The Catholic Controversial Effort

Murner was only one Catholic publicist among many, but the dilemma he faced was also faced by his colleagues. In entering the publishing arena, he worked, as we have seen, at a substantial disadvantage. Both the medium and his message cut against his cause. He received no support from Catholic authorities and only ridicule and abuse from the various Evangelical publicists who sprang to Luther's defense.^[86] While he continued gamely on for a time, he eventually had to quit Strasbourg and henceforth found it extraordinarily difficult to have any of his works published. His fellow Catholic publicists fared little better.

In the crucial early years of the Reformation, suggestions for a coordinated and well-financed effort to answer Evangelical publications were made but found no response from higher ecclesiastical authorities. Four of the six leading Catholic publicists (see table 10) were supported not by ecclesiastical authorities but by the layman Duke Georg of Albertine (Ducal) Saxony. Other authors outside Albertine Saxony did not do as well. The Catholic historian Hubert Jedin has detailed the difficulties of early Catholic publicists in gaining occasional support or even attention from higher Catholic authorities.^[87]

Although several proposals were made in the mid-1520s to support Catholic publicists, none were put into effect. The papal legate Girolamo Aleander (1480–1542), for example, recommended in 1523 that a list of Catholic controversial writers be compiled for each diocese and that benefices or other forms of remuneration be found for these men.^[88] But his advice was not followed. Similar suggestions in 1524 by the Breslau Bishop Jakob von Salza and in 1525 by the vicar-general of the diocese of Constance, and later bishop of Vienna, Johannes Fabri (1478–1541), met with similar inaction.^[89] Citing Aleander's disparaging evaluation of the Catholic controversial writings published up to 1523,^[90] Jedin observes that this view seems to have been shared by the curia and its representatives throughout the reign of Pope Clement VII (r. 1523–1534). Although they occasionally rewarded the Catholic publicists, for the most part they held them and their services in contempt, and nothing was done to promote or coordinate the Catholic response to the Evangelical use of the press.^[91]

It was under Pope Paul III (r. 1534–1549), more than a decade after the beginning of the Reformation movement, that Catholic publicists first received some regular support from the central authorities of the church. In expectation of the upcoming council, the papal nuncio to Germany, Pietro Paolo Vergerio (1498–1565), requested Pope Paul III at the end of 1534 to choose three or four Catholic theologians skilled in writing who could use their great knowledge of Lutheran writings to refute the heretics.^[92] As a result, the Ingolstadt theologian Johannes Eck, the Saxony publicist Johannes Cochlaeus, the onetime Evangelical Georg Witzel, and several others received pensions.^[93] The new nuncio Giovanni Morone was also instructed to support Fabri, Eck, Cochlaeus, Witzel, and several lesser writers.^[94] Yet in 1540 Fabri could still opine that the Lutherans had won the upper hand

because little or no attention had been paid to the scholars. The capable and steadfast are for the most part dead. Only a very few remain who are able and dare to resist; and those who are able to contradict [the Lutherans] or rather to prevail over them scarcely have the means to feed themselves not to mention the means to pay the printers.^[95]

Cochlaeus, who underwrote the efforts of several Catholic publicists as well as himself, had repeated difficulties receiving support for his printing efforts.^[96]

Although consistent support for Catholic controversial writers may have begun under Pope Paul III, this support did not immediately

translate into an appreciable increase in publications. The printings or reprintings of Catholic controversial works, especially in the vernacular, remained relatively low through mid-century. It was not until the second half of the century, with the end of the Council of Trent and the efforts of the Jesuits, that the institutional church began an organized effort to counter Evangelical controversial writing. A variety of reasons can be advanced to explain this significant lag.

The Roman Catholic church saw itself as the only legal institution of religion. It represented the status quo, and its opponents were rebels, heretics, and outlaws. Moreover the Roman Catholic church possessed both the juridical power and ample precedent to condemn its opponents and hand them over to secular authorities for appropriate punishment. The Peasants' War gave added legitimacy to this view of their opponents and to the conventional method for dealing with such opponents.

Given this "law-and-order" conception of affairs, it should be no surprise that in the early decades when Catholics reflected on the Evangelical propaganda barrage and how to counter it, they thought mainly in terms of intervention by authorities. As Paulus Bachmann, abbot of Altzelle, saw it, it was the authorities' negligence or connivance that allowed the Evangelicals to fill the markets with anti-Catholic writings.^[97] It was up to the authorities to remedy the situation. Even the publicists were slow to realize that more than censorship was called for.^[98] As Jedin pointed out, Eck made no proposal for a program of published replies to the Lutherans in the first draft of his famous memo to Pope Adrian VI (r. 1522–1523).^[99] Instead, he proposed that Lutheran pamphlets should be burned and inquisitors should be established. He also made no mention of publishing duties for the theologians whom he proposed should be taken on as advisors by the bishops. In the second edition of his memo, probably directed to Pope Clement VII, he recommended that scholars should be commissioned to refute the Evangelicals using the Scripture, Fathers, and church councils, but not scholastic theology. They would provide an official justification for the new bull condemning Luther. But even here there is no thought of a comprehensive program of published responses.

