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Unit 5 corresponds with pp. 72-88 in our textbook.
The end of the Middle Ages saw the rise of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a cultural movement which involved a number of elements. It was a time of breaking out of the box. There was a renewed interest in going back to some of the writings, ideas, and styles of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The world of scholarship and academia began to go beyond the scholastic approach to learning that had been dominant for the past few centuries. Interest in the natural sciences began taking off. The study of textual criticism (with regard to the Bible as well as other texts) began to grow (textual criticism here means a scientific approach to tracing the sources of manuscripts to get at the original versions, as well as a more critical appraisal of the authenticity of various manuscripts). In many ways, society began to loosen up a bit more. A more laid-back and informal attitude to the world began to be more prominent. Interest began to increase in aspects of the humanities and liberal arts that had not been of as much interest to the scholastics. There was an increase in the diversity of art forms (including an interest in greater realism as well as in more secular subjects of art, although religious themes were still very much prominent). Musical forms began to diversify as well. These are some of the themes that might be used to characterize the Renaissance era.
Although there was a rise of interest in secular subjects and pursuits, the Renaissance was a thoroughly Catholic movement (at least until the Reformation, when Protestants got involved as well). It was, in many ways, a flowering of impulses natural to and latent within Western Christian civilization and the Middle Ages in particular. It was an outgrowth to a great degree of the Middle Ages, an organic and natural development of Medieval culture.
Among the leaders and prime supporters of the Renaissance movement were the Popes. They were especially promoters of the arts during this period. This is the era in which the Church commissioned works by famous artists like Michaelangelo, Raphael, etc., and famous works of music as well.
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/renaissance-in-rome.htm - Shows the intertwining of Renaissance visual arts and the papacy.
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/catholic.htm - Continues examining the Church's involvement in the visual arts through the Counter-Reformation and Baroque period.
http://claver.gprep.org/fac/gldaum/_music_/new_history_text/chapter_12.pdf - On sacred music of the Renaissance and the Church's connection with Renaissance music.
https://brewminate.com/music-in-the-counter-reformation/ - Discussion of Counter-Reformation music.
The Renaissance
The end of the Middle Ages saw the rise of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a cultural movement which involved a number of elements. It was a time of breaking out of the box. There was a renewed interest in going back to some of the writings, ideas, and styles of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The world of scholarship and academia began to go beyond the scholastic approach to learning that had been dominant for the past few centuries. Interest in the natural sciences began taking off. The study of textual criticism (with regard to the Bible as well as other texts) began to grow (textual criticism here means a scientific approach to tracing the sources of manuscripts to get at the original versions, as well as a more critical appraisal of the authenticity of various manuscripts). In many ways, society began to loosen up a bit more. A more laid-back and informal attitude to the world began to be more prominent. Interest began to increase in aspects of the humanities and liberal arts that had not been of as much interest to the scholastics. There was an increase in the diversity of art forms (including an interest in greater realism as well as in more secular subjects of art, although religious themes were still very much prominent). Musical forms began to diversify as well. These are some of the themes that might be used to characterize the Renaissance era.
Although there was a rise of interest in secular subjects and pursuits, the Renaissance was a thoroughly Catholic movement (at least until the Reformation, when Protestants got involved as well). It was, in many ways, a flowering of impulses natural to and latent within Western Christian civilization and the Middle Ages in particular. It was an outgrowth to a great degree of the Middle Ages, an organic and natural development of Medieval culture.
Among the leaders and prime supporters of the Renaissance movement were the Popes. They were especially promoters of the arts during this period. This is the era in which the Church commissioned works by famous artists like Michaelangelo, Raphael, etc., and famous works of music as well.
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/renaissance-in-rome.htm - Shows the intertwining of Renaissance visual arts and the papacy.
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/catholic.htm - Continues examining the Church's involvement in the visual arts through the Counter-Reformation and Baroque period.
http://claver.gprep.org/fac/gldaum/_music_/new_history_text/chapter_12.pdf - On sacred music of the Renaissance and the Church's connection with Renaissance music.
https://brewminate.com/music-in-the-counter-reformation/ - Discussion of Counter-Reformation music.
Give the class a few examples of Renaissance art/music.
As I mentioned, the Renaissance sparked a renewed interest in the natural sciences. The Church approved and promoted this renewed interest. This interest was an outgrowth of the same commitment to the importance of learning that had been a major part of the Church's way of thinking from ancient through medieval times, but in the Renaissance it got a renewed burst of interest in some new directions. Modern science was born, to a great degree, out of Medieval Christendom.
Although the Church supported the sciences, she was also on guard against those who would innovate against the teachings of the Church. True theology and true science could never contradict, but false science could conflict with true theology and false theology could conflict with true science. St. Augustine had warned back in the 4th or 5th century of reading the Bible in an erroneous or over-literal way and so making it seem to be in conflict with what can be known through the sciences. However, in the famous Galileo affair, the Church was concerned with the opposite danger--false science opposing true theology.
For thousands of years, Western civilization had accepted what is called a Ptolemaic view of the solar system, which had the earth motionless while the sun went around it. In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus, who was both a scientist and a canon (someone on the ministry team, we might say) in the Church (not that uncommon a combination throughout Church history) published a book arguing for a heliocentric model--that the earth goes around the sun. His ideas met no resistance by the Church. His book was dedicated to Pope Paul III.
However, a later follower of his ideas, Galileo Galilei, wasn't so lucky. The Church had been dealing with the Protestant Reformation (which we'll discuss below) for a century by his time, and Church leaders were wary of people who would take it upon themselves to interpret Scripture or theology contrary to the Tradition of the Church. In the Catholic view, of course, it is the Magisterium of the Church--the bishops headed by the Pope--that has the authority to authentically interpret and apply both Scripture and Tradition. The Protestants had opposed this view and asserted that only the Bible was guaranteed reliability by God, and so they encouraged everyone to interpret the Bible for themselves, even, if need be, in opposition to the official teachers of the Church. In the early seventeenth century, therefore, the Church was wary of people who would take it upon themselves to attack long-standing ideas in the Church on the basis of their own interpretations of Scripture.
Galileo fell under the suspicion of the Church when he began to advocate for heliocentrism and argue for alternative readings of Scripture to accommodate it. He was called before the Roman Inquisition and his views were condemned in 1616. He was commanded not to teach heliocentrism. He was allowed to give hypothetical arguments for and against heliocentrism and to advocate it as a mathematical model of the solar system, so long as he didn't actually advocate for its physical truth. But in 1632, he published a book called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Church leaders saw in this book a violation of Galileo's previous agreement not to advocate heliocentrism. The Pope at that time, Pope Urban VIII, who had been a friend of Galileo, had made arguments for geocentrism (as a private person, not in terms of official papal teaching), and Galileo had included the Pope's arguments in his book and put them in the mouth of one of his fictional debaters, whose name happened to be Simplicio. Although Galileo argued that the name was copied from a famous earlier philosopher, yet the name in Italian also had the connotation of simpleton. This apparently greatly irritated Pope Urban VIII. At any rate, in 1633, in response to his new book, he was brought once again before the Inquisition, which convicted him of being "vehemently suspected of heresy" for his opinions and sentenced him to house arrest for the rest of his life, after he recanted his position. He died in 1642.
The Church condemned Galileo's advocacy of heliocentrism because it was contrary to the traditional understanding of Scriptural teaching about the earth which had come down from the Fathers (the great teachers) of the Church through her history, and the Council of Trent had forbidden people to interpret Scripture contrary to the consensus of the Fathers. The Church never declared heliocentrism definitively wrong, however. The door was left open for the Church to allow heliocentrism if it could prove itself scientifically and so warrant a challenge to the Fathers' consensus on Scriptural interpretation.
The Church banned books advocating heliocentrism until 1758. Once heliocentrism had proved itself to the scientific community's satisfaction, the Church had no more problems with it. However, the Church never got around to making an explicit statement about whether heliocentrism was allowed until she was challenged on this subject again in 1820 by another heliocentrist who tried to publish a book advocating heliocentrism. The book was opposed by the Church's chief censor for its advocating of heliocentrism, but the author (Giuseppe Settele) appealed to Pope Pius VII, who approved the overturning of the censor's decree and allowed the publishing of the book. Here is the Church's decree on this matter from 1820:
http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscience/2011/05/18/science-owes-much-to-both-christianity-and-the-middle-ages - On the Church's advocacy of science through the ages.
https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/intro/histo-frame.html - Another article on the Church's advocacy of science through the ages.
Science, and the Galileo Affair
As I mentioned, the Renaissance sparked a renewed interest in the natural sciences. The Church approved and promoted this renewed interest. This interest was an outgrowth of the same commitment to the importance of learning that had been a major part of the Church's way of thinking from ancient through medieval times, but in the Renaissance it got a renewed burst of interest in some new directions. Modern science was born, to a great degree, out of Medieval Christendom.
Although the Church supported the sciences, she was also on guard against those who would innovate against the teachings of the Church. True theology and true science could never contradict, but false science could conflict with true theology and false theology could conflict with true science. St. Augustine had warned back in the 4th or 5th century of reading the Bible in an erroneous or over-literal way and so making it seem to be in conflict with what can be known through the sciences. However, in the famous Galileo affair, the Church was concerned with the opposite danger--false science opposing true theology.
For thousands of years, Western civilization had accepted what is called a Ptolemaic view of the solar system, which had the earth motionless while the sun went around it. In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus, who was both a scientist and a canon (someone on the ministry team, we might say) in the Church (not that uncommon a combination throughout Church history) published a book arguing for a heliocentric model--that the earth goes around the sun. His ideas met no resistance by the Church. His book was dedicated to Pope Paul III.
However, a later follower of his ideas, Galileo Galilei, wasn't so lucky. The Church had been dealing with the Protestant Reformation (which we'll discuss below) for a century by his time, and Church leaders were wary of people who would take it upon themselves to interpret Scripture or theology contrary to the Tradition of the Church. In the Catholic view, of course, it is the Magisterium of the Church--the bishops headed by the Pope--that has the authority to authentically interpret and apply both Scripture and Tradition. The Protestants had opposed this view and asserted that only the Bible was guaranteed reliability by God, and so they encouraged everyone to interpret the Bible for themselves, even, if need be, in opposition to the official teachers of the Church. In the early seventeenth century, therefore, the Church was wary of people who would take it upon themselves to attack long-standing ideas in the Church on the basis of their own interpretations of Scripture.
