The answer to the Reformation: Scripture and tradition, justification, the seven sacraments, the Mass — and a reform of the clergy that shaped Catholic life for four centuries.
- Where
- Trent, in the Prince-Bishopric — Trento, Italy
- Convoked by
- Pope Paul III, after more than a decade of delay caused by war between France and the Empire
- Pope
- Paul III, then Julius III, then Pius IV — the council outlasted three popes and was interrupted twice
- Emperor
- Charles V, then Ferdinand I
- Sat
- Opened 13 December 1545; closed 4 December 1563 — eighteen years, in three periods with two long suspensions
- Sessions
- Twenty-five sessions at Trent, an imperial prince-bishopric in the Alps chosen because it was Italian enough for the pope and German enough for the emperor
- Bishops present
- About thirty bishops at the opening — humiliatingly few — rising to roughly two hundred and fifty by the close
What it faced
By 1545 the Reformation was nearly thirty years old and no longer a quarrel among theologians. Half of Germany, all of Scandinavia, England and much of Switzerland were gone. The questions were not academic: where does Christian teaching come from, how is a sinner made right with God, what happens at the altar, and who has the authority to answer.
The emperor wanted a council to reconcile the Protestants and would have preferred it to postpone doctrine and begin with reform. The pope wanted doctrine settled first, since he thought the split had already happened. The council did both at once — a doctrinal decree and a reform decree at nearly every session — which is why it took eighteen years.
Protestants were invited and a few came under safe-conduct in the second period, but the memory of Constance and Jan Hus was not encouraging, and no reunion was ever within reach.
What it defined
- ✠That the Gospel is contained in written books and in unwritten traditions, and that both are received with equal reverence.
- ✠The canon of Scripture, including the seven deuterocanonical books the reformers had set aside.
- ✠That justification is by grace, that faith is its beginning and root, and that a person is not justified by faith alone in the sense of doing nothing and needing nothing further.
- ✠That there are seven sacraments, instituted by Christ, no more and no fewer.
- ✠That in the Eucharist the whole substance of the bread is converted into the body of Christ and the whole substance of the wine into his blood, which the Church fittingly calls transubstantiation.
- ✠That the Mass is a true and propitiatory sacrifice, the same sacrifice as the Cross, offered in an unbloody manner.
- ✠That every diocese must found a seminary to train its priests — the single most effective reform decree in Church history.
In its own words
“…receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety and reverence all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament… as also the said traditions, as well those appertaining to faith as to morals.”
“…faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification, without which it is impossible to please God and to come to the fellowship of His sons.”
“If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema.”
“…this sacrifice is truly propitiatory, and that by means thereof this is effected, that we obtain mercy, and find grace in seasonable aid.”
Its sessions
Twenty-five sessions over eighteen years, each pairing a decree of doctrine with a decree of reform.
- Session 4Scripture and tradition; the canon including the deuterocanonical books; the Vulgate declared authentic for public use; no private interpretation against the unanimous consent of the Fathers.
- Session 5Original sin, and what baptism does and does not remove.
- Session 6Justification — sixteen chapters and thirty-three canons, the most carefully drafted document of the council.
- Session 7The seven sacraments, defined together.
- Session 13The Real Presence and transubstantiation, which the council calls a most apt name for the conversion.
- Session 22The sacrifice of the Mass, and a decree against abuses in celebrating it.
- Session 23Holy orders, and the decree requiring a seminary in every diocese.
- Session 24Marriage: the decree Tametsi requiring a priest and two witnesses for validity, which ended clandestine marriage in Catholic Europe.
- Session 25Purgatory, the invocation of saints, relics, images and indulgences — with a stern decree against abuses in granting them.
- ✕It did not invent the seven sacraments, the Mass, the papacy or purgatory. Every one of them is older than the council by many centuries; what Trent did was define them against denial, in a technical vocabulary the earlier Church had not needed.
- ✕It did not condemn justification by faith. Read canon 9: what it anathematises is the claim that faith alone justifies 'in such wise as to mean that nothing else is required to co-operate'. Chapter 8 calls faith 'the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification'. That distinction is the whole of the argument, and it is why the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church were able to sign a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999.
- ✕It did not create the Latin Mass or forbid the vernacular for ever. It kept Latin and condemned the claim that Mass must be said in the vernacular; it also explicitly told pastors to explain the Mass to the people in their own language. The Missal that followed in 1570 was Pius V's work, not the council's.
- ✕It did not add books to the Bible. The deuterocanonical books were in the Septuagint the apostles used, in Christian Bibles for fifteen centuries, and listed by councils at Hippo and Carthage in the 390s.
What people think it did
Trent anathematised the Gospel by condemning justification by faith.
What happened: This is the most consequential misreading in the history of Christian division. Trent's own chapter 8 makes faith the foundation and root of justification, and its canon 1 anathematises anyone who says a man can be justified by his own works without grace. What canon 9 rejects is a specific construction of <em>sola fide</em> — one in which nothing else is required and the will need not be moved at all. The 1999 Joint Declaration between Catholics and Lutherans states a common understanding of justification by grace through faith, and records that the sixteenth-century condemnations, rightly understood, do not apply to the teaching each Church now presents.
Trent added seven books to the Bible at the Reformation to defend purgatory.
What happened: The order of events is the reverse. The deuterocanonical books stood in Christian Bibles from the beginning, were listed as canonical by the councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397, and appear in the great codices. What happened in the sixteenth century is that the reformers moved them out; Trent's decree of 1546 restated the older list against that removal.
What followed
Trent shaped Catholic life more thoroughly than any council before or since. The seminary decree alone transformed the priesthood within two generations, from an often barely literate class into an educated one; the parish registers of baptisms and marriages it required are, incidentally, the reason genealogy is possible in Catholic countries at all.
It also produced a definite Catholic identity in a way that had not existed before: a common catechism, a common breviary, a common missal, a common style. What historians call the Counter-Reformation and the Church calls the Catholic Reform runs directly out of these decrees, and so do Charles Borromeo, the seminaries, the missions, and the whole Baroque.
The settlement held for four hundred years, until Vatican II — which did not contradict Trent but addressed a world Trent had never imagined.
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Sources
Every date, figure and quotation on this page was checked against the conciliar text or a published translation before it was written, and independently re-checked by three separate passes over dates, quotations and theology. Where the sources disagree — attendance figures above all — the page gives the range rather than choosing.