Defining Catholicism

This discussion asks what King Sigismund of Poland and his subjects understood catholicism to be in the 1520s and 1530s, through language analysis of a diverse and large corpus of sources. It finds that (in contrast to ‘luteranismus’) there was no name for catholicism per se. The church was defined primarily with reference to the past: as the church of one’s ancestors, of the Fathers, of many past centuries. Its chief characteristic was its (alleged) historic unity, resting on a carefully preserved consensus down the ages. Under the pressure of events, however, we find the language used by catholics in Poland-Prussia shifting, from a pre-confessional universal world view towards proto-confessional positions: from ‘good and bad Christians’ to ‘Catholic’ versus ‘Lutheran’. Reformation supporters, meanwhile, described this church very differently—as papal-led, built on distinctive doctrinal positions, and located in a dead, rather than a living, past.