Hilaire Belloc's Characters Of The Reformation

Fr Longenecker began a series of podcasts reading from Hilaire Belloc's Characters of the Reformation. I'm not sure if he's continuing with the series or what, because he's now been putting up true fairy tales or something like that. But the readings he had were so intriguing that I went looking for the text online anyhow -- why wait to get it in dribs and drabs? Although it's apparently in print from Ignatius Press, you can get it for free download in various formats here.

For the past several months, Fr Longenecker has made various presentations on prior crises in the history of the Church, which I've found encouraging -- his point is that the Church has always faced them, it's been led by highly imperfect people throughout its history, but it's always prevailed. Here's some worthwhile analysis from Belloc on the course of the Protestant Reformation:

But meanwhile the Catholic forces in Europe had tardily woken up, and there had been started what is generally called the " Counter Reformation."

But neither the Counter Reformation nor the active fighting which succeeded in preserving a part of Christendom intact, would have been necessary but for difficult success of the Protestant movement in England.

This is the most important point to seize in all the story of the great religious revolution, and it is the point least often insisted on. (p 5)

This points to a conclusion I've come to after watching the course of Anglicanorum coetibus: Law and Ratzinger seem to have thought they could undertake some project of fixing the Reformation (and then, apparently, Benedict was going to go on and fix the Great Schism). And Jeffrey Steenson was going to general this thing, huh? This was about as well thought out as the Children's Crusade. We're going to need more serious popes.

A little later, Belloc says,

It was coincidentally with the beginning of the turn over in England, with the second half of the sixteenth century, that there began that effort against shipwreck which, I have said, is generally called "The Counter Reformation."

Vigorous Popes undertook, unfortunately too late, the reform of abuses; the Franciscans took on a new missionary activity for the recovery of districts lost to the Faith; a General Council (which the Popes before the Reformation had especially avoided because only a little while before General Councils had proved so dangerous to unity), was summoned and is known to history as "The Council of Trent." The most important single factor in the whole of this reaction was the militant and highly disciplined body proceeding from the genius of St. Ignatius Loyola. It came to be known by the name which was first a nick-name, but later generally adopted, of "the Jesuits." These, by their discipline, singleness ofaim and heroism, were the spearhead of the counter-attack. They were very nearly successful in England, they had very great effect in South Germany, and later in Poland. All these forces, combined, made for a general restoration of Catholicism. (p 8)

I agree with other conclusions here, too:

By the middle of the seventeenth century the struggle between Catholicism and the now enthusiastic spirit which had challenged Catholicism had definitely accepted a drawn battie. The Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 established the principle that subjects should follow the religion of their Government, and within the next ten years all Europe settled down into two camps—the Catholic culture on the one side and the Protestant culture on the other. The Catholic culture was, therefore, partially saved ; but it had failed to recover Europe as a whole, and within the Church arose new movements which the Reformation had started. (p 11)

We're going to need a bigger paradigm shift than what we've had so far.