Catholic Reform and Counter-Reform

Many problems that troubled sixteenth-century Protestant leaders also both­ered conscientious Catholics. In consequence during the first three-quarters of the century both a Catholic Reformation (that is, a movement among Roman Catholics to reform their Church from within) and a Counter-Reformation (that is a Catholic reaction against, and attack upon, the Protestant reformers) were going on simultaneously.

Roman Catholic reformers such as Erasmus (ca. 1466-1536), Gian Matteo Gilberti (Bishop of Verona, 1524-43), Cardinal Gaspar Contarini (1483-1542), and St. Philip Neri (1515-95) were troubled by many of the same issues that outraged Protestant leaders. Abuse of papal power, corruption in the distri­bution of church offices, scandals arising from clandestine marriages, doubts about the wisdom of mandatory celibacy for the clergy, reservations about long­standing policies concerning divorce, annulment, separation, and remarriage, questions about morally dubious money-raising schemes, such as the commer­cialization of indulgences—all of these issues were on the agendas of Catholic reformers. But much as they deplored the shortcomings and corruption of indi­vidual popes and bishops, and much as they criticized Church policies, these men were not prepared to reject papal authority and the traditional hierarchical structure of the medieval church.

Counter-Reformers, on the other hand, included such diverse figures as St. Peter Canisius (1521-97), Gian Pietro Caraffa (Pope Paul IV, 1555-59), ^a∏d St. Vincent de Paul (ca. 1580-1660). While these men conceded that the Roman Church must clean its house, they viewed reform primarily as a tactic in the war against the Protestants.

^4β Bucer, De regno Christi 2.9.55, PP∙ 261-62; Calvin, Commentary on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, to 1 Cor. 7:5, quoted in Fuchs, Sexual Desire and Love, pp. 141-42.

⁵⁰Dickens, Counter Reformation, pp. 7-8; Jedin, KatholischeReformation. the scandals and reform the abuses that had paved the way for Protestant victories.

The Council of Trent

Both Catholic Reformers and Counter-Reformers agreed that a general council was essential in order to frame an ambitious program of church reform and give it unassailable legitimacy, but resistance to proposals for summoning such a council were strong, particularly at the papal court. Curial officials were sus­picious of both general councils and reform movements, however earnest and well-intentioned they might be. Curialists suspected—not without reason— that a reforming council would try to strip them of their powers and pre­rogatives and would inevitably attack the well-worn and profitable routines of papal administration. Members of the curia found it hard to believe that the Protestant movement had been as successful as it actually was and, long after large regions of Western and Central Europe had renounced allegiance to Rome, curial officials remained convinced that the Reformation would soon pass away as people grew tired of its novelties.

Not until the election of Pope Paul III (1534-49) did the proposal to summon a reforming council become a serious proposition in Rome. Even then the pope moved cautiously. In the summer of 1536 he appointed a commission of car­dinals to survey the needs of the Church and the problems to be dealt with by a council—if and when it were called. Since the members of the commission were drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the Catholic reform move­ment, the body soon completed its work. It submitted a confidential report to the pope in March, 1537. In its report the commission documented frankly and in detail the record of past abuses of ecclesiastical power, including papal power. Although this explosive document was intended for the eyes of the pope and his chief advisers alone, rumors about its contents soon leaked out. Within a few months a purloined copy was published; it quickly became a best seller, and Luther considered it so devastating to the papal cause that he translated it into German and published it, together with his own acid comments.^[2094]

Once the report of the commission had been made public, pressure on the pope to summon a reforming council mounted rapidly. But Paul III and his advisers continued to delay the formal proclamation of the council, while struggles continued behind the scenes over its venue (the curial party wanted it to meet in Rome, where it would be relatively easy to control), over its agenda, and over the question of whether and how seriously it should try to make peace with the Protestant leaders.

The long-awaited council finally convened on 13 December 1545 at Trent, a small city not far south of the Brenner Pass, on Italian soil, but also subject to the German Emperor, Charles V (1519-56), who insisted that the council must meet in his territories. Even when it finally opened, there was protracted wran­gling over the council’s agenda—Paul III and the Curiawanted to concentrate on condemning the heresies of Luther, Calvin, and other reformers, while the Emperor, anxious to heal religious divisions in Germany, insisted that disciplin­ary problems must be dealt with first and that doctrinal issues could be settled later. As a compromise, it was agreed to deal with both doctrine and discipline simultaneously. As often happens with forced compromises, neither side was happy with the result.