Cochlaeus, more than Eck, seemed aware at an early date of the need for a coordinated response to the Evangelical barrage of publications. In his memo of 1522, Cochlaeus in no way precluded the intervention of the authorities, but he also suggested a greater role for publications. He recommended both the assembling of a compendium

of Evangelical error with appropriate Catholic refutations and the composition of books dealing with individual controversies. The counteroffensive, he felt, should not be confined to refutations of the opponents. At least as important was the circulation of German treatises dealing with the Mass, the sacraments, the veneration of Mary and the saints, as well as the explanation of other ceremonies in the worship service. As Jedin noted, this last proposal, to offer the people catechetical and educational literature, found acceptance only decades later.

In evaluating the tardy Catholic response to the Evangelical propaganda effort, it is important to remember that in the early years of the Reformation Catholics were laboring under a severe disadvantage that only time could cure. Unlike their Evangelical opponents, who, at least for the first couple decades, could appeal to ideals and "Scripture alone" without bothering overly much about the intractable reality of real institutions and real people, Catholics were defending, more or less, an existing institution, whose faults and flaws were apparent and had been experienced by their readers. It took some time for the Evangelicals to build their own imperfect institutions and thus become vulnerable to the criticism that reality differed significantly from the ideals they espoused. When this finally happened, Catholics, not surprisingly, took some delight in pointing out the inconsistency between Evangelical theory and practice.

It should also be kept in mind that for the Roman church to engage in organized, "official" polemics with the Evangelicals, it would have to acknowledge that there was something to debate.^[100] Normally one does not even argue with outlaws, which was what the Catholics considered Evangelical publicists to be. The Roman church had acted with authority (auctoritas ) when it had condemned Luther and his teachings. Further debate only gave apparent legitimacy to the Evangelical claim that there was something to debate. A similar logic lay behind the reluctance of the papacy to convene a general council to decide the matters at issue. Such an action gave at least the impression that papal decisions were not final.

Moreover, the Catholics were understandably loath to accept the Evangelical contention that beliefs and ceremonies that had, the Catholics believed, existed in the church for centuries should now suddenly be open to question. As the Dominican Johannes Mensing remarked in his defense of the Mass, "It should not be necessary for us now, after so many hundreds of years, to prove the validity of our holy sacrifice of the Mass, held in simple faith by all our predecessors,

both the Greek and Latin Fathers, from the time of the twelve apostles to today, as the heretics demand of us."^[101] The very act of defending and justifying long-standing Catholic practices seemed to some Catholics to acknowledge the Evangelical claim that such practices were subject to the "test of Scripture" rather than to the judgment of the Church.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, had everything to gain by polemics. They had to convince people to change their minds and change their allegiance. To accomplish this, they had to convey to people their new understanding of the Christian gospel. It appears from the sixteenth-century literature, and especially from the very belated introduction of Catholic catechisms to counter Evangelical ones, that it took Catholic authorities some decades to realize that it was not enough to counter Evangelical attacks. They had to match the Evangelical educational enterprise with one of their own. Intriguingly, it was a former Evangelical, Georg Witzel, who was one of the pioneers in producing basic, positive summaries of Catholic theology for the use of simple laity.

The propaganda campaign itself posed a considerable dilemma for Catholics, at least in the initial years of the Reformation movement. For Catholics such as Murner and his fellow controversialists, who opposed in principle the public discussion of matters of faith, to enter the vernacular pamphlet war was to risk compromising their own position, for the medium subverted a crucial part of their message. Authority lodged in the hierarchical church and its head, the pope. Common people had no right even to discuss, much less to debate, matters already decided by the institutional church. Yet those who could get their hands on these angry little booklets were brought into the debate, exhorted to make up their own minds, and urged to take action. Is it any wonder, then, that the dissonance between the medium—hundreds of easily circulated pamphlets—and the message—common people should not discuss matters of faith since such discussions subverted proper authority—may have inhibited the Catholic response?

The Catholic dilemma extended further. The controversialist had to describe the views that he was refuting. The readers of Murner, for example, would have learned a great deal about Luther from Murner's own treatises, and there was no guarantee that they would be offended by what they learned. Murner read and re-presented Luther from his own, hostile point of view. But as his decision to translate On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church so dramatically illustrates, mate-

rial that Murner understood as bringing Luther into disrepute could have just the opposite effect. That which repelled Thomas Murner could ironically intrigue if not actually attract his readers. In the early years when the Evangelical message was just being disseminated and people were just learning what the debate was all about, even a hostile presentation helped propagate the Evangelical message and invited readers and hearers to think about the novel understanding of Christianity that Luther and his supporters were offering.

Finally, there may be some merit to the suggestion that, in a fundamental way, the Evangelical message was more easily propagated by the press than the Catholic message. Evangelical emphasis on the word, and especially the word of Scripture, lent itself to written argument. Catholicism, in contrast, was more "visually" and "ritually" oriented. As Paulus Bachmann put it, "The written word of God, as the Lutherans call the Gospel, cannot always be productively presented to the simple folk according to its bare words or literal meaning but rather requires interpretation and the addition of commentary [menschlicher wort ]."^[102] It was accordingly not a good idea, Bachmann believed, to present everything in German.^[103] Explanations from the Scriptures were suitable for the learned, while those of "little understanding" were best nourished by external pomp and ceremonies.^[104] Perhaps more to the point, much of the Western church's practice and ritual had developed over centuries, often arising first among the common Christians and only later receiving theological explanation. That is, practice preceded theology. To defend theologically practices that had first arisen apart from strictly theological concerns was a difficult task unless one had recourse to the authority of tradition itself. Whatever its ultimate cogency, the argument from tradition was not easily defended solely on the basis of Scripture, which was the only authority that Evangelicals accepted.