history of Roman Catholicism

The break with the Roman papacy and the establishment of an independent Church of England came during the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47). When Pope Clement VII refused to approve the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the English Parliament, at Henry’s insistence, passed a series of…

…established religions of Europe, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, zealously sought to assure uniformity of belief in the regions they dominated. The courts inspired by them actively pursued not only the heterodox but also witches, the insane, and anyone who maintained an unusual style of life. The special papal court…

…the fiscal machinery of the church provoked a movement that at first demanded reform from within and ultimately chose the path of separation. When the Augustinian monk Martin Luther protested against the sale of indulgences in 1517, he found himself obliged to extend his doctrinal arguments until his stand led…

In the meantime the Reformation had taken hold in England. The beginning there was political rather than religious, a quarrel between the king and the pope of the sort that had occurred in the Middle Ages without resulting in a permanent schism and might…

…attacked the life of the church while he confronted its doctrine. Whereas they denounced the sins of churchmen, he was disillusioned by the whole scholastic scheme of redemption. The church taught that humans could atone for their sins through confession and absolution in the sacrament of penance. Luther found that…

…Jesuit missions to England, where Roman Catholic worship was prohibited. However, in subsequent years, he despaired of restoring Catholicism to his native country by peaceful means. He therefore called upon King Philip II of Spain to conquer England and assume the English throne. As a consequence, he was made a…

…Augsburg Interim primarily reflected a Catholic viewpoint. It did, however, allow clerical marriage and communion in both kinds (bread and wine) for the laity.

…the commingled interests of European Catholicism and personal aggrandizement. It is also necessary to understand this political struggle of the Catholic crown with its own ultramontane extremists and to perceive its fluctuations in changing circumstances, in order to realize the fundamental consistency of Catherine’s career. Her essentially moderate influence was…

…response to Protestant views, the Roman Catholic Church made its position clear at the Council of Trent (1546) when it dogmatically affirmed that the entire Latin Vulgate enjoyed equal canonical status. This doctrine was confirmed by the Vatican Council of 1870. In the Greek church the Synod of Jerusalem (1672)…

…he had abandoned the traditional Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation—that Christ is rendered substantially present by the Eucharist (although the properties of bread and wine remain the same)—but retained his belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. As early as 1536 he was recognized by the northern…

…other members of the predominantly Catholic Rigsråd postponed the election of a new king; they feared that the obvious candidate, Frederick’s son Prince Christian (later King Christian III), if chosen, would immediately introduce Lutheranism. They tried unsuccessfully to sponsor his younger brother Hans.

…less than that, however, for Roman Catholics, who constituted the majority of the population. In 1695 the Irish Parliament, dominated by the Ascendancy, passed the first of the Penal Laws—a series of harsh discriminatory measures against Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland. These laws disenfranchised Catholics, placed restrictions on their ownership…

…Pope Clement VIII, by the Roman Catholic clergy in France, and by the parlements. Catholics tended to interpret the edict in its most restrictive sense. The Cardinal de Richelieu, who regarded its political and military clauses as a danger to the state, annulled them by the Peace of Alès in…

…force if necessary, to the Roman Catholic faith. This attempt, along with her unpopular marriage to the ardently Catholic king Philip II of Spain, aroused bitter Protestant opposition. In a charged atmosphere of treasonous rebellion and inquisitorial repression, Elizabeth’s life was in grave danger. For though, as her sister demanded,…

…past remained untouched, the semi-independent Roman Catholic Church, and it was left to the second Tudor to challenge its authority and plunder its wealth.

…of the last vestiges of Roman Catholicism. The controversy went to the root of society: Was the purpose of life spiritual or political? Was the role of the church to serve God or the crown? In 1576 two brothers, Paul and Peter Wentworth, led the Puritan attack in the Commons,…

…England and Wales, group of Roman Catholic martyrs who were executed by English authorities during the Reformation, most during the reign of Elizabeth I.

…(1) Everyone agreed that the Roman Catholic church was in need of correction. The lack of spirituality in high places, the blatant fiscalism, of which the unrestrained hawking of indulgences—the actual trigger of the Reformation—was a galling example, and the embroilment in political affairs all were symptoms of corruption long…

He appealed to Rome for a declaration of annulment. Popes had usually obliged kings in such matters, but Henry had picked both his time and his case badly. He was asking Pope Clement VII to help him discard the emperor’s aunt, but Clement, the emperor’s prisoner in 1527–28,…

Roman Catholics during the French Wars of Religion of the late 16th century; it was first organized in 1576 under the leadership of Henri I de Lorraine, 3^e duc de Guise, to oppose concessions granted to the Protestants (Huguenots) by King Henry III. Although the…

…defended the Elizabethan church against Roman Catholics and Puritans. He upheld the threefold authority of the Anglican tradition—Bible, church, and reason. Roman Catholics put Bible and tradition on a parity as the authorities for belief, while Puritans looked to Scripture as the sole authority. Hooker avoided both extremes, allowing to…

…and when the prohibition against Roman Catholics began to ease again in the mid-19th century, arriving European priests were told there were no Japanese Christians left. The Oura Cathedral, a Roman Catholic church set up in Nagasaki in 1865, was dedicated to the 26 martyrs of 1597, and within the…