Galileo fell under the suspicion of the Church when he began to advocate for heliocentrism and argue for alternative readings of Scripture to accommodate it. He was called before the Roman Inquisition and his views were condemned in 1616. He was commanded not to teach heliocentrism. He was allowed to give hypothetical arguments for and against heliocentrism and to advocate it as a mathematical model of the solar system, so long as he didn't actually advocate for its physical truth. But in 1632, he published a book called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Church leaders saw in this book a violation of Galileo's previous agreement not to advocate heliocentrism. The Pope at that time, Pope Urban VIII, who had been a friend of Galileo, had made arguments for geocentrism (as a private person, not in terms of official papal teaching), and Galileo had included the Pope's arguments in his book and put them in the mouth of one of his fictional debaters, whose name happened to be Simplicio. Although Galileo argued that the name was copied from a famous earlier philosopher, yet the name in Italian also had the connotation of simpleton. This apparently greatly irritated Pope Urban VIII. At any rate, in 1633, in response to his new book, he was brought once again before the Inquisition, which convicted him of being "vehemently suspected of heresy" for his opinions and sentenced him to house arrest for the rest of his life, after he recanted his position. He died in 1642.
The Church condemned Galileo's advocacy of heliocentrism because it was contrary to the traditional understanding of Scriptural teaching about the earth which had come down from the Fathers (the great teachers) of the Church through her history, and the Council of Trent had forbidden people to interpret Scripture contrary to the consensus of the Fathers. The Church never declared heliocentrism definitively wrong, however. The door was left open for the Church to allow heliocentrism if it could prove itself scientifically and so warrant a challenge to the Fathers' consensus on Scriptural interpretation.
The Church banned books advocating heliocentrism until 1758. Once heliocentrism had proved itself to the scientific community's satisfaction, the Church had no more problems with it. However, the Church never got around to making an explicit statement about whether heliocentrism was allowed until she was challenged on this subject again in 1820 by another heliocentrist who tried to publish a book advocating heliocentrism. The book was opposed by the Church's chief censor for its advocating of heliocentrism, but the author (Giuseppe Settele) appealed to Pope Pius VII, who approved the overturning of the censor's decree and allowed the publishing of the book. Here is the Church's decree on this matter from 1820:
The Assessor of the Holy Office has referred the request of Giuseppe Settele, Professor of Optics and Astronomy at La Sapienza University, regarding permission to publish his work Elements of Astronomy in which he espouses the common opinion of the astronomers of our time regarding the earth’s daily and yearly motions, to His Holiness through Divine Providence, Pope Pius VII. Previously, His Holiness had referred this request to the Supreme Sacred Congregation and concurrently to the consideration of the Most Eminent and Most Reverend General Cardinal Inquisitor. His Holiness has decreed that no obstacles exist for those who sustain Copernicus’ affirmation regarding the earth’s movement in the manner in which it is affirmed today, even by Catholic authors. He has, moreover, suggested the insertion of several notations into this work, aimed at demonstrating that the above mentioned affirmation [of Copernicus], as it is has come to be understood, does not present any difficulties; difficulties that existed in times past, prior to the subsequent astronomical observations that have now occurred. [Pope Pius VII] has also recommended that the implementation [of these decisions] be given to the Cardinal Secretary of the Supreme Sacred Congregation and Master of the Sacred Apostolic Palace. He is now appointed the task of bringing to an end any concerns and criticisms regarding the printing of this book, and, at the same time, ensuring that in the future, regarding the publication of such works, permission is sought from the Cardinal Vicar whose signature will not be given without the authorization of the Superior of his Order. [Original Latin source: W. Brandmüller and E.J. Greipl, eds., Copernicus, Galileo, and the Church: The End of the Controversy (1820), Acts of the Holy Office (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1992), pp. 300-301, taken from the website of the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science on 4/4/20.]
http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscience/2011/05/18/science-owes-much-to-both-christianity-and-the-middle-ages - On the Church's advocacy of science through the ages.
https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/intro/histo-frame.html - Another article on the Church's advocacy of science through the ages.
Discuss in class the Church's relationship with science through the ages.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-and-the-Church-What-the-history-books-don-t-say - Helpful article discussing the Church's response to Copernicus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair - A nice, thorough summary of the Galileo affair.
https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2020/03/historical-challenges-to-infallibility.html - An article responding to objections to the Church's infallibility based on her response to Galileo.
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/galileo-tuscany.asp - Letter of Galileo to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, where he lays out his own attempt to justify his heliocentric views in light of Scripture and the Catholic faith.
http://inters.org/approval-Settele-heliocentric - Decree of the Church regarding Giuseppe Settele's later book advocating heliocentrism.
The Renaissance Church, along with the Church at any time, had its share of corruption. The Popes, even while doing many positive things for the Church and for the culture, tended to be more worldly than was wise. They spent too much money, nearly bankrupting the papacy. They engaged over-much in secular endeavors. Besides being indulgent in their artistic fixing up of Rome, some of them (such as Julius II) focused a lot of attention on their secular, military defense of the territory they had rulership over. Many priests had too little education and allowed too much superstition and supported too little good catechizing in doctrines and morals. But the Church had been here before, and had promoted reform. The Church is ever both human and divine, and the divine in her is always fighting against the sinful aspects of the human. In the early 15th century, from 1512 through 1517, right on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, the Church called another ecumenical council--the Fifth Lateran Council--which issued decrees on the reform of the Church. Most of them, however, didn't end up being followed up on, and corruptions were not adequately dealt with.
Read in class - https://catholicism.org/how-the-renaissance-papacy-contributed-to-the-reformation.html - Helpful article articulating some of the corruptions of the Popes during this period which called for reform and helped set the stage for the Protestant Reformation.
The Protestant Reformation started in 1517 with the nailing of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses to the Church door in Wittenberg in Germany. Luther was an Augustinian monk, and he was very scrupulous. He was always concerned about his salvation, fearful that he was not living with sufficient righteousness to warrant belief that he could be in good favor with God. He would spend hours in confession, and then go back soon afterwards because he had forgotten something. His confessor is said to have told him at one point to go out and commit some real sins before coming back to confess again, since Luther would confess such a huge barrage of trifling matters. Luther was sent to Rome on some business connected with his monastic order. It was hoped that this would help him, but it only made things worse, since he came face to face with the corruption in Rome.
What eventually brought Luther a sense of relief was his reading of the Epistles of St. Paul. He saw that St. Paul teaches that we are justified before God--that is, brought into a right standing before him--not by our own works or efforts but by the righteousness of Christ given to us as a free gift. This is, of course, the doctrine of the Scriptures, as well as the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church. However, Luther ended up taking this in some unique directions that eventually brought him into conflict with the Church.
St. Paul says, in Romans 3, that we are justified before God because, even though we are sinners, when we trust in and believe in Christ our "faith is imputed for righteousness." Luther seems to have taken this to mean that faith is accepted by God for us in place of our actually having to be righteous. The idea he develops is that God gives us Christ's righteousness, and his satisfaction for our sins through his death on the cross, as a free gift received by faith alone. That is, we don't have to do anything to earn it or attain it other than trusting in Christ for it. Once we've done that, God accounts us righteous in his sight, and so we are saved. Luther went on quickly to add that a person who has real faith in Christ will be motivated by love and gratitude to want to do good works and live a holy life; but he is not obligated to do so, he does not have to do so in order to be right with God and be saved. Holiness of life is a fruit of our justification, but not a ground for it. Of course, this conflicts with Catholic doctrine and the Church's reading of St. Paul. The Church agrees that our salvation is entirely a gift of grace, merited and procured for us entirely by the Passion and merits of Christ. We are not saved by anything we can produce from ourselves apart from grace. However, in Catholic teaching, the gospel does not do away with the requirement that we be holy. It's not that faith is accepted in place of righteousness, or that Christ is righteous for us so that we don't have to be; it's rather that Christ's merits and sacrifice are applied to us inwardly by the Holy Spirit so that, by grace, we can actually become righteous. The grace of God in Christ does not simply make us acceptable to God without righteousness; it makes us acceptable to God by making us righteous. The requirements of the moral law are not set aside for us; rather, by grace we are changed within so that we can love God and our neighbor and thus fulfill the demands of the moral law.
Luther also ended up saying some harsh things about free will in his zeal to emphasize the grace of God in our salvation. He sometimes spoke as if free will doesn't exist at all, and that people are saved or damned by the actions of God or the devil without any input from free will. On the other hand, he did make it clear that sin and good works are both done voluntarily; there is no idea that a person is dragged into them against or without his will. But whatever Luther intended, his language made it sound to many like he was denying free will. The Church, of course, while recognizing that all our good choices are a product of the grace of God, also emphasizes that the input of free will is crucial. We must cooperate with God's grace voluntarily. Even our cooperation is a gift of grace, but, still, we must cooperate.
Luther became frustrated with the way some in the Church were promoting indulgences. Pope Leo X had offered indulgences to those who would contribute to the building of the new St. Peter's Basilica in Rome--one of those grandiose artistic projects of the Renaissance Popes. Some of those promoting these indulgences made it sound as if the indulgences were being sold--as if Pope Leo X was selling forgiveness of sins in order to fund his building projects. One of these indulgence-promoters, Johann Tetzel, came across like a used-car salesman. He even had a jingle: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs!" This seemed to Luther--and to many others--to be a crass and sacrilegious treatment of something profound and holy. In protest to some of these practices, he drew up a paper containing ninety-five statements correcting errors. He posted them to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. The door functioned as a kind of bulletin board for the community. Luther was seeking to dispute with other scholars and theologians. The Ninety-Five Theses were written in Latin--the language of the scholars--but some people got a hold of them, translated them into German (the common language of the people) and distributed them. This led to Luther very quickly becoming a center of controversy. He continued to write, and came more and more into conflict with Church leaders. As his thinking progressed over the years, he became more and more critical of various aspects of Catholic teaching. Eventually, things escalated to the point that Pope Leo X issued a papal bull (a kind of document written by the Pope) condemning several errors in Luther's teaching. The bull was called Exsurge Domine. Luther responded by publicly burning it--which, not surprisingly, didn't help matters. Finally, Luther was called before an assembly at the city of Worms--the Diet of Worms--and was ordered to recant his errors. He refused to do so, and was excommunicated. But this did not deter him, and he kept on promoting his views.
Luther's movement continued to gain traction, and the Reformation--as it was called--spread to many countries in Europe, eventually shattering the unity of Christendom and dividing it up into competing churches and traditions.
