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Martin Luther's revolt was, almost from the beginning, an essential matter,
i.e., it was explicitly directed against the pope's essential claim that he
is the ruler of the whole Church of Christ. He had already moved away from
the Catholic belief, in certain matters regarding the divine forgiveness of
sins, by the time he made the famous attack on Indulgences with which
Protestantism began (1517). Within a further six months he was writing that
the first thing needed in order to cure the manifold ills that afflicted
religion was to overthrow the whole accepted system of theological teaching
(1518). To the papal legate who now called on him, in the name of a
fundamental papal law, to withdraw his teaching about Indulgences Luther
replied by denying the validity of that law; and, within a few weeks, by
appealing from the pope who had commissioned the legate, to the judgment of
the next General Council whenever it should meet--an appeal made in due
legal form, and in defiance of the papal law that forbade such appeals. The
controversies continued without intermission, and a year later than the
appeal (i.e., in 1519) Luther's mind had moved so far that he now denied
that General Councils had any special divine protection that kept them from
erroneous teaching when deciding questions about belief.
These rebellious principles were listed among the errors for which Luther
was condemned by the papal bull Exsurge Domine (June 15, 1520). He was
given sixty days to appear and publicly recant his sayings. Instead, he
wrote two most violent--and exceedingly popular--pamphlets, the one to show
how the popes had systematically corrupted the whole teaching of Christ for
a thousand years and so led all the world astray, the other denouncing the
papal institution as a vast financial racket which, for centuries, had been
draining the life out of Germany. In impassioned phrases he called on the
princes of Germany to destroy the papacy, and to wash their hands in the
blood of the sacrilegious impostors at Rome. As to the bull Exsurge, Luther
waited until the fatal sixtieth day, and then with a vast amount of public
mockery, he threw it into the bonfire kindled on the town dunghill--and
into the flames he threw, after the bull, the whole collection of the
popes' laws binding the whole Church of Christ.
This was spectacular, and symbolical. Not for centuries had there been any
defiance so far-reaching--and with the encouragement and protection of the
state. To what means were the popes, drawing on a vast experience of
crisis, now to turn and so avert the general destruction that threatened
German Catholicism? There could only be one answer, since this was the
opening of the sixteenth century. From all quarters came a demand for the
classic panacea. The pope must call a General Council. And finally the
General Council met, the Council of Trent--but not until twenty-five years
after the great defiance of the appeal to the princes and the Wittenberg
bonfire.
Since in all that long time the needed council never ceased to be talked of
by Catholics and by rebels, by princes and by popes, and since it was amid
the angry dissensions on the subject between Catholic princes and the popes
that the men were largely formed who actually were the Council of Trent, to
recall something of those twenty-five unhappy years is a first condition of
understanding the history of the council, of its failures as of its
splendid successes.
The sentences of bishops, and popes also, against heretics were mere noise
until they were taken up by the State and put into execution. Luther was
assured that his own sovereign, the elector Frederick the Wise, would not
execute the bull Exsurge. It was however quite another thing to be assured
that the sentence would remain a dead letter once the pope had appealed to
the emperor and the princes of Germany, assembled at the first diet of the
new emperor's reign. It met at Worms in January 1521, and in the way it
both thwarted and supported the pope it was curiously prophetic of the
history of the coming years. The princes accepted the papal sentence, and
they made it their own by outlawing Luther. Whoever could, might kill him
without fear of punishment, as though he were a dangerous bandit. But they
ignored the papal sentence to this extent that they re-tried Luther; that
is to say, they gave him a hearing, under a safe conduct, refusing to
listen to the protestations of the ambassador whom the pope had sent to
direct the action of the diet. The action of this solemn assembly was thus
a great public flouting of the papal law, a serious repudiation, in a most
serious matter, of the will of the man whom all these princes acknowledged
to be the head of their church.
This is not the place in which to tell again the familiar story of the
events of the next ten years. But something must be said, however briefly,
about the papal delay in applying the only remedy that could meet the
German situation--the General Council.
The general attitude towards the plan of a General Council may thus be
summed up: the man who was pope through the greater part of the period,
Clement VII (1523-34), was at heart consistently hostile; the cardinals and
other officers of his Curia were, for quite other reasons, still more
hostile; the German Catholics were eager for a council, but a council in
which they would really matter, a council fashioned rather after the
pattern of a parliament than General Councils have usually been; the
Catholic kings who enter the story are Charles I of Spain (just lately
become the emperor Charles V), the life-long champion of the council idea,
and Francis I of France, its bitterest opponent. And the history of Europe
during the crucial twenty-five years, 1520-45, is little more than the
history of the duel between these two princes. In their wars Clement VII,
as often as he dared, sided with the King of France, for purely political
reasons--it was, invariably, the side that lost.
The council problem comes to this, that a General Council was absolutely
necessary, and that, for political reasons, it was just not possible to
summon one. Whence, inevitably, on the part of Charles V, and of the German
princes, a succession of schemes to bring back the Lutherans (for this, in
the early years, is what it was hoped the council would achieve) by
negotiations, conferences, local councils, informal councils, and the like.
All of these failed and, in the long run, these ventures complicated the
problem of reconciliation or submission; while the refusal of the Holy See
really to take action gradually destroyed all confidence in its integrity
among the Catholic princes of Germany. To such a depth, indeed, had the
prestige of Rome sunk that when the successor of this timorous,
vacillating, and all too worldly-wise pope announced, in the first hours of
his reign, that he proposed to summon a General Council, the news stirred
not a ripple among the Catholic reformers of Germany.
This second pope was Paul III (1534-49) and ultimately he lived to see the
council he had dreamed of meet at Trent, but after bitter vicissitudes--for
some of which history must hold his own personal failings responsible. The
catalogue of these events needs to be set down.
