Counter-Reformation

The term Counter-Reformation was used for the first time at the end of the eighteenth century to indicate the process of re-catholicizing territories put in place by the Church of Rome against the Protestant threat. Since then, the concept of Counter-Reformation has long been at the center of occasionally rather harsh historiographical debates, whose sides have sometimes been defined by creed. A purely oppositional idea of the Counter-Reformation, understood as the opposite reaction to the Reformation, has been supplemented by a broader vision: this tends to emphasize that, since the Middle Ages, attempts were made, within the Church of Rome, to reform and thus meet the demands of a considerable part of the clergy and of the faithful. This historiographical orientation has subsequently preferred to adopt the concept of “Catholic Reformation,” thus emphasizing the propositive plan of internal reform of the Church rather than on the oppositional reaction to the Reformation.