Everything the Protestant Reformation stood for was vigorously—one could almost say violently—rejected at Trent. The Protestant reformers emphasized justification by faith alone. The council insisted that Christian people must perform good works lest they become lazy and indifferent. Instead of the Protestant concept of external righteousness, by which God counts a person right in his eyes by faith, for Catholics, righteousness was internal, the process by which God imparts righteousness within Christians during the course of their life.
That first generation under Loyola’s zealous leadership rode full gallop into their new assignments: convert the heathen, reconvert Protestant Europe. Francis Xavier leaped from India to Southeast Asia to Japan, a country that had never before heard the Christian message. More than any others, the Society of Jesus stemmed, and sometimes reversed, the tide of Protestantism in France, the Low Countries, and Central Europe. When Ignatius died in 1556, his order was nearly one thousand strong and had dispatched its apostles to four continents.
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After a wide-ranging study of conditions in the Church of Rome, the commission issued in 1537 a formal report, Advice . . . concerning the Reform of the Church . Disorder in the church, the report said, could be traced directly to the need for reform. The papal office was too secular. Both popes and cardinals needed to give more attention to spiritual matters and stop flirting with the world. Bribery in high places, abuses of indulgences, evasions of church law, prostitution in Rome: these and other offenses must cease.
Loyola (1491–1556) transformed his rebirth at Manresa to a plan for spiritual discipline, a military manual for special forces at the service of the pope. The result was the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, the greatest single force in Catholicism’s campaign to recapture the spiritual domains seized by Protestantism.
This swing in a Protestant direction came to a sudden halt when Edward died in 1553 and Mary, the daughter of Catherine, ascended the throne. Devoutly Catholic, Mary tried to lead England back to the ways of Rome. In four short years she outdid her father in intolerance. She sent nearly three hundred Protestants, including Archbishop Cranmer, to the burning stake. Later John Foxe collected the vivid reports of these martyrdoms in his Book of Martyrs (1571) and incited the English people to a long-standing horror of Catholicism. He succeeded in giving Mary the name by which history still remembers her—Bloody Mary.
Don't let every word just come out of your mouth. Cool off.
I thought about it for a while, then saved that tweet in my drafts. I opened up Evernote on the browser of my laptop. I used this to spill out the more incendiary thoughts I had, giving them time to cool off.
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