The York Research Database

During 1492–1692, Rome was reinvented as the capital of the first globalized religion. Roman Catholicism’s coming of age was reflected in the unprecedented fact that all the revised texts, regarded as being of universal application in the daily worship of the post-Reformation Catholic Church, shared the suffix Romanum. , beginning with the Catechismus romanus of 1566. This was not merely textual symbolism, for exported to the far-flung corners of the new Roman Catholic world were missionaries trained in the city’s national colleges,as well as precious, physical relics of its early Christian martyrs. Moreover, copies of key icons, such as the Salus Populi Romani of S. Maria Maggiore, which the Jesuits adopted as their global logo, were appropriated and remade by indigenous artists from Mexico to Manila, Ming China to Mughal India. Such material vectors of influence were validated by indulgences, whereby venerating a copy anywhere in the world was as legitimate as praying before the Roman original. This ‘miracle’ of portable Catholicism universalized the particular, Roman reality to create a remarkably resilient spiritual/devotional ‘alloy’ that still commands the loyalty of over one billion of this planet’s inhabitants.