The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Author:Diarmaid MacCulloch [MacCulloch, Diarmaid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christianity, Europe, History, Protestantism, Religion
ISBN: 9781101563953
Google: dikJzCnL7eUC
Amazon: B00AWGIRPW
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2005-03-25T03:00:00+00:00

9

The South: Catholic Heartlands

By the 1570s southern Europe was secured for the old Western Church, from the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal to the Venetian towns and territories on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic Sea. The great majority of European dioceses not lost to the Protestants were in the south: from a total of around 620 surviving Roman Catholic bishoprics around 1600, no fewer than 315 were Italian, and 67 were in Spain (where dioceses had always been larger and wealthier); that compared with rather fewer than 60 in total surviving in northern Europe, eastwards from the Spanish Netherlands through the Holy Roman Empire to Poland-Lithuania.1 In the absence of Protestantism, the task of Catholic churchmen was to remould the multifarious patterns of medieval devotion and religious practice that might be considered vaguely Christian into a form compatible with the strategies laid down at the Council of Trent.

This was no small task. One sixteenth-century Portuguese Archbishop was dumbfounded when in the course of his visitation a well-meaning procession of peasants welcomed him to their community, chanting ‘Blessed be the Holy Trinity and His sister the Virgin Mary’.2 To some extent the creation of Tridentine Europe was a matter of using the apparatus of coercion possessed by both Church and civil power. However, Tridentine Catholicism would have been a barren and empty creed if it had not also genuinely sought to make people do more than understand their faith – love it and claim it for their own. The story of southern Europe is partly about monarchs, bishops and inquisitors, but it is also a tale of intense personal searches for God and his saints, pursued in settings as various as the bleak cork-lined cells of a Portuguese Capuchin hilltop convent battered by Atlantic gales, the newly-gilded splendours of Baroque basilicas, or the crowded market-places and street-corners of the Mediterranean world. Since the missionary effort of Tridentine Catholicism stretched out into the Americas, Asia and Africa, there is good reason to see it as the largest such enterprise since the Church’s expansion in the first five centuries after the life of Christ.

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