The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture by Susanna Berger (review)

Convent Reform, Catholic Reform, and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-Century New Spain: The View from the Nunnery

This brief volume is a welcome challenge to the traditional interpretation of Catholic Church politics in nineteenth-century Europe and Latin America. The traditional view has liberals espousing rationality, modernity and progress in opposition to the church and its conservative allies, opposing the creation of a modern state. The authors of this work see a Catholic revival that frequently embraced Liberal goals of democracy and scientific progress rather than an obscurantist church.Margaret Lavinia Anderson finds the Catholic revival most prominent in Germany, Belgium, England, and Ireland. As evidence, she cites increased religious vocations, growth of religious congregations and celebrity converts, such as John Henry Newman. As a result, a revived ultramontane church was prepared to mobilize political parties. Yet she acknowledges that in the end, it became the “handmaiden of reaction” in France.James F. McMillan picks up the story of Catholics and republicans, who became sworn enemies during the French Reaction. Their fundamental disagreement centered on the role of religion in developing nationhood. The anticlerical republicans wanted the church to be just another belief system in a pluralistic society.Spain was no exception to the Catholic revival. According to Frances Lannon, the most controversial aspect of the revival was the rapid growth of religious congregations. Compromises temporarily sidelined church-state conflicts but with the resurgence of anticlericalism and the search for hispanidad after the disastrous defeat of 1898, the debate over modernity vs. anti-modernity led to clashes with the church.The final chapters treat the Catholic revival and liberalism in Latin America. Eric Van Young starts with the analysis of popular religion during the Mexican insurgency, 1810–21. He concludes that Indian Mexico was first and foremost committed to the preservation of the community rather than the broader concept of statehood as envisioned by the creole leaders.Next David Brading studies the ultramontane instringence of Bishop Clemente Jesús Munguía (1810–68) of Michoacán. Influenced by French reactionary thinking, the prelate found Mexican liberalism threatening. He rejected the state’s claim to the patronato and insisted on a sovereign church. For the Liberals, it was imperative that the clergy be removed from politics. The conflict made for strange bedfellows in that it promoted separation of church and state—a situation far more beneficial to the church than the older close union of church and state.The Catholic revival in Antioquia, Colombia, 1850–1900, as described by Patricia Landoño Vegas, suggests the church’s considerable influence in philanthropic associations. This influence increased the presence of the institution in the lives of the people and prepared them for the modernization needs of the next century.In studying Argentina, Austen Ivereigh looks at the Catholic and liberal clash over the educational law of 1820. Instead of seeking the customary pragmatic compromise, the Liberals argued for state autonomy with unlimited influence. The Catholic deputies saw the state as governing corporate entities, which became a reality under Juan Domingo Perón.The work concludes with an analysis of religion of politics in Chile, 1850–1925, by J. Samuel Valenzuela and Erika May Valenzuela. Here Catholics were on both sides of the fence in church-state conflicts. The authors find continuity between the conservative Catholics in their social justice commitments and the subsequent rise of the Christian Democratic Party.This study of Catholic revivals mobilizing society for democracy points to many similarities in both Europe and Latin America, with the exception of Mexico. Van Young’s treatise of popular religion during the insurgency does not fit the theme of the work. Munguía fits the mold by default, in that the prelate’s thinking unwittingly prepared the way for separation of church and state. Mexican anticlericalism left the church struggling for its institutional existence, hardly and ideal situation for a Catholic revival.The work has neither an index nor a bibliography. The authors to varying degrees rely on printed primary and secondary sources and archival materials. It is well documented with very perceptive analyses of secondary literature in the European area.Background knowledge of church-state relations in Europe and Latin America is essential in reading this treatise. Thus the work will appeal mostly to scholars and graduate students in the field.The publication is very timely, especially in light of the fact that contemporary studies of the church center on the post-Vatican II period and liberation theology. Unfortunately, this emphasis frequently leads to neglecting essential background information. This reviewer fully concurs with the editor that more studies of this nature are needed for a more balanced view of the church’s struggle for modernity.