By the time of the election of Paul III (October 13, 1534) the situation in
Germany had radically altered since Leo X had first faced the problem in
the Diet of Worms (1521). The Lutheran movement had long since passed from
the stage where it was a matter of preachers and writers and the masses
they influenced. The state was now in control of it, half a dozen princes
in central Germany and a number of leading cities north and south. In all
these places the adherents of the new religion and the preachers were
organised into churches, installed in the buildings that had once been
Catholic; monasticism had been abolished and the monks' properties taken
over by the state; the clergy who wished had married, with the state's
approval; the mass was everywhere forbidden and the new rites made
obligatory; and these Lutheran states were banded together in a formidable
military alliance, so powerful that it had been able (at a moment when a
Turkish invasion threatened) to ignore the diet's summons to disband and
submit, and furthermore it had won for their sect's new status in these
regions a provisional acquiescence from the emperor.
One root of Clement VII's troubles had been his ambition to strengthen the
hold of his family--the Medici--as rulers in what had been the republic of
Florence. With Paul III there was the like family concern, to see his son,
Pierluigi, established among the reigning families of Europe. In the end
the pope succeeded, giving him in fief the duchies of Parma and Piacenza,
carved out of the States of the Church, and marrying Pierluigi's son--
Ottavio--to a natural daughter of Charles V. The intricate business of
forcing his offspring into the charmed circle of royalty-by-birth, the
negotiations with Charles for example over recognition of the new duchies,
runs like a subtle poison through what was, despite the very evident
Renaissance worldliness of this great pope, the leading policy of his
reign, the calling of this council that would reform the life of the Church
and heal the divisions in Germany.
Paul III's first obstacle was his cardinals, who voted unanimously against
the plan to call a council, when he proposed it. After an exhaustive study
of the situation in Germany--a matter where he had everything to learn--he
despatched nuncios to all the courts of Europe, to the Lutherans as well,
with invitations to attend. The French king was unfavourable, the German
Protestants refused with insults. In these negotiations a whole year went
by, and then, on June 2, 1536, the official announcement was made: the
council would meet at Mantua, May 23, 1537. What followed next, however,
was a whole series of postponements that finally brought the Catholics of
Germany to feel that the new pope was as shifty as the old; postponements
first to November 1537, then to May 1538, then to April 1539, and then a
postponement indefinitely.
The reasons given were real enough, the steady refusal of the French king
to co-operate (i.e., in practice, the impossibility of any French bishop or
cardinal taking part in the council), the renewal of the war between France
and the emperor, and so forth. But it came to be believed that the true
cause was that the pope really preferred that the council should not ever
take place.
Actually, as the years went by, Paul III came to understand that the task
before the council was much more complex than he had conceived, or his
official advisors. As was to be the case with the Vatican Council, three
hundred years later, the official world began by oversimplifying the
problem. The heresies, it was thought, could be simply dealt with by re-
enacting the various decrees in which, at their first appearance, centuries
before, they had been condemned. There would, of course, be no need to
discuss such burning topics as the reform of the Curia Romana--that was not
the business of any council, but a matter for the pope's personal action.
The reform of Catholic life, again, called for no great research; the old
laws were adequate, if only they were enforced. The council, once it met,
would accomplish its task in a matter of weeks. Actually, the working time
of the Council of Trent--to anticipate the story--was to amount to four and
a half years; the constant hard work of the bishops and theologians who
attended would produce a mass of decrees and canons exceeding in volume the
whole of the legislation of all the previous eighteen General Councils.
What was also gradually borne in on Paul III was that the kind of council
he had in mind--the traditional meeting of bishops--was not at all what
Charles V was thinking of, nor the Catholics of Germany. Was the coming
council to begin with a new religious crisis, with all these champions of
the council demanding a say in how it should conduct its business, in what
should appear upon its agenda? The Catholic critics of the intolerable
abuses--for which the Roman Curia was generally held responsible--now
expected to be heard, at the council. Luther's insistent cry, that there
would never be any reform so long as Rome controlled the council, found
echoes in the secret thoughts of many of Luther's Catholic adversaries.
And the achievement of the councils of Constance and of Basel, in those
sessions ever since officially disregarded, came into the mind of more than
one Catholic reformer as the obvious instrument to bring off the desired
improvement. The acts of these councils, the wholeheartedly Catholic bishop
of Vienna (for example) wrote to Rome, were indispensable as a guide to the
council now under consideration. German bishops, supporting the pope's
desire for a council, were taking for granted that just as they desired it
should meet in Germany, so it would follow the pattern of these two classic
German councils. How was the pope to accept this position, and not risk at
the outset a new damaging controversy about the nature of his own
authority? a controversy that might send thousands of Catholics in Germany,
not, indeed, into the Lutheran body but into schism no less disastrous.
Then there were the Catholics who, for years, had been thinking that unless
the power of the Curia to grant dispensations were checked, reform
legislation would be a dead letter from the day it was enacted.
"The pope was not merely having bad dreams when he saw these dangers."[340]
And so he hesitated, time and again, and even when he did not hesitate he
failed to be insistent. With all his gifts--and with the merit of the great
reform he had achieved in his own personal life--Paul III was far from that
perfect state where the supernatural controls every act and every thought.
He was not a saint. And as his great servant Cardinal Girolamo Morone once
expressed it, "He who conducts God's business must not be exclusively
actuated by human considerations."[341]
The emperor now won over the pope to try what another, much lauded method
might do to bring peace to Germany, the method of peaceful negotiation
between the theologians of both parties, with reunion (perhaps) as the
fruit of "a better understanding of what it is that divides us." For many
years some leading Catholics had been urging that this way promised better
results, some of them influenced in part--let it be bluntly stated--by the
fatal delusion that the differences between the Church and the Lutheran
bodies did not amount to a real separation. This seemingly incredible
blindness had one source in the dangerous superficialities of Erasmus, who,
for example, saw no reason why any differences mattered provided men agreed
in accepting Christ, and who could not understand why either party would
not accept as a sufficient statement of the Eucharistic mystery the
unexamined ambiguity that Christ is here present somehow. The "appalling"
intellectual confusion of which Jedin[342] speaks is indeed, by this time, a
leading characteristic of the age among the Catholics.
