The Council of Trent

Trent was demanded for twenty years before it met and then took eighteen years to finish, sitting in three widely separated periods under five popes, with a spell relocated to Bologna and long suspensions between. It was called too late to reunite anybody: by 1545 the Lutheran churches had confessional books and territorial establishments, and the council's effective task was to state what the Catholic Church held rather than to negotiate.

Its method shows in its results. On justification it produced a decree of real theological care, affirming that grace is prior and unmerited while refusing the formula that faith alone justifies, and its distinctions were argued over by good theologians for months. On scripture it declared the Latin Vulgate the authentic text for public use and set scripture and unwritten apostolic tradition side by side, against the Protestant appeal to scripture alone. On the sacraments it fixed the number at seven and defended the disputed practices of the mass, penance and the invocation of saints.

Its reforming legislation was as consequential as its doctrine. Bishops were required to reside in their dioceses, a rule widely ignored before, and every diocese was ordered to found a seminary for the education of its clergy. The professionalisation of the Catholic priesthood over the next century follows from that decree more than from any other.

The council itself left several tasks unfinished and handed them to the papacy, which produced in the following decades a catechism, a revised breviary and a revised missal. The result was a degree of uniformity in Catholic worship and teaching that had never existed before: from the late sixteenth century a Catholic could hear substantially the same mass in the same language in Lima, Goa and Cracow. That uniformity, rather than any single decree, is the practical legacy of the council.

It held for four centuries. The word Tridentine, from the Latin name of the city, still marks that liturgy and that profession of faith, and the reason the Second Vatican Council registered as such a shock in the 1960s is that it altered arrangements which several generations had experienced as simply what the church was.

Historians have revised the older picture of Trent as a purely defensive counter-reformation. Movements of Catholic reform, new orders, reforming bishops and a renewed devotional literature were under way before Luther and continued alongside the council, and the term Catholic Reformation is now used at least as often as Counter-Reformation. Both readings capture something: much of what Trent enacted answers Protestant criticism directly, and much of it answers complaints that Catholics had been making about their own church for a century.