The Council of Trent

Trento, a prince-bishopric on the imperial side of the Alps · December 13, 1545, to December 4, 1563 · twenty-five sessions across eighteen years and three popes.

This is the only council that was convened specifically to address the challenges posed by the Protestant Reformation. Every other assembly on this site belongs to the Reformation. This one seeks to counter it.

Trent is where the Roman church decided what it would say about the questions Luther had raised, and it said them in a form designed to close the discussion: not merely positive teaching, but canons, each ending with the words anathema sit. Its decree on justification condemns, by name and under anathema, the doctrine this site exists to steward. Whatever else is true about Trent, that has to be said first, if we are to steward this history.

Why It Took So Long

Luther had called for a free general council of the German nation in 1520. The council met twenty-five years later, in Italian territory, under papal presidency, with the agenda set in Rome.

The delay was not accidental. A general council was exactly what the papacy feared, because the previous century had produced conciliarism — the doctrine that a council stands above the pope — and Constance had deposed three popes to prove it. Successive popes preferred almost any alternative. Charles V, who needed religious peace in Germany, pressed for a council for twenty years. Francis I of France obstructed it, since a settled Germany was against French interests. The Recess of the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 had promised a council within a year; it took fifteen.

Paul III finally convoked it by the bull Laetare Ierusalem in November 1544. It opened on December 13, 1545, with between twenty-six and thirty archbishops and bishops present, out of roughly seven hundred in Christendom, together with five superiors of mendicant orders and three Benedictine abbots. Forty-two theologians attended the opening — more theologians than bishops, which tells you something about how the work was actually done.

Three Periods

Attendance rose sharply in the third period — a hundred and seventeen prelates at the seventeenth session, two hundred and twenty-eight by the twenty-fourth — and the final decree was signed by two hundred and fifty-five prelates and procurators. The Italian contingent outnumbered all others combined. In eighteen calendar years the council actually sat for about four and a half.

It closed on December 4, 1563, with acclamations, including one of anathema for all heretics. Pius IV confirmed the decrees by the bull Benedictus Deus on January 26, 1564.

Session Four: Scripture and Tradition

On April 8, 1546, in its fourth session, the council answered sola Scriptura directly.

It decreed that the gospel is contained in written books and in unwritten traditions, and that the council receives and venerates both with an equal affection of piety and reverence — pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia. It fixed the canon of Scripture to include the books Protestants call apocryphal. And it declared the Latin Vulgate the authentic edition for public reading, disputation, preaching, and exposition.

That last provision is worth pausing over on a site concerned with the vernacular Bible. In the same decades that Tyndale's successors were putting Scripture into English and Luther's German Bible was making a national language, Trent was fixing a fourth-century Latin translation as the authentic text for all public use in the Western church.

Session Six: Justification

The decree of January 13, 1547, is the most important thing Trent produced and the hinge of the whole division. Sixteen chapters of positive teaching, followed by thirty-three canons.

It deserves to be described accurately rather than as a caricature, because the caricature is easy to refute and the real thing is not. Trent does not teach that a man saves himself. It affirms that no one can be justified without the prevenient grace of God through Christ; that we are justified gratuitously, because nothing preceding justification merits it; that faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification. Pelagianism is condemned as firmly there as in any Protestant confession.

The division lies elsewhere, and it is real. For Trent, justification is not a verdict God pronounces but a transformation God works: righteousness is infused rather than imputed, so that a man is made just rather than declared just; justification can therefore be increased by good works and lost by mortal sin and recovered by the sacrament of penance; and the believer cannot know with the certainty of faith that he is in a state of grace. Faith is assent to revealed truth, and it justifies when formed by love — not the trusting apprehension of Christ's righteousness that the Reformers meant by the word.

Change justification from a verdict to a process and everything downstream changes with it: assurance, the place of works, penance, purgatory, indulgences, the mass. Trent was entirely consistent. That is precisely why the disagreement could not be negotiated.

The Anathemas

The canons attached to the decree are what make Trent a boundary rather than an argument. Canon nine reads: “If any one shall say, that by faith alone the impious is justified; so as to mean that nothing else is required to co-operate in order unto the obtaining the grace of justification … let him be anathema.” Canon twelve condemns the view that “justifying faith is nought else but confidence in the divine mercy which remits sins for Christ’s sake.” Canon twenty-four condemns the denial that justification is increased by good works. Canon thirty condemns the denial that temporal punishment remains to be satisfied in this world or in purgatory.

These canons have never been revoked. The Second Vatican Council changed the tone of Rome's engagement with Protestants profoundly, and the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation claimed a consensus on basic truths sufficient that the Tridentine condemnations do not apply to the teaching set out in that document. Whether that claim succeeds is vigorously disputed on both sides, and confessional Lutheran and Reformed bodies have largely judged that it does not. The canons themselves stand as written.

Read all thirty-three anathemas →

What Trent Actually Reformed

Trent did address many abuses in the church raised by the Reformers. Bishops were required to reside in their dioceses and to preach. Pluralism — holding several benefices at once — was restricted. Clerical concubinage was attacked directly. The office of the questors of alms, the professional indulgence-sellers whose activity had provoked the Ninety-Five Theses, was abolished outright, and the twenty-fifth session curbed the financial abuses attached to indulgences.

Yet this did not resolve the conflict between Rome and the Reformers, which demonstrates that the Reformation was not merely a reaction to moral corruptions but truly was supremely a divide over the gospel.

The Protestant Answer

Calvin replied almost immediately. His Acts of the Council of Trent with the Antidote appeared in 1547, printing the decrees and answering them section by section, and arguing that the council had been governed more by political and personal interest than by the Word of God.

Its most useful sentence answers Trent's central accusation, which was that justifying faith alone makes works unnecessary:

It is therefore faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone.

That is the Reformed position in fourteen words, and it disposes of the charge without conceding an inch of the doctrine. Calvin put the same thing another way elsewhere in the work: we do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.

The fuller reply came from the Lutheran side. Martin Chemnitz — the chief author of the Formula of Concord — produced his Examination of the Council of Trent in four volumes between 1565 and 1573, going through the decrees and answering each not only from Scripture but from the church fathers, in order to show that what Trent declared was not what the ancient church had taught. It remains the standard Protestant treatment, and a Tridentine delegate, Diogo de Payva de Andrada, thought it serious enough to write a book-length defense against it.

Conclusion

The division was and remains real, being fundamentally based on doctrinal differences and not merely differences in practice or moral purity. Moreover, it is not a misunderstanding, a matter of emphasis, or a quarrel about words. Rome and the Reformation give different answers to the question of how a sinner is accepted by God, and Trent stated its answer with an unmistakable clarity.

Trent is presented here because you cannot appreciate the seriousness of the Reformation without it.

Why It Matters

It made the division permanent. Before Trent, reunion was conceivable and men on both sides worked for it. After Trent, the two positions were formally incompatible, and a Catholic who held the Reformation doctrine of justification was under anathema by the law of his own church.

It defined Catholicism for four centuries. Tridentine doctrine, catechism, breviary, and missal shaped Roman Catholic life until the 1960s, and shape substantial parts of it still.

It launched the Counter-Reformation. With the Jesuits, founded in 1540, Trent gave Rome a program, a curriculum, and a disciplined clergy to carry them — and much of central Europe was recovered for Rome as a result.

It clarified what the argument is about. For a Protestant seeking to understand the difference between his church and Rome, the sixth session of Trent is the most useful document in existence, precisely because it leaves nothing vague.

Roman Catholic Councils