Catholic reform and world mission

In the sixteenth century the Catholic Church renewed itself from within through the Jesuits, approved in 1540, and the Council of Trent, opened in 1545, and its missionaries carried the gospel to Japan and China. In the Americas conquest crushed the native peoples, and friars protested on their behalf.

Kanō Naizen, Portuguese carrack from a Nanban screen (detail), c. 1600 · Source

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Renewal from within

Catholics remember the sixteenth century not only as an age of division but as an age of saints who renewed the church from within, the Catholic Reformation. Its teaching is the Theology course's The Catholic Reformation and the English Reformation; this lesson follows its people and events.

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), a Basque nobleman, was badly wounded fighting at Pamplona in 1521 and, while he recovered, read the life of Christ and the lives of the saints and gave his life to God. What he learned in prayer became The Spiritual Exercises, four weeks of prayer on the life of Christ to discern the will of God. In 1534 he and six companions from Paris made vows of poverty and chastity, and in 1540 Pope Paul III approved them as the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits promised to go wherever the pope would send them; they founded schools and sent missionaries to distant lands.

In Spain Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) founded a small convent at Ávila in 1562 to bring the Carmelites back to a life of prayer and poverty, and wrote books on prayer. John of the Cross (1542–1591), her companion in reforming the friars, was imprisoned in Toledo in 1577 by brothers of his own order who opposed the reform, and in his cell made songs of the soul seeking God. The Catholic Church honours both as saints and Doctors of the Church.

The Council of Trent

A coloured bird’s-eye view of the walled city of Trent beside the curving river Adige, its cathedral among red roofs, with two well-dressed couples standing in the foreground. — Frans Hogenberg, Tridentum (Trent), from the Civitates orbis terrarum, between 1581 and 1621 · Source

In December 1545 Pope Paul III opened a council at Trent (Trento in Italy today). Halted again and again by war and politics, it met in three periods and closed only in December 1563. It issued decrees on Scripture and tradition in 1546, on justification in 1547 and on the Mass in 1562 Decrees of the Council of Trent.

The council did not deal with doctrine alone. Bishops were to live in their dioceses and preach, and a decree of 1563 had every diocese found a seminary to train its priests. After it came a catechism for parish priests in 1566 and a missal in 1570 that shaped Catholic worship until the 1960s.

Catholics remember Trent as the council of reform that made the church's teaching clear and renewed its pastors. Protestants saw it as closing the door on the gospel the Reformation had brought to light. In its second period, in 1551 and 1552, envoys of some Protestant princes came, but the two sides could not agree even on the terms of discussion. Calvin answered the decree on justification in 1547: faith alone justifies, yet the faith that justifies is not alone Calvin, Acts of the Council of Trent with the Antidote. In 1999 the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church affirmed basic truths of justification together Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification; differences remain.

As far as Japan and China

The risen Jesus sent his disciples "to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8):

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
Matthew 28:19-20

Francis Xavier (1506–1552), one of Ignatius's Paris companions, was sent east at the request of the king of Portugal and reached Goa in India in 1542. On the southern coast he had prayers and the catechism put into the fishermen's own language. In Malacca he met a Japanese man, Anjirō, and with him landed at Kagoshima in Japan in August 1549; that year he wrote from Kagoshima that the Japanese were the best people yet discovered Xavier, Letters. After two years in Japan he waited to enter China and died in 1552 on an island off its coast.

The church in Japan grew quickly, but Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had united the country, came to distrust the missionaries. In February 1597 twenty-six Christians were crucified on a hill at Nagasaki: Franciscan missionaries from abroad, Japanese Jesuits, Paul Miki among them, and Japanese lay people, young boys among them. Catholics remember that Miki preached from his cross and forgave those who killed him, and in 1862 the church declared them saints. Japan banned Christianity in 1614, yet hidden Christians kept the faith without priests for more than two centuries and in 1865 made it known to a French priest at Nagasaki.

The Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) came to Macau in 1582, learned Chinese and the Confucian classics, and later dressed as a Confucian scholar, winning the learned with his map of the world, his clocks and his mathematics. In 1601 he entered Beijing, stayed by the emperor's leave, and died there in 1610. The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, which he published in 1603 as dialogues between a Chinese and a Western scholar, links the Lord on High of the old Confucian classics to God. Korean scholars read it too (The Korean Catholic Church: beginnings and persecution).

Conquest and protest, and today

The Dominican friar Las Casas, in a white collar and black cloak, sits at a desk writing with a quill. — Unknown painter, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 16th century · Source

After Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492, the Spanish overthrew the Aztecs of Mexico in the early 1520s and the Incas of Peru in the 1530s. The conquerors were granted native people as labourers on the pretext of teaching them the faith, and war, forced labour and diseases from Europe killed native people in vast numbers. The sword and the cross arriving together is a dark chapter of the church's history.