Let it be remembered, also, that in the twenty years since the somewhat
elementary directions of the bull Exsurge, Rome had not said a word about
the divergencies. Lutheranism had, since then, developed all its doctrines,
and a varied host of Catholic writers, each according to his lights and
temperament, had, in criticising the heresiarch, offered his own solution
for the new theological problems he had posed. For the Catholic princes and
their political advisors the "conference" method offered this advantage
that an official business like the General Council must result in clear-cut
definitions of doctrine; in sentences, that is to say, and a summons to
accept these or take the appropriate punishment; in strong resistance, and-
-who knows?--in civil war. And this with Francis I longing to renew the war
against Charles; and the French ally, the Turk, already at the gates! Of
the emperor's critical position, in the world of armies, of the grave risk
of a Catholic defeat, the belligerents in the Sacred College and the Curia
knew all too little. Paul III never lost sight of all this. His knowledge
was one reason for his reluctance to act with decision.
The high-water mark of the reunion-through-negotiation movement was the
conference held at Ratisbon in the summer of 1541 about which historians
are still arguing. This history is of interest because it does much to
explain what, at first sight, is utterly incomprehensible, viz., that
nearly thirty years went by before the vitally necessary council met, and
also because it reveals the nature of one serious weakness that hampered
the Catholic champions in these critical years.
To Ratisbon, where most of the princes of Germany attended and the emperor
himself, there came two of the principal reformers, Philip Melanchthon and
Martin Bucer, the last-named bringing with him a reformer of the second
generation who was soon to eclipse in influence all the rest, the young
John Calvin. The pope sent, as legate, the Venetian Gaspar Contarini,
theologian and statesman, the greatest figure the Curia had known for
generations, and a man of saintly life. If Contarini, a steady opponent of
extreme solutions, went to Ratisbon still really believing that
disagreement about the essentials was not so serious as many believed, he
was soon enlightened. Though he contrived an apparent, momentary harmony on
the question of Justification, there was no resolving the flat
contradictions he encountered on the doctrines of the Eucharist and of the
sacrament of Penance. The conference failed utterly, and when Paul III
announced that the preparation for the General Council would be resumed the
emperor did not dissent. The conference had had this useful result: it
demonstrated to the "practical" minds the truth which the controversial
theology of twenty years had ever insisted on, that Catholicism and the new
theologies were contradictory, and impossible to reconcile.
The bull convoking the council is dated May 22, 1542. It was to meet on
November 1 following, at the episcopal city of Trent, the first town
outside Italy on the great road along which for a thousand years and more
the traffic had travelled between Rome and Germany. Trent was a city of the
empire, a German city where the bishop was also the reigning prince. Eighty
miles to the north, along the same road, is Innsbruck, the capital of
Charles V as Count of Tyrol.
The three legates appointed to preside arrived at Trent on November 2. They
found scarcely a single bishop awaiting them. In January 1543 the
representatives of the emperor arrived, and very slowly bishops came in--
very slowly, for by May there were no more than a dozen. The fact was that
four months before the summons of Paul III's bull, the long-expected war
had broken out between France and the empire. Francis I had explicitly
refused to countenance the council, and had forbidden the hundred bishops
of France to leave the country. The emperor, driven to fury by the pope's
determined neutrality in the war, had taken a similar course, barring out
thereby any participation of the bishops, not only from Spain, but from his
kingdom of the Two Sicilies (110 bishops), from the Netherlands, from
Austria and Hungary; and affording an excuse for all the bishops of the
empire. A General Council, at a time when three fourths of the bishops of
the world were violently prevented from attending? By July 1543 there was
only one thing to be done, suspend the council yet once again.
How, upon the peace between the rival sovereigns (September 1544), Francis
I withdrew his prohibition, while Charles was reconciled to the pope, and
how next there supervened the new trouble over the investment of the pope's
son with the duchies of Parma and Piacenza--all these highly relevant
matters must be studied elsewhere.[343] But in November 1544 Paul III revoked
the suspension of the council, and on March 13, 1545, the legates once more
made their entry into Trent.
The council was solemnly opened there on December 13, with thirty-one
bishops in attendance and forty-eight theologians and canonists, technical
experts, summoned to assist them.
It will perhaps help the reader if, before the attempt is made to convey
what is contained in the legislation of Trent--itself equal in volume to
this present work--it is stated, once and for all, that the various
political difficulties that had delayed the council's meeting for so many
years never ceased to harass it during its entire progress. Here, of
course, lay the cause of the two long suspensions which the council
suffered--one of four years and one of ten. The council's history has, in
fact, three chapters: sessions 1-10, December 13, 1545, to June 2, 1547;
sessions 11-16, May 1, 1551, to April 28, 1552; sessions 17-25, January 17,
1562, to December 4, 1563
What I now propose to do is to explain how the council organised itself,
how the bishops and the technicians did their work, and then to show, by
some examples, the tone of the council's treatment of the twofold task
before it, viz., the restatement of belief in opposition to the new
theologies, and the reformation of Catholic life.