When Luther began to debate his ideas with other Catholic theologians, it eventually became apparent that he was out of accord with the official teachings of the Catholic Church in a number of areas. When that became clear, it forced a choice upon Luther. At first, he tried to make himself out to be a defender of authentic Catholic teaching against perversions of that teaching. But when this position became untenable, and he was forced to acknowledge his opposition to official Catholic teaching, he had to decide whether he would go with his own interpretations of true doctrine or follow the Church. He decided to keep to his own interpretations, but this required him to develop an epistemology (a theory of knowledge, or how we know things) different from that of the Catholic Church. According to Catholic teaching, as we've seen, the revelation of God comes to us by means of the three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. The revelation of God is written in Scripture, but is also passed down through the teaching and practice of the Church over the ages, and is authentically and officially interpreted and applied by the Magisterium of the Church--that is, by the bishops headed by the Pope. In this view, it is no more valid to oppose Scripture to Tradition than it is valid to oppose the Book of Galatians to the Gospel of Matthew. They cannot be put in opposition to each other, because they all come as parts of a package deal and they all must be understood in light of each other. But Luther wanted to follow his own interpretations of Scripture in opposition to the Tradition and official teaching of the Catholic Church. So he had to articulate a new epistemology. The epistemology he articulated became known eventually as the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. The idea is that it is only Scripture which is infallible. Although Tradition, Church teaching, the ideas of theologians, the scholarship of scholars, etc., are all valuable things that should not be taken lightly, and one should do one's study of Scripture with humility and with prayer under the guidance of all of these sources and helps, yet none of these other things are gifted by God with infallibility, and therefore they cannot be trusted implicitly. One must do one's own study of Scripture, and if, after diligent effort and humble study, one comes to the conclusion that Scripture seems to contradict Tradition or Church teaching, one must go with what one sees in Scripture. In effect, therefore, this doctrine makes everyone's personal interpretation of Scripture supreme, for when the Church's reading and application of Scripture conflicts with my own, after careful study, I must go with my own reading rather than trust implicitly the Church's teaching.
Of course, the unsurprising practical result of Sola Scriptura is the explosion and proliferation of numerous competing churches and traditions, all based on competing interpretations of Scripture. For if Luther could break off from the Catholic Church based on his own reading of Scripture, can't I break off from Luther if I disagree with his reading of Scripture? The Protestants argued that Scripture was sufficiently plain in all important matters so that no official, infallible interpreter was needed. Everyone should be able to see what Scripture says clearly and agree on it. However, there are many questions that are not addressed explicitly or with obvious clarity in Scripture--should infants be baptized, how many sacraments are there, is communion symbolic or is it really the Body and Blood of Christ, etc.--and without an authoritative interpreter people are likely to come to different conclusions as they try to infer from the text what it doesn't directly address. Also, even if Scripture is clear in many areas, without a recognized authentic interpreter there is no supreme authority that can decide between competing interpretations. It would be like having the US Constitution without a Supreme Court. "Everybody, just interpret the Constitution for yourself. It's clear enough, surely we'll all agree on what it means!" Well, it's not too hard to imagine how that would actually work out. But that's basically the situation Protestantism found itself in with regard to the Bible.
So the followers of Luther became known as Lutherans, and they continued to develop the theological tradition he started. Another of the great early Reformers inspired by Luther but who went his own way was Ulrich Zwingli. He helped begin a Reformation movement among the Swiss. Later on, John Calvin joined the movement and helped influence the theology of the Swiss Reformation. Calvinism proved very popular and spread to several other countries, including to England and Scotland where it became the foundation of Presbyterianism. Over time, there were more and more splits and divergences, adding Baptists, Methodists, Anabaptists, and many others to the mix.
In England, the Reformation got going when King Henry VIII tried to get the Pope to grant an annulment with regard to his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The Pope refused, perhaps in part because the Pope had originally granted Henry a dispensation to marry Catherine in the first place. Henry's response to this was dramatic. He severed ties with the Pope and had himself declared supreme head of the Church in England. He required everyone to go along with this. He got very little resistance from the English bishops and was successful eventually in severing the ties of the English Church with Rome. Some engaged in strong opposition, including a number of priests and monks (Henry went after the monasteries and shut them all down) as well as Bishop John Fisher and former Chancellor of England Thomas More, and Henry executed Fisher, More, and many others, creating many martyrs. The English Reformation was furthered by Henry's son, Edward VI, who became the next king and was far more influenced by Protestant theology than Henry was. But after Edward, Henry's daughter Mary came to the throne. Mary was a staunch Catholic, and she returned England to Catholic obedience and persecuted Protestants (for which she attained the popular title of Bloody Mary). After Mary, however, came Elizabeth I, who returned England to Protestantism. Under Elizabeth, the Church in England (henceforth known often as the Anglican Church, to distinguish it from the Catholic Church from which it had broken off) established its somewhat middle-ground sort of position regarding Protestantism. The Anglican Church would not be Roman Catholic, but it would also not be as extreme in its Protestantism as some Protestants desired. It took a kind of moderate Protestant approach which has continued down to the present day. The Pope excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and released her subjects from obedience to her. This was intended, of course, as a censure against Elizabeth, but it had the effect of making things harder for Catholics in England as well, as now Elizabeth became harder on them for fear that they were treasonous against the State.
The Protestant view of Catholicism tended to be very negative, not surprisingly. They attacked the Catholic view of salvation, as well as many other Catholic ideas and practices such as praying to saints, penance, purgatory, indulgences, images, the papacy, honoring of Mary, etc. They tended to see the Catholic Church, and particularly the papacy, as a manifestation of the biblical prophecies regarding the coming of the Antichrist, and themselves as witnesses to the truth against Antichrist. This belief was so predominant that it even found its way into official Protestant statements of faith, such as the Presbyterian Westminster Confession (chapter 25, section 6):
Give us a few examples in class - http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/274/pg274.html - Luther's Ninety-Five Theses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
http://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2016/07/commentary-on-martin-luthers-freedom-of.html - This article contains the complete text of one of Luther's most famous works, Freedom of a Christian, along with my own inline commentary coming from a Catholic point of view. This piece from Luther, I think, illustrates well some of his basic ways of thinking about salvation.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm - Exsurge Domine, the papal bull that condemned various errors of Martin Luther.
Look at in class - http://protestantism.co.uk/denominations - A very helpful article outlining the distinctives of several different Protestant traditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Reformation
https://www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/act-of-supremacy.htm - Brief article describing the two "Acts of Supremacy," Henry VIII's (1534) and Elizabeth I's (1559), both of which established Anglicanism by establishing the monarch as head or supreme governor of the Church in England.
https://www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/supremacy-henry-text.htm - The text of Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy.
https://www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/supremacy-text.htm - The text of Elizabeth I's Act of Supremacy.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius05/p5regnans.htm - Regnans in Excelsis, the papal bull that excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I and discharged her people from obeying her.
https://www.elizabethi.org/contents/elizabethanchurch/catholics.html - Treatment of Catholics under Queen Elizabeth I.
https://www.thomasmorestudies.org/docs/DialogueConcerningHeresies2015-etext.pdf - St. Thomas More's book against Protestantism, Dialogue Concerning Heresies. As the title suggests, the book is in the form of a dialogue, a conversation, between a Catholic and a somewhat wavering person who has been influenced by Protestant views. Shows St. Thomas More's Renaissance Humanism and his Catholicism combined into a substantial but also witty and informal examination and refutation of Protestant ideas.
https://archive.org/details/catholiccontrove00sain/page/n6/mode/2up - St. Francis de Sales wrote pamphlets to Calvinists, trying to persuade them to return to the Catholic faith. He had great success, and his pamphlets have been collected into a book called The Catholic Controversy. I highly recommend it, along with St. Thomas More's Dialogue, as an excellent and persuasive apologetic for Catholicism in response to Protestantism (and particularly Reformed, or Calvinistic, Protestantism).
https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2019/05/justification-reformed-catholic-dialogue.html - This is a fictional dialogue I have written up between a Catholic and a Reformed (Calvinistic) Protestant over the doctrine of justification. It exhibits the differences between the two views and argues for the Catholic view, but also tries to suggest a way in which the two traditions might find reconciliation.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-and-the-Church-What-the-history-books-don-t-say - Helpful article discussing the Church's response to Copernicus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair - A nice, thorough summary of the Galileo affair.
https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2020/03/historical-challenges-to-infallibility.html - An article responding to objections to the Church's infallibility based on her response to Galileo.
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/galileo-tuscany.asp - Letter of Galileo to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, where he lays out his own attempt to justify his heliocentric views in light of Scripture and the Catholic faith.
http://inters.org/approval-Settele-heliocentric - Decree of the Church regarding Giuseppe Settele's later book advocating heliocentrism.
A Need for Reform
The Renaissance Church, along with the Church at any time, had its share of corruption. The Popes, even while doing many positive things for the Church and for the culture, tended to be more worldly than was wise. They spent too much money, nearly bankrupting the papacy. They engaged over-much in secular endeavors. Besides being indulgent in their artistic fixing up of Rome, some of them (such as Julius II) focused a lot of attention on their secular, military defense of the territory they had rulership over. Many priests had too little education and allowed too much superstition and supported too little good catechizing in doctrines and morals. But the Church had been here before, and had promoted reform. The Church is ever both human and divine, and the divine in her is always fighting against the sinful aspects of the human. In the early 15th century, from 1512 through 1517, right on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, the Church called another ecumenical council--the Fifth Lateran Council--which issued decrees on the reform of the Church. Most of them, however, didn't end up being followed up on, and corruptions were not adequately dealt with.
Read in class - https://catholicism.org/how-the-renaissance-papacy-contributed-to-the-reformation.html - Helpful article articulating some of the corruptions of the Popes during this period which called for reform and helped set the stage for the Protestant Reformation.
Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation started in 1517 with the nailing of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses to the Church door in Wittenberg in Germany. Luther was an Augustinian monk, and he was very scrupulous. He was always concerned about his salvation, fearful that he was not living with sufficient righteousness to warrant belief that he could be in good favor with God. He would spend hours in confession, and then go back soon afterwards because he had forgotten something. His confessor is said to have told him at one point to go out and commit some real sins before coming back to confess again, since Luther would confess such a huge barrage of trifling matters. Luther was sent to Rome on some business connected with his monastic order. It was hoped that this would help him, but it only made things worse, since he came face to face with the corruption in Rome.
What eventually brought Luther a sense of relief was his reading of the Epistles of St. Paul. He saw that St. Paul teaches that we are justified before God--that is, brought into a right standing before him--not by our own works or efforts but by the righteousness of Christ given to us as a free gift. This is, of course, the doctrine of the Scriptures, as well as the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church. However, Luther ended up taking this in some unique directions that eventually brought him into conflict with the Church.
