The Catholic Reformation and the English Reformation

Renewal from within

The sixteenth century's reform did not happen only in Wittenberg, Zurich and Geneva. Before Luther, voices inside the Catholic Church were calling for renewal. In Spain, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo, disciplined the clergy and the religious orders and gathered scholars to print a great Bible with its texts in several languages side by side. In Italy small circles of clergy and lay people met to pray, care for the sick and reform their own lives.

Historians call this the Catholic Reformation; when they mean the church's resistance to Protestantism, they also speak of the Counter-Reformation. Both names describe something real. What began as a longing for holiness grew, after Luther, into new religious orders and a council that set out Catholic teaching for centuries.

The best known of the new orders is the Society of Jesus. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), a Basque nobleman and soldier, had his leg shattered defending Pamplona against the French in 1521. Recovering, he read lives of Christ and of the saints and gave his life to God. Out of his own prayer he shaped The Spiritual Exercises Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises: four ‘weeks’ of meditation on sin and God's mercy, then on the life, passion and resurrection of Christ, so that a person may discern the will of God and choose it freely.

Ignatius gathered companions while studying in Paris, and in 1540 Pope Paul III approved them as the Society of Jesus. Under the motto ‘for the greater glory of God’ the Jesuits founded schools across Europe and sent missionaries to the ends of the known world. One of the Paris companions, Francis Xavier (1506–1552), reached Goa in India in 1542 and Japan in 1549, and died in 1552 on an island off the coast of China, waiting for a way in. Books that later Jesuits wrote in Chinese eventually reached the scholars of Joseon Korea.

The Council of Trent

In 1545 Paul III opened a council at Trent (Trento) in northern Italy. Interrupted by war and politics, it met in three periods and closed only in 1563. The Catholic Church counts it as an ecumenical council, and its decrees shaped Catholic faith and life for the next four centuries. It also reformed in practice: bishops were to live among their people and preach, and every diocese was to train its priests in a seminary.

In 1546 the council taught that the truth of the gospel is contained in the written books and in the unwritten traditions which the apostles received from Christ or from the Holy Spirit and handed on, and that the church receives both with equal devotion and reverence Council of Trent, Decree on the Canonical Scriptures. It fixed the list of books, including the deuterocanonical books (see the doctrine course's lesson The canon), and declared the Latin Vulgate the authentic text for the church's public reading, preaching and debate.

The Decree on Justification of January 1547, the fruit of months of debate, is the heart of the council. Catholic teaching speaks of justification as both forgiveness and transformation: it is "not remission of sins merely, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man" Council of Trent, Decree on Justification. Nothing that comes before justification, whether faith or works, earns that grace, so the sinner is justified freely; faith is the beginning, foundation and root of all justification. The justified then grow in righteousness by keeping God's commandments, and their good works, done in grace, truly merit an increase of grace and eternal life. The council put it tenderly: God is so good that he wills his own gifts to be our merits. It also condemned the teaching that we are justified by faith alone, as if nothing else needed to cooperate, or by the imputation of Christ's righteousness alone.

The council confirmed seven sacraments (baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders and marriage). It taught that the Mass is a true sacrifice, the same Christ once offered in blood on the cross now offered without the shedding of blood. And it taught that there is a purgatory, where those who die in grace but still need cleansing are helped by the prayers of the living and above all by the Mass, while warning against superstition and idle curiosity about it Council of Trent, Decree on Purgatory. In Catholic eyes, Trent did not make light of grace; it insisted that God's grace really changes us.

Answering from Scripture

The Reformers did not deny that Trent took holy living seriously. Their question was a different one: on what ground does a sinner stand before God? Paul answers:

For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

Romans 3:28

God is the one who "justifies the ungodly" (Romans 4:5), not those who have first become holy. "For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). So the Reformers taught that in justification God counts Christ's righteousness as ours and declares us righteous, while the renewal of the inward man is sanctification, the fruit that always grows from it. Answering Trent in 1547, Calvin wrote that faith alone justifies, yet the faith that justifies is never alone Calvin, Acts of the Council of Trent with the Antidote. Holiness is not the ground of our acceptance but its sure result.

Two centuries later John Wesley, a priest of the Church of England, said the same in his note on Romans 3:28. Faith justifies "not as it is a work, but as it receives Christ" Wesley. On James 2:24, which Trent cited, he answered that the two apostles do not contradict each other: Paul speaks of living faith and of works before faith, James of dead faith and of works that follow it Wesley.

The Reformers read Hebrews the same way: "by a single offering He has made perfect for all time those who are being sanctified" (Hebrews 10:14). To them the sacrifice of the Mass and the teaching on purgatory obscured the sufficiency of the cross, and they kept two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, as those Christ instituted (see the doctrine course's lesson The sacraments).

These differences remain. Yet in 1999 the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church stated together that by grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit of ours, we are accepted by God Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. The declaration did not settle every question, and some churches and theologians have not accepted it. The doctrine itself is taught in the doctrine course's lesson Faith and justification.

England's way

In England the break with Rome began with a king's marriage. Henry VIII had written against Luther in 1521 and received from the pope the title ‘Defender of the Faith’. But he had no son by Catherine of Aragon, his brother's widow, and when the pope would not annul the marriage, Henry broke with Rome. In 1534 Parliament declared the king supreme head on earth of the Church of England. Henry dissolved the monasteries and had the English Bible set up in the churches, yet in doctrine he stayed largely with the old faith.

Deeper reform came through Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury from 1533. Under the boy king Edward VI he gave the church its worship in English, the Book of Common Prayer, first in 1549 and then, more plainly Protestant, in 1552 Cranmer, The Book of Common Prayer. Its services read the Bible through in order and sang the Psalms, and one of its prayers asks that we may hear the Scriptures, "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them".

Mary I, who came to the throne in 1553, restored the church's bond with Rome, and nearly three hundred Protestants were burned in her reign. Cranmer was among them, at Oxford in 1556. In prison he had signed several recantations; at the end he renounced them and, as the accounts tell it, held first into the flames the right hand that had signed them.

The blood of that age was not shed on one side only. Under Henry, Thomas More and John Fisher were executed for refusing the king's supremacy, and under Elizabeth, Catholic priests were put to death as traitors. Christians of every tradition can remember this with sorrow and humility.

Elizabeth I, queen from 1558, settled the church again on a Protestant footing in 1559. Articles of faith agreed by the clergy in 1563 were confirmed by Parliament in 1571 as the Thirty-nine Articles The Thirty-Nine Articles. Article 6 holds that "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation", so nothing that cannot be read there or proved by it may be required as an article of faith. Article 11 confesses that we are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, by faith, and not for our own works, and "that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort".

So the Church of England kept bishops, the ancient creeds and set forms of prayer, while standing with the Reformation on salvation; Anglicans still describe their church as both catholic and reformed. Not everyone was content. Some held that vestments and ceremonies left from the old worship had no warrant in Scripture and pressed for a church reformed more thoroughly still. Their opponents called them Puritans, and their story continues in Protestant orthodoxy and the Puritans.

The two paths reached different conclusions, but both began from the conviction that the church must be renewed before the word of God. For how Catholics and Protestants agree and differ today, see How do Catholics and Protestants differ?

Practice