A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

In the end, the papal diplomacy prevailed. His conciliatory manner helped Pius through difficulties in which another would have failed. No man was readier to give way in things which he did not consider essential, and what he promised he scrupulously performed. The success of the last meeting of the Council was due to bargaining and dexterous persuasion. When the critical point arrived, and it seemed as if the Council must fall to pieces, his agents, Morone and Peter Canisius, the great German Jesuit, won Ferdinand over to the Pope’s side. Similar persuasive diplomacy secured the influence of the Cardinal of Lorraine. Even Philip of Spain was brought to see that the Spanish Bishops were asking too much.

It must also be remembered that while Pius IV. refused to tolerate any loss of papal rights or privileges, he consented to and did his best to carry out numberless salutary reforms; and that the Council of Trent not only reorganised, but greatly purified the Roman Church. Almost all that was good in the reformation wrought by his predecessor Paul IV. was made part of the Tridentine regulations.

The special matter in dispute between the Pope and the great majority of non-Italian Bishops concerned the relations in which the Bishops of the Catholic Church stood to the Bishop of Rome, whom all acknowledged as their head. The Spanish, French, and German Bishops were strongly opposed to that doctrine of papal supremacy which had been assiduously taught by the canonists of the Roman Curia for at least two centuries, and which was called curialism. Curialism taught that the Pope was lord of the Church in the sense that all the clergy were his servants, and that Bishops in particular were mere assistants whom he had appointed for the purpose of oversight to act as his vicars. Whatever powers of jurisdiction they possessed came from him, and from him alone. The opposite conception, that insisted on at Trent by the northern and Spanish Bishops, that maintained at the great Councils of Constance and Basel, was that every Bishop had his power directly from Christ, and that the Pope, while he was the representative of the unity of the Church, and therefore to be recognised as its head, was only a primus inter pares, and subject to the episcopate as a whole in Council assembled. The question kept cropping up in almost all the discussions in the Council which turned on reform. It began as early as the fifth session (June 17th, 1546) and went on intermittently; but it positively raged in the later sessions.

The question was raised on its practical side. One of the standing abuses in the mediæval Church was the non-residence of Bishops. The Council was passionately called upon by the Spanish and northern Bishops to declare that residence was a necessary thing, and unanimously responded that it was. Their function was the oversight of their dioceses, and this could only be done when they were resident. But how was this to be enforced? To compel the Bishops to reside within their dioceses would depopulate the Court of Rome, and make it very much poorer. Bishops from every country in Europe were attached to the Roman Court, and their stipends, drawn from the countries in which their Sees lay, were spent in Rome, and aided the magnificence of the papal entourage. The reformers felt that a theoretical question lay behind the practical, and insisted that the oversight and therefore the residence of Bishops was de jure divino and not merely de lege ecclesiastica—something enjoined by God, and therefore beyond alteration by the Pope. Behind this lay the thought, first introduced by Cyprian, that every Bishop was within his congregation or diocese the Vicar of Christ, and in the last resort responsible to Him alone. Thus the old conciliar conception, maintained at Constance and at Basel, faced the curial at Trent; and both were too powerful to give way entirely. In spite of his Italian majority, the Pope could not get a majority for a direct negative denying the de jure divino theory. At the final vote, sixty-six fathers declared for the de jure divino theory, while seventy-one either rejected it altogether or voted for remitting it to the decision of the Pope. The Pope dared not make use of the liberty of decision thus accorded to him by a majority of five. If he did he would then be left to face the European Roman Catholic Courts of Germany, France, and Spain—all of whom supported the conciliar view. Thus the theoretical question was left undecided at Trent, but the papal diplomacy prevailed to the extent of creating a bias in favour of curialist ideas, which left the Pope in a stronger position as regards the episcopate than any other General Council had ever placed him in.

The prominence given to the Roman (i.e. the papal) Church throughout the decisions of the Council, beginning with the way in which the Constantinopolitan (Nicene) Creed was affirmed;[720] the insertion of the phrase His own Vicar upon earth;[721] the injunction that Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops, and all others who of right and custom ought to be present at a provincial council ... promise and profess true obedience to the Sovereign Roman Pontiff;[722] the 10th clause in the Professio Fidei Tridentinæ: “I acknowledge the holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church for the mother and mistress of all Churches; and I promise and swear true obedience to the Bishop of Rome, successor to St. Peter, Prince of Apostles, and Vicar of Jesus Christ”; the way in which the Council at its last session (Dec. 4th, 1563) left entirely in the Pope’s hands the confirmation of its decrees and the measures to be used for carrying them out; and above all its calm acquiescence in the Bull Benedictus Deus (Jan. 24th, 1564), in which Pope Pius IV. reserved the exposition of its decrees to himself[723]—all testify to the triumph of curialist ideas at the Council of Trent. The Roman Catholic Church had become, in a sense never before universally accepted, the “Pope’s House.”

This Council, so eagerly demanded, so greatly protracted, twice dissolved, buffeted by storms in the political world, exposed, even in its later sessions, to many a danger, ended in the general contentment of the Roman Catholic peoples. When the prelates met together for the last time on the 4th of December 1563, ancient opponents embraced, and traces of tears were seen in many of the old eyes.

It had done three things for the Roman Catholic Church. It had provided a compact system of doctrine, stript of many of the vagaries of Scholasticism, and yet opposed to Protestant teaching. Romanism had an intellectual basis of its own to rest on. It had rebuilt the hierarchy on what may be called almost a new foundation, and made it symmetrical. It had laid down a scheme of reformation which, if only carried out by succeeding Pontiffs, would free the Church from many of the crying evils which had given such strength to the Protestant movement. It had insisted on and made provisions for an educated clergy—perhaps the greatest need of the Roman Church in the middle of the sixteenth century.

All this was largely due to the man who ruled in Rome. Pope Pius IV., sprung from the shrewd Italian middle-class, caring little for theology, by no means distinguished for piety, had seen what the Church needed, and by deft diplomacy had obtained it. A stronger man would have snapped the threads which tied all parties together; one more zealous would have lacked his infinite patience; a deeply pious man could scarcely have employed the means he continually used. He was magnificently assisted by the new Company of Jesus. No theologians had so much influence at Trent as Lainez and Salmeron; the Council would have broken down altogether but for the aid given by Canisius to Morone in his negotiations with the Emperor.

Pius IV. was not slow to fulfil the promises he had made to sovereigns and Council. The Breviary and the Missal were revised, as Ferdinand had requested. Ecclesiastical music was purified. Exertions were made to establish colleges and theological seminaries. But a sterner Pontiff was needed to guide the battle against the growing Protestantism. He was found in the next, Pope Pius V.

The influence of Cardinal Borromeo, the pious nephew of Pius IV., was powerful in the Conclave, and was exerted to procure the election of Michele Ghislieri, Cardinal of Alessandria, who took the name of Pius V. The new Pontiff had entered a Dominican convent when fourteen years of age, and had given himself up heart and soul to the strictest life his Order enjoined. He had all the zeal for strict orthodoxy which characterised the Dominicans, an asceticism which never spared himself, and a detestation of the immoralities and irregularities which too often disgraced the lives of ecclesiastics. He carried the habits of the cloister with him into the Vatican. He never missed attendance at the prescribed services of the Church, and in his devotion there was no trace of hypocrisy. He was a Pope to lead the new Romanism, with its intense hatred of heresy, its determination to reform the moral life, and its contempt for the Renaissance and all its works. Philip II. of Spain sent a special letter of congratulation to Cardinal Borromeo to thank him for his efforts in the Conclave.