St. Paul says, in Romans 3, that we are justified before God because, even though we are sinners, when we trust in and believe in Christ our "faith is imputed for righteousness." Luther seems to have taken this to mean that faith is accepted by God for us in place of our actually having to be righteous. The idea he develops is that God gives us Christ's righteousness, and his satisfaction for our sins through his death on the cross, as a free gift received by faith alone. That is, we don't have to do anything to earn it or attain it other than trusting in Christ for it. Once we've done that, God accounts us righteous in his sight, and so we are saved. Luther went on quickly to add that a person who has real faith in Christ will be motivated by love and gratitude to want to do good works and live a holy life; but he is not obligated to do so, he does not have to do so in order to be right with God and be saved. Holiness of life is a fruit of our justification, but not a ground for it. Of course, this conflicts with Catholic doctrine and the Church's reading of St. Paul. The Church agrees that our salvation is entirely a gift of grace, merited and procured for us entirely by the Passion and merits of Christ. We are not saved by anything we can produce from ourselves apart from grace. However, in Catholic teaching, the gospel does not do away with the requirement that we be holy. It's not that faith is accepted in place of righteousness, or that Christ is righteous for us so that we don't have to be; it's rather that Christ's merits and sacrifice are applied to us inwardly by the Holy Spirit so that, by grace, we can actually become righteous. The grace of God in Christ does not simply make us acceptable to God without righteousness; it makes us acceptable to God by making us righteous. The requirements of the moral law are not set aside for us; rather, by grace we are changed within so that we can love God and our neighbor and thus fulfill the demands of the moral law.
Luther also ended up saying some harsh things about free will in his zeal to emphasize the grace of God in our salvation. He sometimes spoke as if free will doesn't exist at all, and that people are saved or damned by the actions of God or the devil without any input from free will. On the other hand, he did make it clear that sin and good works are both done voluntarily; there is no idea that a person is dragged into them against or without his will. But whatever Luther intended, his language made it sound to many like he was denying free will. The Church, of course, while recognizing that all our good choices are a product of the grace of God, also emphasizes that the input of free will is crucial. We must cooperate with God's grace voluntarily. Even our cooperation is a gift of grace, but, still, we must cooperate.
Luther became frustrated with the way some in the Church were promoting indulgences. Pope Leo X had offered indulgences to those who would contribute to the building of the new St. Peter's Basilica in Rome--one of those grandiose artistic projects of the Renaissance Popes. Some of those promoting these indulgences made it sound as if the indulgences were being sold--as if Pope Leo X was selling forgiveness of sins in order to fund his building projects. One of these indulgence-promoters, Johann Tetzel, came across like a used-car salesman. He even had a jingle: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs!" This seemed to Luther--and to many others--to be a crass and sacrilegious treatment of something profound and holy. In protest to some of these practices, he drew up a paper containing ninety-five statements correcting errors. He posted them to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. The door functioned as a kind of bulletin board for the community. Luther was seeking to dispute with other scholars and theologians. The Ninety-Five Theses were written in Latin--the language of the scholars--but some people got a hold of them, translated them into German (the common language of the people) and distributed them. This led to Luther very quickly becoming a center of controversy. He continued to write, and came more and more into conflict with Church leaders. As his thinking progressed over the years, he became more and more critical of various aspects of Catholic teaching. Eventually, things escalated to the point that Pope Leo X issued a papal bull (a kind of document written by the Pope) condemning several errors in Luther's teaching. The bull was called Exsurge Domine. Luther responded by publicly burning it--which, not surprisingly, didn't help matters. Finally, Luther was called before an assembly at the city of Worms--the Diet of Worms--and was ordered to recant his errors. He refused to do so, and was excommunicated. But this did not deter him, and he kept on promoting his views.
Luther's movement continued to gain traction, and the Reformation--as it was called--spread to many countries in Europe, eventually shattering the unity of Christendom and dividing it up into competing churches and traditions.
When Luther began to debate his ideas with other Catholic theologians, it eventually became apparent that he was out of accord with the official teachings of the Catholic Church in a number of areas. When that became clear, it forced a choice upon Luther. At first, he tried to make himself out to be a defender of authentic Catholic teaching against perversions of that teaching. But when this position became untenable, and he was forced to acknowledge his opposition to official Catholic teaching, he had to decide whether he would go with his own interpretations of true doctrine or follow the Church. He decided to keep to his own interpretations, but this required him to develop an epistemology (a theory of knowledge, or how we know things) different from that of the Catholic Church. According to Catholic teaching, as we've seen, the revelation of God comes to us by means of the three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. The revelation of God is written in Scripture, but is also passed down through the teaching and practice of the Church over the ages, and is authentically and officially interpreted and applied by the Magisterium of the Church--that is, by the bishops headed by the Pope. In this view, it is no more valid to oppose Scripture to Tradition than it is valid to oppose the Book of Galatians to the Gospel of Matthew. They cannot be put in opposition to each other, because they all come as parts of a package deal and they all must be understood in light of each other. But Luther wanted to follow his own interpretations of Scripture in opposition to the Tradition and official teaching of the Catholic Church. So he had to articulate a new epistemology. The epistemology he articulated became known eventually as the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. The idea is that it is only Scripture which is infallible. Although Tradition, Church teaching, the ideas of theologians, the scholarship of scholars, etc., are all valuable things that should not be taken lightly, and one should do one's study of Scripture with humility and with prayer under the guidance of all of these sources and helps, yet none of these other things are gifted by God with infallibility, and therefore they cannot be trusted implicitly. One must do one's own study of Scripture, and if, after diligent effort and humble study, one comes to the conclusion that Scripture seems to contradict Tradition or Church teaching, one must go with what one sees in Scripture. In effect, therefore, this doctrine makes everyone's personal interpretation of Scripture supreme, for when the Church's reading and application of Scripture conflicts with my own, after careful study, I must go with my own reading rather than trust implicitly the Church's teaching.
Of course, the unsurprising practical result of Sola Scriptura is the explosion and proliferation of numerous competing churches and traditions, all based on competing interpretations of Scripture. For if Luther could break off from the Catholic Church based on his own reading of Scripture, can't I break off from Luther if I disagree with his reading of Scripture? The Protestants argued that Scripture was sufficiently plain in all important matters so that no official, infallible interpreter was needed. Everyone should be able to see what Scripture says clearly and agree on it. However, there are many questions that are not addressed explicitly or with obvious clarity in Scripture--should infants be baptized, how many sacraments are there, is communion symbolic or is it really the Body and Blood of Christ, etc.--and without an authoritative interpreter people are likely to come to different conclusions as they try to infer from the text what it doesn't directly address. Also, even if Scripture is clear in many areas, without a recognized authentic interpreter there is no supreme authority that can decide between competing interpretations. It would be like having the US Constitution without a Supreme Court. "Everybody, just interpret the Constitution for yourself. It's clear enough, surely we'll all agree on what it means!" Well, it's not too hard to imagine how that would actually work out. But that's basically the situation Protestantism found itself in with regard to the Bible.
So the followers of Luther became known as Lutherans, and they continued to develop the theological tradition he started. Another of the great early Reformers inspired by Luther but who went his own way was Ulrich Zwingli. He helped begin a Reformation movement among the Swiss. Later on, John Calvin joined the movement and helped influence the theology of the Swiss Reformation. Calvinism proved very popular and spread to several other countries, including to England and Scotland where it became the foundation of Presbyterianism. Over time, there were more and more splits and divergences, adding Baptists, Methodists, Anabaptists, and many others to the mix.
In England, the Reformation got going when King Henry VIII tried to get the Pope to grant an annulment with regard to his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The Pope refused, perhaps in part because the Pope had originally granted Henry a dispensation to marry Catherine in the first place. Henry's response to this was dramatic. He severed ties with the Pope and had himself declared supreme head of the Church in England. He required everyone to go along with this. He got very little resistance from the English bishops and was successful eventually in severing the ties of the English Church with Rome. Some engaged in strong opposition, including a number of priests and monks (Henry went after the monasteries and shut them all down) as well as Bishop John Fisher and former Chancellor of England Thomas More, and Henry executed Fisher, More, and many others, creating many martyrs. The English Reformation was furthered by Henry's son, Edward VI, who became the next king and was far more influenced by Protestant theology than Henry was. But after Edward, Henry's daughter Mary came to the throne. Mary was a staunch Catholic, and she returned England to Catholic obedience and persecuted Protestants (for which she attained the popular title of Bloody Mary). After Mary, however, came Elizabeth I, who returned England to Protestantism. Under Elizabeth, the Church in England (henceforth known often as the Anglican Church, to distinguish it from the Catholic Church from which it had broken off) established its somewhat middle-ground sort of position regarding Protestantism. The Anglican Church would not be Roman Catholic, but it would also not be as extreme in its Protestantism as some Protestants desired. It took a kind of moderate Protestant approach which has continued down to the present day. The Pope excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and released her subjects from obedience to her. This was intended, of course, as a censure against Elizabeth, but it had the effect of making things harder for Catholics in England as well, as now Elizabeth became harder on them for fear that they were treasonous against the State.
The Protestant view of Catholicism tended to be very negative, not surprisingly. They attacked the Catholic view of salvation, as well as many other Catholic ideas and practices such as praying to saints, penance, purgatory, indulgences, images, the papacy, honoring of Mary, etc. They tended to see the Catholic Church, and particularly the papacy, as a manifestation of the biblical prophecies regarding the coming of the Antichrist, and themselves as witnesses to the truth against Antichrist. This belief was so predominant that it even found its way into official Protestant statements of faith, such as the Presbyterian Westminster Confession (chapter 25, section 6):
There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ. Nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof: but is that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God.
Give us a few examples in class - http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/274/pg274.html - Luther's Ninety-Five Theses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
http://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2016/07/commentary-on-martin-luthers-freedom-of.html - This article contains the complete text of one of Luther's most famous works, Freedom of a Christian, along with my own inline commentary coming from a Catholic point of view. This piece from Luther, I think, illustrates well some of his basic ways of thinking about salvation.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm - Exsurge Domine, the papal bull that condemned various errors of Martin Luther.
