There was no single war between Catholics and Protestants and no single event that ended all conflict. Europe experienced several wars after the Reformation, and different settlements ended different conflicts. The Peace of Augsburg, Edict of Nantes, and Peace of Westphalia are among the most important turning points.
The Peace of Augsburg, 1555
The Peace of Augsburg helped end conflict within the Holy Roman Empire between Catholic rulers and Lutheran rulers. It recognized a limited legal coexistence between Catholicism and Lutheranism.
It did not include all Protestant groups, and it did not permanently settle religious conflict.
The French Wars of Religion
France experienced decades of conflict involving Catholics and Huguenot Protestants. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted limited protections to French Protestants and helped end the main phase of the wars.
Those protections were later restricted and eventually revoked in 1685, showing that religious peace remained fragile.
The Thirty Years’ War and Westphalia
The Thirty Years’ War began in 1618 within the Holy Roman Empire but became a complex political and international struggle as well as a confessional conflict.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the war and expanded legal recognition of confessional arrangements within the Empire. It is often treated as a major milestone in the decline of large-scale European wars framed primarily by Catholic-Protestant rivalry.
Conflict did not disappear
Religious discrimination, local violence, and political rivalry continued after 1648. Britain and Ireland, for example, experienced their own long history of Catholic-Protestant conflict.
Modern ecumenical dialogue and religious liberty developed much later and through different political and theological processes.
Best answer
The Peace of Westphalia is the most common answer for the major continental conflict of the seventeenth century, but no treaty ended every Catholic-Protestant conflict in Europe.