The direction of the council was in the hands of the three cardinal-
legates. Of these the senior, Gian Maria del Monte, a man of fifty-eight,
had been in the service of the papal curia for well over thirty years. He
was esteemed one of its leading canonists and had a vast experience of
administration, civil and ecclesiastical. He was the practical man of the
trio, level-headed, firm, and a good manager of men. The second in rank,
Marcello Cervini, was another type altogether, a theologian primarily and a
man of rigidly austere life, dedicated passionately to the extirpation of
the abuses that had almost become an ecclesiastical institution. He was not
really a curialist at all, and had come to the notice of Paul III as a
tutor to the pope's two grandsons whom the old man had made cardinals, at
the age of fifteen, in the opening weeks of his reign. The third legate was
the solitary English cardinal, Reginald Pole, the near kinsman of King
Henry VIII, and an exile for his faith this many a year. His mother, and
other relations, had some years before been executed by the king, and the
cardinal was continuously in danger from the Italian bravos whom Henry
hired to assassinate him. Pole, at forty-five, was roughly Cervini's
contemporary, a scholar primarily, the Christian humanist indeed, and
learned in the Fathers, in the new Renaissance manner. With his great
friend Contarini, whom a premature death had carried off in 1542, he was
regarded by all as the very embodiment of the Catholic Reformation. It fell
to him to write the opening address of the legates to the council--a frank
admission that it was clerical sin mainly that had brought religion to this
pass, and a passionate plea for sincerity in the deliberations. One who was
present has recorded that as the secretary of the council read the speech,
the bishops instinctively turned to look at Pole, recognising from its tone
and content who was its actual author. Paul III could have given no clearer
sign of his own sincerity than in this association of Cervini and Pole in
the direction of the longed-for council.[344]
As to procedure, the bishops decided that only bishops and generals of
religious orders should have the right to a vote. The question whether to
treat doctrinal matters first (as the pope required, to the anger of
Charles V) or the reforms, they settled by treating both simultaneously--
along with each decree about a doctrine called in question by the reformers
there would be enacted a definite law about reforms. After some experiments
the following system of work was adopted. The technicians would debate the
proposed decree with the bishops assisting as an audience. This was the
meeting called the "particular congregation" of the council. Next the
bishops, meeting alone, discussed the matter under the presidency of the
legates--the "general congregation"--and came to a final conclusion about
the text. Then, in a public meeting called a "session," an open vote was
taken and the decree read out as the council's definition. In the first
chapter of the council's history the public sessions took place in the
cathedral of Trent, later in the church of S. Maria Maggiore. The
particular congregations were held in various mansions of the little city.
Of the twenty-five public sessions between 1545 and 1563, seventeen were
devoted to definition of doctrine and the promulgation of reform laws. The
rest were ceremonial occasions for the transacting of the inevitable legal
formalities--the opening of the council, the various suspensions, and
reopenings, and so forth.
The technical work done by the bishops, the theologians, and the canonists
was of a very high order, and the work was done thoroughly. It took, for
example, seven months to hammer out the decree on the key doctrine of
Justification, forty-four particular congregations and sixty-one general
congregations. The decrees about belief especially are evidence of the
theological revival that had begun with the emergence of the great figure
of Cajetan, and is marked by the teaching of Francis de Vittoria and Soto--
the last named of whom actually took part in the council. The language of
the decrees, again, is that of men influenced by the new classical learning
of the Renaissance--as is that other literary monument of the council, the
so-called Catechism of the Council of Trent. And all in all, the
theological achievement of Trent is a memorial to the small band of
competent writers who, from Luther's first adventure, had never ceased to
examine critically and to expose the weaknesses and the mischievousness of
his theology.
It was a small band also who, at Trent, whether of the theologians or of
bishops, brought about this great result. The modern French historian who,
to a statement similar to this, appends the word heureusement was not
merely cynical. The comparatively small number of bishops made for
manageable discussions. When, three hundred years later, there appeared at
the Vatican Council some seven hundred or so bishops and, in the early
days, the drafts of decrees prepared proved inadequate, and debates dragged
on endlessly, a prelate who knew his history said, feelingly, "If the
Fathers of Trent could rise from their graves, they would disown us." The
number of bishops present at the Tridentine sessions varied greatly. At the
opening of the council there were, besides the legates, 32. During the
remainder of this first (1545-47) period the numbers gradually increased to
68. In the two sessions of the second (1551-52) period there were 44 and
51, respectively. The third (1562-63) period began with 105, and rose to
228 at the session of November 11, 1563. At the closing session there were
176. As well as the bishops, there were also present the generals of five
religious orders, who were full members of the council, with the right to
speak and to vote. Two of these played a principal role in the council, the
Augustinian Girolamo Seripando[345] in the Paul III period of the council,
and the Jesuit, Diego Lainez in the two closing years.
Throughout the council, the great majority of the bishops were from Italian
sees--which does not imply that they were all equally at the disposal of
the Curia Romana. The Italy of the sixteenth century was not, of course, a
single unified national state. In central Italy--one sixth of the whole
Italian territory--the pope was the sovereign. To the south and in Sicily
and Sardinia, it was Charles V (as King of Naples) who ruled, and he also
ruled the Duchy of Milan in the north. Whether the 110 bishops of the
kingdom of Naples were likely to favour papal policies against those of
their king needs no telling. To the east of Milan lay the Venetian
Republic, one of the most powerful states in Europe which, notoriously and
for generations, had taken its own line in ecclesiastical affairs. In a
list of 270 bishops present, at one time or another, during the third
period of the council, 187 are set down as "Italians," 31 are Spaniards, 26
French, with no more than 2 from Germany.
The various orders of friars played a great part in the council, furnishing
the bulk of the theological experts, and--many others of them--sitting as
bishops. There were no fewer than 23 Dominican bishops at the council, for
instance, and a total of 28 Dominican theologians besides. It was at Trent
that St. Thomas Aquinas first really came into his own as the doctor
communis among the theologians.
The prestige of the Council of Trent was to approach the fabulous in the
ensuing centuries. And not surprisingly. In answer to the challenge of the
reformers it had surveyed anew the greater part of the Christian belief and
had reaffirmed it, always with an especial explicitness about the points
where Luther and the rest had gone astray. It had looked directly in the
face the dreadful disorders that had for centuries disfigured the practice
of religion, and had laid the axe to the root of the tree. It had no less
boldly innovated in the remedies it provided. The decrees of Trent "remain
to this very day, the most noble part of all the Church's legislation," a
modern authority can say.[346] All this is what every man knows about the
Council of Trent. It remains for us to examine, a little more in detail,
what those scores of pages of reform decrees contain. Perhaps the summary
will be less deadly if it follows the simple historical fact that the
council abolished altogether many practices hitherto lawful, and introduced
much that was new, and that it hoped to secure the future observance of
what it now decreed by the related legal devices of a new kind of power for
the diocesan bishop and of penalties for wrongdoing that would work
automatically. The summary list of the achievements that follows is not, of
course, complete, and it does not follow the chronological order of the
sessions.
