Counter-Reformation

For many years, the idea of the Counter-Reformation has been associated, in a negative way, with the reaction initiated by the Catholic Council of Trent (1545-1563) in order to restore and strengthen the Church’s control over society. According to its critics, such an attitude would cause a sort of return to medieval obscurantism. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however,  some alternative hypotheses were proposed: first, the idea that the Counter-Reformation had been preceded by attempts at an internal ephemeral self-reform within the Catholic Church; then the idea, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, that the two trends – the Catholic Reformation that began at the end of the fifteenth century and the anti-Protestant Counter Reformation – had lived together, intertwining and opposing one another, that they had succeeded each other in chronological order. In general, we can say that between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Church of Rome tried to reassert its authority, on the one hand reaffirming the theological foundations criticized by Protestants, on the other hand, setting up a major reorganization of its ecclesiastical structure, reactivating the tribunal of the Inquisition and compiling the Index of Forbidden Books (1559). A fundamental role in the control of religious life and in the reform of collective behaviour, a kind of new Christianization, was given to the new Religious Orders which flourished during the sixteenth century.

Read more :

• A. Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari, Torino 1996.
• R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770, Cambridge 1998.
• W. de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul. Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter Reformation Milan, Leiden 2001.