Marriage Reform at Trent

The Council of Trent found it easier to compromise on disciplinary issues than on dogmatic ones. Although the council rejected all of the basic theological or ecclesiological criticisms leveled against Roman Catholicism by Protestant leaders, it was willing to make some modifications in the Catholic disciplinary system. One major area of reform was marriage law. The marriage reforms of Trent were embodied in the decree Tametsi, which the Council finally adopted after more than fifteen years of discussion, in its twenty-fourth session, 11 No­vember 1563.^[2095] The final version of Tametsi revolutionized earlier practice and doctrine. While the canon explicitly, even defiantly, reiterated the long-stand­ing teaching that the essence of marriage consisted in the free exchange of mari­tal consent between parties competent to marry one another, Tametsi added the further critical requirement that in order to be valid the exchange of con­sent must take place in the presence of witnesses and that these witnesses must include the pastor of the parish where the parties made their promises. Mar­riages that failed to meet these requirements would from the time of the pro­mulgation of the decree be considered invalid and of no effect.

Trents marriage legislation also tidied up numerous loose ends. Tametsi in­stituted controls over the marriages of persons without fixed addresses, pro­hibited forced marriages, regulated the times at which weddings might be cele­brated, abolished the rule that sexual intercourse created affinity, and made some technical adjustments in the law concerning consanguinity and affinity.^{[2097] [2098]} In addition, the council reiterated the ban on concubinage among the laity adopted by the Fifth Lateran Council and imposed stiff penalties on men who refused to give up their mistresses.³⁶

In the aftermath of the council, the interpretation of the Tridentine rules and the elaboration of the post-Tridentinc theology and canon law on marriage were dominated by the work of the erudite but aloof Spanish Jesuit, Tomas Sanchez (1550-1610). His De sancti matrimonii sacramento remained a stan­dard Roman Catholic guide to marriage problems until the mid-twentieth cen­tury. Sanchez, an intelligent and enormously learned jurist, approached mar­riage law as he might have approached a complicated tax code. A shrewd master of the rules of the game, an inventor of ingenious solutions to many of its puzzles, Sanchez seems to have been utterly uninterested in human emo­tions or their consequences for relationships in real life.

Trent’s most significant action on marriage law was its abolition of the loop­holes that had made clandestine marriage such a problem for the medieval Church. But this measure was only partially successful: numbers of clandestine marriages diminished, certainly, in the decades after 1563, but the phenome­non by no means disappeared from the Catholic world. Tametsi provided that its regulations would become binding only after they had been promulgated and explained to the faithful. In many regions of Europe, however, Tametsi was nei­ther published nor explained for generations after its adoption at Trent and hence did not become binding law for those areas until much later. In Nor­mandy, for example, Tametsi was not received until the seventeenth century; it was not published and received by English Catholics until the nineteenth century.^[2101]

Marital Sex and Tridentine Catholicism

The legislation of the Council of Trent gave no explicit attention to problems of marital sexuality, but those who interpreted Trent’s marriage law found it neces­sary to deal with marital sex. In some respects, the commentators—Sanchez above all—were less restrictive of sexual enjoyment in marriage than their pre­Reformation predecessors. Sanchez, for example, taught that it was appropri­ate for married persons to take pleasure in seeing one another’s bodies and even in touching each other, although he modified this principle by distinctions based on the intentions of the actors. If a couple touched and fondled each other in order to secure arousal as a prelude to coitus, then their actions consti­tuted no sin. If, however, they took to touching and feeling one another in order to heighten their pleasure after arousal, this was sinful, though only venially so.⁶⁰ Likewise Sanchez held that it was not gravely sinful for married persons to daydream about the sexual pleasures that they experienced with their mates, although he suspected that all sexual fantasies entailed some degree of sin.⁶¹ There was danger, after all, that contemplating sexual delights with one’s proper spouse might lead to arousal, which was always sinful, although the sin was not always mortal.⁶² In general, however, Sanchez and his followers believed that married couples might do as they pleased in their sexual relations, so long as they did not impede or preclude conception; at worst they would be guilty of venial sin.⁶³ The pleasure that married couples experienced during sex, Sanchez taught, was not sinful in itself; indeed, once intercourse had begun, the couple had a moral obligation to continue until both parties achieved orgasm, for it was wrong for one to attain satisfaction without assuring that the other did so too.⁶⁴