Of all the chronic scandals of the fourteen to the sixteenth centuries none
had given rise to more continuous resentment than the papal licences to
ecclesiastics to hold more than one see, or abbey, or parish
simultaneously--scandals connected with what is called compendiously, the
benefice system. Trent utterly forbade this practice--even where the
beneficiaries were cardinals--and the council ordered all existing
pluralists to surrender all but one of the benefices they held. It
abolished, also, all expectatives, that is to say, all grants of posts when
they next fell vacant; and, with these, "coadjutorships with the right of
succession," the practice whereby the benefice-holder secured, in his own
lifetime, the nomination of his successor (a relative usually) to whom,
when something better for himself turned up, he could surrender the parish,
or canonry, or see. The choice of coadjutors to sees was strictly reserved
henceforth to the pope. Meanwhile the third chronic benefice scandal was
checked--the absentee priest or abbot or bishop, who never even saw his
flock but merely drew the profits while a hireling tended them at a salary.
Dealing with which the council roundly says, "The law about residence has
become in practice a dead letter." The new method of dealing with this old
trouble was to forbid all licences allowing clerics with a cure of souls to
reside away from their posts, to set out in detail the limits of the
temporary leave annually allowed them, and to provide an automatic penalty
of loss of right to the income--so that the delinquent who managed to get
the income was, in effect, stealing it and bound to restitution. No more
were there to be sees where, like Milan, no archbishop had resided for a
hundred years.
Other dispensations, to the profit of the benefice-hunting cleric, which
were now abolished were the permissions which enabled newly appointed
bishops to delay their consecration all but indefinitely, so that boys
could be appointed to sees, draw their revenues (or their parents draw them
in their stead), and, when arrived at an age to be ordained and
consecrated, could remain in their semi-lay state until, succeeding to some
lay dignity, they chose to resign an abbey or see, marry and found a
family. No one, henceforward, is to be appointed to a see who has not been
in Holy Orders for at least six months, and he must be consecrated within
six months, or the appointment lapses. For lesser clerics, the
dispensation, so often given, to delay receiving the orders which were the
very condition of holding the post was likewise abolished; and also
licences to be ordained by whatever bishop the cleric chose. Bishops were
now told that it was their duty to ordain personally all the clerics
destined to work in their own particular sees. The benefice-holder not yet
ordained must go for ordination to the bishop of the diocese where his
benefice lay.
Money--the cleric's need and desire for more and more of it--was certainly
one main cause of the religious malaise whence Luther's chance came. Trent
cut away two perennial sources of trouble by abolishing, under most
stringent automatic penalties, the custom by which bishops, making the
visitation of their dioceses, either levied a tax on the parishes visited,
or were given tributes of affection, free gifts, etc., in the shape of
money, and otherwise. And it abolished similar age-long customs for the
benefit of the bishop at ordinations. Finally the council remembered
Luther, and how his revolution had started, in 1517, with a declaration
against Indulgences which stressed the scandals deriving from the
connection between these and the Christian duty to give alms to pious
causes. The council speaks of these abuses as the occasion of heretical
blasphemies, and of the wickedness of the alms collectors' practices being
the source of great mischief to the ordinary Catholic. The very office--
name and thing--of clerical "alms-collector" (questor in Latin) is
therefore abolished, the council bluntly stating that after two centuries
of lawmaking there seemed to be no hope of their amendment. The duty of
announcing Indulgences was reserved henceforward to the bishop of the
diocese, and, for the future, the giving of an alms was never to be the
necessary condition for the gaining of an Indulgence.
Finally, in the matter of marriage, the council restricted the force of the
law which forbade marriage between in-laws (so to call them) related
through sinful sex relations,[347] between those related through a brother or
sister's solemn espousals (sponsalia), or by the spiritual relationship set
up through the sacrament of baptism--the council frankly admitted that the
number of these prohibitions had become an occasion of sin to very many, of
invalid marriages, for example, contracted in ignorance, which the partners
refused to abandon, and which could not be broken off without danger of
further sin. The council also abolished secret marriages--marriages where
none need be present but the man and woman who contracted the marriage.
Such marriages--provided the parties were really free to marry--were true
marriages. But since the fact of the marrying could not be proved by
independent testimony, and since the mutual contradiction of the two
partners (should one of them choose to abandon the other) was not capable
of resolution, these secret marriages were a chronic source of trouble. The
Church, says the council's decree (Tametsi, November 11, 1563), "has ever
held the practice in detestation, and strictly forbidden it." To contract a
marriage in this way was, generally speaking, a grave sin. Those married in
this clandestine fashion were, once the fact was discovered or admitted,
condemned to a public penance in reparation of the scandal, and compelled
to renew their matrimonial pledges in due form in the parish church. The
council's proposal, to decree that clandestine marriages were, by the fact,
not marriages at all, met with strong opposition. All, of course,
acknowledged the terrible evil they had caused from time immemorial, but
many bishops doubted whether the Church had the power to make the
declaration which, for the future, nullified all marriages but those
contracted before three witnesses, one of whom must be the parish priest
(parochus, i.e., "pastor" in the modern American parlance) or a priest
licensed by him or by the bishop.[348] The reader will perceive, behind the
objection, the shade of a doctrinal controversy about the power of the
Church of Christ with reference to the matter and form of the sacraments.
