Catholic Opponents of the Reformation

he Reformation was resisted at every level of the church and the state. Popes condemned it, emperors and kings outlawed it, bishops and inquisitors sent its preachers to the fire, and some of the ablest scholars of the age wrote against it. The 52 figures below were the major Roman Catholic opponents of the Reformation, grouped by where and how they fought it. Each page gives a short sketch of the man or woman, drawn wherever possible from the historians of the Reformation and from their own words, with sources cited.

Their stories are not told to stir contempt. Several of them were learned, sincere, and brave, and some died for their convictions. They are told so that the reader can see what the Reformers faced, and what was at stake: the authority of Scripture and the gospel of grace.

The Papacy

The bishops of Rome who condemned the Reformers, called the Council of Trent, and armed the Counter-Reformation.

• Pope Leo X — The Medici pope whose St. Peter’s indulgence provoked the Ninety-Five Theses and who excommunicated Luther in 1521.
• Pope Adrian VI — The last non-Italian pope before 1978, who admitted the corruption of the papal court but demanded that Luther be silenced.
• Pope Clement VII — The Medici pope of the sack of Rome, who delayed a council and refused Henry VIII’s annulment.
• Pope Paul III — The pope who approved the Jesuits, reorganized the Roman Inquisition, and opened the Council of Trent.
• Pope Paul IV — Gian Pietro Carafa, architect of the Roman Inquisition, who as pope issued the first papal Index of Prohibited Books.
• Pope Pius IV — The pope who brought the Council of Trent to its close, confirmed its decrees, and imposed the Tridentine Profession of Faith.
• Pope Pius V — The Dominican inquisitor turned pope who excommunicated Elizabeth I and fixed the Tridentine catechism, breviary, and missal.

Indulgences and Luther’s First Opponents

The preachers, prelates, and theologians who answered Luther in Germany between 1517 and 1521, and those who carried on the literary war.

• Johann Tetzel — The Dominican indulgence preacher whose sales just beyond Wittenberg’s border provoked Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses.
• Albrecht of Brandenburg — The young Archbishop of Mainz whose debt for his offices was paid with the St. Peter’s indulgence, and to whom Luther sent the Ninety-Five Theses.
• Hieronymus Schulz — Luther’s own bishop, who first counseled silence and then vowed to see the monk in the fire.
• Sylvester Prierias — The papal theologian whose reply to Luther made the pope, not Scripture, the infallible rule of faith.
• Thomas Cajetan — The learned cardinal-legate who examined Luther at Augsburg in 1518 and demanded that he recant.
• Johann Eck — Luther’s ablest debater, who forced him at Leipzig to side with Hus and carried the bull of excommunication into Germany.
• Hieronymus Emser — Duke George’s secretary, who waged a pamphlet war with Luther and issued a rival German New Testament built on Luther’s own.
• Johannes Cochlaeus — The tireless polemicist who betrayed Tyndale’s first English New Testament at Cologne and wrote the hostile life of Luther that shaped Catholic memory for centuries.
• Desiderius Erasmus — The prince of the humanists, whose Greek New Testament served the Reformation but who wrote against Luther on the freedom of the will and remained in Rome’s communion.

Emperor, Princes, and Papal Envoys

The rulers and diplomats who sought to enforce Rome’s sentence in the Holy Roman Empire.

• Charles V — The emperor who outlawed Luther at Worms and spent his reign trying to restore one faith to his divided empire.
• Duke George of Saxony — The bearded duke of Dresden who hosted the Leipzig Debate and became Luther’s most determined princely enemy.
• Girolamo Aleandro — The scholar-nuncio who burned Luther’s books in the Netherlands and the Rhineland and drafted the Edict of Worms.
• Lorenzo Campeggio — The canon lawyer and legate who organized the first Catholic league in Germany and urged Charles V to use fire and sword at Augsburg.
• Julius Pflug — The humanist bishop of Naumburg who sought reunion on Rome’s terms and helped write the Augsburg Interim of 1548.

Switzerland and France

The bishops, theologians, and rulers who opposed Zwingli, Farel, Calvin, and the Huguenots.