CHAPTER 13. Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation

Catholic Reform and Protestant Reformers: The Scottish Province 1517–1560

Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation

This chapter familiarizes readers with some of the major historical debates about the Catholic Reformation. The terminology is explained and related to the historiography around the topic, in particular the shift towards usage of ‘Catholic Reformation’ as opposed to ‘Counter-Reformation’. It outlines that there is no exact time coverage that has been agreed upon when discussing the Catholic Reformation, but argues for understanding it as a long Catholic Reformation. Significant arguments that run throughout the book are introduced, particularly the cyclical relationship between centre(s) and peripheries. The popular notion that, in this period, Catholicism was simply one big, universal bloc is countered. Instead, contemporaries’ competing visions of Catholic Reformation are highlighted to show what was a strength, but also a weakness, as tensions developed between an international outlook and national necessity.

In comparison with the estimated number of about 60,000 executed so-called witches (women and men), the number of executed and punished witch-priests seems to be rather irrelevant. This statement, however, overlooks the fact that it was only during medieval and early modern times that the crime of heresy and witchcraft cost the life of friars, monks, and ordained priests at the stake. Clerics were the largest group of men accused of practicing magic, necromancy, and witchcraft. Demonology and the media (in constant dialogue with trials) reveal the omnipresence of the devil’s cleric with his figure possessing the quality of a ‘super-witch’, labelled as patronus sagarum. In Western Europe, the persecution of Catholic priests played at least two significant roles. First, in confessional debates, it proved to Catholics that Satan was assaulting post-Tridentine Catholicism, the only remaining bulwark of Christianity; for Protestants on the other hand, the news about the devil’s clergy proved that Satan ruled popedom. Second, in the Old Reich and from the start of the 17th century, the prosecution of clerics as the devil’s minions fueled the general debates about the legitimacy of witchcraft trials. In sketching these over-lapping discourses, we meet the devil’s clergy in Catholic political demonology, in the media and in confessional debates, including polemics about Jesuits being witches and sorcerers. Friedrich Spee used the narratives about executed Catholic priests as vital argument to end trials and torture. Inter alia, battling the devil’s clergy played a vital role in campaigns of internal Catholic church reform and clerical infighting. Studying the debates about the devil’s clergy thus provides a better understanding of how the dynamics of the Reformation, counter-Reformation, Catholic Reform, and confessionalization had an impact on European witchcraft trials.

The 16th century began in France as a time of relative peace, prosperity, and optimism, but horizons soon darkened under the clouds of religious schism, heresy persecutions, and civil war. French theologians condemned Martin Luther’s ideas as early as 1521, but his views continued to spread underground. The movement remained small and clandestine until the 1550s, when the penetration of John Calvin’s ideas from nearby Geneva resulted in the formation of Reformed churches, whose growing membership demanded the right to worship openly. The accidental death of King Henry II in 1559 left France with a religiously divided court and a series of young, inexperienced kings. Henry’s widow, Catherine de Medici, attempted a policy of compromise that backfired. Militancy increased on both sides of the religious divide, and civil war broke out in 1562. Neither side could secure a decisive win on the battlefield, and neither was satisfied with the compromise peace that ended the war. Indeed, war broke out seven more times before a more lasting peace was secured by the first Bourbon king, Henry IV, with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The edict set the terms for religious coexistence, allowing French Protestants limited rights to worship and certain protections under the law. It also fostered the spread of a movement already underway for the renewal of Catholic spirituality and reform of Catholic church institutions in France. Until the 1970s, the civil and religious wars that afflicted France through the second half of the 16th century were viewed largely as the consequence of political rivalries that spun out of control following the death of King Henry II. More recently, historians have shifted their attention to the social and cultural contexts in which the wars took place, particularly to the fundamentally religious nature of the quarrels. This has led to a profusion of new scholarship on the impact of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in France, the tensions—and ultimately the violence—generated by competing claims to religious truth, and the difficulty of resolving the quarrels or putting an end to the wars that resulted from them.

13. Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a center of industrial unions and an important component of the New Deal Democratic coalition, was an ideological battleground in the struggle among anti-communists, conservatives, and Catholic social reformers in the 1930s and 1940s. Such Pittsburgh Catholics as Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leader Philip Murray, “labor priest” Charles Owen Rice, and Democratic machine boss David Lawrence, struggled to advance the New Deal, while contending with red-baiters and communists. Catholic activists sought to reform capitalism, counter anti-communists inside and outside the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party, and purge communists from the CIO and the New Deal. From the vantage point of the Pittsburgh front, it is possible to see the seamless evolution of New Deal Democrats into Cold War Democrats. Catholic reformers, inspired by the social encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, built alliances across religious, racial, and ethnic lines. Without their efforts, it would have been far less likely that the cause of labor and political reform would have extended for a generation beyond the 1930s.

The Catholic Reformation unleashed bursts of creativity that changed the spiritual and, indeed, sensory experience of everywhere it touched. While on the one hand it offered a universality of experience, differences in interpretation and implementation as it adapted to cultural circumstance, particularly on its furthest geographical edges, created a two-way relationship between the Catholic world’s traditional centres and its new peripheries. The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction places this movement within its global context. It considers the expected, such as spiritual and religious matters, and how they entwined with the political, but also covers the full gamut of experience of the Catholic Reformation, particularly its deliberately sensory approach in terms of art, architecture, and music. The book traces the Catholic Reformation from its beginnings in the first half of the 16th century, pre-dating the Council of Trent (which is frequently viewed as its starting point), through the years of unrest in Europe, to its global expansion in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and its continued influence and legacy into the 20th century. This book not only introduces the reader to the breadth of the Catholic Reformation experience in concise form, but it also sets it within important recent debates within the scholarship, thus presenting a provocative discussion of the topic’s central issues. Combining broad overviews and focused examples, The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction offers a concise introduction to a global movement.

Due to the efforts of Jesuit archivists and historians, the literature on the Jesuit order and its founder St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) is abundant. This holds true for the vast body of scholarly works on the period under study, the Catholic Reformation. By using the term Catholic Reformation, which was introduced by Hubert Jedin in 1946 in order to replace the one-sided term Counter-Reformation, Smith accentuates the autonomous force of the Catholic reform. This goes along with recent attempts by historians to portray the social-historical process of ‘reCatholicization’ within “The World of Catholic Renewal” (Ronnie Po-Hsia, Cambridge 1999) or as “The Refashioning of Catholicism” (Robert Bireley, Washington 1999).

This chapter argues that the Catholic Reformation harnessed the sensory whether through art, architecture, or music. Vitally, it also sought to engage the mind and intellect. The chapter opens by considering architecture and art, explaining how the Catholic Reformation encouraged a revolution in visual culture, especially through the baroque movement. Next, the chapter explores new strains of spirituality within the Catholic Reformation, particularly the sensory approach of the Spiritual Exercises, and the lay vocation encouraged by Francis de Sales. After considering musical changes and aural culture, the chapter ends by exploring the intellectual culture of the Catholic Reformation. Throughout the chapter, examples are given from across the Catholic Reformation world, both from its centres but also the adaptations on its peripheries.

