The Counter-Reformation

David M. Luebke’s textbook includes nine leading articles on the early modern Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation in Europe and South America, at the beginning of the important essay “Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation” of the German Roman Catholic church historian Hubert Jedin. Jedin (1900-1980), who was the great historian of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), created in this study, which was first published in German as a small book in 1946, the term and the concept “Catholic Reformation” for the own Roman Catholic reformation movement beside and independent of the Protestant Reformation. Jedin adopted the term “Catholic Reformation” from the Protestant German historian Wilhelm Maurenbrecher who had used this term for the Italian and Spanish Roman Catholic reformatory movements of the early sixteenth century in 1880. By his distinction between “Counter-Reformation” and “Catholic Reformation” Jedin prepared the current view that the Counter-Reformation was not a reactionary antithesis to the Protestant Reformation but a movement to modernity like the Reformation.

The other articles are H. Outram Evennett’s “Counter-Reformation Spirituality”, first published in 1970, John W. O’Malley’s SJ “Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism”, first published in 1991, John Bossy’s “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe”, first published in 1970, Wolfgang Reinhard’s “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment”, first published in English in 1989, Peter Burke’s “How to Become a Counter-Reformation Saint”, first published in 1984, Alison Weber’s “Little Women: Counter-Reformation Misogyny”, first published in 1990, Marc R. Forster’s “The Thirty Year’s War and the Failure of Catholicization”, first published in 1992, and Sabine MacCormack’s “’The Heart Has Its Reasons’: Predicaments of Missionary Christianity in Early Colonial Peru”, first published in 1985.

I do miss texts of two English-writing historians: Robert Bireley and Ronnie Po-chia Hsia. I think of parts of Bireley’s “Religion and Politics in the Age of Counter-Reformation: Emperor Ferdinand II and William Lamormaini SJ and the Formation of Imperial Policy” (1981), his “The Counter-Reformation Prince” (1991), or Hsia’s “The World of Catholic renewal” (1998). Bireley’s “The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700. A Reassessment of Counter-Reformation” (1999) was published to late for Luebke. However, there may be reasons to deny these authors’ contributions. But unfortunately Luebke did not accept very important contributions of the German historian Wolfgang Reinhard for his volume, especially Reinhard’s “Counter-Reformation as Modernization”, published in German under the title “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters” in 1977 (“Archive for Reformation History” 68, 1977, pp. 226-251), and his “Duress to Confessionalization”, published in German under the title “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters” in 1983 (“Zeitschrift für historische Forschung” 10, 1983, pp. 257-277). But the greatest shortcoming seemes to me that Luebke did not include in his book Reinhard’s “What is Catholic Confessionalization?”, published in German under the title “Was ist katholische Konfessionalisierung?” in 1995 (“Die katholische Konfessionalisierung”, ed. by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, 1995, pp. 419-452). Therefore the readers of his book cannot realize that many historians nowadays integrate “Counter-Reformation” and “Catholic Reformation” into the concept “Catholic Confessionalization”. They have been doing this since the 1980s because the term “Catholic Confessionalization” is appropriate to understand the relationship to the Lutheran Confessionalization and the Calvinist Confessionalization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to overturn the traditional antithesis of the (supposed) progressive Protestant Reformation and the (so-called) reactionary Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation.

However, this is no wonder because Luebke is a critic of the “confessionalization thesis” he speaks about in his “Editor’s Introduction”, where he is using the term “confessionalization” but not the term “Catholic confessionalization”: “According to Reinhard, both the Catholic and Protestant reforms fundamentally rearranged the relationship between church and state” (11). “Together, both Reformations helped bring about the indispensable prerequisite of absolutism: the transformation of subjects into the willing objects of state domination” (11). “To pose the question this way is, admittedly, to caricature the Counter-Reformation’s role in ‘acculturation’ and ‘confessionalization’” (13). “Gradually, a picture is emerging of the Counter-Reformation as a highly complex interaction with many players - a progress, in other words, that cannot be reduced to the tidy social and political dichotomies implicit in ‘acculturation’ and ‘confessionalization’” (14). I think Luebke is right that Counter-Reformation is much more than social and political integration of individuals into the formation of early modern states. But I do also think that confessionalization means much more than that, especially since the last years’ researches which left the older only social and political (‘etatism’) view behind. However, “Catholique confessionalization” seems to me the better term and the more appropriate concept than “Counter-Reformation”. Maybe we should use “Counter-Reformation” and “Catholic Reform” as subcategories of “Catholic confessionalization”.