Event · 1545

Council of Trent

The Catholic church’s council in answer to the Reformation, held in three periods between 1545 and 1563. It defined Catholic teaching on Scripture and tradition, justification and the sacraments, and launched the Counter-Reformation.

History

Causes

By the 1520s almost everyone in Western Christendom wanted a council. Martin Luther appealed to one in 1518 and again in 1520, after Rome condemned him. Emperor Charles V wanted one to heal the religious split in Germany before it tore his empire apart. Reformers inside the Roman Catholic church wanted one to deal with abuses they had complained about for a century: bishops who never lived in their dioceses, priests with no training, the sale of church offices and indulgences.

Popes were slower. The memory of Constance and Basel, fifteenth-century councils that had claimed authority over the pope, made Rome wary of any council it could not control. War between Charles V and Francis I of France kept getting in the way. Paul III finally summoned a council to Mantua for 1537. Luther wrote the Smalcald Articles that year as a statement of what the Lutherans could and could not concede at such a meeting (preface), but the Mantua council never met. After further false starts, Paul III fixed on Trent, an Italian-speaking city inside the Empire, a compromise that let the emperor call it German soil and the pope keep it close to Rome.

By the time it opened, on 13 December 1545, the split had hardened. The Lutheran princes had their own confession (Augsburg, 1530) and their own military league, Zurich and Geneva had gone their own way under Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin, and England had broken with Rome. The council the reformers had asked for in 1520 was no longer one they would attend.

Proceedings

The council met in three periods across eighteen years and five pontificates, and its attendance was never large. The opening session drew only a few dozen bishops, most of them Italian.

First period (1545–1547), under Paul III. The legates, led by Giovanni Maria del Monte, Marcello Cervini and Reginald Pole, had a quarrel to settle first: Charles V wanted reform of abuses discussed before doctrine, so as not to provoke the Protestants, while the pope wanted doctrine first. The council agreed to treat both side by side, and every later session issued a doctrinal decree and a reform decree together. The work came fast. Session 4 (April 1546) fixed the canon of Scripture and the relation of Scripture to tradition (text). Session 5 defined original sin (text). Session 6 (January 1547) issued the decree on justification after seven months of debate, the council’s most careful document (text). Session 7 dealt with the sacraments in general, baptism and confirmation (text). In March 1547, citing an outbreak of disease, a majority voted to move to Bologna. The emperor’s bishops refused to go, and the council stalled until Paul III suspended it in 1549.

Second period (1551–1552), under Julius III. Del Monte, now pope, reopened the council at Trent. It defined the Eucharist, including transubstantiation, in Session 13 (October 1551, text), and penance and extreme unction in Session 14 (text). Envoys from some Protestant states, including Württemberg and electoral Saxony, arrived in late 1551 and early 1552. They asked for the earlier decrees to be reopened and for the council to be declared above the pope, and got neither. When Maurice of Saxony turned on the emperor in the spring of 1552, the bishops fled and the council was suspended again.

Third period (1562–1563), under Pius IV. After a ten-year gap, including the hostile pontificate of Paul IV, who wanted nothing to do with councils, Pius IV reconvened it. It finished the sacraments: communion under one kind (Session 21, text), the sacrifice of the Mass (Session 22, text), holy orders (Session 23, text) and matrimony (Session 24, text). This period nearly broke up over whether bishops’ duty to reside in their dioceses was a matter of divine law, which would have implied that their authority came straight from Christ and not through the pope. Cardinal Giovanni Morone, appointed legate in 1563, brokered a settlement that left the question undecided. The last session, on 3–4 December 1563, hurried through purgatory, the veneration of saints and images, and indulgences (text). The decrees were signed by 255 members, and Pius IV confirmed them on 26 January 1564 (Schaff-Herzog, secondary). The full decrees are online in J. Waterworth’s 1848 translation (Hanover Historical Texts) and in a second English edition at Papal Encyclicals Online.

Influence

Trent shaped Roman Catholic life for four hundred years, mostly through what came after it. The council had handed several unfinished jobs to the pope, and within a decade Rome produced the Profession of the Tridentine Faith (1564), a revised Index of Prohibited Books (1564), the Roman Catechism (1566, an 1833 English translation is on Archive.org), a reformed Breviary (1568) and the Roman Missal of 1570, whose Mass stayed the norm until after the Second Vatican Council. An official revision of the Latin Vulgate followed in 1592.

The reform decrees mattered as much as the doctrine. Session 23 ordered every diocese to found a seminary to train priests, and bishops were told to live in their dioceses, preach, hold synods and visit their parishes. Reforming bishops such as Charles Borromeo in Milan made these decrees a working model. Reception was uneven: Spain and the Italian states accepted the decrees quickly, while the French crown never formally promulgated them.

The doctrinal decrees fixed the lines between Catholics and Protestants for centuries. Every later Catholic statement on these subjects, from the First Vatican Council to the Joint Declaration on Justification in 1999, has had to say how it relates to Trent.

Key ideas and contributors

Scripture and tradition. Against Sola Scriptura, Session 4 said that the gospel’s truth and discipline are contained “in the written books, and the unwritten traditions” handed down from the apostles, and that the council receives both “with an equal affection of piety, and reverence” (Session 4). It listed the canon, including the books Protestants call the Apocrypha, declared the Latin Vulgate the authentic text for public use, and forbade anyone to interpret Scripture “contrary to that sense which holy mother Church… hath held and doth hold” or against “the unanimous consent of the Fathers.” This is the root of later Catholic teaching on Holy Tradition and the Magisterium.