…to the expansion of Polish Roman Catholic influence, spearheaded by vigorous proselytization by the Jesuits. In the 17th century a religious Ukrainian brotherhood was established in Kyiv, as in other Ukrainian towns, to further this opposition and encourage Ukrainian nationalism. Peter Mogila (Petro Mohyla), a major theologian and metropolitan of…

…which were supported by the Roman Catholic church, and it took stern measures against Calvinism. Calvinists forcibly removed their coreligionists from prisons and occasionally even attacked monasteries. This group’s rejection of icons, paintings, statues, and valuables in churches sometimes led them to remove them and hand them over to the…

…division of Western Christendom between Roman Catholicism and the new Protestant traditions, mainly Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, the Anabaptists, and the anti-Trinitarians. He is one of the most influential figures in the history of Christianity. Reformation Day, the

…for the reform of the Roman Catholic church. His efforts to gain the right of marriage for priests failed, largely because of the opposition of Spain.

The Roman Catholic Church had unusual influence and autonomy in Milan. Charles Cardinal Borromeo, member of a rich noble family of Milan and nephew of Pope Pius IV (reigned 1559–65), resided in his diocese after 1565 as the model bishop of the Catholic Reformation. He instituted…

…against the Franciscan order, the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the veneration of the saints. He early showed himself to be an independent thinker. After occasional participation in debates between Luther and the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Eck in Leipzig, he pursued intensive literary studies at the monastery of Beuditz…

The Roman Catholic missionaries that accompanied Coronado and de Soto worked assiduously to Christianize the Native population. Many of the priests were hearty supporters of the Inquisition, and their pastoral forays were often violent; beatings, dismemberment, and execution were all common punishments for the supposed heresies…

of Lutheranism and Catholicism in Germany, promulgated on September 25, 1555, by the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire assembled earlier that year at Augsburg. The Peace allowed the state princes to select either Lutheranism or Catholicism as the religion of their domain and permitted the free emigration…

Roman Catholics in Britain and Ireland after the Reformation that penalized the practice of the Roman Catholic religion and imposed civil disabilities on Catholics. Various acts passed in the 16th and 17th centuries prescribed fines and imprisonment for participation in Catholic worship and severe penalties,…

…I, 1580–98), champion of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. During his reign the Spanish empire attained its greatest power, extent, and influence, though he failed to suppress the revolt of the Netherlands (beginning in 1566) and lost the “Invincible Armada” in the attempted invasion of England (1588).

…Speyer in 1529, when the Roman Catholic emperor of Germany, Charles V, rescinded the provision of the Diet of Speyer in 1526 that had allowed each ruler to choose whether to administer the Edict of Worms (which banned Martin Luther’s writings and declared him a heretic and an enemy of…

…in the religious controversy between Catholics and Protestants, and the dependence of the small states in France’s borderlands upon an equilibrium of power between France and Spain.

…letters of consolation to persecuted Roman Catholics and making pastoral journeys. His An Epistle of Comfort was printed secretly in 1587; other letters circulated in manuscript.

…influence was marked by intense Roman Catholic missionary activity. Franciscans established centers in the country from 1543 onward. Jesuits were active in the north. Toward the end of the century, Dominicans and Augustinians arrived. With the conversion of Dharmapala, many members of the Sinhalese nobility followed suit. Dharmapala endowed missionary…

…all the properties of the Roman Catholic Church. The church at that time held 21 percent of Sweden’s land, as opposed to only 6 percent held by the crown. The appropriation of the possessions of the church thus added enormously to the wealth of the state. To some degree the…

…he viewed as the decadent Roman Catholic hierarchy, Zwingli favored the return to the teachings of the Bible. While Luther strictly separated the spiritual and political realms, Zwingli emphasized that both the church and the state were subject to the law of Christ. In 1525 Zürich’s great council adopted his…

…Church, largest of the Eastern Catholic (also known as Eastern rite or Greek Catholic) churches, in communion with Rome since the Union of Brest-Litovsk (1596). Byzantine Christianity was established among the Ukrainians in 988 by St. Vladimir (Volodimir) and followed Constantinople in the Great Schism of 1054. Temporary reunion with…

The church might prefer that Christians seek their well-being through faith, the sacraments, and the intercession of Mary and the saints, but distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable belief in hidden powers were difficult to make or to maintain. Most clergy shared the common beliefs in occult…

…1789 Baltimore became the first Roman Catholic diocese in the United States, and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1806–21) was the nation’s first Roman Catholic cathedral; St. Mary’s Seminary and University was founded in 1791. The Shot Tower (1828) is a…

—died April 12, 1704, Paris) was a bishop who was the most eloquent and influential spokesman for the rights of the French church against papal authority. He is now chiefly remembered for his literary works, including funeral panegyrics for great personages.

…1685, Louis sought to impose Roman Catholicism on all his subjects. Thousands of Protestants emigrated; those who remained were subjected to severe repression. In the first years of the 18th century, a wave of religious enthusiasm swept the strongly Protestant Cévennes. Prophets predicted the end of persecution, and many felt…

…keeping New France in the Roman Catholic faith.

