The Catholic Reformation/The Counter Reformation (1 janv. 1545 – 1 janv. 1648)

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The Roman Catholic Church made significant strides in maintaining Catholicism after Protestantism spread. The developments of the Catholic Reformation, as Catholics called it, and the Counter Reformation, as Protestants called it, consisted of both attempts to reform their own church and to oppose Protestants.

Pope Paul III began the change of the papacy being the center of reform. He established the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, also called the Holy Office, with jurisdiction over the Roman Inquisition. The Roman Inquisition had judicial authority over all Catholics and the power to arrest, imprison, and execute suspected heretics. The Holy Office also forbade readings of Christian humanists and Protestants in the Index of Prohibited Books.

A general council met intermittently from 1545 to 1563 at Trent, an imperial city close to Italy, to reform the Catholic Church and secure reconciliation with Protestants (the latter of which they did not really do). They dealt with matters that disillusioned faith, gave bishops greater authority, ordered them to establish seminaries for the education/training of the clergy, and ended private marriages. However, little was done belief-wise, and its impacts were not as significant as they'd hoped. It secured practices such as transubstantiation, priesthood value, putting Scripture and tradition on equal footing, declaring Latin the language of religious worship, clergy celibacy, monasticism, indulgences (while still arguing against abuses of it), and religious art.

Religious orders were reformed. Teresa of Avila traveled around Spain reforming Carmelite order to standards of asceticism and poverty, to some resistance. Angela Merici founded the Ursuline order of nuns which focused on the education of women. It received papal approval in 1565 and spread. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuits (Society of Jesus). He wrote Spiritual Exercises in which he guides readers through spiritual exercises intended to be used in a four-week retreat. Jesuits recruited mainly from wealthy merchant and professional families and sought to improve spiritual condition rather than reform the church. It grew and achieved great success. Jesuit efforts carried Christianity to India and Japan before 1550 and in the 1600s, to Brazil, North America, and the Congo. They also brought Southern Germany and much of Eastern Europe back to Catholicism. Confraternities of laypeople were established or expanded, and churches began to be more artful.

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