Justification. The decree of Session 6 is the fullest statement of Catholic Justification. It rejected the Pelagian idea that anyone can be justified by their own works without grace (canon 1). It then rejected the Lutheran account point by point. Justification is not only the forgiveness of sins but “the sanctification and renewal of the inward man.” Its “alone formal cause is the justice of God, not that whereby He Himself is just, but that whereby He maketh us just,” so that believers “are not only reputed, but are truly called, and are, just” (ch. 7). Faith is “the beginning of human salvation, the foundation, and the root of all Justification,” and nothing before justification, faith or works, merits it (ch. 8). The canons condemned anyone who says “that by faith alone the impious is justified” in the sense that nothing else is needed (canon 9), that justifying faith “is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy” (canon 12), or that a believer must be certain their sins are forgiven (canon 13). The decree also taught that grace can be lost by mortal sin and restored by penance, and that the good works of the justified truly merit eternal life. The Reformation read Paul’s “justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:28) as excluding these claims; Trent read it alongside “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24).

The Augustinian general Girolamo Seripando pressed for a “double justice” in which the believer relies finally on Christ’s righteousness imputed, not on an inherent righteousness. The council rejected it, a choice that still matters in dialogue with Protestants.

The seven Sacraments. Session 7 fixed the number at seven and taught that they confer grace “through the act performed” (ex opere operato), condemning the view that “faith alone in the divine promise suffices for the obtaining of grace” (canon 8). It upheld Infant Baptism against the Anabaptist movement.

The Eucharist and the Mass. Session 13 taught that consecration changes “the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ,” a change “suitably and properly called Transubstantiation” (ch. 4), against Lutheran, Zwinglian and Reformed views. Session 21 held that lay communion under the bread alone is enough, and Session 22 that the Mass is “a true and proper sacrifice” offered for the living and the dead, in which “the same Christ… is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner” (canon 1, ch. 2).

Order and marriage. Session 23 defended a sacramental priesthood and the bishops’ place in the hierarchy. Session 24’s decree Tametsi required a priest and two witnesses for a valid marriage, ending the secret marriages that had caused endless legal disputes.

Contributors. Beyond the legates, Cervini (later Marcellus II) steered the justification debate. Seripando and Pole represented the wing most open to Protestant concerns. The Jesuits Diego Laínez and Alfonso Salmerón served as papal theologians and argued for the papal side, and Thomas Aquinas supplied much of the theological vocabulary. Morone saved the third period from collapse.

Key controversies

Protestant rejection. Calvin answered the first seven sessions within months in Acts of the Council of Trent, with the Antidote (1547, in Tracts Relating to the Reformation, vol. 3, Archive.org). His reply to the justification decree became a Reformed slogan: “It is therefore faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone.” The Lutheran Martin Chemnitz wrote the fullest response, Examen Concilii Tridentini (1565–1573, Latin original on Archive.org), which tested each decree against Scripture and the church fathers. Protestants have also objected that a council where they could neither vote nor reopen past decisions was not the free general council they had asked for, and that Session 22’s sacrifice of the Mass contradicts Christ’s single offering “once for all” (Hebrews 10:10–14).

Who controlled the council. Paolo Sarpi, a Venetian friar, published a History of the Council of Trent in London in 1619 (English translation, 1676, Archive.org). He told the story as a papal maneuver to block real reform, with legates taking instructions from Rome by courier. Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino wrote an official reply in 1656–57. Hubert Jedin’s four-volume history (1949–1975) and John O’Malley’s Trent: What Happened at the Council (Harvard University Press, 2013, secondary) gave a more balanced picture, though both acknowledge the papal grip on the agenda and the small, mostly Italian attendance.

Partly in Scripture, partly in tradition? The draft of Session 4 said revelation is found “partly” (partim) in the written books and “partly” in unwritten traditions; the final text replaced this with “and” (et). In the 1950s the German theologian Josef Rupert Geiselmann argued that the change left open whether Scripture contains all revealed truth, with tradition as its interpreter, and that it was not Trent’s intention to place tradition on a par with Scripture (Christianity Today, 1963, secondary). Others read the change as stylistic. The question came back at the Second Vatican Council, which said that the church does not draw “her certainty about everything which has been revealed” from Scripture alone and that tradition and Scripture are “to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence” (Dei Verbum 9), echoing Trent while leaving Geiselmann’s question open.

Do Trent’s anathemas still apply? The 1999 Joint Declaration on Justification between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation concluded that “the teaching of the Lutheran churches presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent” (§41, text). It did not withdraw the canons; it said they do not hit the Lutheran teaching as now stated. Many confessional Lutherans and Reformed and Evangelical critics reply that Trent condemned exactly what the Reformation taught, so either the Declaration has redefined the Reformation or it has redefined Trent.

Trent and later Catholicism. For many Catholics after 1564, “Tridentine” came to mean the whole fixed shape of the church: the Latin Mass, the catechism, the seminary, a defensive posture toward Protestants. Historians now stress that much of this came from the popes who carried the council out, not from the decrees themselves. The debate over whether Vatican II continued or broke with that inheritance is still live. Benedict XVI argued in 2005 for a “hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church” against a “hermeneutic of discontinuity” (address to the Roman Curia). Traditionalist Catholics who keep the 1570 Missal and progressive Catholics who want to move past Trent both appeal to the same history.

What remains unresolved

Trent’s doctrine is settled for the Catholic Church: its decrees are those of an ecumenical council. What remains open is how to read them. Ecumenical dialogues argue that Trent condemned positions, some of them caricatures, more than it condemned the Reformers’ actual teaching. Critics on both sides answer that the disagreement was real and that the Reformers and the council fathers understood each other well enough. Whether justification includes inner renewal or is purely a declaration remains the dividing line.