…the French language and the Roman Catholic faith, gave the church power to enforce the collection of tithes, and formalized the authority of the seigneurs to collect cens et rentes. In addition, Quebec’s territory was greatly expanded, its western border henceforth stretching to the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi…

…toleration to his Nonconformist and Roman Catholic subjects were sharply rebuffed in 1663, and throughout his reign the House of Commons was to thwart the more generous impulses of his religious policy. A more pervasive and damaging limitation was on his financial independence. Although the Parliament voted the king an…

…an attempt to reorganize the Roman Catholic Church in France on a national basis. It caused a schism within the French Church and made many devout Catholics turn against the Revolution.

He proposed to destroy Rome’s power in England and to replace it by the royal supremacy in the church. He was behind the first attacks on the papacy (1532) and the act against the payment by bishops of their first year’s revenue to Rome. He secured the submission of…

In 1667 the Roman Catholic Church made its own decision by putting Descartes’s works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) on the very day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called Descartes a…

…which was supported by both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. These thinkers held that, because all things are created by God with a given nature, there can be no evolutionary development of animals or of the universe as a whole. For Aristotle, all living things possess a spirit or “soul,”…

…were rigidly drawn, and the Roman Catholic Church served as the strong right arm of temporal authority. A cruel, exploitative slave-based society and economy came into being.

…that moderates of all persuasions, Roman Catholic and Protestant alike, might dwell together in his church. He offered to preside at a general council of all the Christian churches—Catholic and Protestant—to seek a general reconciliation. Liberals in all churches took his offer seriously. He sought to find a formula for…

…the monolithic authority of the Roman Catholic Church. For Martin Luther, as for Bacon or Descartes, the way to truth lay in the application of human reason. Both the Renaissance and the Reformation were less movements for intellectual liberty than changes of authority, but, since they appealed to different authorities,…

Among Roman Catholic countries France’s situation was in some ways unique. Even there orthodox doctrines remained entrenched in such institutions as the Sorbonne; some bishops might be worldly but others were conscientious; monasteries decayed but parish life was vital and curés (parish priests) well trained. Nor…

…without destroying the idea of catholicism to which the Roman church gave institutional form. The word catholic survived in the creeds of Protestant churches, such as that of England. Calvin had thought in catholic, not sectarian, terms when he mourned for the Body of Christ, “bleeding, its members severed.” Deeper…

…to mitigate the harshness of Roman Catholic intolerance by open meetings with the Protestants (1686–87) to present Catholic doctrine in a reasonable light. While unsympathetic to Protestant belief, he equally repudiated forced conversions.

The king, moreover, was a Christian monarch and as such was endowed with quasi-priestly functions. He was anointed at his coronation with holy chrism said to have been brought from heaven by a dove. It was thought that, as evidence of his special status, he could cure scrofula by his…

…that sweeping reform might return Roman Catholicism to its basic ideals, shorn of aristocratic trappings and superfluous privileges, but they assumed that the church itself would collaborate in the process. In the Assembly’s view, however, nationalization of church property gave the state responsibility for regulating the church’s temporal affairs, such…

…nationalize the lands of the Roman Catholic Church in France to pay off the public debt led to a widespread redistribution of property. The bourgeoisie and the peasant landowners were undoubtedly the chief beneficiaries, but some farm workers also were able to buy land. The land transfer was made through…

…and the beginning of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. But the tide in Rome was turning against the Copernican theory, and in 1615, when the cleric Paolo Antonio Foscarini (c. 1565–1616) published a book arguing that the Copernican theory did not conflict with scripture, Inquisition consultants examined the question and pronounced the…

…made minor concessions to British Roman Catholics, who were excluded from civil rights. Anti-Catholic prejudice, however, had been a powerful emotion in Britain since the Reformation in the 16th century, and Roman Catholicism tended to be associated by many with political absolutism and persecution. A movement to repeal the Catholic…

Roman Catholics and those implicated in the Irish rebellion were permanently disenfranchised. Religious toleration was denied to Roman Catholics and upholders of episcopacy.

…and cultural roles of the church—in particular, the supranational character of the papacy, the immunity of clerics from the state’s legal and fiscal apparatus, the church’s intolerance and intransigence in theological and institutional matters, as well as its wealth and property—constituted the central problems in the reform schemes of Italy’s…

…he was admitted to the Roman Catholic Church, though on his brother’s insistence he continued to take the Anglican sacraments until 1672, and he attended Anglican services until 1676. Charles II also insisted that James’s daughters, Mary and Anne, be raised in the Protestant faith.

…a Flemish leader of the Roman Catholic reform movement known as Jansenism. He wrote biblical commentaries and pamphlets against the Protestants. His major work was Augustinus, published by his friends in 1640. Although condemned by Pope Urban VIII in 1642, it was of critical importance in the Jansenist movement.