By calling his book The Catholic Reformation, Mullett wants to draw attention to the late medieval roots of Catholic reform in the early modern period. Divided into seven chapters, the focus of this informative study is on the institutional Church's attempts to reform itself before the Protestant Reformation and on its continuing effort of renewal after 1517. A first chapter on the medieval background of the Catholic Reformation gives very useful summaries on the various movements of reform undertaken by popes and bishops. It stresses the importance of the impulse of reform, even under the worldly pontificates of Alexander VI and Julius II, and rightly discusses in some detail the significance of the Observance movement among the religious orders. Both Savonarola and Luther, Mullett reminds us, emerged out of the mendicant reform movements. Moreover, many of the doctrinal and disciplinary provisions of the Council of Trent had already been anticipated by reform councils and reforming bishops in the fifteenth century and by the Fifth Lateran Council on the eve of Luther's revolt. The two following chapters follow in some detail the history of the Council of Trent and the new religious orders, drawing on recent as well as standard scholarship. Although the Society of Jesus occupied a great deal of the author's attention, Mullett manages to convey the full panorama of institutional renewal in the Catholic Church during the later sixteenth century. The institutional angle is continued in Chapter 4 with a chronological discussion of the pontificates from Julius III to Clement VIII and a brief introduction of the work of several prominent reform bishops, notably Gian Matteo Giberti and Carlo Borromeo. Two more chapters (5 & 6) give a rapid survey of the progress of Catholic reform in the different countries of Europe. Mullett's discussion of Italy and France is particularly interesting and original; there are also shorter treatments of the other countries of Catholic Europe and sketches of Catholic missions overseas. With a concluding chapter on Catholic Reformation and the arts, Mullett has offered the reader an informative and competent summary of the Catholic Reformation. The strength of this book lies in its extensive discussion of doctrine, liturgy, and the institutional history of the Catholic [End Page 509] Church. However, The Catholic Reformation might prove to be too difficult for beginning students, who may need a more extensive orientation in the political and social context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL BOOK REVIEW THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1845-1961: NEWMAN, HOPKINS, BELLOC, CHESTERTON, GREENE, WAUGH BY IAN KER 116 The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh. By Ian Ker. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp: ix + 231. Cloth $60.00, ISBN 0-268-03879-1; paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-268-03880-5. The author of the definitive 20th-century biography of John Henry Newman, the editor of editions of several of his works,and a perceptive commentator on many aspects of his thought, Ian Ker is a preeminent Newman scholar. Consequently, it is a bit ironic that his latest book begins by pointing out an error in Newman’s thinking: his claim, made in “Catholic Literature in the English Tongue, 1854-58” (one of the lectures that make up the“University Subjects”section of The Idea of a University), that a Catholic literature could not develop in the essentially Protestant culture of England.This book is a refutation of that claim. Of course, refuting Newman is not really Ker’s purpose. His goal is rather “realization: that is, in the very Newmanian sense, of making real the extent to which Catholicism informed and shaped a considerable and impressive corpus of literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (7). He achieves this goal in The Catholic Revival in English Literature. Ker examines six writers: Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Ker’s critical approach is traditional and straightforward. He (thankfully) deploys none of the techniques or terminology of postmodern literary criticism in analyzing his subjects.Readers need not be versed in contemporary critical theory to grasp Ker’s analysis,and readers who have labored in the fetid swamps of current literary theory will find Ker’s clear prose and good sense bracing and restorative.This book demonstrates how lucid and informative can be interpretations based on the careful reading of primary texts, a solid knowledge of the culture in which those texts were written, and a strong critical intelligence. What unifies the book is the question at the heart of the author’s examination of each author: how did each writer’s Catholicism influence him as a writer? For Newman,Ker answers this question by distinguishing between his conversion to and discovery of Catholicism. Newman’s conversion to Catholicism, Ker argues, was followed by“a more experiential discovery of Catholicism”(13).What he discovered was Catholicism as a concrete,everyday reality,a faith which integrated itself into the ordinary business of life, a faith which existed as an objective fact embodied in a definite creed, system of worship, and sacraments. Ker observes that this postconversion discovery of Catholicism “powerfully engaged Newman’s imagination” and“provided much of the creative stimulus that produced the most overtly literary period of his life, when he deliberately abstained from theology and instead turned to writing Catholic apologetics in the form of novels and satire” (22). Like Newman, the Catholic writers who followed him were all influenced, Ker contends,by one or another of the dimensions of Catholicism as a concrete,everyday 117 reality. In his chapter on Hopkins, Ker examines how Catholicism influenced the poetic style of Hopkins. Building on Geoffrey Hill’s observation that the poetic diction and prosody of Hopkins were influence by Catholic liturgical practices, Ker shows that the litany was a formative influence on his poetry after his conversion. Spare,abrupt,monosyllabic,and without stylistic pretensions,litanies were a popular form of ordinary Catholic worship prior to the Second Vatican Council. Indeed, Newman wrote several litanies. Ker shows how frequently Hopkins’ poetry echoes the form, language, and rhythm of the litany. Ker’s thesis that Catholicism as a concrete,everyday reality is important to his six authors needs to be modified when applied to Hilaire Belloc. Ker correctly observes that “like Newman, Belloc loves to emphasize the sheer concreteness of Catholicism—it is decidedly a thing,not a theory”(65).However,the Catholic“thing” that influenced Belloc was less the Catholicism he actually encountered in his life and more the pre-Reformation Catholicism he encountered in his...