Nelson H. Minnich

Trent: What Happened at the Council by John W. O'Malley (review)

John W. O’Malley, who has distinguished himself as the preeminent historian of Catholicism in the early-modern period, has turned his attention to the most important event of that period, the Council of Trent (1545–63). Far from being a boring assembly of like-minded prelates and theologians who confidently reaffirmed traditional teachings and put order into a Church shaken by the challenge of Protestantism,

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (review)

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism--all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformations protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science--as the source of all truth--necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

LEÃO X: SUCESSO OU FRACASSO?

Was Leo X (Giovanni dei Medici) a success or a failure? By which criteria is he to be judged? By following the advice given to him by his father Lorenzo the Magnificent, he succeeded in restoring the Medici to power in Florence and secured his own election as pope. To a remarkable degree he accomplished the goals set for his pontificate in the election capitularies of 1513 and guided the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-17) to issue decrees that fulfilled most of the ends set for the council by his predecessor Julius II. By ending the Pisan Schism and replacing the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges with the Concordat of Bologna he defeated conciliarism. His efforts to bring about church reform by personal example and conciiliar legislation were eventually seen as inadequate due to a failure of implementation. The personal rivalries among Charles von Habsburg, Francis de Valois, and Henry Tudor frustrated his plans for establishing a permanent peace among Christian princes and launching a crusade against the Turks. As head of the Medici family, he maintained its dominance in Florence, secured for its lay members duchies and royal marriages, and for its clerical members and clients high church offices. By his patronage of artists and writers he made Rome the center of the High Renaissance. His attempt to provide financing for the rebuilding of the Basilica of St. Peter (an obligation mandated in his election capitularies) by means of an indulgence led to Luther’s 95 Theses and the beginnings of the Protestantism, a movement whose suppression he thought he had secured by the Edict of Worms (1521). In his own eyes and those of contemporary leaders in the Roman and Florentine worlds he inhabited, Leo X was a success. But this view was not shared by the rest of the world in a time of momentous crisis.

The Priesthood of all Believers at the Council of Trent

In its Constitution on the Church and Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Vatican II attributed to the laity a sharing in the one priesthood of Christ whereby they join in the offering of the Eucharist and in the mission of consecrating the world to God by their apostolic labors.1 Although deservedly hailed for making a major step toward the development of a theology of the universal priesthood of all believers, Vatican II was not the first ecumenical council to speak on this subject. Almost exactly four-hundred years earlier on July 13, 1563, the fathers of Trent touched upon this topic in their decree on the sacrament of orders. Although its teaching was in the form of a condemnation of Luther’s assertion that all Christians are equally priests, Trent did not deny the existence of a universal priesthood of all believers. As will be seen from a study of the council’s documents, the theologians and bishops of Trent The Jurist 67 (2007) 341–363