…as the officials of the church, the Encyclopédie would have been throttled. It was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, and a ban of excommunication was pronounced on any who should read it; but even Rome was equivocal. The knowledge that Pope Benedict XIV was privately sympathetic lessened the…

…developed a strong distaste for Roman Catholicism. In 1596 the patriarch of Alexandria, Meletios Pegas, sent Lucaris to Poland to lead the Orthodox opposition to the Union of Brest-Litovsk, which had sealed a union of the Orthodox metropolitanate of Kiev with Rome. For six years Lucaris served as rector of…

…the Eighty Years’ War, when Roman Catholics still frequently bore the burden of their preference for the rule of the Catholic monarchs in the southern Netherlands. Sizable islands of Roman Catholicism remained in most of the United Provinces, while Gelderland and the northern parts of Brabant and Flanders conquered by…

Roman Catholics, still without political rights but facing milder restrictions, fell into a quarrel between adherents of Jansenism (see Roman Catholicism: Jansenism), which followed Augustinian theology, especially in the matter of predestination, and supporters of Rome, in particular the Jesuits; the former split off to…

Manila was also the ecclesiastical capital of the Philippines. The governor-general was civil head of the church in the islands, but the archbishop vied with him for political supremacy. In the late 17th and 18th centuries the archbishop, who also had the legal status of lieutenant governor, frequently won.…

Roman Catholicism was Sarmatized in its turn, assuming a more intolerant posture toward other denominations. The struggles against Lutheran Swedes and Prussians, Orthodox Russians, and Muslim Turks and Tatars strengthened the belief in Poland’s mission as a Catholic bastion. The expulsion in 1658 of Polish…

…Rebellion, (1637–38), uprising of Japanese Roman Catholics, the failure of which virtually ended the Christian movement in 17th-century Japan and furthered government determination to isolate Japan from foreign influences.

…1618, when the future Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand II, in his role as king of Bohemia, attempted to impose Roman Catholic absolutism on his domains, and the Protestant nobles of both Bohemia and Austria rose up in rebellion. Ferdinand won after a five-year struggle. In 1625 King Christian IV of…

…half of the population were Catholic; the rest were Protestant. Neither bloc was prepared to let the other mobilize an army. Similar paralysis was to be found in most other regions: the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had separated Germany into hostile but evenly balanced confessional camps.

…John Henry Newman, of the Roman Catholic monthly the Rambler, but he laid down his editorship in 1864 because of papal criticism of his rigorously scientific approach to history as evinced in that journal. After 1870, when the First Vatican Council formulated the doctrine of papal infallibility, Acton was all…

…one-third of Germans who professed Roman Catholicism. In Prussia the minister of public worship and education, Adalbert Falk, with Bismarck’s blessing, introduced a series of bills establishing civil marriage, limiting the movement of the clergy, and dissolving religious orders. All church appointments were to be approved by the state. Clerical…

…civil disabilities granted to the Roman Catholics of Britain and Ireland in a series of laws during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the Reformation, Roman Catholics in Britain had been harassed by numerous restrictions. In Britain, Roman Catholics could not purchase land, hold civil or military offices…

…had made the issue of Roman Catholic emancipation urgent. Rebellion in Ireland, in Pitt’s view, could not be cured simply by the union of the British and Irish Parliaments. Conciliation, by the political emancipation of the Roman Catholics, was a necessary concomitant of union. George III believed this proposal to…

While holding that Catholic Emancipation was a condition of any genuine Whig government, he accepted the fact that parliamentary reform must wait until there was solid support for it in the country. He thought the political stability of Britain was endangered both by the reactionary postwar policy of…

…adherence of the population to Roman Catholicism. He felt that in time nationalism could be created and more social cohesion would emerge as a result but that meanwhile Ecuador needed a period of peace and strong government. When he became president, therefore, he based his regime on two factors—strong authoritarian…

…made new arrangements with the Roman Catholic church to encourage religion against political attacks. Pope Pius IX, who had been chased from Rome during the final surge of agitation in 1848, turned adamantly against new political ideas. In the Syllabus of Errors accompanying the encyclical Quanta cura (“With What Great…

…new pope, Leo XIII, the Roman Catholic church moved more formally to accommodate to modern politics. The encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things,” 1891) urged Catholics to accept political institutions such as parliaments and universal suffrage; it proclaimed sympathy for working people against the excesses of capitalism, justifying moderate trade…

…papacy in 1802 reintegrated the Roman Catholic Church into French society and ended the cycle of bare toleration and persecution that had begun in 1792. Having immediately halted the campaign to enforce the republican calendar (which was quietly abolished on January 1, 1806), the Consulate then extended an olive branch…

…reassert the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, which had been undermined by Enlightenment skepticism and by the Revolutionary upheaval. The Concordat of 1802 had allowed the beginning of a religious revival, which gained strength after 1814. The best-selling Le Génie du christianisme (1802; Genius of Christianity), by the Romantic…

…came into conflict with the Roman Catholic church in 19th-century French Canada. Founded in Montreal on Dec. 17, 1844, it soon became a forum for discussing the problems of the day, maintaining the largest free library in Montreal. The membership of the parent organization in Montreal reached 700, and branches…

…in the country was the Roman Catholic Church. The Risorgimento had deprived the church of the Papal States, including Rome itself, and of much of its income. The church had lost its previous virtual monopoly of education and welfare, and compulsory state education was deliberately secular. Many religious orders had…

Nor could the organized Roman Catholic movement easily make open arrangements with the Giolitti government. The Catholics too had founded trade unions and workers’ cooperatives, as well as mutual aid societies and rural banks, throughout northern Italy in the 1890s. This development followed Pope Leo XIII’s embrace of social…

…economic monopoly held by the Roman Catholic Church and the landed aristocracy. He also believed that political stability could be achieved only through the adoption of a constitutional form of government based on a federal system.