Yet friars took the native peoples' side. In Advent 1511 the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos asked the settlers on Hispaniola by what right they held the native people in such cruel servitude. Bartolomé de las Casas was at first a settler who used native labourers himself, until in 1514, preparing a sermon, he read the thirty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus (one of the deuterocanonical books Catholics read), saw that offerings made from the native people's forced labour were sin, and gave up the people entrusted to him, as he tells in book 3 of his History of the Indies. As a Dominican friar he pleaded for them before the king and his courts until his death in 1566, denouncing the conquerors' massacres in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552).

But he too had once proposed bringing enslaved Africans to lighten their burden, and in the same book repented of it as no less unjust. In 1537 Pope Paul III, in Sublimis Deus, declared the native peoples truly human and able to receive the faith, not to be robbed of their freedom or goods or enslaved. In July 2015 in Bolivia Pope Francis asked pardon for the church's sins in the Americas and for the crimes against the native peoples in the conquest Francis, Address to the Second World Meeting of Popular Movements.

Paul asks how the gospel reaches people:

How then can they call on the One in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”
Romans 10:14-15

Matthew Henry comments, "It was necessary that the gospel should be preached to the Gentiles. Somebody must show them what they are to believe" Matthew Henry. The Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth century answered that call at the cost of their lives; yet in the same years the gospel also went in with the conqueror's sword. As Xavier and Ricci learned the peoples' tongues and Las Casas stood with the trampled, the church is to be renewed from within by prayer and teaching and to carry the gospel as a servant. The next lesson, Wars of religion and toleration, follows the wars fought in the name of faith after the Reformation and the freedom of conscience that grew out of them.

Practice

Practice 1 of 7
What did Pope Paul III approve in 1540?
Practice 2 of 7
Which describes the Council of Trent?
Practice 3 of 7
How did Calvin answer Trent's decree on justification in 1547?
Practice 4 of 7
Which is true of Francis Xavier in 1549?
Practice 5 of 7
What happened at Nagasaki in February 1597?
Practice 6 of 7
Which describes what Matteo Ricci did in China?
Practice 7 of 7
Which is true of Bartolomé de las Casas?

Reading to the end marks it read; tap to switch it.

Source

Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises 1548 — Four weeks of prayer on the life of Christ, to discern God's will; the root of Jesuit spirituality.
Council of Trent, Decrees of the Council of Trent 1545–1563 — 1545–1563. The council of Catholic reform: decrees on Scripture and tradition (1546), justification (1547), the sacraments and the Mass (1547–1562), and seminaries for training priests.
John Calvin, Acts of the Council of Trent with the Antidote 1547 — A reply to Trent's decree on justification: faith alone justifies, yet the faith that justifies is not alone.
Lutheran World Federation and Catholic Church, Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification 1999 — A shared statement of basic truths on justification, signed at Augsburg on 31 October 1999: together they confess that God accepts us by grace alone, as we trust in what Christ did to save us, and not for anything we have earned, and that the sixteenth-century condemnations do not apply to the teaching it sets out, while naming the differences that remain. The World Methodist Council joined it in 2006 and the World Communion of Reformed Churches in 2017.
Francis Xavier, Letters — 1542–1552. Letters from his mission in India and Japan; in one from Kagoshima, 1549, he calls the Japanese the best people yet discovered.
Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven — 1603. In dialogues between a Chinese scholar and a Western one, argues for the Lord of Heaven and the soul's immortality, linking the Lord on High of the old Confucian classics to God; read by Korean scholars too.
Bartolomé de las Casas, History of the Indies 3 — Begun c. 1527, published long after his death. In book 3 he tells how in 1514, reading Ecclesiasticus 34, he saw that offerings made from the forced labour of the native people were sin and gave up his land and his Indians; and he repents of having once urged that African slaves be brought in their place.
Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies 1552 — 1552. Written in 1542 for the king and printed at Seville in 1552, it denounces, region by region from Hispaniola to Peru, the massacres and cruel servitude the conquerors inflicted on the native peoples, and pleads for their protection. His turning in 1514 over a passage of Ecclesiasticus, and his repentance for proposing African slaves, are told not here but in his History of the Indies.
Pope Paul III, Sublimis Deus 1537 — 1537. Declares that the native peoples of the Americas, and all peoples, are truly human and able to receive the faith; even outside it they are not to be deprived of their liberty or property or enslaved, but drawn to the faith by preaching and the example of a good life.
Pope Francis, Address to the Second World Meeting of Popular Movements 2015 — Santa Cruz, Bolivia, 9 July 2015. Acknowledging the church's sins in the Americas, the Pope humbly asked forgiveness, not only for the church's own offences but for the crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.

Lessons from the Bible, the church's creeds and the sources and witnesses of its history. They tell the church's story fairly, as each tradition remembers it, and do not hide the church's sins. Scripture quotations: BSB.