently cited to suggest that ecclesiastical repression in the world of art was effective. However, the assertion that the attempt was successful ignores a vast body of evidence. Evidence lies in the humanistic oratory of post-Tridentine preachers and funeral eulogists. It can be found in the intense painting and sculpture created by artists like Agostino (1557–1602), Annibale (1560–1609), and Ludovico Carracci (1555–1619), as well as Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and Giambologna (1529–1608). The era was one of bold creativity that followed from humanistic innovations that were only partly subordinated to the goals of religious leaders. The works produced by popular Italian vernacular authors also serve as evidence. They offered everything from legal to occult texts, in addition to the orthodox religious publications associated with the post-Tridentine printing industry. Yet another example can be found in northern Europe. In Germany, Catholics, and even Jesuits, were behind an artistic revitalization that contributed to the survival of Catholicism there, but also to the emergence of the German baroque movement.

Early modern Catholicism allegedly had a stultifying effect on intellectual life, and especially on the development of science, but recent scholarship suggests that this view needs considerable revision. Intellectual historians have insisted that humanism remained a vital, dynamic intellectual movement in the seventeenth century throughout Europe, despite attempts by church authorities to refocus scholarship to support new confessional ideologies. Spanish intellectual life apparently was much more complex than historians in previous generations had thought. In Spain, humanism mixed with more traditional scholastic thought, and writers moved with considerable flexibility between methods: even Spanish inquisitorial records illustrate this reality. Something similar was largely true in Italy, especially in the age of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). Jesuits at the Roman College—some from Germany like Kircher, and others from elsewhere—showed considerable favor for the cosmology of Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), even though it stood in sharp contrast to the Aristotelian status quo. The "church," both as an institution and literally as a structure, provided a great deal more support for the development of science, especially astronomy, than most would imagine, given the pervasive image of the struggle Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) had with the bureaucrats of the Roman Inquisition. Observations and calculations carried out in some of the principal cathedral churches of Europe, with the financial support of high-ranking prelates, paved the way for improvements in observational astronomy. They also belie the image of the Catholic Church as an effective, let alone pervasive, barrier to the expansion of learning. However, extreme Catholic opposition to the Enlightenment movement also reared up toward the end of this period. Still, had counter-cultural efforts like these been effective on any significant level, historians would have considerably greater difficulty explaining the emergence of the jarring political revolutions of the late eighteenth century.

If, as the famous American lawmaker Tip O'Neill once said, "All politics is local," then perhaps all history is local, too. The history of early modern Catholicism surely could stand as an example to defend such a thesis. Historians studying more distant ages in the past sometimes face a paucity of sources and data that makes generalization necessary. The early modern period was no such era. It was, on the contrary, the very age in which the passion for record keeping that we take for granted today first emerged. Such records, in their display of local circumstances and realities, illustrate a human complexity that defies categorization. When Martin Luther wrote his letter to Leo X, he set the pattern for consideration of early modern Catholicism, either demon or hero, that is only now being revised and seen with a human face. Further historical investigation will reveal even more wrinkles and complexities. Early modern Catholicism will take a good deal longer to describe, but the description will be closer to the human reality of that fascinating era.

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—WILLIAM V. HUDON

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