Sanchez analyzed in detail the problem of coital positions used by married couples. The missionary position, he maintained, was “natural,” and all devia­tions from it were therefore to some degree “unnatural” and thus sinful, unless excused by a just cause.⁶⁵ This was so, he explained, because changes in coital position inverted the order of nature and also tended to make conception less likely. Sanchez suspected that couples usually experimented with deviant coital positions in order to enhance their sexual pleasure. This goal, he felt, did not constitute a legitimate cause for departing from the “natural” way of doing things. Accordingly Sanchez classed variations in coital position as serious ven­ial sins, although they fell short of being deadly sins. He was inclined, however, to count intercourse with the woman on top of her husband as a mortal sin, because it significantly inverted the natural order. After all, he recalled, it was on account of this perversion that God had sent the Biblical Flood—an arcane bit of lore that he had picked up from Petrus Comestor.⁶⁶

Sanchez and other post-Tridentine canonists were prepared to tolerate other slight variations from what they regarded as the normal and natural course of

^eoSdnchez, De sancto matrimonio 9.44.2.8-11.

“Ibid. 9.44.3.

⁶²Ibid. 9.44.4-5.

⁶³Ibid- 9.16.4; Flandrin, “Vie sexuelle,” p. 103.

⁶⁴Sdnchez, De sancto matrimonio 9.17.11.

⁶⁵Ibid. 9.16.1, 3, 7.

⁶⁶Ibid. 9.16.1, 3; Flandrin, Sexe et !’accident, p. 130.

marital sex. Sanchez, for example, was more tolerant than most in his treatment of such lovemaking practices as the wife licking or sucking her husband’s penis or allowing anal penetration. So long as these practices were used as a prelude to “natural” intercourse, Sanchez allowed them. If couples did these things just for pleasure, the actions were venially sinful; if they experienced orgasm during foreplay, however, the sin was mortal.^[2102]

Divorce, Separation, and Remarriage

Since Protestant reformers, particularly Luther, had rejected Catholic law con­cerning divorce, separation, and remarriage, the Council of Trent was bound to deal with these issues. After lengthy deliberations and after considering a num­ber of alternatives, the council adopted a canon that held that adultery did not dissolve the marriage bond and hence was not an acceptable basis for divorce.^[2103] This was a studied rejection of Luther’s argument that Matt. 5:32 and 19:9 au­thorized dissolution of marriages, with the right of remarriage, because of adultery. The Fathers of the council were aware when they adopted this posi­tion that patristic writings substantially supported Luther’s contentions. The majority felt, nonetheless, that they must stand by a teaching that had become traditional since the late twelfth century, in part at least because failure to do so would seem tantamount to a confession that earlier rulings had been incorrect. The text of the canon was deliberately framed in such a way as to avoid pro­nouncing on the question of whether the Church had the power to dissolve a valid marriage or not.^[2104]

Sex and the Clergy

The Fathers of the Council of Trent were, of course, painfully aware that Prot­estant reformers had attacked the policy of mandatory clerical celibacy, which had itself been introduced into Catholicism by the earlier reform movement in the eleventh century. The Fathers knew also that the principal Protestant lead­ers and many of their sympathizers had personally renounced celibacy and had married. Indeed, during the Council the papacy twice authorized papal nun­cios and legates to recognize marriages contracted by priests, provided that the married priests ceased to exercise their sacerdotal functions in public.^[2105] More­over members of the council repeatedly stated during its deliberations that the policy of clerical celibacy was not working, that in practice priests commonly kept concubines, and that celibacy in many areas accomplished little more than to assure that priests’ de facto wives and children received no share in their estates. The Duke of Bavaria’s representative, for example, declared publicly during the council that a recent visitation had shown that ninety-six or ninety­seven Bavarian priests out of a hundred had concubines or clandestine wives.^[2106]

Celibacy was a sore issue. All Protestant reformers had rejected it and most members of the council knew that observance of the discipline was at best un­even and in many regions might fairly be described as unusual. Many members of the council felt that it was time to rescind the policy and to restore to clerics the right to marry, as they had done in the early history of the Church. As the Bavarian representative put it:

Many other men who are aware of the current state of affairs in Ger­many... believe that chaste marriage would be preferable to sullied celibacy. They further warn that the most able and knowl­edgeable men in the population would rather have wives without ecclesiastical benefices than benefices without wives.^[2107]