Look at in class - http://protestantism.co.uk/denominations - A very helpful article outlining the distinctives of several different Protestant traditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Reformation
https://www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/act-of-supremacy.htm - Brief article describing the two "Acts of Supremacy," Henry VIII's (1534) and Elizabeth I's (1559), both of which established Anglicanism by establishing the monarch as head or supreme governor of the Church in England.
https://www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/supremacy-henry-text.htm - The text of Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy.
https://www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/supremacy-text.htm - The text of Elizabeth I's Act of Supremacy.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius05/p5regnans.htm - Regnans in Excelsis, the papal bull that excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I and discharged her people from obeying her.
https://www.elizabethi.org/contents/elizabethanchurch/catholics.html - Treatment of Catholics under Queen Elizabeth I.
https://www.thomasmorestudies.org/docs/DialogueConcerningHeresies2015-etext.pdf - St. Thomas More's book against Protestantism, Dialogue Concerning Heresies. As the title suggests, the book is in the form of a dialogue, a conversation, between a Catholic and a somewhat wavering person who has been influenced by Protestant views. Shows St. Thomas More's Renaissance Humanism and his Catholicism combined into a substantial but also witty and informal examination and refutation of Protestant ideas.
https://archive.org/details/catholiccontrove00sain/page/n6/mode/2up - St. Francis de Sales wrote pamphlets to Calvinists, trying to persuade them to return to the Catholic faith. He had great success, and his pamphlets have been collected into a book called The Catholic Controversy. I highly recommend it, along with St. Thomas More's Dialogue, as an excellent and persuasive apologetic for Catholicism in response to Protestantism (and particularly Reformed, or Calvinistic, Protestantism).
https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2019/05/justification-reformed-catholic-dialogue.html - This is a fictional dialogue I have written up between a Catholic and a Reformed (Calvinistic) Protestant over the doctrine of justification. It exhibits the differences between the two views and argues for the Catholic view, but also tries to suggest a way in which the two traditions might find reconciliation.
https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2016/01/st-francis-de-sales-on-trying-to-sail.html - Helpful, brief selection from St. Francis de Sales's work linked to just above, where he points out the problems that arise when people try to use Scripture alone without an authoritative and infallible interpreter to determine the doctrines we should hold.
Perhaps movie - A Man For All Seasons
Another possibility - Luther
The Catholic Church responded to the Protestant Reformation in a number of ways. There were many valid concerns the Reformers had raised, and the slap in the face that was the Reformation woke the Church up to the serious need to address those concerns. On the other hand, the Church judged that the Protestants had gone too far. Instead of merely being a reform movement within the Church, which was sorely needed, the Reformers had taken to challenging historic teachings of the Catholic faith. Therefore, while the Church responded positively to the legitimate call to reform, she condemned the heresies promoted by the Reformers and was spurred on (as she had been by so many heresies in the past) to articulate and defend her own teachings more clearly, firmly, and explicitly.
The Reformation, therefore, didn't really get what it wanted from the Catholic Church, and so the rift was hardened into a permanent division. The Protestant Reformation was never primarily a reform movement within the Church. From the beginning, although the Reformers were concerned to fight against moral corruption, moral corruption was not really their primary concern. Their primary concern was doctrinal. They disagreed with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. It is informative to compare Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther. Desiderius Erasmus was a preeminent Renaissance scholar. He was also a moral reformer. He was a loyal Catholic. His problem wasn't with the teaching of the Catholic Church but with the corruption of morals within the Church. He protested that corruption vigorously, as can be seen from his famous book lampooning corruption and superstition in the Church entitled In Praise of Folly. Luther and the other Reformers loved his work, made much use of it, and were inspired by him. One would have thought that Luther and Erasmus would get along great. But Luther's reformation was fundamentally different. He started out not concerned not so much with the moral corruption of the Church as with the problem of his own salvation, and it was his beliefs about salvation that eventually brought him into controversy with the Church. Luther and the other mainstream Reformers were generally prepared to be quite tolerant of a great degree of moral corruption in the Church (not that they approved of it, but they did not consider it grounds for division), but they were prepared to fight to the death over their doctrinal differences. So when Luther began to realize that his main enemy was the actual doctrine of the Church, he and Erasmus had a dramatic parting of ways. Erasmus eventually began to write against Luther, and Luther responded against Erasmus. Luther was excommunicated and became the founder of a new and alternative Christian tradition. Erasmus remained a loyal son of the Catholic Church.
The Church's definitive response to the Reformation finally came between the years 1545 and 1563 with the Ecumenical Council of Trent. At Trent, the Church decreed a number of reforms that would have a significant impact on the Church--moral reforms, new programs to educate clergy, greater promotion of piety among the people, etc. She also condemned errors of the Protestant Reformers and affirmed and articulated authentic Catholic teaching on controverted points. She did not leave untouched the two foundational issues of the Protestant Reformation--Sola Scriptura and Luther's idea that we are justified before God by faith alone because of Christ's righteousness to the exclusion of our own good works, even good works that are worked into us as a fruit of God's grace. (This latter doctrine came to be called justification by faith alone, or Sola Fide. I should note that although most mainstream Protestants agreed with Luther that good works could form no part of the grounds of our justification before God, there was disagreement among Protestants regarding the emphasis that should be placed on good works, where exactly they fit in the system, whether they should be considered required for salvation, etc.)
Here, for example, is Trent (Session Four) on the interpretation of Scripture:
Here are a couple of teachings the Church wished to condemn relating to the doctrine of salvation (Session Six):
Here is Trent's own basic definition of the core idea of justification (Session Six):
The Counter-Reformation period also saw a burst of energy from the Church in the form of new religious movements and saints. This is the age of great saints such as St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Philip Neri, St. Francis de Sales, and many others. The founding of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) occurs during this period.
https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent.html - Documents of the Council of Trent from a 19th century edition put into electronic form by the Hanover Historical Texts Project at Hanover College. My quotations from Trent in this section come from the Hanover website.
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/local-council-history-and-text-1472 - Canons of the Second Council of Orange (529). Although this council took place 1000 years before the Protestant Reformation, it articulates the Church's understanding of the foundation of our salvation in the grace of God that grounds all the rest of the Church's teachings regarding justification and salvation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Folly - Description of, and links to, Erasmus's book In Praise of Folly.
https://catholicsaints.info/counter-reformation/ - Brief description of some of the movements of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Discuss in class (particularly section on Ignatius and the Jesuits) -https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/07/30/the-counter-reformation-ignatius-and-the-jesuits/ - Helpful article on St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits, discussing Ignatius's life, the founding of the Jesuits, what they were all about, etc.
The Counter-Reformation
The Catholic Church responded to the Protestant Reformation in a number of ways. There were many valid concerns the Reformers had raised, and the slap in the face that was the Reformation woke the Church up to the serious need to address those concerns. On the other hand, the Church judged that the Protestants had gone too far. Instead of merely being a reform movement within the Church, which was sorely needed, the Reformers had taken to challenging historic teachings of the Catholic faith. Therefore, while the Church responded positively to the legitimate call to reform, she condemned the heresies promoted by the Reformers and was spurred on (as she had been by so many heresies in the past) to articulate and defend her own teachings more clearly, firmly, and explicitly.
The Reformation, therefore, didn't really get what it wanted from the Catholic Church, and so the rift was hardened into a permanent division. The Protestant Reformation was never primarily a reform movement within the Church. From the beginning, although the Reformers were concerned to fight against moral corruption, moral corruption was not really their primary concern. Their primary concern was doctrinal. They disagreed with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. It is informative to compare Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther. Desiderius Erasmus was a preeminent Renaissance scholar. He was also a moral reformer. He was a loyal Catholic. His problem wasn't with the teaching of the Catholic Church but with the corruption of morals within the Church. He protested that corruption vigorously, as can be seen from his famous book lampooning corruption and superstition in the Church entitled In Praise of Folly. Luther and the other Reformers loved his work, made much use of it, and were inspired by him. One would have thought that Luther and Erasmus would get along great. But Luther's reformation was fundamentally different. He started out not concerned not so much with the moral corruption of the Church as with the problem of his own salvation, and it was his beliefs about salvation that eventually brought him into controversy with the Church. Luther and the other mainstream Reformers were generally prepared to be quite tolerant of a great degree of moral corruption in the Church (not that they approved of it, but they did not consider it grounds for division), but they were prepared to fight to the death over their doctrinal differences. So when Luther began to realize that his main enemy was the actual doctrine of the Church, he and Erasmus had a dramatic parting of ways. Erasmus eventually began to write against Luther, and Luther responded against Erasmus. Luther was excommunicated and became the founder of a new and alternative Christian tradition. Erasmus remained a loyal son of the Catholic Church.
The Church's definitive response to the Reformation finally came between the years 1545 and 1563 with the Ecumenical Council of Trent. At Trent, the Church decreed a number of reforms that would have a significant impact on the Church--moral reforms, new programs to educate clergy, greater promotion of piety among the people, etc. She also condemned errors of the Protestant Reformers and affirmed and articulated authentic Catholic teaching on controverted points. She did not leave untouched the two foundational issues of the Protestant Reformation--Sola Scriptura and Luther's idea that we are justified before God by faith alone because of Christ's righteousness to the exclusion of our own good works, even good works that are worked into us as a fruit of God's grace. (This latter doctrine came to be called justification by faith alone, or Sola Fide. I should note that although most mainstream Protestants agreed with Luther that good works could form no part of the grounds of our justification before God, there was disagreement among Protestants regarding the emphasis that should be placed on good works, where exactly they fit in the system, whether they should be considered required for salvation, etc.)
Here, for example, is Trent (Session Four) on the interpretation of Scripture:
Furthermore, in order to restrain petulant spirits, [the sacred and holy Synod] decrees, that no one, relying on his own skill, shall,--in matters of faith, and of morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, --wresting the sacred Scripture to his own senses, presume to interpret the said sacred Scripture contrary to that sense which holy mother Church,--whose it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures,--hath held and doth hold; or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers; even though such interpretations were never (intended) to be at any time published.
Here are a couple of teachings the Church wished to condemn relating to the doctrine of salvation (Session Six):
CANON V.-If any one saith, that, since Adam's sin, the free will of man is lost and extinguished; or, that it is a thing with only a name, yea a name without a reality, a figment, in fine, introduced into the Church by Satan; let him be anathema.
CANON XI.-If any one saith, that men are justified, either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and is inherent in them; or even that the grace, whereby we are justified, is only the favour of God; let him be anathema.
Here is Trent's own basic definition of the core idea of justification (Session Six):
This disposition, or preparation, is followed by Justification itself, which is not remission of sins merely, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man, through the voluntary reception of the grace, and of the gifts, whereby man of unjust becomes just, and of an enemy a friend, that so he may be an heir according to hope of life everlasting.
