Alessandro Farnese belonged wholly to the old world. Born in 1468, he owed his cardinal’s hat at twenty-five to the influence of his sister Giulia with Alexander VI — Romans called him il Cardinale Fregnese, the petticoat cardinal. He fathered four children, was not ordained a priest until 1519, and when he became pope in October 1534 he promptly made two teenage grandsons cardinals.

And yet the Counter-Reformation begins with him. Whatever his private life, Paul III grasped what his three predecessors had not: that the Roman church faced a permanent rival and would have to answer it with institutions rather than with bulls.

He commissioned an honest report. In 1536 he appointed a commission of nine under Cardinal Gasparo Contarini — including Carafa, Sadoleto, and the Englishman Reginald Pole — to examine the abuses of the church. The Consilium de emendanda ecclesia, presented on 9 March 1537, was blunt about the fiscal corruption of the papacy, the traffic in offices, and the dispensing of law by papal fiat.¹ It was meant to be confidential. It leaked, and Luther published a German edition in 1538 with sarcastic notes in the margins.

He approved the Jesuits. In 1540 the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae confirmed the Society of Jesus under Ignatius of Loyola — an order of exceptional discipline and learning, vowed to the pope, which would do more than any army to recover ground lost to Protestantism.

He established the Roman Inquisition. In 1542 the bull Licet ab initio created the Congregation of the Holy Office, with authority over the whole church, to try and suppress heresy. See the Inquisitions.

He convened Trent. After years of delay the Council of Trent opened in December 1545. Its decrees on Scripture and tradition, on original sin, and on justification — including the canons that placed the evangelical doctrine under anathema — all belong to Paul’s reign. He had also excommunicated Henry VIII in 1538.

He died in November 1549, with the council suspended and unfinished. It would reconvene twice more and conclude only in 1563.

Paul III is the hinge of the century. Under him the Roman church stopped treating the Reformation as a disturbance to be managed and began treating it as a rival to be answered — conceding the abuses, defining the doctrine, and building the instruments that would carry both. The reform he launched was real. It was also, on every point the Reformers thought essential, a reform that moved in the opposite direction. See The Counter-Reformation.

Roman Catholicism   The Counter-Reformation   The Council of Trent

Sources

1. Consilium de emendanda ecclesia (presented 9 March 1537), the report of the commission appointed by Paul III in 1536 under Cardinal Gasparo Contarini. Luther issued a German edition with his own marginal comments in 1538. ↩