17th Century Chronology

Excerpts from the chronology for the 17th century at Yahoo:

1603 Henry IV allowed the Jesuits to re-enter France (see 1595).

1616 The Roman Catholic Church declared the Copernican theory, supported by Galileo, as “false and erroneous.” This was done in agreement with a recommendation by Robert Bellarmine, who had met with Galileo and counselled him to regard the heliocentric model of the solar system as a hypothesis only. Bellarmine (1542-1621), a Jesuit, was a driving force behind the doctrine of papal infallibility. He taught that the pope was infallible when teaching the whole Church on faith, morals, and things necessary to salvation.

1624 Cardinal Richelieu of France formed pacts with the Dutch, English, Swedes, Danes, and with Savoy and Venice to contest Hapsburg power in the Low Countries and Germany.

1628 French Catholic forces led by Richelieu took La Rochelle, the last Huguenot fortified city.

1633 Galileo Galilei tried in Rome on suspicion of heresy for supporting the Copernican (sun-centered) view of the solar system.

1636 Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, known as M. de St. Cryan, abbot of St. Cyran in the diocese of Poitiers, became director of the nunnery at Port Royal. A friend of Cornelius Jansen (see 640), St. Cyran intended the nunnery to be a center for opposition to the Jesuit’s teachings on doctrine, devotion and morals.

1638 Janos Toroczkai, a Unitarian, said, “If Jesus would come to earth, I would send him to work in a vineyard.” The Transylvanian Reformed Church had him stoned to death.

1640 Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus published posthumously. Jansen, the bishop of Ypres, had died of the plague in 1638. It is claimed that he had read Augustine through twenty times. The Augustinus was to become a source of conflict between the Jansenists and the Jesuits in seventeenth century France.

1643 Antoine Arnauld published his De la frequente communion his Theologie morale des Jesuites, against the Jesuits’ practice of frequent communion and their perceived moral laxity. Arnauld had come across a letter from a Jesuit that read, in part, “The more one is destitute of grace, the more one ought boldly to approach Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.”

1653 Pope Innocent X (1644-55), in the bull Cum occasione, condemned the Five Propositions. He stated that these had been held by Jansen, and he implied they were found in Jansen’s Augustinus. The Five Propositions are (1) some commandments of God are impossible even for righteous persons to keep, (2) in the fallen state internal grace is never resisted, (3) in order to merit or demerit in a state of fallen nature, freedom from necessity [the necessity imposed by God’s irresistible grace] is not required, only freedom from constraint, (4) the heresy of the Pelagians consisted in their assertion that grace could be either resisted or obeyed, and (5) it is a Semi-Pelagian error to say that Christ died or shed His blood for all men absolutely.

1656-57 Blaise Pascal published his Provincial Letters, a defense of the Jansenists and satirical attack on the Jesuits in France.

1661 King Louis XIV of France demanded that all French bishops subscribe to the Formulary of 1656. The nuns of Port Royal were required to sign also, but they refused and were excommunicated.

1665 The Great Plague. An estimated 15 to 20% of the population of Western Europe died.

1669 The Peace of the Church ratified by Pope Clement IX (1667-70). The Jansenist bishops of France were allowed to provide explanations for their signatures to the Formulary of 1656, though these could not be published. Persecution ceased. The excommunication of the nuns of Port Royal was lifted.

1682 The Assembly of the French clergy issued the Four Gallican Articles: (1) popes, whose power is entirely spiritual, cannot release subjects from oaths of loyalty to kings and rulers; (2) the plenitude of power enjoyed by popes is limited by the decrees of the 4th and 5th sessions of the Council of Constance; (3) the pope must exercise his authority in accordance with “the canons enacted by the Spirit of God and consecrated by the reverence of the whole world,” so that the pope cannot alter the “ancient rules, customs, and institutions” of the French church; and (4) though the pope has the principal place in deciding issues of faith, his decisions are not irreversible until confirmed by the consent of the Church.