Paul III
Alessandro Farnese · 1534 – 1549
Launched the Catholic Counter-Reformation by convening the Council of Trent and approving the Jesuit order.
Paul III was a Renaissance man in every sense. He had fathered children before ordination, practiced nepotism freely, and lived lavishly. But he also recognized that the Church was in crisis and acted on it. He convened the Council of Trent in 1545, beginning the massive reform effort that would reshape Catholicism for the next four centuries. He approved Ignatius of Loyola's Society of Jesus in 1540, giving the Church its most dynamic new religious order. He commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and to take over the design of St. Peter's Basilica. He also issued Sublimis Deus in 1537, declaring that indigenous peoples in the Americas were rational beings who should not be enslaved, though enforcement was another matter entirely. Paul III was complicated: a pope with serious personal flaws who nonetheless made decisions that saved the Catholic Church from itself.
The Right Decisions at the Right Time
Paul III's personal life wouldn't pass any modern standard of clerical conduct. But he had the sense to see that the Church needed radical reform and the political skill to make it happen. Approving the Jesuits and convening Trent were two of the most consequential decisions any pope has ever made.
Trent's Long Shadow
The Council of Trent clarified Catholic doctrine on nearly every point the Reformers had challenged: scripture and tradition, justification, the sacraments, the Mass. Its decrees defined Catholic identity until Vatican II in the 1960s. Paul III started all of it.