The Evolution of the Papacy. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1949
No Jesuit was ever elected Pope, for they assumed that every Pope would be a Jesuit. – Hermann Mueller
The Middle Ages may be said to have ended about AD 1500, when, almost simultaneously, a succession of new and intensely revolutionary forces broke in upon the stagnant feudal-clerical civilisation which had dominated Europe since the Crusades. Almost concurrently, a geographical, a cultural, an economic and a religious revolution broke in upon the agrarian medieval culture and combined effectively to destroy its traditional world.
We have here only space to describe in the very briefest outline the main causes of the revolutionary era of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Suffice it here to say that between about 1450 and 1550, that century of stupendous discovery, the Era of the Voyages of Discovery to East and West, the world was literally ‘put on the map’ and the world market opened up by the simultaneous discovery of America and the sea route to the East (1492 – 98).
The economic results of this marvellous expansion were staggering. The eminent economic historian Alexander Del Mar has calculated that about 2000 million dollars-worth of bullion (gold and silver) were dumped into Europe during the sixteenth century. We may in fact say that the unseen ‘pull’ of the newly-discovered world market represented the most powerful force making for social, and even for religious change throughout this self-same period.
The concurrent intellectual and religious revolutions are better known; the Renaissance, the rediscovery of classical antiquity and the creation of a secular humanistic culture independent of the Church, and the religious revolution against the ‘dead hand’ of the totalitarian Church of the Middle Ages started by Martin Luther in 1517. In their relationship to our proper subject, the Papacy, only one point need here be added: the Reformation was not, as is sometimes supposed, a continuation of the Renaissance, quite the contrary. The Popes welcomed the Renaissance, but they fought the Reformation to the finish.
Actually the Reformation started as a revolt against the Renaissance. For it was the ruthless exploitation of Germany by the Renaissance Papacy which caused the German people to welcome Luther, and, on the whole, the early Protestant Reformers were not more but less liberal in their cultural outlook than were the Renaissance Popes.
One must reject the conclusion that there was anything new in itself about the religious revolution of the sixteenth century. Actually, the Protestant Reformers did not go as far in their Church ‘Reformation’ as some of their medieval predecessors had done. It was the revolutionary social changes alluded to above, to which must be added certain technical changes, primarily the contemporary invention of printing, that made the Bible universally accessible, which explains the success of the Reformers.
The Reformation took the Papacy by surprise, and its initial resistance was feeble, so much so that by the middle of the sixteenth century it looked very much as if the Roman Church was doomed to make a hasty exit from History. The Roman See was weakened by the schisms in the last centuries of the medieval era, when disputed successions and even anti-Popes were a regular occurrence.
Whilst the Popes of the Renaissance era were easy-going humanists whose personal morals were often the reverse of Christian, and who were not above poisoning an inconvenient rival, [1] such Popes were obviously not fanatics. If they – Leo included – defended the Church with fanaticism against the Reformers, it was, as Karl Kautsky, the German historian, aptly observed, ‘a fanaticism of avarice masquerading as faith’.
It is well known that the Roman Catholic Church was saved from what seemed a certain destruction by the Counter-Reformation of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Popes, however, were the figureheads rather than the actual leaders of the movement, the actual directors of which were the Jesuits; the General of which Order was known as the ‘Black Pope’ and seems frequently to have been the real leader of the Church. The study of the Counter-Reformation is far more the study of the Jesuit ‘Company’ than of its nominal leader, the Papacy.
Between about 1550 and 1650, the Counter-Reformation under the effective leadership of the Jesuits checked and even drove back the Reformation by a combination of ‘jesuitical’ demagogy and open terrorism.
A word may usefully be added on the origins and nature of the famous Spanish ‘Company of Jesus’. Its founder was the Spanish soldier Ignatius of Loyola (1490 – 1556), who founded the Company, as its name in Spanish implies, on military lines, with the original object of recovering Palestine by a new Crusade from the Turks. Circumstances, however, turned the Spanish order principally into the chief weapon of Rome against the Reformation. Its discipline, strict but flexible, is said to have been modelled on that of the Dervish religious orders of Mohammedan (Moorish) Spain. The famous motto ‘Ad majorem dei gloriam’ – ‘To the greater glory of God’ – is taken from the same source.
Under the nominal leadership of the Papacy, but under the real direction of their autocratic General, the Jesuits devoted themselves to teaching and preaching, and developed all the arts of religious demagogy. Their system of dialectics and of moral casuistry excited the indignation of old-fashioned Catholics like Pascal, who made a most effective attack on them in his Provincial Letters (1656 – 57), but proved most useful to the Church, particularly in the economic sphere, where it enabled the Church to discard its medieval prohibitions of ‘usury’ which were becoming impossible to continue in the rapidly expanding commercial age.
Briefly, one can say that the Jesuits were the shock troops, the corps d'élite or, in current phraseology, the ‘SS men’ of the Papacy, and down to the present time they have remained the arch-strategists of militant Catholicism. [2]
The Papacy, however, did not rely entirely upon the Jesuits and their famous casuistry of ‘ends and means’ – ‘the end justifies the means’ – in its dealings with the Reformation. It also used a host of more carnal weapons, from religious terrorism organised in the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions (both founded in this period) to literary censorship. [3] These weapons against ‘heresy’ were adequately supplemented by the ‘Invincible Armadas’ and armies of the Kings of Spain, the fighting standard-bearers of the Counter-Reformation.
The result of a century of physical and ideological struggle which culminated in the terrible ‘Thirty Years War’ (1618 – 48) was to leave Europe divided on lines which remained substantially unaltered until 1789, when Freethought may be said to have succeeded Protestantism as the chief rival of the Church of Rome.
The Reformation which ended the Middle Ages themselves, ended concurrently the Totalitarian Papacy of the Middle Ages. Modern, unlike medieval Catholicism, has been a defensive Catholicism, and the modern Papacy, no longer the unchallenged master of Europe, has been reduced to fighting for its existence against the ever-mounting modern secular tide of heresy. But Rome has, notwithstanding, managed to delay her final exit from History, and still today fights on, haunted by the vanished dream of her former medieval grandeur.
1. The Borgia Pope, Alexander VI (1492 – 1503), had a particularly bad reputation in this last respect. Another Medici Pope, Leo X, the actual Pope under whom the Reformation started (1513 – 21), is said to have observed ‘What a profitable superstition for Popes is this fable of Christ.’
2. In my book The Jesuits – A Study in Counter-Revolution (London, 1938), I have traced in a detail not possible here the influence exercised by the Jesuits upon modern as distinct from medieval Catholicism.
3. The famous ‘Index of Prohibited Books’ belongs also to the era of the Counter-Reformation.