Mediator Unus: The Intercession of Saints in the Expurgated Bibles of the Censura Generalis (1554)

• Autores: María José Vega Ramos
• Localización: Hispanic Hagiography in the Critical Context of the Reformation / coord. por Fernando Baños Vallejo, 2022, ISBN 978-2-503-60212-7, págs. 21-49
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • María José Vega discusses the controversy surrounding the intercession of the saints in the first half of the sixteenth century (1517-1554) and, above all, its impact on the interpretation of the Bible. She thus deals with the theological bases of worship, which sustain and legitimise both Catholic social practices and hagiographic discourse, and examines the paradoxes and contradictions found in treatises in defence of the saints. Catholic polemicists and heresiologists shared the common purpose of building a repository of biblical places in relation to the saints to counter the Reformers’ powerful ex silentio Scriptura argument, and to manage the possible interpretations given to a series of New Testament passages that explicitly identified Christ as the only mediator between God and men. The article first examines the cumulative construction of this new (Catholic) pathway for reading the Bible, and describes the coincidences and nuances between European and Spanish Catholic theologians, notably Alfonso de Castro. Vega then analyses censorship by the Inquisition of printed Bibles (Censura generalis, 1554) to eliminate any dissident or Lutheran interpretations regarding saintly mediation that can be found in summaries and margins. The analysis highlights both the parallels and the differences in the censorship decreed by the Universities of Louvain, Paris, Salamanca and Alcalá.