To avoid the chance of a debate about this, the council dealt with the
practical problem only, and it is among the disciplinary reforms, and not
among the decrees on doctrine, that the great change was placed. At the
same time the council refused to declare null for the future marriages of
young people made without the consent of their parents. "Had there been no
other reason for calling this council," said a bishop who took part in
it,[349] "this task alone, the condemnation of furtive marriages, would have
justified its being summoned, for there was not a corner of the world that
this plague had not infected, the occasion, for generations, of an infinity
of wicked deeds."[350]
The bishop's arm as a reformer is strengthened, time and again, in the
Tridentine reforms, by the clause that he acts "as delegated for this by
the Holy See." This in such matters as these: the visitation of all
chapters within his diocese, of all monasteries which are held "in
commendam,"[351] and of all "pious places," i.e., places of pilgrimage,
shrines, and so forth; for the examination of all dispensations sent
through him, from Rome, to his subjects (and henceforth it is always to the
petitioner's bishop that dispensations will be sent), of all Roman
permissions to change the terms of wills; the examination and correction of
all notaries, a race whose costly incompetence is frequently complained of;
the correction of all secular clerics who live in his diocese, and of all
regulars there who are not living within a monastery; for the summary, out-
of-hand correction of notorious and defiant concubinary clerics, and for
the suppression of all abuses and superstitions centering round the mass.
In all these cases the bishop's sentence takes effect immediately. He is
given the like power to unite neighbouring parishes, and to divide parishes
that are, geographically, too large, and this whether the priests are
willing or not, and he may finance the new from the revenues of the old as
he judges best. Where the priest is too ignorant to preach, the bishop may
provide him with a better instructed curate, fix his salary and compel the
parish priest to pay it. Dilapidated churches are a frequent subject of
comment in all medieval church records. The bishop's powers "as delegated,"
etc., make it possible to compel the repair of churches, i.e., to compel
those to whom the parish revenues are paid to finance the repairs, even the
repairs of monastic churches where the superior of the local abbot is
negligent in this duty. Finally, he may use the same power to finance, out
of the revenues of the cathedral chapter, the new public lectureship of
Sacred Scripture which he is ordered to institute in his see-city, the
Scripture teaching in the diocesan "high school," and the diocesan seminary
which he is now ordered to found. One sometimes hears the nonsense that
never have bishops really been bishops since the Council of Trent.
Actually, with Trent there came to an end, once and for all, that reign of
the exemptions from episcopal authority which had plunged the Church into
an anarchy that had well nigh destroyed her religious life, so that Pole,
as legate at the council, could speak of "the almost ruined Church."
There are three phrases that continually recur in this new legislation,
tamquam delegatus, deinceps (i.e., henceforward), and ipso iure, a phrase
of the same force as our own common expression, English now as well as
Latin, ipso facto--the fact here, being the law in which the phrase
appears. This is the magical automatic penalty. The law issues an order,
and states a penalty, and the delinquent incurs the penalty immediately he
breaks the law, sometimes a spiritual penalty such as excommunication,
sometimes the loss of a title to income. Some of these penalties we have
met already, incidentally, on our voyage through the forest. Here are more
specimens. It is the bishop who is the subject chiefly affected. The
bishops at Trent are legislating about their own order; they are reforming
bishops, securing to the best of their powers that "Never again," etc.,
etc. It is with laws providing against the catastrophe of bad bishops that
the council's reforms, indeed, begin; to which the blunt honest words of
Pole's keynote speech, at the opening of the council, all but compelled
them. "Let us come to what are called abuses.... It will be found that it
is our ambition, our avarice, our cupidity that have wrought all these
evils on the people of God." Trent may indeed have been the glorious
triumph of orthodoxy over the new heresies, but we shall fail wholly to
understand the real changes it brought about, unless we see also in the
council the repentant episcopate, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. "Before
the tribunal of God's mercy we, the shepherds, should make ourselves
responsible for all the evils now burdening the flock of Christ ... not in
generosity but in justice...." So Pole, once more.
These reforming bishops, then, use the device of the "automatic" penalty so
that the absentee bishop loses the right to his income, and the pluralist
is deprived of sees he will not resign; that the concubinary prelate who
defies the warnings of the provincial council loses his see; that the
bishop becomes (in law) a thief who accepts gifts from those he ordains or
from the parishes and other churches where he is making the visitation; and
that the metropolitan is deprived of his right to officiate who fails to
report to Rome the fact of a defiantly absentee suffragan. It is in the
same way, too, that the pluralist of lesser degree is reached, and the non-
preaching parish priest is fined.
The simplest remedy for whatever has been amiss in these matters is to
appoint to the office none but good men, competently endowed with the
needed natural gifts and technical training. And on this subject the
council has much to say, about preliminary enquiries before the
appointments are made. Ultimately the responsibility lies with that supreme
authority whose bulls are the essential element in all these appointments.
The council ventures to hint at negligence here as the chief source of the
evils. "In the last place, this holy synod, troubled by the number of these
most serious evils, cannot refrain from putting on record, that nothing is
more necessary for the Church of God than that the most blessed pope of
Rome, who by his office is bound to the care of the whole Church, should
give this particular matter his closest attention, [namely] to associate
with himself, as cardinals, only men of exceptional character and gifts,
and to appoint as diocesan bishops the very best and most suitable; and
this all the more because our Lord, Jesus Christ, will require at his hands
the blood of those sheep of Christ who have perished through the wicked
misgovernment of neglectful bishops unmindful of their duty."[352]
Both cardinals and bishops are explicitly warned that the natural affection
of a man for his kinsfolk breeds nepotism, that this affection can be "a
seeding-plot of many evils in the Church." So the council forbids these
personages to provide for their relations out of church revenues. If they
are poor folk, they may, of course, be succoured like other poor folk. And
one of the most obnoxious troubles of the past centuries is faced when the
council begs bishops to be moderate in the use of excommunication, "for
experience teaches that if this penalty is inflicted rashly, and for slight
offences, it provokes contempt, not fear, and works harm to the offender
rather than good"--excommunication being, in the mind of the Church, not a
vindictive act but medicinal, something done to bring a man to his senses.
Bishops are warned especially not to allow themselves, in this matter, to
be made the tools of the state, excommunicating according to the wish of
the prince.
Two more items in this lengthy selection and we have done; one of them
about the layman--a rare subject for direct notice in these Canon Law
sections. The subject is duels, the use of which, as an acknowledged social
convention among the nobles--and what a curse it was to be down to the mid-
nineteenth century!--is now first establishing itself. The council's
principle is that the man who kills another in a duel is a murderer. The
man killed dies with the stigma that his last intention, too, was murder.
