The Counter-Reformation

Rome’s answer to the Reformation · from the 1530s to the mid-seventeenth century · a council, a company of men, a tribunal, and an index of forbidden books.

The Counter-Reformation was the Roman Catholic Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation. It sought to renew the church’s discipline and devotion while reaffirming, without concession, the doctrines the Reformers had challenged. Its decisive statement was the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which declared Scripture and unwritten tradition to be received with equal reverence, defined justification as the infusion of righteousness rather than its imputation, and fixed the seven sacraments, the sacrifice of the mass, and purgatory. It closed the door on the evangelical doctrine with thirty-three anathemas that have never been withdrawn.

Reform Before and After Luther

Calls for reform did not begin in Wittenberg. Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros had disciplined the Spanish clergy and sponsored the Complutensian Polyglot before 1517, and the Fifth Lateran Council had heard sermons on reform from 1512 until it closed in March 1517. But the impulse gathered force only after the Reformation had divided Europe. Adrian VI admitted in 1522 that corruption had flowed from the papal court itself, and in 1537 a commission appointed by Paul III laid bare the abuses of the curia in the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia. Paul III then forged the movement’s principal instruments.

The Instruments of the Counter-Reformation

New religious orders arose: the Theatines (1524), the Capuchins (1528), the Ursulines (1535), and above all the Society of Jesus, approved on September 27, 1540, which grew from about a thousand members at Ignatius of Loyola’s death in 1556 to more than fifteen thousand by 1626. In 1542 Paul III reorganized the Roman Inquisition under a commission of cardinals. In 1559 Paul IV issued the first papal Index of Prohibited Books, and after Trent came the Roman Catechism (1566), the reformed Breviary (1568), and the Roman Missal (1570), which shaped Catholic worship until the Second Vatican Council.

What It Reformed, and What It Refused

The Counter-Reformation did correct real abuses. Bishops were made to reside and preach, seminaries were founded to train priests, and the professional pardon-sellers whose trade had provoked the Ninety-Five Theses were abolished. Rome recovered much of Poland, Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, and the southern Netherlands, and its missionaries carried Catholicism to the Americas and to Asia.

Yet no reform of conduct touched the question Luther had raised: how a sinner is made right with God. On that question the Counter-Reformation did not move, and it pressed its answer with the sword and the stake in France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. That is the clearest evidence that the Reformation was never merely a protest against bad popes. It was a recovery of the gospel.