But the prospect of changing this long-standing policy made most council Fa­thers uneasy. Some, perhaps, remembered the chilling threats of St. Birgitta about the likely fate of prelates who took responsibility for abandoning man­datory celibacy.^[2108] Many changed their minds repeatedly, in the style of Pope Pius II, who prior to his election as pope had favored allowing the clergy to marry, but after his election felt obliged to reverse his position.^[2109]

In the end the council reaffirmed the policy of mandatory celibacy, reiter­ated penalties earlier imposed on Concubinary clerics, and re-enacted older canons penalizing the bastard children of the clergy.^[2110] Little in this bundle of legislation was new, and a reading of it would furnish scant reason to believe that Trent’s reaffirmation of mandatory celibacy would result in any significant change. In fact, however, Trent would be far more successful than any previous council had been in securing general, if not universal, observance of celibacy. The secret of its success lay not in canons dealing with clerical sexuality, but rather in prescriptions concerning clerical education. In the summer of 1563, a few months before final adoption of Tametsi, the council approved another de­cree, Cum adolescentium aetas, which became the cornerstone of the seminary system of clerical education. The seminaries created under the provisions of Cum adolescentium aetas provided the intellectual and moral formation of the post-Reformation Catholic clergy. Seminaries systematically instilled the prac­tice of celibacy into aspirants for the priesthood and attempted, with some suc­cess, to weed out those unwilling or unable to accept responsibility for a celi­bate lifestyle. While scandals over clerical sex were certainly not unknown in Post-Tridentine Catholicism, the seminary system proved to be a powerful and often effective instrument for inculcating would-be priests with a reverence for the virtue of celibacy and for conditioning them from an. early age to minimize sexual temptations and resist the allures of the flesh.^[2111]

Extramarital Sex among the Laity

Trent made no significant changes in the canon law dealing with sex outside of marriage and the council Fathers apparently felt that existing law was adequate to deal with these problems. There does seem to have been a major change, however, in the way in which laws dealing with extramarital sex were enforced in the years after Trent. Protestant preachers inveighed against the sexual vices of the old order and warned their flocks to abjure the loose moral standards that they claimed characterized popery. Catholic reformers, for their part, sought to police sexual behavior more vigorously and to repress undesirable sexual ac­tivity more systematically than earlier generations had done.

The new moral climate was particularly hard on the practice of prostitution. Reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, denounced the wickedness of both harlot and client, while fulminating against the involvement of municipalities in operating public brothels. Public opinion, in consequence, seems to have turned against the old policy of tolerating prostitution, and people began to consider it shameful to patronize the brothels that their ancestors had estab­lished. Toward the close of the sixteenth century, municipal brothels began to close their doors in one town after another. The activities of private prostitutes also came under censorious scrutiny from officials, who commenced to banish them from public places and to penalize them for what had formerly been a recognized, if not honored, trade.^[2112]

Sanchez and other post-Tridentine Roman Catholic commentators on sex of­fenses were, like their Protestant counterparts, much concerned with strength­ening parental control over the marriages of young people. Sdnchez, for ex­ample, analyzed abduction, forcible intercourse, and marriage by coercion in minute detail. Any abduction of a young woman, so far as Sanchez was concerned, constituted raptus, provided that the victim was in her parents’ custody at the time of her abduction. Whether the victim consented or not was beside the point. Raptus, according to Sanchez, was a twofold crime: since it involved extramarital sex it was an offense against chastity, and since it involved forcible abduction of a girl from her parents it was a crime against natural jus­tice.^{[2113] [2114] Whether abduction without sexual intercourse constituted raptus was a question about which Sanchez’s authorities differed. He concluded that nonsex- ual abduction was a less serious form of the crime, for which lesser penalties were appropriate.™ Sanchez added that raptus was not an exclusively male crime, for it could also be perpetrated by a woman either against a man or an­other woman, although he acknowledged that neither case was common. Fe­male rapists, he thought, should be subject only to the noncapital punishments prescribed for this crime.[2115] More important, Sanchez broadened the definition of raptus by arguing that passionate and importunate pleading by a perpetrator who implored his victim to run away with him or begged tearfully for her sexual favors, constituted the force necessary to qualify the act as raptus. Sanchcz care­fully specified that what he had in mind was not just the usual kind of persua­sion that passionate young men employed with their girl friends, but pleading so ardent and extreme that it amounted to verbal violence and made it emo­tionally impossible for the victim to resist.[2116] Moreover Sanchez believed—un­like most medieval canonists—that the crime of raptus should include abduc­tion and forcible sexual relations with a prostitute. Raptus, he asserted, was radically different from simple fornication because it involved an element of violence, either physical or moral. A man who used violence against a woman (regardless of her social status) in order to have sex with her, committed a crime against justice and that, so far as Sanchez was concerned, made raptus a heinous crime.[2117]}

