5.3: Religious Orders

The Catholic Reformation was happening in earnest by the 1530s. The Church adopted the use of the printing press and began reaching out to both priests and educated laypeople, often in the vernacular languages rather than Latin. (Note: The Bible was to remain untranslated.) The new fervor led to a revival of religious orders focused on reaching out to the common people rather than remaining sequestered from the public in monasteries and convents.

Jesuits

In addition to the edicts and councils convened by the popes, the Catholic Reformation benefited from a resurgence of Catholic religious orders. The most important new religious order was the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits were founded by Ignatius of Loyola (1491 – 1556), a kind of Catholic counterpart to Luther or Calvin, in 1540. A Spanish knight, Loyola was injured in battle. During his recovery and after reading books on the life of Christ and the saints, he gave up his possessions and took a pilgrimage across Spain and Italy. He claimed to offer “spiritual conversion” to those who would follow his teachings, which led to a brief imprisonment on suspicion of heresy.

Loyola's book, the Spiritual Exercises, encouraged a mystic veneration of the Church and single-minded devotion to its institutions. Based on an imaginary recreation of the persecution and death of Christ, the Exercises would lead many new members of the Jesuits to experience an emotional and spiritual awakening. That awakening was explicitly focused on what he described as the “Church Hierarchical”: not just a worldly institution that offered guidance to Christians, but the sole path to salvation, imbued by God Himself with spiritual authority.

The Jesuits were to be “faithful soldiers of the pope", with the purpose of fighting Protestantism and heresy. What made the Jesuits distinct from the other religious orders was that they were responsible to the pope, not to kings. They came to live and work in kingdoms all over Europe. However, bypassing royal authority and taking orders directly from Rome did not endear them to monarchs across the region.

By Loyola’s death in 1556, there were about 1,000 Jesuits, a number that rapidly increased by the end of the century. Many Jesuits became influential advisors to kings across Europe, ensuring that Catholic monarchs would actively persecute and root out heresy, including Protestantism. They also began a missionary campaign that sought to rekindle an emotional connection to the Church through its use of passionate sermons.

Figure 8.3.1: Statue of Ignatius of Loyola at the Church of the Gesù in Rome, one of the original Jesuit churches. The statues are in the baroque style, practically dripping with ornamentation and gilding.

Education was important. Indeed, Jesuits were required to undergo an eleven-year period of training before they were full members. Thus, they created schools, where noble and rich, non-noble young men received an excellent humanist education and developed a fierce devotion to the Church. By 1600, there were 250,000 students in Jesuit schools across continental Europe. The schools were noteworthy for being free, funded by the Church and private gifts. However, students did have to apply for admittance. Upon successfully completing school, the young men often went on to positions of considerable political and commercial power.

Jesuits were also active missionaries, traveling all over the known world. Unlike many other orders of missionaries, the Jesuits distinguished themselves by learning the native languages and customs of the people. In East Asia, they founded Christian communities in Japan (in 1549) and China (in 1552). The Jesuits failed to make many converts in China, but did bring back an enormous amount of information about the highly sophisticated, rich, ancient culture that had achieved its power without Christianity.

Carmelites

The Carmelites was an order of nuns reformed by St. Teresa of Avila starting in 1535. The nuns’ vow of poverty and their focus on prayer and purity became the focus. In addition, the use of separate residences and lifestyles for nuns from rich and poor families was abolished. Likewise, many orders started opening hospitals and orphanages in the cities that provided care for both the sick and the poor and indigent.

Figure 8.4.1: This portrait is probably the most accurate representation of St Teresa's appearance. Her age was approximately 61 years old.

Outcomes

While Catholic monarchs continued to almost completely control the Church in their kingdoms, popes had at least moderate success in forcing bishops to stop living like princes, to have priests remain at least nominally celibate, and for church officials to actually live in the places they were supposed to represent. Over time, the moral qualities of members of the Church, while not universally exemplary, did come to more closely resemble the purported standards.

Inspired by the success of Protestantism and to better connect with laypeople, the Church began to sponsor a counter-propaganda campaign. Lives of saints, prayer books, and anti-Protestant propaganda were printed and distributed throughout Europe. The Church began to stage plays on both Biblical scenes and great moments in the Church’s history. The new religious orders, including the Jesuits, the Capuchins, the Ursulines, and the followers of Vincent de Paul sponsored major charitable works, reconnecting the poor to the Church. In contrast to the austerity and even harshness of Lutheranism and (especially) Calvinism, the Catholic Church came to offer a mystical, emotional form of both worship and religious experience that was very appealing to those people that had been alienated from the institution.

Literacy definitely benefited from both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Schools and universities – both church-supported and private – continued to be created throughout the sixteenth century. All Protestant denominations emphasized the importance of reading the Bible. Also, as the Catholic Church waged its counter-propaganda campaign, the Church hierarchy came to regard general literacy as desirable. Overall, literacy climbed to between 5 – 10% of the population by 1600 across Central and Western Europe.