The Emperor’S Legacy

Abstract

The religious climate in the Austrian Netherlands at the accession of Maria Theresa was characterized by a rigid Catholic orthodoxy tempered by determined opposition to Dutch Calvinism and promoted by a century-long struggle between Jansenist theologians and the pro-papal Archbishops of Malines. Jansenism, with its strong “Gallican” propensities, had appealed to a people accustomed to upholding their cherished “rights” in the face of foreign domination, and for a time — just after the turn of the century — it had appeared to be in the ascendancy as its tenets found forceful expression in the Jus ecclesiasticum Universum (1760) and other treatises of Zeger Bernard van Espen, professor of jurisprudence and canon law at the University of Louvain. Van Espen had written against excessive veneration of relics and the saints, the practice of simony, Jesuit casuistry, and unwarranted papal intervention in the affairs of the Belgian episcopacy. Rome, he had insisted, should not dominate the church but should be subject to the restraints of monarchy and episcopacy as was the case in its early history. He had resisted promulgation of the bull Unigenitus which condemned substantive portions of Pasquier Quesnel’s Réflexions morales, and had ranged himself on the side of the Dutch church of Utrecht in its struggle to free itself from papal authority. However, the determined efforts of the curia and the stringent measures employed by Maria Elizabeth, iron-willed sister of Charles VI and his regent for the Lowlands, had succeeded by 1730 in eradicating Jansenist dissenters from the faculty of Louvain. Henceforth this onetime Jansenist center became the outspoken champion of ultra- montanism and strict religious orthodoxy.