The Counter Reformation

Trent met in sessions across eighteen years, and its output divides neatly into doctrine and plumbing. On doctrine it restated the disputed positions in terms designed to exclude the Protestant readings: justification as a process involving cooperation rather than a single imputed act, seven sacraments, the real presence defined in the language of transubstantiation, and a fixed canon of scripture including the books Protestants placed outside it. On plumbing it did something arguably more consequential. It required every diocese to found a seminary, because a great deal of the criticism directed at the clergy concerned men who had been ordained without training. It required bishops to live in their dioceses, which many had not. It regulated the appointment of parish clergy, the keeping of registers and the conduct of visitation.

Diarmaid MacCulloch's history of the whole period observes that the discipline outlasted the polemic. Doctrinal formulas are argued about for centuries, but a rule that every priest must pass through a seminary changes what the clergy of a church are like within two generations, and the Catholic parish priest of 1650 was a recognisably different figure from his predecessor of 1500 largely for that reason.

The century that follows Trent produced two things at once, and any honest account has to hold them together. On one side there were the new orders. The Jesuits, approved in 1540, built schools and colleges across Catholic Europe and mission fields in Asia and the Americas, and took a fourth vow that made them available to be sent anywhere. Other foundations took up teaching, nursing and work with the poor, and women's congregations pressed, against considerable resistance, for forms of religious life that were not enclosed. Devotional life was reorganised around frequent confession, the catechism and new forms of prayer.

On the other side the same movement produced the Roman Inquisition, reorganised in 1542, and the Index of prohibited books, and both were used against Catholics as well as against Protestants, over doctrine, over scholarship and over mysticism that looked unregulated. The atlas does not present these as a good side and a bad side of the period, because contemporaries did not experience them as separate programmes. A church that had decided its problem was disorder pursued education and discipline together, and the Index and the seminary were the same argument applied to different objects.