A. Duffy, Saints and Sinners, A History of the Popes ch.§4 Protest and Division. III. THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

[PRELUDE to JANSENISM: GALLICANISM]

Louis was unused to this sort of resistance, and a confrontation developed, in which Innocent’s stand was presented as a breach of the rights of the Gallican church. Anti-papal feeling mounted in France, and in 1682 Louis mobilised the French Assembly of the Clergy against the Pope.The Assembly passed Four Articles which paid lip-service to papal primacy, while denying the Pope’s temporal authority and the irreformability of his decrees even touching matters of faith, and making the Pope subordinate to a general council.

Unsurprisingly, Innocent condemned these articles, and refused to ratify the appointment of any bishops for France till the matter was resolved. By the beginning of 1685, thirty-five French bishoprics were vacant. Relations steadily deteriorated, with Louis appealing to a general council against the Pope, and the Pope closing down the French quarter in Rome and refusing to receive a French ambassador. At the end of his pontificate Innocent was at loggerheads with Louis, and a schism between France and the papacy seemed inevitable. It would take the efforts of another two popes to heal the breach between Paris and Rome. ^[p.189]

JANSENISM

Gallicanism was not the only French challenge to papal authority in the seventeenth century. In the 1640s theological controversy erupted within the French church over the teaching of the posthumously published treatise Augustinus by a former bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansen. Jansen’s immense and unreadable Latin treatise was in fact a manifesto for a party of devout Catholics alienated by the worldliness of much Counter-Reformation religion. They believed that too much insistence on human freedom in salvation had eclipsed the New Testament’s teaching about grace.While rejecting Protestantism and placing great emphasis on the sacraments and the hierarchical Church, they also stressed the doctrine of predestination, taught that the grace of God was irresistible, and that therefore all who are damned are lost because God withholds his grace from them. By and large, they took a gloomy view of the average man or woman’s chances of salvation. They shared the papacy’s disgust at the opportunism of contemporary politics, and Jansen was also the author of Mars Gallicus, an attack on Richelieu’s cynically opportunistic foreign policy.

Jansenism was therefore a hold-all term which included many of the most serious elements of French and Dutch Counter-Reformation Catholicism. On such matters as the need for a Catholic political alliance against Protestantism, Jansenists were ardent supporters of the papacy. They detested the Jesuits, however, whom they saw as the chief culprits in the spread of lax moral and sacramental teaching (they disapproved of too easy access to communion for ‘worldly’ lay people, and thought the Jesuits curried favour with rich patrons by granting cheap grace). Urban VIII had condemned Jansen’s teaching, but the Jansenist debate really took hold under Innocent X. In 1653, responding to a formal request from eighty-five of the bishops of France, he condemned Five Propositions summarising Jansen’s teaching in the bull Cum Occasione.

No one in France contested a solemn papal condemnation of doctrine. The Jansenist party, however, attempted to get round the bull by accepting that the Five Propositions were indeed heretical, while maintaining that the Pope was mistaken in thinking that they were to be found in Jansen’s book. This distinction between ‘right’ and ‘fact’ was banned by Pope Alexander VII (1655-67), after which the Jansenists tried further evasive action by maintaining a right to ‘respectful silence’ in the face of papal condemnation. The papacy was now embroiled in a damaging debate about the nature of its own doctrinal authority, which would rumble on to the eve of the French Revolution. It was all the more damaging because the Jansenist party included some of the most serious and edifying clergy in France, and much of their practical teaching and devotional style could be traced back to the practice of Counter-Reformation models like Carlo Borromeo. Louis XIV set about suppressing Jansenism, because it damaged the unity of his realm. Papal condemnation of Jansenism was therefore seen by many Jansenist clergy as part of an unholy conspiracy between Pope and King against the Gospel. The only two bishops who protested on behalf of the church of France against Louis XIV’s extension of the régale in the 1670s were Jansenists, one of whom, Nicholas Pavillon of Alet, had some claim to be the most outstanding French Bishop of the century. Many of those who sincerely accepted the Pope’s teaching authority were alienated by the condemnation of men and women so patently dedicated to serious religion. The debate threatened the Pope’s credibility as the guardian and leader of the Counter-Reformation.

The Jansenist quarrel came to a disastrous climax in 1713, when Clement XI (1700-21) issued the bull Unigenitus, condemning 101 propositions taken from the best-selling devotional treatise by the Jansenist Pasquier Quesnel, Moral Reflections on the Gospels. The publication of Unigenitus plunged the church of France into crisis. Fifteen bishops, led by Cardinal de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, appealed against the bull, and of the 112 bishops who ultimately accepted it, many were reluctant, and published it with explanatory letters of their own — implying that episcopal approval and explanation was necessary before a papal bull carried authority in France. The Regency government of France, anxious to put an end to religious controversy, threw its weight behind the bull, but opposition persisted. In 1717 twenty bishops asked the Regent to appeal to the Pope for an explanation of the bull, and in the following year four bishops appealed against it to a general council. They were joined by twenty others and by 3,000 clergy, and there was widespread support for the ^[p.190] Appellant cause among the lawyer class who staffed the regional Parlements. Slowly the dissidents were brought under control, but the last Appellant bishop did not die until 1754, and in the meantime the controversy had seriously damaged the papacy’s authority in France. In Holland, the controversy led to the consecration of a schismatic Jansenist bishop and the creation of a breakaway Jansenist church.

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