ABSTRACT

For local Catholic officials, processions involving images, quasi-theatrical displays of biblical stories, bloody self-flagellation, litanies and songs were an effective medium for sharpening the cultural boundaries between the city's Catholics and Protestants. Occasional processions with litanies embodied the Catholic ideal of public supplication, but they also helped to promote the authority of Catholic tradition in the eyes of participants and observers. A published dispute from the first decade of the seventeenth century dramatizes the controversial nature of some Catholic processions. Catholic organizers—the Jesuits, confraternities or the church establishment—would have felt some vindication at Volcius's disclosure that a large Protestant audience attended these processions. Catholic officials knew that such processions could also become the focus of Protestant resistance and, sometimes, violence. If Catholic leaders feared Protestant resistance to their processions before 1600, there is much evidence to suggest that they welcomed their potential as propaganda in the subsequent period.