Our Relation to Catholicism.
The Catholic historians and politicians who judge our Reformation from their religious standpoint are serious and consistent opponents of Palacký. In their eyes the Reformation was, and is, a religious and political mistake; the Catholicizing of our people by the Hapsburgs was its spiritual and national salvation; the Bohemian Brotherhood and Protestantism would have Germanized us; the Battle of the White Mountain was a blessing.
In Germany, England and elsewhere Catholic historians and public men look more objectively upon the origins and significance of our Reformation. Admitting the defects and errors of their own Church, and the need for reform at the end of the Middle Ages, they recognize at least the relative and temporary justification of Protestantism. If Providence directs the course of history, if there is order and purpose in the sequence of events, how can the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism be condemned in the lump without thought of the significance, for Catholics in particular, of so huge and lasting a movement throughout the world? Precisely from the theistic point of view, the Catholic opponents of Palacký take up an untenable position in their interpretation of history. Could there have been a Reformation if the Church had satisfied the peoples’ needs? Did not the Reformation proceed from the bosom of the Church itself? The best Catholics have ever criticized the shortcomings of their own Church. Indeed, their critical literature, from the beginning down to the Reformation, would fill more than one library. But as soon as the movement for reform went on outside the Church, and new Churches were founded, the old Church became a Party of which the main object was to retain power by compromise or by force. Hence the “Compacts” made with us, hence the Inquisition, hence Jesuitism—and the Inquisition and Jesuitism carried through the Catholicizing process in our midst also. Yet, if the Church was inadequate I do not assert that the Reformation was adequate in all things and everywhere. Among Protestants, party strife soon replaced spiritual emulation; new theocracies, eager for power, sprang up against the old theocracy; the Churches that professed the religion of love resorted to violence and readily allowed themselves to be misused by temporal Powers.
Our Catholic opponents of the Czech Reformation, who maintain that the Catholicizing process saved the nation from