Of this Justification the causes are these: the final cause indeed is the glory of God and of Jesus Christ, and life everlasting; while the efficient cause is a merciful God who washes and sanctifies gratuitously, signing, and anointing with the holy Spirit of promise, who is the pledge of our inheritance; but the meritorious cause is His most beloved only-begotten, our Lord Jesus Christ, who, when we were enemies, for the exceeding charity wherewith he loved us, merited Justification for us by His most holy Passion on the wood of the cross, and made satisfaction for us unto God the Father; the instrumental cause is the sacrament of baptism, which is the sacrament of faith, without which (faith) no man was ever justified; lastly, the alone formal cause is the justice of God, not that whereby He Himself is just, but that whereby He maketh us just, that, to wit, with which we being endowed by Him, are renewed in the spirit of our mind, and we are not only reputed, but are truly called, and are, just, receiving justice within us, each one according to his own measure, which the Holy Ghost distributes to every one as He wills, and according to each one's proper disposition and co-operation. For, although no one can be just, but he to whom the merits of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ are communicated, yet is this done in the said justification of the impious, when by the merit of that same most holy Passion, the charity of God is poured forth, by the Holy Spirit, in the hearts of those that are justified, and is inherent therein: whence, man, through Jesus Christ, in whom he is ingrafted, receives, in the said justification, together with the remission of sins, all these (gifts) infused at once, faith, hope, and charity. For faith, unless hope and charity be added thereto, neither unites man perfectly with Christ, nor makes him a living member of His body. For which reason it is most truly said, that Faith without works is dead and profitless; and, In Christ Jesus neither circumcision, availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by charity. This faith, Catechumen's beg of the Church-agreeably to a tradition of the apostles-previously to the sacrament of Baptism; when they beg for the faith which bestows life everlasting, which, without hope and charity, faith cannot bestow: whence also do they immediately hear that word of Christ; If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. Wherefore, when receiving true and Christian justice, they are bidden, immediately on being born again, to preserve it pure and spotless, as the first robe given them through Jesus Christ in lieu of that which Adam, by his disobedience, lost for himself and for us, that so they may bear it before the judgment-seat of our Lord Jesus Christ, and may have life everlasting.
The Counter-Reformation period also saw a burst of energy from the Church in the form of new religious movements and saints. This is the age of great saints such as St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Philip Neri, St. Francis de Sales, and many others. The founding of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) occurs during this period.
https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent.html - Documents of the Council of Trent from a 19th century edition put into electronic form by the Hanover Historical Texts Project at Hanover College. My quotations from Trent in this section come from the Hanover website.
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/local-council-history-and-text-1472 - Canons of the Second Council of Orange (529). Although this council took place 1000 years before the Protestant Reformation, it articulates the Church's understanding of the foundation of our salvation in the grace of God that grounds all the rest of the Church's teachings regarding justification and salvation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Folly - Description of, and links to, Erasmus's book In Praise of Folly.
https://catholicsaints.info/counter-reformation/ - Brief description of some of the movements of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Discuss in class (particularly section on Ignatius and the Jesuits) -https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/07/30/the-counter-reformation-ignatius-and-the-jesuits/ - Helpful article on St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits, discussing Ignatius's life, the founding of the Jesuits, what they were all about, etc.
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c3a2.htm - Section on grace and justification from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Lays out basic Church teaching on these subjects.
Response to Protestant Claims
As we have seen in our discussions of previous schisms from the Catholic Church in earlier units, since Christianity is a divine revelation, we must default to the continuity of the faith as this has been handed down to us in the providence of God, and we must defer to the unity and authority of the historic Church. Therefore, if anyone wants to break from the continuity, unity, and authority of the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith, the burden of proof is on them to justify this break.
The Catholic argument is going to be that Protestants have not been able to justify their break with the Catholic Church. Protestants have not been able to provide any solid, conclusive arguments against the Catholic Church or Catholic teaching from reason, from history, or from Scripture. Several attempts to make historical and rational arguments against Catholic teaching have been looked at throughout the various units of our history narrative, including attempts to show the Church and Popes to have erred in their teaching at various points in history (we think, for example, of our earlier discussion regarding Pope Honorius and the Monothelite controversy back in unit 3, or our discussion of the Galileo controversy earlier in this unit). Protestants will sometimes attempt to show that the early Church denied the papacy or held to Sola Scriptura, but these claims cannot be substantiated and are contradicted by the historical evidence (some of which we've looked at throughout our narrative).
Sometimes Protestants will attempt to make biblical arguments against Catholicism. The problem here is that many of these arguments are question-begging, since they assume as their foundational principle that Sola Scriptura is the right way to interpret Scripture. That is, Protestants will interpret Scripture for themselves in opposition to the teaching of the Catholic Church, and then use their own interpretations of Scripture to claim that the Catholic Church contradicts Scripture. But Catholics do not agree that this is the right way to use Scripture. So before this method of Scriptural interpretation can be used, it must be shown to be correct. But Protestants cannot provide any proof of Sola Scriptura. It has never been the teaching of the historic Church. As we have seen throughout our narrative, the historic Church that Protestants came out of had always affirmed the three-legged stool view of how to interpret divine revelation--that the Word of God is found in Scripture and Tradition as interpreted and applied by the Magisterium of the Church. Sola Scriptura cannot be proved in a non-question-begging way from Scripture either, since there are no biblical passages that require an interpretation that supports Sola Scriptura. Take, for example, a passage often cited by Protestants to be proof of Sola Scriptura, 2 Timothy 3:16-17:
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
Does this passage say that Scripture alone is infallible? Does it say that Church Tradition is not infallible, or that the bishops of the Church are not infallible? Does it say that Scripture is rightly used by being interpreted by individuals even sometimes in contradiction to the interpretations of the bishops of the Church or against the Tradition of the Church? No, it doesn't say any of these things. It simply says that Scripture is inspired and is from God, and that it is useful if we want to be able to do all that God commands us to do. Both Catholics and Protestants agree with this. This passage doesn't teach Sola Scriptura. Rather, Protestants have to read this into the text. This very case shows the danger of Sola Scriptura. When we go out on our own and try to read Scripture apart from the divinely-guided help of the Church, we are likely to go wrong by drawing false inferences from the text that are a product not so much of the text itself as of our own biases read into it. (Also, Catholics often ask, how do Protestants even know which books are Scripture? The canon of Scripture is something that can only be known by trusting God's guidance of the Church's Tradition. By rejecting that Tradition, Protestants have jettisoned any objective basis even to know what the Scriptures are that they consider infallible.)
So our answer to the Protestants is going to be fundamentally the same as our answer to the Gnostics, to the separated Eastern churches, and to any others who have split off or been formed independently from the Catholic Church. If we must default to the continuity of the faith as this has been handed down to us by the providence of God, and if we must default to the preservation of the unity of the Church and to submission to the authority of the Church, we cannot follow the Protestant Reformers because they are unable to provide adequate justification for their separation from the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith. We must remain in communion with the Church Christ founded, the authority Christ and his apostles put in place (the college of bishops and especially the See of Rome), and the faith the Church has handed down to us.
https://www.catholic.com/tract/apostolic-tradition - A selection of evidence from the Church Fathers showing their commitment to the three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and Church authority divinely guided by the Holy Spirit.
http://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-church-fathers-sola-scriptura-or.html - A much more thorough collection of evidence for the same. In this series of articles, I have tried to lay out the raw data of what the early Church Fathers had to say about Scripture, Tradition, and Church authority, without adding any argument for or against a Catholic interpretation of that data, so that the reader can look at the evidence thoroughly and come to his/her own conclusions.
http://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-church-fathers-sola-scriptura-or.html - A much more thorough collection of evidence for the same. In this series of articles, I have tried to lay out the raw data of what the early Church Fathers had to say about Scripture, Tradition, and Church authority, without adding any argument for or against a Catholic interpretation of that data, so that the reader can look at the evidence thoroughly and come to his/her own conclusions.
http://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2016/06/dialogue-concerning-claims-of.html - This is a brief case for the Catholic point of view over against Protestantism in a dialogue format. For a more complete and thorough book-length case, see my book, No Grounds for Divorce.
https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2018/01/john-baptist-immaculate-conception-of.html - This is a brief article in which I try to show how Protestant biblical arguments against Catholic doctrines are often question-begging because they assume the controverted position of Sola Scriptura.
https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2017/06/i-believe-in-tradition-of-catholic.html - In this article, I discuss the inconsistency of relying on the Tradition of the Church for the canon of Scripture while refusing to submit to that Tradition on other matters.
https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2021/06/protestant-vs-catholic-debate.html - In this piece, I make use of two fictional characters, Norman McTavish and George Stewart, to lay out a case both for the Protestant point of view and the Catholic point of view.
Missions and the Treatment of Natives
One of the most important aspects of our time period is that this was the prime age of European exploration and colonization, and, going along with that, it was a period of intense and widespread missionary activity by the Church.
Due to advancing technology, awareness of other cultures due to trade, and many other factors, Europeans during this period became intensely interested in other parts of the world. There was a desire to establish and increase trade with distant lands, and to figure out more convenient ways of reaching such lands. Going through Muslim-dominated territories to reach and establish connections with distant lands like India and other Far Eastern countries was not appealing, so explorers began to attempt sea voyages to reach these lands. Bartolomeu Dias was the first to manage to sail around the bottom tip of Africa, and Vasco da Gama was the first to reach India by such a route. Christopher Columbus made his famous trip trying to sail around the world going west in order to reach India (and ending up accidentally reaching and discovering the American continents in the process). Europeans established trade where they could, and, where they could, they established European colonies.
Along with the military and economic interests and motivations of Europeans, there were also religious motivations. Europeans were aware that there were many places around the world where the gospel had not been preached, or at least not fully preached, and there was a desire to reach these souls for Christ. Accompanying European explorers and colonizers, therefore, were missionaries of various religious orders--especially Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans. These missionary ventures had a great deal of success, so that during the same time that the faith was suffering so much in Europe due to the Protestant Reformation and the growing secularism that would be one of the results of the Reformation (which we'll talk about in the next unit), the faith was expanding rapidly in non-European societies around the world.
One of the pressing questions of this period was how Europeans should treat the peoples they encountered in their travels. This was an especially acute question when Europeans encountered people who seemed to them very "primitive". Europeans had a very hard time understanding the mentality and way of life of many of the native peoples of the Americas, for example. Because of their more simple civilizations, their nomadic lifestyles, their indigenous forms of paganism, and other factors, Europeans often tended to regard such peoples as almost like children, and they felt a justification and even sometimes a calling to colonize such areas and "take care" of such people, helping them to achieve proper civilization in addition to receiving the saving gospel. It was difficult for Europeans to understand the long-term impact of their colonization in these lands. For example, with the more nomadic sorts of tribes, it seemed that they made no claims to ownership over the lands they moved through, which seemed to leave those lands unclaimed and suited to European claims and colonization. Over time, this led to a European domination of these lands and peoples. The condescending paternalism of the Europeans, who viewed many of the natives as little more than children in intellect, led to them taking control of their lives and dominating them, showing little respect for their own cultures and independence.