The seconds are accessories to murder, and the friends of the parties who
assemble to see the duel are approvers. All, then, are henceforward
punished by ipso facto penalties: the principals and the seconds are
excommunicated, and incur the legal penalty of "perpetual infamy"--never
again will a court of law consider their testimony in any case before it;
they rank as professional criminals, and are all to be held as murderers.
If one of the party is killed in the duel he is not to be given Christian
burial. All who encourage the duel, and the spectators, are also, by the
fact, excommunicated. Rulers, whatever their rank (and the emperor is
explicitly mentioned), who make provision for the fighting of duels--
providing a kind of official duelling ground (for example) are ipso facto
excommunicated, and lose all their jurisdiction over the place where this
is situated, if it is a fief of the Church; if it is held by a lay prince,
the place reverts to the suzerain.
"With regard to the ordination of priests, Holy Father, no care whatever is
taken," the cardinalitial committee on reform had reported to Paul III,
eight years before the council met. "The most ignorant of men," they said,
"and sprung from the dregs of society, and even themselves depraved, mere
youths, are everywhere admitted to holy orders." We touch on one of the
great mysteries of medieval Catholicism, not that there were bad priests,
but that the Church never faced the problem of training and educating the
rank and file of the parochial clergy--and this in the centuries which saw
the rise of such remarkable formative institutions as the monastic orders
and the orders of friars. Here, more than in any other point, with Trent a
new age begins. "Youth, unless rightly trained, sinks to the pursuit of the
lustful pleasures of the world," say the venerable Fathers of the council.
"Unless a boy has been formed in habits of prayer and religion from his
tenderest years, before the habits of adult vice can take root, he will
never perfectly persevere in ecclesiastical discipline, unless by some very
great and more than ordinary grace from God." So the council now decrees
that every bishop shall set up a special college where picked boys shall
live and be given a religious training, be taught to live the clerical
life. These are to be boys who give promise of perseverance in the Church's
service, poor boys preferably. They must be twelve years old at least, and
able to read and write well, and of legitimate birth. This college "will
become a permanently fruitful seed-bed (seminarium) of ministers of God."
The council, in this aside, has given the new institution the name it will
henceforward always bear--the seminary. The programme of studies is next
set out, and the way of life: daily mass, monthly confession, Holy
Communion as often as the boy's confessor judges. On Sundays, and at the
great feasts, the seminarians will assist at the services in the cathedral,
hard by which the college is to be placed, or in other churches in the
town. Unsuitable boys, the incorrigible above all and the troublemakers,
are to be sent away. As the years pass, they receive minor orders and go on
to their professional studies, Holy Scripture, ecclesiastical treatises,
the administration of the sacraments (especially the hearing of
confessions), the Church's ritual. They will receive Holy Communion more
frequently once they are in minor orders, and will begin to be associated
with the practical work of the parish clergy. Once they receive the
subdiaconate they are to communicate every week. For this first of the
major orders they must be twenty-one years of age completed, for the
diaconate twenty-two, for the priesthood twenty-four. The foundation of
these new colleges the bishops are to take in hand quam primum--at the
earliest opportunity.
The remainder of this very long decree is taken up with rules about the
choice of teachers, and their needed academic qualifications. As to
finance, the bishop is given exceptionally wide powers to call upon all the
ecclesiastical revenues of his diocese, of the regulars (even the exempt)
as well as the diocesan clergy, the mendicant orders alone excepted.
Special provision is made for the diocese that is too poor or too small to
provide its own seminary.
These clergy, thus carefully trained, and now duly ordered, how are they to
live? The sixteenth-century parish rarely needed more than one priest to
attend to it--so numerous were the parish churches, even in the cities.[353]
In most churches there were chapels built by pious men of means, where mass
was daily offered for the repose of the souls of themselves and their
family--the chantries. The funds left were sufficient to keep the priest
appointed to the duty--this was his benefice. Very often also he served as
schoolmaster. Now one of the trials of the pious man down to the end of the
Middle Ages had been the sight of the horde of beggar-priests--priests
without any benefice at all, driven to live by their wits out of the
general benevolence of the laity. As well as founding the seminary system,
Trent forbade bishops to ordain candidates who could never be of service,
and also all who were not able, at their ordination, to bring legal proof
that they were in peaceful possession of a benefice the income of which was
enough to support them. Even good, suitable candidates are not to be
ordained, says the new law, if they are lacking here. This benefice, if it
is the only one the priest possesses, he is never allowed to resign without
expressly stating that it is the benefice by title of which he was
ordained.
The sixteen dogmatic decrees of the council, for all their terse style,
would run to some sixty pages of this size even in a terse translation.
Little more can be done than to list them, and for the student of history
especially, to point out the excellent starting point they are for the
study of the Catholic religion as it was in the early sixteenth century,
and of the theological case between the Church and the reformers. It is a
statement of that case as simple and as clear as it is authoritative. These
decrees are, in form, miniature theological treatises, and they are
carefully not written in the technical language theologians use. To each
decree there is a list of canons annexed, statements, that is to say, of
some point of the reformed teaching which is contrary to the teaching set
forth in the decree and therefore condemned.
Here, in chronological order, is the list of the dogmatic decrees, with the
dates of the sessions when they were passed, and a note of the number of
the canons attached to them and of the length (in printed pages) of the
decrees:
Doctrine ... Session ... Date ... Canons ... Decrees.