• Hugo von Hohenlandenberg — The Bishop of Constance, in whose diocese Zurich lay, whose mandates against Zwingli’s preaching only hastened Zurich’s break with him.
• Johann Fabri — Zwingli’s friend turned foe, who represented the Bishop of Constance at Zurich and earned the name “hammer of heretics.”
• Pierre de la Baume — Geneva’s worldly last prince-bishop, whose flight from the city in 1533 opened the way for Farel and Calvin.
• Noël Béda — The Sorbonne’s formidable syndic, who hounded Lefèvre, Erasmus, and Berquin and demanded torture for the “false doctors.”
• Jacopo Sadoleto — The eloquent cardinal whose letter urging Geneva back to Rome drew Calvin’s classic Reply in 1539.
• Charles de Guise — The Cardinal of Lorraine, head with his brother of the Guise party that led Catholic France against the Huguenots.
• Catherine de’ Medici — The queen mother of three French kings whose shifting policy ended in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.

England

The archbishops, cardinals, bishops, statesmen, agents, and the queen who resisted the English Reformation from Warham to the Marian fires.

• William Warham — The aged Archbishop of Canterbury who tried to destroy Tyndale’s New Testaments, tried Latimer, and yielded the royal supremacy “so far as the law of Christ permits.”
• Thomas Wolsey — Henry VIII’s all-powerful cardinal, who burned Luther’s books in London and on his deathbed urged the king to destroy “this new pernicious sect.”
• John Fisher — The scholarly Bishop of Rochester who led the English theological attack on Luther and died for refusing Henry VIII’s supremacy.
• Thomas More — The brilliant humanist and Lord Chancellor who wrote thousands of pages against Tyndale and Luther and prosecuted English evangelicals.
• Cuthbert Tunstall — The scholarly Bishop of London who turned Tyndale away, then bought up and burned his New Testaments.
• John Longland — The king’s confessor and Bishop of Lincoln who led the great persecution of the Buckinghamshire Lollards in 1521.
• Henry Phillips — The young Englishman who befriended William Tyndale in Antwerp and betrayed him to the emperor’s officers in 1535.
• Stephen Gardiner — The able Bishop of Winchester who led the Catholic reaction against Cranmer and, as Mary’s chancellor, revived the burning of heretics.
• Edmund Bonner — Mary’s Bishop of London, who examined, degraded, and condemned more Protestant martyrs than any other English bishop.
• Reginald Pole — Henry VIII’s royal cousin turned cardinal, who returned as papal legate to reconcile England to Rome under Mary.
• Mary I — The Catholic queen who restored the papacy in England and under whom 288 Protestants were burned.

Scotland

The archbishops and the regent who fought the Scottish Reformation from Patrick Hamilton to John Knox.

• James Beaton — The Archbishop of St. Andrews who had Patrick Hamilton burned in 1528, Scotland’s first martyr of the Reformation.
• David Beaton — The cardinal who had George Wishart burned at St. Andrews in 1546 and was murdered there in revenge.
• John Hamilton — The last Catholic Archbishop of St. Andrews, who burned the aged Walter Myln in 1558 and opposed the Reformation Parliament of 1560.
• Mary of Guise — The French queen-regent of Scotland whose struggle with John Knox and the Protestant lords ended with her death in 1560.

The Counter-Reformation

The cardinals, Jesuits, and Spanish rulers who led Rome’s recovery after the Council of Trent.

• Gasparo Contarini — The Venetian cardinal who came nearest to agreement with the Protestants at Regensburg in 1541, and failed.
• Giovanni Morone — The diplomat-cardinal who was imprisoned by Paul IV on suspicion of heresy and then steered the Council of Trent to its close.
• Ignatius of Loyola — The Basque soldier who founded the Jesuits, the most effective instrument of the Counter-Reformation.
• Peter Canisius — The Jesuit “second apostle of Germany,” whose catechisms answered Luther’s for two centuries.
• Charles Borromeo — The nephew of Pius IV who drove Trent to its finish and made Milan the model of a Counter-Reformation diocese.
• Robert Bellarmine — The Jesuit cardinal whose Disputations became Rome’s standard systematic answer to Protestant theology.
• Bartolomé Carranza — The Dominican archbishop who helped restore Catholicism in Mary’s England and was then himself imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition for seventeen years.
• Philip II — The king who crushed the Spanish Protestants, made war on the Dutch, and sent the Armada against England.
• The Duke of Alba — Philip II’s iron general, whose Council of Troubles brought terror to the Protestant Netherlands.

Scandinavia and Poland

Rome’s champions in the northern and eastern kingdoms.

• Hans Brask — The last great Catholic bishop of Sweden, who fought Olaus Petri and the Reformation until he went into exile in 1527.
• Stanislaus Hosius — The Polish cardinal who led the Counter-Reformation in Poland, presided at Trent, and worked to bring Sweden back to Rome.

Roman Catholicism   The Reformers