…von Bismarck to subject the Roman Catholic church to state controls. The term came into use in 1873, when the scientist and Prussian liberal statesman Rudolf Virchow declared that the battle with the Roman Catholics was assuming “the character of a great struggle in the interest of humanity.”

Liberals saw the Roman Catholic church as politically reactionary and feared the appeal of a clerical party to the more than one-third of Germans who professed Roman Catholicism. Both Bismarck and the liberals doubted the loyalty of the Catholic population to the Prussian-centered and, therefore, primarily Protestant nation.…

The Roman Catholic Church also was the target of ever more aggressive liberal attacks after mid-century. In much of Latin America the church had been the preeminent source of capital and a major property owner. As in the case of indigenous communities, the justification for those…

…laws of La Reforma, establish Roman Catholicism as the exclusive religion, restore the religious orders, remove the church from its dependence on civil authorities, turn education over to ecclesiastics, and return properties confiscated and sold by the republicans. Replying that he, not outsiders, would decide such matters, Maximilian issued decrees…

…leader and orator who advocated Roman Catholicism as an instrument of social reform.

Jews, Roman Catholics, and numerous ethnic groups lived in Manhattan before the end of the 17th century, but political control remained in the hands of the established merchant elite. When the American Revolution began, more prominent Dutch families—the Van Cortlandts, De Peysters, and Schuylers—supported the cause…

…a cardinal deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. His eloquent books, notably Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834–42), Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), and University Sermons (1843), revived emphasis on the dogmatic authority of the church and urged reforms of the Church of England after the pattern…

…the pope, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, from 1846 to 1878. His pontificate is the longest in history and was marked by a transition from moderate political liberalism to conservatism. Notable events of his reign include the declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854), the Syllabus of…

…on the civil liberties of Roman Catholics. Irish disorders centred, as they had since the Act of Union in 1801, on the issue of Catholic emancipation, a favourite cause of the Whigs, who had been out of power since 1807. During the 18th century, Catholics in England had achieved a…

The Roman Catholic Church was growing in importance not only in the Irish sections of the industrial cities but also among university students and teachers. Dissent had a grip on the whole culture of large sections of the middle classes, dismissed abruptly by Matthew Arnold as…

…population still claims to be Roman Catholic, while only a small proportion belongs to Protestant denominations. During the period of New France (1534–1763), Roman Catholicism was the official religion, and French Protestants were prevented from settling in the colony. After 1760 freedom of religious practice was authorized by the British…

>Roman Catholic Church. His crimes were detailed in The Boston Globe’s 2002 Spotlight series and in the 2015 movie of the same name. Because of the Globe’s reporting, the archdiocese of Boston became ground zero for the abuse crisis in the

In the 1960s the Roman Catholic-led civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was inspired by events in the United States. Its initial focus was fighting discriminatory gerrymandering that had been securing elections for Protestant unionists. Later, internment of Catholic activists by the British government sparked both a civil disobedience…

…attention to dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. In the 1960s Patriarch Athenagoras I and Pope Paul VI met in Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Rome, symbolically lifting the anathemas imposed in 1054 and making other gestures of rapprochement, though these moves were sometimes mistakenly interpreted as if they were ending the…

…among them, as with the Roman Catholic church. There is virtually complete religious tolerance in England and no longer any overt prejudice against Catholics. The decline in churchgoing has been thought to be an indicator of decline in religious belief, but opinion polls substantiate the view that belief in God…

…of traditional elites, including the Catholic church.

Many Roman Catholics were outraged by the triumph of the anticlericals, and they responded to the Vatican’s urging to sabotage the new system. They resisted (sometimes violently) the transfer of church property to state ownership and refused to establish lay associations to govern the church. By…

At the end of the 20th century, Roman Catholics around the world were shaken by revelations that many bishops had covered up evidence of sexual abuse by clergy. Allegations emerged from dioceses in many countries, but Ireland was singled out as “ground zero” of the abuse

The head of the Roman Catholic Church, József Cardinal Mindszenty, who refused to follow their example, was arrested on transparent charges in December 1948 and condemned to life imprisonment. The monastic orders were dissolved. Thereafter, the Roman Catholic Church accepted financial terms similar to those offered to other churches,…

…in the country was the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican implicitly supported Mussolini in the early years and was rewarded in February 1929 by the Lateran Treaty, which settled the “Roman Question” at last. Vatican City became an independent state, Italy paid a large financial indemnity to the pope for…

Regular church attendance fell sharply, from about 70 percent in the mid-1950s to about 30 percent in the 1980s. The membership of Catholic Action fell to about 650,000 by 1978, about one-fourth of its figure in 1966, and in the late 1960s Catholic trade unions allied…

…as the “centre of the Catholic world and place of pilgrimage.” Article 20 stated that all bishops were to take an oath of loyalty to the state and had to be Italian subjects speaking the Italian language.