Deviant Sexuality

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century canon law and theology showed few novel­ties in their treatment of deviant sexual behavior. By and large the older con­demnations continued in force, and both Catholic and Protestant writers agreed that homosexual acts should be punished severely. Writers and judges seem to have been more concerned with lesbian behavior in this period than was true earlier. Some scattered sixteenth-century prosecutions for sexual relations be­tween women have come to light in recent years and, while there are not many of them, they greatly outnumber those known from any earlier century in the Middle Ages.^{[2118] [2119] Similarly, transvestite behavior seems to have concerned au­thorities during this period and to have been punished much more severely than was common previously.[2120]}

Post-Tridentine moral and canonical commentators on sex problems also gave great prominence to masturbation, which they classed as a more serious moral problem than fornication. Masturbation, they reasoned, was contrary to nature, and people engaged in it solely in order to feel the pleasure of orgasm. Hence, the argument ran, masturbation was akin to sodomy and ought to merit more severe penalties than fornication or even adultery—although none of the authorities went quite so far as to prescribe the death penalty for it.^[2121] Sanchez believed that even spontaneous orgasm, where no conscious self-stimulation was involved, was wrong and should be fended off, if at all possible. A person who felt a sexual climax coming on, save during marital intercourse, should lie still, taking care to avoid touching the genitals, should make the sign of the cross, accompanied by fervent prayers beseeching God not to allow him to slip into orgasmic pleasure.^[2122] Sanchczs treatment of spontaneous orgasm makes it plain that the notion of sex as impurity remained an important element in his thought on sex and sexual problems, as did his identification of pleasure with immorality.

Jurisdiction and Courts

Protestant writers almost unanimously criticized the treatment of marriage and sex offences by medieval Church courts. Some, like Martin Bucer, maintained that ecclesiastical tribunals should have no jurisdiction over marriage at all. Instead, Bucer argued, matrimonial causes rightfully belonged in the royal courts, since marriage is a civil matter.^[2123] Bucers stance became the norm in much of Protestant Europe, where princely and municipal courts extended their jurisdiction over offenses against sexual morality and marriage law, while ecclesiastical courts either ceased to exist or restricted themselves to settling disputes involving church property and similar matters.⁸⁸

England long remained a notable exception to the general rule among Prot­estant nations. Anglican Courts Christian continued for generations following the Reformation to function in ways not radically different from those that had obtained before the break with Rome. Although Henry VIII asserted royal con­trol over ecclesiastical matters, including Church courts, he failed to achieve the substantial revision of canon law that at one time he envisioned. Instead he and his Successessors left the medieval canonical system basically intact, al­though modified in some details by a series of royal injunctions, parliamentary statutes, and the Canons Ecclesiastical of 1603. Marriage and sexual behavior remained subject primarily to ecclesiastical courts whose rules and procedures differed only marginally from those of medieval Catholicism.⁸⁰ The prc-Tridcn- tine practice of consensual marriage, for example, continued to flourish in En­gland and in the seventeenth century roughly ten percent of English marriages were clandestine. Only in 1753 did Hardwicke s Act effectively do for Anglicans what Tametsi had done for Catholics.⁹⁰ Marriage remained in principle indis­soluble in English law, although Parliament occasionally did revoke the mar­riages of peers and influential persons by private bills. Divorce in the modern sense of the term did not become available to ordinary people in England until the Marriage Act of 1857.

In Roman Catholic Europe, the most striking result OfTrentsjudicial reforms was the increased centralization of Church law and courts. The Tridentinc pa­pacy systematically attempted to discourage local customs and vigorously sup­pressed variations, even minor ones, from Roman usage in all aspects of Catho­lic life.