This was a problem even with Europeans with the best intentions. But not all Europeans had the best intentions. There were many among the colonizers who were quite happy to exploit and mistreat the natives for their own personal gain, sometimes in barbaric and cruel ways. In Central America, for example, it seemed to the Spanish conquerors (conquistadors) that the native tribes and empires were ripe for the picking. The missionaries from the various religious orders who accompanied these conquerors and exploiters ended up becoming a thorn in their side, as many of them protested the ill treatment of the natives and worked to protect them from unscrupulous exploitation. But it was very difficult to prevent such mistreatment, since in many cases the conquerors and colonizers, being literally on the other side of the world, were difficult for their European governments to reign in or to exercise effective oversight over.
In Asia, things went very differently, because Europeans who went there encountered cultures they could more easily recognize as legitimate civilizations, or at least whom they had a tougher time trying to exploit. The Jesuits especially were very active in trying to spread the gospel in India, Japan, China, and other Asian countries. Missionaries like Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci preached the gospel in India, Japan, and China. One of the strengths of the Jesuits in particular was their ability to enculturate the gospel. They could learn to dress like the natives, use the language of the natives, and try to relate the gospel to native ideas. Sometimes they went so far with this as to make other people nervous. Ricci and others, for example, in China, wanted to approve even of Chinese ancestor-devotion, considering it a legitimate expression of respect, trying to avoid opposing customs that were not inherently immoral. Other missionaries complained about this, and it caused quite a controversy, until Rome finally ruled that they couldn't do that anymore. The concern was that such ancestor-veneration veered too much towards idolatry. Missionaries in Asia during this time period were sometimes subject to strong and cruel persecution by the native peoples--there are some particularly horrific stories about the persecution of Christians in Japan during parts of this time period, as can be seen, for example, in the accounts of St. Paul Miki and his companions.)
In the Americas, with the Spanish colonies and missions in particular, the question over the treatment of the natives led to a huge controversy. In the very early days of exploration of the Americas, shortly after Columbus discovered them (from the European point of view, anyway), as I mentioned, there was much confusion among Europeans as to exactly how the natives related to the land. Did they own it? Did they even claim to own it? Were they able adequately to care for it without supervision from more "mature" peoples? Etc. We remember that the Popes had a strong temporal as well as spiritual influence over European society in those days. So the Popes wrote documents helping to arbitrate between various countries, particularly, in the Americas, between Spain and Portugal. In 1493, for example, Pope Alexander VI wrote a document (Inter Caetera) in which he divided up the newly-discovered lands between Spain and Portugal. Since the lands seemed to be inhabited only by childlike nomads, there didn't seem to be any reason not to allow European civilizations to claim ownership over them and divide them up amongst themselves.
However, as European expansion continued and more reports continued to come in about how things were going, there was increasing concern on the part of the Church that Europeans were not always acting justly towards the natives. The Popes began to put out documents trying to give spiritual and ethical (as well as political) instruction and commands with regard to how Europeans were to relate to native peoples. In the document Sicut Dudum, for example, written in 1435, Pope Eugene IV reprimanded Europeans who were making slaves of the natives of the Canary Islands. He warned that "some Christians (we speak of this with sorrow), with fictitious reasoning and seizing and opportunity, have approached said islands by ship, and with armed forces taken captive and even carried off to lands overseas very many persons of both sexes, taking advantage of their simplicity." Pope Eugene commanded the Europeans to stop doing this and to set free all those who had been enslaved, under pain of excommunication.
The natives that were being encountered by Europeans, especially in the Americas, were so strange to the Europeans that there were actually debates at this time regarding whether they could be considered rational human beings. This was, of course, a hugely important question. The practical consequence of it would determine the rights that the natives would be considered to have. It was in the interest of some of the colonizers to consider the natives irrational savages, thus providing fodder to justify enslaving them, taking their lands, etc. The natives were indeed greatly mistreated in many cases, such as in the Spanish American colonies. It was primarily out of the ranks of the religious orders that defenders of the natives came. The Dominicans, in particular, were at the forefront of this defense in the 16th century--men like Pedro de Córdoba, Antonio de Montesinos, Francisco de Vitoria, and Bartolomé de las Casas. These men entered into great controversy with other Spaniards regarding how the natives should be thought of and how they should be treated. Las Casas eventually wrote a scathing critique of Spanish treatment of natives entitled A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he described terrible atrocities that he had witnessed in the colonies. These Dominicans reported to the Popes what was happening in the Spanish colonies and helped them to understand the situation better. Partly as a result of this, in 1537, Pope Paul III issued the document Sublimis Deus, in which he strongly asserted the humanity of the natives along with their right to freedom and retention of their own property, and commanded everyone to respect their rights. He attacked those who "have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith." He said that the natives were "truly men," and he commanded that "the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved."
Unfortunately, even the word of the Popes failed to put an end to the debates over the nature and rights of the natives. Eventually, the Spanish King Charles V called for a debate on the subject to be held at Valladolid in Spain. Representing the defense of the natives was Bartolomé de las Casas, while taking the side of Spanish conquest was theologian and philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Sepúlveda argued that the native peoples were irrational savages, and that therefore they were naturally oriented towards being slaves to those races that were superior to them in intellect. He also argued that they were steeped in terrible immoralities and that they regularly committed acts of violence and atrocity (such as human sacrifice) within and between their societies, and that this justified Spain in coming in and conquering them in order to prevent these things. Las Cases argued, in response, that the natives were not inferior to Europeans in their ability and use of reason, even if they expressed themselves differently because of their different cultures. He also argued that even though it was true that the natives engaged in great immoralities and even atrocities, this did not justify enslaving them, as the Spanish had no jurisdiction over them. In response to Sepúlveda's argument that the Spanish had a duty to defend the well-being of those who were being tortured and killed by the atrocities of the natives, Las Casas argued that it would be a worse evil for the Spanish to enter into a bloody war of conquest in order to stop these things. The debate did not entirely end what Las Casas considered unjust Spanish dominance over the natives, but it did have the effect of making Spanish laws and policies somewhat more humane.
Look at in class - https://www.britannica.com/list/to-all-nations-8-fascinating-jesuit-missionaries - Short bios of eight important Jesuit missionaries.
Watch in class - https://www.amazon.com/Xavier-Missionary-Saint-Liam-Neeson/dp/B000S5XOUK - Documentary on the life of St. Francis Xavier and his missions to the Far East.
Watch in class - http://www.californiafrontier.net/junipero-serra-video/ - Helpful video on the Spanish California missions in the 18th century, focusing on the great Franciscan missionary St. JunÃpero Serra.
Look at in class - https://www.californiafrontier.net/indian-life-california-missions/ - Nice, relatively brief, but detailed look at the California missions.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/resource/56007/slavery-and-the-catholic-church - Helpful, brief article defending the Church from the charge that she didn't condemn or that she even promoted slavery through her history.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/alex06/alex06inter.htm - Inter Caetera, document from Pope Alexander VI in 1493 dividing up the New World between Spain and Portugal.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Eugene04/eugene04sicut.htm - Sicut Dudum, document from Pope Eugene IV in 1435, "Against the Enslaving of Black Natives from the Canary Islands."
http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/2011/02/dum-diversas-english-translation.html - This article contains a translation of Dum Diversas, a document from Pope Nicholas V in 1452 in which he granted King Afonso V of Portugal the authority to fight against enemies of the Catholic Church and to subjugate them, including putting them into a state of perpetual servitude. This is sometimes alleged as contrary to other documents from the Popes during this time period opposing slavery, such as the ones linked to here and mentioned in the narrative above. However, we need to keep in mind the distinction between the capture and subjugation of people in just warfare and the forcing of innocents into involuntary servitude. The Popes did not see these as identical things (even if we might argue that the Popes' positions on warfare needed adjustment in the direction of greater justice). Also, as we've seen, ignorance about the nature of some of the more "primitive" native peoples led the Popes to fail to realize the full implications of European colonization, especially during its earlier days. This does not mean, however, that Dum Diversas and other such documents (such as the follow-up document Romanus Pontifex, also by Nicholas V and written in 1455) did not contribute to mistreatment of the natives. Even if the Popes did not intend to sanction the kidnapping and subjugation of innocent persons into servitude, it can certainly be argued that their support of Portugal and Spain and their colonizing missions contributed to such evils, even taking into account the other Papal documents we've mentioned which clarified the Church's opposition to these things.
Read in class - https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul03/p3subli.htm - Sublimis Deus, by Pope Paul III in 1537, in which he recognized the reason and the humanity of native peoples, their right to their own freedom and property, and the duty of all to refrain from subjugating them or stealing from them and to preach the gospel to them peaceably.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/greg16/g16sup.htm - In Supremo Apostolatus, Pope Gregory XVI, 1839, "Condemning the Slave Trade."
http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_05051888_in-plurimis.html - In Plurimus, encyclical of Pope Leo XIII from 1888 on the abolition of slavery.
Skim through this and bring us some selections in class - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20321 - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, in which he lays out some of the atrocities committed against natives by Spaniards in Spanish colonies in the Americas.
https://history.sfsu.edu/sites/default/files/images/2001_Bonar%20Ludwig%20Hernandez.pdf - A helpful account of the history and arguments involved in the Valladolid debate (particularly the sections labeled "The Context of the Debate" and "The Theoretical Debate").
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/De_Indis_De_Jure_Belli - A selection from Dominican scholar Francisco de Vitoria (from around 1532) in which he argues about the just treatment of American natives, giving arguments in favor of the idea that they should not be conquered or enslaved. See particularly Part II. Do a search for "Sixth Proposition: Although" and read from there through to the section labeled "SUMMARY OF THE THIRD SECTION." (Ed. 3/1/23: The links seem to be broken. You can find the document here in various formats and do the same searching as described above to find the selection I am referring to.)
Summarize and discuss in class the Valladolid debate, the arguments on both sides, Vitoria's arguments, etc.
Read in class - https://www.pbs.org/conquistadors/devaca/lascasas_01.html - Part of the famous speech by Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos in which he called out the unethical behavior of the Spaniards towards the natives.
Read in class - https://www.pbs.org/conquistadors/devaca/lascasas_01.html - Part of the famous speech by Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos in which he called out the unethical behavior of the Spaniards towards the natives.
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2023/03/30/230330b.html - The Vatican Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development have issued a joint statement regarding the Catholic view of the "doctrine of discovery" - the idea that many had in the colonial period that colonial powers had a right to take land from natives. The statement also briefly articulates some things the Church did right and some things she did wrong in terms of recognizing and protecting the rights of natives during this time period.