Roman Catholicism continued to be a powerful force in the second half of the 20th century. Its influence could be seen in the continuing prohibition, almost everywhere, of abortion and in the tendency to play down official support (which nevertheless existed) for birth control campaigns.…

In the Roman Catholic Church, the movement can be traced back to the mid-19th century, when it was initially connected with monastic worship, especially in the Benedictine communities in France, Belgium, and Germany. After about 1910, it spread to Holland, Italy, and England and subsequently to the…

…led to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1929, and he is now often referred to as a theistic or Christian existentialist. Marcel’s approach to religious belief was notably existentialist, and it is no surprise that he distanced himself from traditional philosophy of religion. Indeed, he remained suspicious of attempts…

…conservatism dominated the early 20th-century Roman Catholic Church.

…Rome and head of the Roman Catholic Church, from 1939 to 1958. He had a long, tumultuous, and controversial pontificate. During his reign, the papacy confronted the ravages of World War II (1939–45), the abuses of the Nazi, fascist, and Soviet regimes, the horror of the Holocaust, the challenge

…United States who left the Roman Catholic Church. From 1907 until 2003 it was a member of the Union of Utrecht and in full communion of the Old Catholic churches; in 2006 it entered a limited communion agreement with Rome. Headquarters and a seminary are in Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Roman Catholicism is the primary religion of ethnic Hungarians and Swabian Germans. The Eastern rite (Uniate) church is prominent in Transylvania. In 1948 it was forcibly united with the Romanian Orthodox Church by the communist regime, but its independence was restored after 1989. Protestantism, both…

…countryside by the Calvinist and Roman Catholic Hungarian nobility and in the cities by the Lutheran German-speaking Saxon upper class. A large Romanian population lived there also, but Romanians were excluded from public affairs and privileges because they were overwhelmingly peasant and Orthodox. Their fortunes improved when Transylvania was brought…

…in permanent opposition to the Roman church and raised a continued protest against the corruption of the clergy of their time. The Albigensian theologians and ascetics, known in the south of France as bons hommes or bons chrétiens, were always few in number.

…King Henry IV (later Holy Roman emperor) fought for control of the church in Germany. In 1075 Margrave Ernest, who had regained the Neumark and the Bohemian March for his family, was killed in the Battle of the Unstrut, fighting on the side of Henry IV against the rebellious Saxons.…

…fell victim to disputes between Roman Catholics and the followers of the Bohemian religious reformer Jan Hus, who was burned as a heretic in 1415. Wars between Bohemian Hussites and the Roman Catholics of Bohemia and Germany engulfed the kingdom until compacts were negotiated in 1436 that granted the more-moderate…

…the enormous wealth accumulated by the church in a comparatively short time. Moral corruption had infected a large percentage of the clergy and spread also among the laity. Prague, with its large number of clerics, suffered more corruption than the countryside. Both the king and the archbishop showed favour to…

Both the victorious Catholic Church and the wealthy laymen regarded the Baroque style as the most faithful expression of their religious convictions and their worldly ambitions. For about 100 years, the Baroque dominated in architecture, sculpture, and painting and influenced literature, drama, and music. The external appearance of Prague…

Boris originally intended to accept Roman Christianity, but an unsuccessful war with the Byzantines forced him to adopt the Orthodox faith of Constantinople (864). Boris (at his baptism he took the Christian name Michael), his family, and the nobles who supported his policy were baptized one night in secret by…

…essentially nonheretical branch of the Roman Catholic Church, based in monastic houses in which some Eastern Orthodox practices also were observed.

…dignity of emperor of the Romans. For all those reasons, Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Lombards by right of conquest, assented to his coronation as emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, 800, by Pope Leo III. No longer a barbarian king, Charlemagne became, by virtue of the symbolism…

…of stirring the conscience of Western Christendom. His father had been skeptical about the benefits of such a policy, knowing that it would antagonize most of his own people and arouse the suspicion of the Turks. The proposal was made, however, at the Council of Florence in 1439, attended by…

…therefore, only natural that the Roman Catholic Church looked for potential converts among non-Muslim people of Asia. After Franciscan envoys brought back information on what was known as Cathay (northern China) in the mid-13th century, Pope Nicholas IV, a former Franciscan, dispatched a Franciscan mission to the court of the…

…into the conquered lands a Latin ecclesiastical organization and hierarchy. The Greek patriarch of Antioch was removed, and all subsequent incumbents were Latin except in one brief period before 1170, when imperial pressure brought about the installation of a Greek. The Eastern Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem left before the conquest…

…discipline and order into the English church. The see of York was subordinated to Canterbury, and efforts were made to bring the ecclesiastical affairs of Ireland and Scotland under Lanfranc’s control. Several church councils were held in England to legislate for the English church, as similar councils did in Normandy.…

