Decades of scholarship reconsidering the nature of the early modern Catholic Church has yet to erase popular perception of this institution as a rattling, decrepit hulk, one groaning under the weight of overfed monks, bejeweled cardinals, and ignorant indolent parochial clergy. To be sure, this perception reflects in part the influence of early Protestant historiography. For Martin Luther and many of his Protestant contemporaries, informed by the apocalyptic sensibilities of their age, the Church by 1521 was in its final days. Its imminent destruction was part of a divine plan leading to the return of Jesus and the final judgment of the quick and the dead. The Church was irredeemably corrupt, and its leader, the pope, was the Antichrist. Luther certainly had good reasons to complain about the Church of his day, but he proved incorrect in predicting its imminent destruction. Indeed, by 1600 the Catholic Church still presided over the single largest religious tradition in Western Europe, even managing to reassert its spiritual authority in some formerly Protestant regions while extending its reach to the New World. If we are to appreciate its remarkable resiliency in the face of Protestant challenges, and more pertinently its influence in shaping cultures across the Atlantic after 1500, we have to view the Church through multiple lenses, of which only one is the Protestant Reformation. This broader perspective brings into the foreground an institution that was by any measure a great international power.