In keeping with the papacy’s general policy of imposing uniform observance, the central papal courts, the Rota, the Signatura, and the Penitentiary, became increasingly busy appellate tribunals in the period following Trent. Local ca­nonical courts, of course, continued to function and in many regions their case loads expanded dramatically in the wake of the council’s reforms and the flood of decrees that issued from the newly created Roman dicasteries. But the deci-

^saThe Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical (Made in the Year 1603 and Amended in the Years 1865, ι88γ, 1936, 1946, and 1948) (London: S.P.C.K., 1961); The Canon Law of the Church of England, Being the Report of the Archhishops' Commission on Canon Law (London: S.P.C.K., 1947); Eric Waldram Kcmp, An Introduction to Canon Law in the Church of England (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1957). On sixteenth­century Anglican canon law see particularly Ronald A. Marchant, The Church under the Law: Justice, Administration, and Discipline in the Diocese of York, 13601640 (Cam­bridge: At the University Press, 1969), pp. 140-41, 240-43, and Ralph Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520-1570 (Oxford: Ox­ford University Press, 1979), pp. 55-88.

⁹¹¹ Anglican divines and common lawyers had, of course, long voiced dismay at clan­destine unions and their consequences. In 1696, however, the government imposed a tax on marriages, as a result of which secret weddings flourished even more. When Hardwickes Act made these invalid, the effect was to cut the poor off from cheap mar­riages and to drive them into concubinage; Lasch, “Suppression of Clandestine Mar­riage,” pp. 90-109.

sions of the Roman tribunals increasingly dominated the thought and practice of local ecclesiastical judges.^[2124] The jurisprudence of the Rota was particularly important for the law of matrimony and sexual morality in Tridentine Catholi­cism. Unlike other Roman tribunals, the Rotas decisions spelled out the rea­soning on which they were grounded and thus provided guidance for other ec­clesiastical judges. While the Rota did not publish its decisions systematically, individuals (including some judges of the Rota) compiled private collections of selected Rotal decisions and these became standard reference works for can­onists throughout the world.^[2125] Although the Rota never formally adopted a stare decisis rule, Roman authorities expected the decisions of local Church courts to adhere to the stylus, or practice, of the Rota. Canonical judges at the local level often cited Rotal decisions as the basis for their rulings and fre­quently assigned them greater weight than papal decretals and most other sources of Church law.^[2126]

Canonical marriage jurisprudence after Trent reflected the new divisions in Christendom. Mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants confronted the Church’s courts with complex problems, both practical and theoretical. In dealing with these issues, ecclesiastical judges drew upon medieval law con­cerning marriages with Jews, Saracens, and pagans, but the new situation posed difficulties for which the older law provided few guidelines. Canonical courts needed to decide, for example, whether and under what conditions they should consider marriages between baptized Protestants binding. Likewise, since most Protestant groups held that legitimate marriages could be dissolved under some circumstances, Catholic canonists had to determine whether, for example, a Catholic could lawfully marry a former Protestant who had been divorced and subsequently converted to Catholicism. And since civil authori­ties in predominantly Protestant regions often granted divorces without regard to the religion of the parties, canonists with increasing frequency had to wrestle with cases of Catholics who had secured civil divorces and later wished to re­marry with the blessing of their own Church. Or if one party entered marriage with the intention of seeking divorce should the union fail to work out, did that intention itself invalidate the marriage? If so, how could such an “intention against permanence’’ be proved? Moreover, since the Council of Trent required the announcement of banns, the presence of the parish priest, and a prescribed ceremony as essential conditions for valid marriage, a wide range of cases in­volving what canonists called “defects of form” also came before the Church’s tribunals for adjudication.

Post-Tridentinc writers on matrimonial law were greatly concerned, too, with reproductive intention in marital relations. Catholic theologians and can­onists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries held sharply conflicting opin­ions on this matter. Sanchez, among others, argued that married couples need not intend to conceive a child each time they had conjugal relations, but also maintained that if a person married with a firm intention to avoid having any children at all, the marriage could be annulled.^[2127] In practice, however, this issue seems not to have come before the Church’s courts with any regularity prior to the twentieth century.^[2128]

The role of canonical courts in dealing with sex offenses declined precipitously in the period following the Council of Trent. Municipalities and royal govern­ments in many parts of the West assumed greater responsibility for the regula­tion of public morality, while theologians increasingly viewed the internal forum of the confessional as a more appropriate venue than the courts for the chastisement of sex offenses that took place in private. In some regions, princi­pally Spain and Italy, the Inquisition, rather than the local Church courts, took cognizance of the most heinous and scandalous types of sexual misbehavior. By the eighteenth century ordinary ecclesiastical courts no longer played a major role in the enforcement of sexual morals, save perhaps in the papal states. Canon law continued to enunciate standards of sexual behavior for Catholic Christians, but enforcement of those standards had passed into other hands.