A very pious Catholic, he especially favoured the Jesuits. Yet, basing his policies chiefly on religious principles, he suffered from discrepancies between his religious goals and the maxims of a modern raison d’état. An indecisive man, he depended much on the influence of his counselors and his Jesuit…

The Roman Catholic church grew in wealth and power, and by the 12th century its schools were flourishing, training generations of clerks in the liberal arts. Society itself became less embattled, and the nobility became more leisured and sophisticated. The machismo of the epics was tempered…

…in the Reich: the German church. By ancient Germanic custom, moreover, the founder of a church did not lose his estate in the endowment that he had made; he remained its proprietor and protecting lord. Still, the bishoprics and certain ancient abbeys, such as Sankt Gallen, Reichenau, Fulda, and Hersfeld,…

…put the defense of the Roman Church into the king’s hands. But after defeating the Saxons, Henry considered himself strong enough to cancel his agreements with the pope and to nominate his court chaplain as archbishop of Milan. The violation of the agreement on investiture called into question the king’s…

As a promoter of church reform willing to compromise with the papacy, he had the support of the church. He took his father prisoner and forced him to abdicate (Dec. 31, 1105) but was not certain of his throne until his father’s death on Aug. 7, 1106. He had…

…the most important 15th-century Czech religious reformer, whose work was transitional between the medieval and the Reformation periods and anticipated the Lutheran Reformation by a full century. He was embroiled in the bitter controversy of the Western Schism (1378–1417) for his entire career, and he was convicted of heresy at…

The Hussites broke with Rome in using a Czech liturgy and in administering Holy Communion to the laity under the forms of both bread and wine. (The doctrine supporting this was called Utraquism and the more moderate Hussites were called Utraquists.)

…11th and 12th centuries the ecclesiastical reform movement of western Europe was extended into Ireland. As the kings of Munster and Connaught, along with those of Leinster and Ulster, each struggled to secure the dominant position that had once been held by Brian Boru, they came to realize the value…

The Roman Catholic Church in Jerusalem, established in 1099 during the First Crusade, was dissolved when the Muslims won the city in 1244. The Franciscan order, which since 1334 has been the “Custodian of the Holy Land,” is charged with the safekeeping of Roman Catholic rights…

John’s attention was diverted and his prestige disastrously affected by relations with the papacy. In the disputed election to the see of Canterbury following the death of Hubert Walter, Pope Innocent III quashed the election of John’s nominee in procuring the election of…

Joseph’s conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, however, posed more difficult problems. He established national training colleges for priests and deprived the bishops of their authority and limited their communications with the Pope. The power of the church was even more affected by the dissolution of more than 700…

A new concordat with the Pope, concluded in 1472, allowed him to control the appointment of bishops. He augmented the royal revenues by raising taxes on his own authority. The meetings of notables and the assemblies of the estates had only a consultative role. Nevertheless, Louis XI sought the support…

…affairs, the organization of the universal church and local churches acquired a symmetry and consistency hardly possible before 1100. An 11th-century anonymous text that was accepted by canon law identified two orders of Christians, the clergy and the laity. It considered the clergy largely in a monastic context, indicating that…

His long struggle with the Roman papacy ended with the transfer of the Curia to Avignon, France (beginning the so-called Babylonian Captivity, 1309–77). He also secured French royal power by wars on barons and neighbours and by restriction of feudal usages. His three sons were successively kings of France: Louis…

Michael Cerularius) and the Western church (led by Pope Leo IX). The mutual excommunications by the pope and the patriarch in 1054 became a watershed in church history. The excommunications were not lifted until 1965, when Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, following

…Constantinople and the church of Rome. While 1054 is the symbolic date of the separation, the agonizing division was six centuries in the making and the result of several different issues. The Eastern church sharply disagreed when the Western church introduced into the Nicene Creed the doctrine that the Holy…

The church received the right to administer justice according to canon law and a separate system of taxation, protected by royal privileges, and the pretenders sought the church’s sanction for their candidacies. The first known coronation by the archbishop was that of Erik Knutsson in 1210.…

…Lithuanians into the Latin (Roman Catholic) church. The spread of Catholicism among the Lithuanians and the attendant diffusion of the Polish language, culture, and notions of political and social order among the Lithuanian nobility eroded the position of the Orthodox Ruthenians, as had happened earlier in Galicia. In 1569,…

The Roman Catholic Church, steadily expanding eastward into Ukraine, enjoyed the support of the state and legal superiority over the Orthodox. External pressures and restrictions were accompanied by a serious internal decline in the Ruthenian church. From the mid-16th century, both Catholicism, newly reinvigorated by the…

…their views and conform to Roman Catholic doctrine. The sect continued to multiply, however, among townspeople, merchants, gentry, and even the lower clergy. Several knights of the royal household gave their support, as well as a few members of the House of Commons.