Summarize the story and discuss in class - https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2018-12/our-lady-of-guadaloupe-feast-day-mexico-americas.html - An article summarizing the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe and her appearances to St. Juan Diego, an Aztec peasant. These appearances had a profound effect on the Aztec natives of Mexico and led to the conversion of many Mexicans to Catholicism.
The Protestant Reformation had the effect of dividing a previously-united Christendom (thinking particularly of Western Christendom, after the break between East and West). This is not to say that pre-Reformation Christendom was always one big happy family of people who always got along. Far from it. There were plenty of conflicts and divisions. But there was always a fundamental unity of faith to come back to which tended to make the divisions and conflicts ultimately temporary. The Reformation fundamentally altered this situation.
Catholic Christendom had been used to having a unified faith. If heretics arose, they were typically a relatively small and isolated group and didn't challenge the general consensus. As we've seen previously, eventually the Christian civilization that developed from the union of Church and civil society took a position of rooting heretics out of their midst. They were always treated differently from Jews and unbelievers. Jews and unbelievers had never been Christians, and so they were considered outsiders, not subject to the religious jurisdiction of the Church. Medieval Christians generally therefore considered it inappropriate to attempt to enforce Christianity upon them--though it did make rules by which they could exist within a Christian civilization without getting in its way. Heretics, on the other hand, had been Catholics and had left the purity of the faith. They should not receive the same toleration as unbelievers because they could and should be held to what they had previously embraced and promised. They were under the jurisdiction of the Church.
The Reformation challenged this whole way of looking at things. Now we had large groups of people, eventually multiple generations of them, who were living in Christian lands, claimed to be Christians, but held heretical views. It took some time for the Catholic culture to adjust to this new situation. The same can be said for the Protestant cultures that were developing--many of them had just as strong a view of the unity of the faith and the Church with civil society and the need to use civil authority to oppose heresy. Therefore, the divisions of the Reformation--between nations as well as between individuals and families within nations--created an unstable situation that led to an enormous amount of chaos and bloodshed. This is the time of the great "European wars of religion." Most people still thought that there needed to be a unified, orthodox Christendom--but now they disagreed about which version of the faith was "orthodox". So there were intense efforts on all sides to fight for different versions of an orthodox Christian civilization. The fighting took place between nations who had adopted different loyalties to different faiths. The fighting also took place within nations, as the dominant powers attempted to squelch dissenting viewpoints and dissenting minorities tried to subvert dominant powers.
Eventually, it became evident to many people on all sides that the Reformation wasn't going to be a merely temporary conflict that would eventually go away, leaving behind unity of faith. This was going to be a long-term situation. Stability would have to come from some other source than an ideal resolution of all disagreements and unity of faith. One of the first ideas tried was the idea of "cuius regio, eius religion"--Latin for "whose realm, his religion." In other words, each nation's ruler would decide the religion of that nation, and all the other nations would accept this situation. Rulers could choose between Catholicism or Lutheranism (which was sometimes interpreted broadly enough to include Calvinists).
While this cut down on international conflicts, it didn't entirely solve the problem. For one thing, there was a growing diversity of viewpoints as Protestantism continued to result in more and more divisions. Also, as diversity within individual nations was growing, "cuius regio, eius religion" still resulted in a lot of persecution within nations. Eventually, people began advocating for more toleration for dissenting viewpoints within nations. A famous example of this advocacy is the philosopher John Locke's classic work, A Letter Concerning Toleration, published in 1689. Although this idea was strongly resisted by many, eventually most people--including Catholics--came to accept it as necessary for peace and harmony and respect for differences between people of different versions of faith, given the growing pluralism--religious diversity--of European societies. Although the Catholic Church resisted this idea for a time, eventually she was able to accept this situation, since, although she had advocated civil penalties against heretics during the Middle Ages, she had never adopted the idea that there was some kind of intrinsic moral requirement that heretics must always be penalized in civil law. Whether and to what extent heretics should be punished in civil law depended not only on the evil of the heresy but also on all the other factors that determined what would be best for the common good. If the growing pluralism of European nations made it so that more trouble would come from trying to use civil authority to oppose heresy than from tolerating it, the Church was willing to grant that concern for the greater good favored greater toleration. (Also, although Protestantism was originally classified as a heresy, the idea of "heresy" as the Church was used to thinking of it typically had in mind a situation where a group of Catholics departed from their former faith. Once there was time for a multigenerational Protestantism to develop, Protestants no longer fit the category of "heretics" quite as neatly, since most of them had never been Catholics and had inherited a tradition that hadn't been Catholic in recent memory.)
However, religious pluralism, conflict, and toleration eventually gave birth to ideas that were more insidious from the Catholic point of view, as a kind of Agnosticism began to grow up among Europeans, leading to religious indifferentism among individuals and within the structures of civil society. But we'll talk more about that, and the Catholic Church's response to it, in our next unit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_regio,_eius_religio
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Letter_Concerning_Toleration - John Locke's famous argument for religious toleration.
This time period produced many great saints, some of whom have been mentioned already: Thomas More, John Fisher, Philip Neri, Ignatius of Loyola, Robert Bellarmine, Peter Canisius, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Charles Borromeo, Francis de Sales, Jane de Chantal, Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac, Peter Claver, Juan Diego, Rose of Lima, Martin de Porres, Junipero Serra, Paul Miki and his companions, and many others.
Summarize the story and discuss in class - https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2018-12/our-lady-of-guadaloupe-feast-day-mexico-americas.html - An article summarizing the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe and her appearances to St. Juan Diego, an Aztec peasant. These appearances had a profound effect on the Aztec natives of Mexico and led to the conversion of many Mexicans to Catholicism.
Toleration and Pluralism
The Protestant Reformation had the effect of dividing a previously-united Christendom (thinking particularly of Western Christendom, after the break between East and West). This is not to say that pre-Reformation Christendom was always one big happy family of people who always got along. Far from it. There were plenty of conflicts and divisions. But there was always a fundamental unity of faith to come back to which tended to make the divisions and conflicts ultimately temporary. The Reformation fundamentally altered this situation.
Catholic Christendom had been used to having a unified faith. If heretics arose, they were typically a relatively small and isolated group and didn't challenge the general consensus. As we've seen previously, eventually the Christian civilization that developed from the union of Church and civil society took a position of rooting heretics out of their midst. They were always treated differently from Jews and unbelievers. Jews and unbelievers had never been Christians, and so they were considered outsiders, not subject to the religious jurisdiction of the Church. Medieval Christians generally therefore considered it inappropriate to attempt to enforce Christianity upon them--though it did make rules by which they could exist within a Christian civilization without getting in its way. Heretics, on the other hand, had been Catholics and had left the purity of the faith. They should not receive the same toleration as unbelievers because they could and should be held to what they had previously embraced and promised. They were under the jurisdiction of the Church.
The Reformation challenged this whole way of looking at things. Now we had large groups of people, eventually multiple generations of them, who were living in Christian lands, claimed to be Christians, but held heretical views. It took some time for the Catholic culture to adjust to this new situation. The same can be said for the Protestant cultures that were developing--many of them had just as strong a view of the unity of the faith and the Church with civil society and the need to use civil authority to oppose heresy. Therefore, the divisions of the Reformation--between nations as well as between individuals and families within nations--created an unstable situation that led to an enormous amount of chaos and bloodshed. This is the time of the great "European wars of religion." Most people still thought that there needed to be a unified, orthodox Christendom--but now they disagreed about which version of the faith was "orthodox". So there were intense efforts on all sides to fight for different versions of an orthodox Christian civilization. The fighting took place between nations who had adopted different loyalties to different faiths. The fighting also took place within nations, as the dominant powers attempted to squelch dissenting viewpoints and dissenting minorities tried to subvert dominant powers.
Eventually, it became evident to many people on all sides that the Reformation wasn't going to be a merely temporary conflict that would eventually go away, leaving behind unity of faith. This was going to be a long-term situation. Stability would have to come from some other source than an ideal resolution of all disagreements and unity of faith. One of the first ideas tried was the idea of "cuius regio, eius religion"--Latin for "whose realm, his religion." In other words, each nation's ruler would decide the religion of that nation, and all the other nations would accept this situation. Rulers could choose between Catholicism or Lutheranism (which was sometimes interpreted broadly enough to include Calvinists).
While this cut down on international conflicts, it didn't entirely solve the problem. For one thing, there was a growing diversity of viewpoints as Protestantism continued to result in more and more divisions. Also, as diversity within individual nations was growing, "cuius regio, eius religion" still resulted in a lot of persecution within nations. Eventually, people began advocating for more toleration for dissenting viewpoints within nations. A famous example of this advocacy is the philosopher John Locke's classic work, A Letter Concerning Toleration, published in 1689. Although this idea was strongly resisted by many, eventually most people--including Catholics--came to accept it as necessary for peace and harmony and respect for differences between people of different versions of faith, given the growing pluralism--religious diversity--of European societies. Although the Catholic Church resisted this idea for a time, eventually she was able to accept this situation, since, although she had advocated civil penalties against heretics during the Middle Ages, she had never adopted the idea that there was some kind of intrinsic moral requirement that heretics must always be penalized in civil law. Whether and to what extent heretics should be punished in civil law depended not only on the evil of the heresy but also on all the other factors that determined what would be best for the common good. If the growing pluralism of European nations made it so that more trouble would come from trying to use civil authority to oppose heresy than from tolerating it, the Church was willing to grant that concern for the greater good favored greater toleration. (Also, although Protestantism was originally classified as a heresy, the idea of "heresy" as the Church was used to thinking of it typically had in mind a situation where a group of Catholics departed from their former faith. Once there was time for a multigenerational Protestantism to develop, Protestants no longer fit the category of "heretics" quite as neatly, since most of them had never been Catholics and had inherited a tradition that hadn't been Catholic in recent memory.)
However, religious pluralism, conflict, and toleration eventually gave birth to ideas that were more insidious from the Catholic point of view, as a kind of Agnosticism began to grow up among Europeans, leading to religious indifferentism among individuals and within the structures of civil society. But we'll talk more about that, and the Catholic Church's response to it, in our next unit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_regio,_eius_religio
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Letter_Concerning_Toleration - John Locke's famous argument for religious toleration.
This time period produced many great saints, some of whom have been mentioned already: Thomas More, John Fisher, Philip Neri, Ignatius of Loyola, Robert Bellarmine, Peter Canisius, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Charles Borromeo, Francis de Sales, Jane de Chantal, Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac, Peter Claver, Juan Diego, Rose of Lima, Martin de Porres, Junipero Serra, Paul Miki and his companions, and many others.
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