Conclusion

With the turn-of-the-seventeenth-century proliferation of variations on Protestantism, and renewed missionary efforts by the Roman Church, came the vigorously renewed possibility of Catholic bloody martyrdom. In England, by the time the Tridentine Council was underway, a number of Catholics had been executed; in the Netherlands, Protestant rebel forces were responsible for killing about 130 priests between 1567 and 1591. The Oratoriani overseeing Rubens' re-decorating, with a cleverly subtle audacity, the apse of their Vallicella to exalt and promote their founder as a new bloodless martyr, bespeaks another Counter-Reformation dynamic equilibrium. Turn-of-the-seventeenth-century proliferation of variations on Protestantism, and renewed missionary efforts by the Roman Church, heralded the vigorously renewed possibility of Catholic bloody martyrdom. Catholics executed in England, albeit for political motives, transmutated in Counter-Reformation hagiography to emerge as heroic victims of heretical violence. In the Netherlands, Protestant forces slew over one hundred Catholic priests in the period between 1567 and 1591.