Lectures on Modern historyActon, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron
History
Lectures on Modern history
Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron
History, Modern
The Reformation in Italy had by that time come to an
end, and the Popes had been supplied with an instrument that enabled
them to control the Council of Trent. Its action did not extend to
other countries.
Next to the Inquisition, the second of the several measures by which
central organs were created for the Counter-Reformation is the
establishment of new orders. The old ones were manifestly
ineffective. The Augustinians produced Luther. The Dominicans had
done still worse, for they produced the adversaries of Luther. The
learning of the Benedictines was useless for the purpose of the day,
and they were not organised for combat. A rich and varied growth of
new religious orders was the consequence. The first were the
Theatines, then the Capuchins, who were remodelled Franciscans,
adapted to the need of the time; then the Barnabites, the Oratorians,
and others. Caraffa was the most influential of the Theatines, though
not their founder; and he gave them their name, for he was Bishop of
Chieti, in Latin Theate. He did more for another institution than for
his own, for it was he who brought forward the extraordinary man in
whom the spirit of the Catholic reaction is incorporated. At Venice
he found a group of young men, most of them Spaniards, all of them
seekers after perfection, united otherwise in a somewhat vague design
of visiting the Holy Land. Their leader, Ignatius Loyola, at that
time an enthusiast, later on a calculator and organiser of the first
class, was the same man who helped to transplant to Rome the
Inquisition of his own country. As they waited in vain for a passage,
Carana advised them that their true destination was Rome, where they
would be more useful with Protestants than with the heathen; and thus,
by his intervention, the Society was founded which eclipsed his own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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