The Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation

To the Protestant Reformation, the Church answered not only with condemnations. In the Council of Trent and the great movement it opened, she reformed herself deeply and set forth her faith with a new clarity. This recovery, called the Catholic Reformation, gave the Church three centuries of vigor.

The Council of Trent

Gathered from 1545 by pope Paul III in the town of Trent, in the north of Italy, the council sat in stages over eighteen years. Two tasks awaited it, equally urgent: to reform the life of the Church, corrupted by abuses, and to define the faith, contested by the reformers. It accomplished both. Trent was the great Catholic answer to the rupture of the century.

These eighteen years covered three periods separated by long interruptions, imposed by wars and by tensions between the pope and the emperor; suspended for nearly ten years, the council was not reopened and brought to a close until 1563, under pope Pius IV, who confirmed all its decrees.

The Reform of Morals

Against the disorders that had fed the revolt, the council reformed discipline. It obliged bishops to reside in their dioceses and to preach there, curbed the trade in offices and corrected the abuses of indulgences. Above all, it ordered the founding in each diocese of a seminary to form priests seriously, which was perhaps its most lasting fruit. The Church began by sweeping before her own door, taking from the reformers a part of their most just grievances.

It abolished the trade in indulgences and the pardon-sellers who exploited it, while keeping the doctrine itself: the Church retains the power to remit the temporal penalties of sin, but no one may make a business of it.

The Clarification of the Faith

Faced with the new doctrines, Trent defined the Catholic faith point by point. Man is justified by the grace of God, received in faith; but he must cooperate with it, and his works, accomplished in grace, count for his salvation, against the principle of faith alone. The Word of God is borne together by Scripture and by Tradition, against the principle of Scripture alone; the council also fixed the list of the sacred books, including those the reformers cut out, and held the Latin translation of Saint Jerome, the Vulgate, to be the standard edition. The council confirmed the seven sacraments, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, purgatory, the veneration of the saints and the authority of the pope. To each point denied by the reformers, it opposed the faith of the Church, stated with precision. To carry this teaching to the people, pope Pius V then published a Roman catechism and a unified missal, which fixed the doctrine and the Mass for four centuries.

On the Eucharist, besides the real presence, it defined the Mass as a true sacrifice, that of the Cross made present under the species, which the reformers rejected, and retained the word transubstantiation to name the change of the bread and wine.

The Catholic Renewal

Around the council, a wave of holiness and zeal renewed the Church. New orders arose, above all the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius of Loyola, devoted to the pope, to teaching and to mission. Great saints appeared: Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross reforming Carmel and mapping the ways of prayer, Charles Borromeo as a model bishop, Francis de Sales calling even the laity to holiness. From the same surge set out the missionaries who carried the faith to the new worlds.

A Church Reformed and Sure of Herself

From the crisis, the Catholic Church emerged reformed, better instructed, more fervent, sure of her faith. She had lost the north of Europe, but was gaining whole continents. The teaching and discipline of Trent would order her life for four centuries, until the Second Vatican Council. The Reformation had wounded her unity; the Catholic Reformation had renewed her life.