…beliefs and practices of the church. Theologically, this was facilitated by a strong predestinarianism that enabled him to believe in the “invisible” church of the elect, constituted of those predestined to be saved, rather than in the “visible” church of Rome—that is, in the organized, institutional church of his day.…

…contributions by the Jesuits endeared Roman Catholicism to Kangxi, who gave official permission for its propagation in 1692 and later gave French missionaries a residence within the imperial city and built a church for them in Beijing in gratitude for curing him of malaria. His sympathy attracted to China more…

…modify the imperial reserve regarding Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholic preaching remained officially forbidden after the “Rites Controversy”—a quarrel over the compatibility of ancestor worship with Roman Catholicism—that pitted the pope’s legate against the Kangxi emperor at the beginning of the 18th century. Although the work of the missionaries continued to…

…been called the founder of Catholicism in the West.

…most influential figures in the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 16th century. In 1534 he formed a religious brotherhood in Paris known as the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), which received official papal recognition in 1540. The Jesuits later served as leaders in the modernization of the Roman Catholic Church.

Approved by the pope in 1540, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was already well known for its spirit of apostolic initiative. Its members were distinguishing themselves in scientific research as well as in their voyages to new worlds. Stimulated by the examples of his seniors, Ricci dedicated himself…

…December 3) was the greatest Roman Catholic missionary of modern times. He was instrumental in the establishment of Christianity in many parts of Asia and evangelized extensively in India, the Malay Archipelago, and Japan. In Paris in 1534 he pronounced vows as one of the

The Roman Catholic Church, reformed and revitalized after the Council of Trent (1545–63), sent missionaries into the newly discovered and conquered territories of three Catholic empires: Spain, Portugal, and France. As a result, Christianity was established in Central and South America, in the Caribbean, and in…

In the 15th century European nations began a process of exploration and colonization that brought them more fully into contact with the rest of the world and facilitated the spread of Christianity. Motivated in part by Christian zeal, Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) launched exploratory voyages along the…

In the Belgian sphere the Roman Catholic church took a high profile and eventually established a Catholic university through which to train not only colonial whites but also a small elite of Black Africans. The rival to the state church was an independent Black church, built in honour of the…

…under the jurisdiction of the Roman pope until 732. In that year the iconoclast Byzantine emperor Leo III, angered by Albanian archbishops because they had supported Rome in the Iconoclastic Controversy, detached the Albanian church from the Roman pope and placed it under the patriarch of Constantinople. When the Christian…

…there was also a powerful Roman Catholic party anxious to reforge the links with Rome, in support of whom St. Germanus of Auxerre visited Britain in 429. It may have been partly to thwart the plans of this party that Vortigern made the mistake (c. 430; the date given by…

…relations between the empire and Roman Catholic Europe. The Lombard advance, it may be remembered, had restricted Byzantine authority in Italy to the exarchate of Ravenna, and to that quarter the popes of the 7th century, themselves ordinarily of Greek or Syrian origin, turned for protection against the common enemy.…

…made of Clovis’s conversion to Catholicism. One of the first Germanic kings to do so, he did, in fact, convert to Catholicism, but recent analysis of the contemporary sources that describe his reign—especially of a letter written by Avitus of Vienne congratulating him on his baptism—suggests that Clovis did not…

…a leader of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, Clovis converted to Catholic Christianity with some 3,000 of his army in 498. This traditional account of the conversion, however, has been questioned by scholars, especially because of the echoes of the conversion of Constantine that Gregory so clearly incorporated in his history.…

…Africa that broke with the Roman Catholics in 312 over the election of Caecilian as bishop of Carthage; the name derived from their leader, Donatus (d. c. 355). Historically, the Donatists belong to the tradition of early Christianity that produced the Montanist and Novatianist movements in Asia Minor and the…

Christians were still a minority at the end of the 3rd century in all levels of society, but they were in a good position to benefit from Constantine’s adoption of the religion and his grants of various privileges to the clergy. At that time (313)…

…the apostolic origin of the church of Rome, was incompatible with the Eastern idea that the importance of certain local churches—Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and, later, Constantinople—could be determined only by their numerical and political significance. For the East, the highest authority in settling doctrinal disputes was the ecumenical council.

…son were, however, Catholic, and Catholics were common among the Lombards as a whole from at least the 590s as well. Germanic peoples had often been Arians in the 5th and 6th centuries (the Ostrogoths were, for example), but the Lombards seem to have been less committed to Arianism than…

…Latin Christians adopted the term Catholic (from catholicus, “universal”). The term catholic Christianity was originally used to authenticate a normative, orthodox Christian cult (system of religious belief and ritual) on the grounds of its universality and to characterize different beliefs and practices as heterodox on the grounds that they were…

…instructive in showing that the Roman church, even in the late 1st century, was asserting its right to intervene in the affairs of other churches. The letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch at the beginning of the 2nd century, depict the position of the monarchical bishop, flanked by subordinate presbyters…

…restored and was reconverted to Catholicism by St. Martin of Braga. When Muslim forces invaded in 711, the only serious Gothic resistance was made at Mérida; upon its fall the northwest submitted. Berber troops were placed in central Portugal and Galicia. When ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I set up the Umayyad monarchy

…were henceforth to be considered Catholic Christians, a designation that here appears for the first time in a document.

… in its early predominance of Roman Catholicism. Because the first European settlers in Detroit were French Roman Catholics, many immigrants of that faith were attracted to the city even before the large Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrations of the 19th century. Detroit was made a diocese in 1833 and an…