The Holy Scriptures ... 4 ... 1546 ...April 8 ... None ... 1
Original Sin ... 5 ... June 7 ... 5 ... 4
Justification ... 6 ... 1547 ... January 13 ... 33 ... 16
The Sacraments in General ... 7 ... March 3 ... 13 ... 1
Baptism ... 7 ... " ... 14 ... None
Confirmation ... 7 ... " ... 3 ... "
The Holy Eucharist II[354] ... 13 ... 155l ... October 11 ... 11 ... 8
Penance ... 14 ... November 15 ... 15 ... 15
Extreme Unction ... 14 ... " 4 ... 4 ... 3
The Holy Eucharist II[355] ... 21 ... 1562 ... June 16 ... 4 ... 3
" " " III[356] ... 22 ... September 9 ... 9 ... 4
Holy Orders ... 23 ... 1563 ... July 15 ... 8 ... 3
Marriage ... 24 ... November 11 ... 12 ... 1
Purgatory ... 25 ... December 4 ... None ... 1
The Cult of the Saints
of Relics and Images ... 25 ... " ... " ... 3
Indulgences ... 25 ... " ... " ... 1
It will be observed that more than half of the text of the decrees is given
to the doctrine of the sacraments. This, indeed, ever since Luther's famous
tract, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) had been the main
point of the Protestant assault, in this sense, that what was challenged
here was what every man could appreciate immediately, namely, the actual
practice of the religion instituted by Christ our Lord. All could see here
the difference between the old and the new, where only a select few were in
a position to judge the implications of the new key-doctrine that
Justification is through faith alone. With this heresy the Council dealt
very faithfully, in a single decree of sixteen chapters that takes up one-
quarter of the whole text.
Trent, it is sometimes said, put an end once and for all to the
indefiniteness and confusion of thought among Catholics--to their
comparative freedom to believe pretty much what they liked, in one version
of the criticism. But this matter of terminating differences, when true at
all, is true only with a great reservation. The confusion, or division of
opinion, was not about traditional doctrine but about the problems raised
by the new theories, differences in part related to the practical problem
how best to deal with the points raised by Luther, and how to reconcile the
Lutherans by so stating the tradition that it would satisfy them also. The
idea that the Catholic unity in the fundamentals of belief about grace,
original sin, justification, and the sacraments is the fruit of the
Tridentine restatement of Catholic doctrine, is too grotesque for patience
to bear. Nowhere does the council say--in effect--so far some Catholics
have believed it is X, others that it is Y. but from henceforth, all shall
believe it is Y. It is, on the contrary, forever using such phrases as,
"following the teaching of the Fathers we define...." Where is the
doctrinal definition of this council, for comment on which the theological
lecturer will not turn for guidance to St. Thomas, to say nothing of one or
other of the Fathers?
Trent is a witness to the age-long tradition, to the Apostolic tradition,
as truly as Nicaea twelve hundred years before or the Vatican Council three
hundred years later. It never does more than state, with the peculiar
authority and explicitness of a General Council, what the body of the
teaching theologians had been agreed on for centuries and the Church as a
whole had implicitly accepted and practiced. As to questions which do not
touch the substance of a particular doctrine, but regard methods of
explaining and defending it, questions of its history, its relation to
other doctrines, questions arising from the various ways in which different
ages have set it out, the council decides nothing. From the learned warfare
of the Catholic theologians about such matters, it carefully distinguishes
its own role, which is not theological scholarship but the preservation of
the traditional belief, and the exposure, and condemnation therefore, of
whatever contradicts this. As to the theological views put forward in the
council, and rejected, in, e.g., the long discussions that preceded the
decree on Justification, when what was called the theory of the double
Justification was proposed as an orthodox solution that might reconcile
Lutheranism and Catholicism--how new such ideas were among Catholic
theologians is illustrated, it may be suggested, from the fact that when
the leading theologian of the age, Cajetan, was dealing, in 1507,[357] with
St. Thomas' refutation (two centuries in advance) of Luther's basic theory,
he has no comment to make about this that would suggest that anywhere among
theologians was there any division of opinion on the essence of the
question.
The decrees restate the whole doctrine; they are not merely a contradiction
of the reformers' innovations. The canons attached to the decrees are short
summary condemnations of heresies that contradict the doctrine set out in
the decree, and not of the new, contemporary heresies only. Thus, along
with the Lutheran theories about Original Sin, there are also condemned
(yet once again) the heresies of Pelagius. To show something of the
council's teaching, the canons on the key doctrines of Justification, the
Sacraments in General, and the Holy Eucharist will now be summarised.
In the matter of Justification, a doctrine which now makes its first
appearance--in its own right--at a General Council, these new errors are
condemned:[358] the theory that man is passive, like a stone, under the
influence of grace; that since Adam's fall there is no real freedom in the
human will, this last idea being an invention brought into the Church by
the devil; that the good works done by man before he is justified are sins
meriting damnation; that nothing but faith is requisite to achieve
Justification; that man can be justified otherwise than through the justice
of Christ;[359] that man is justified by the imputation only, of the justice
of Christ--Justification being no more than God showing favour to a man;
that the faith without which man cannot be justified is the trustful
confidence that the divine mercy has forgiven his sins for Christ's sake;
that it is a condition for a man's sins being forgiven that he believes,
without any hesitation, that his sins have been forgiven; that no one is
justified unless he believes he is justified, this belief being what brings
about absolution and justification; the justified man is bound to believe,
as of faith, that he is numbered among those predestined [to eternal life];
that all men except these are, by the Divine Power, predestined to evil; to
believe is the only thing commanded in the Gospel, all the rest being
neither commanded nor forbidden, the Ten Commandments having nothing to do
with being a Christian; Christ our Lord was sent as a Redeemer to save, not
as lawgiver to be obeyed; man, once justified, cannot sin or fall from
grace; there is only one sin that is mortal, the sin of not believing, and
through no other sin can grace once attained be lost.
This is not a complete account of what the thirty-three canons about
Justification contain. It omits some more subtle statements that would call
for a lengthy explanation, and it omits canons which state, not a theory
the reformers put out, but Catholic doctrine which they deny.
As to the new theories about the kind of thing sacraments are, the
canons[360] condemn those who say: that there are more or less than seven
sacraments instituted by Christ our Lord--baptism, confirmation, the
Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, order, marriage--or that any one of
these is not truly a sacrament in the full sense of the word; that these
sacraments only differ from the sacraments of the Jewish dispensation as
one ritual from another; that the sacraments are not a necessity of
salvation, but that through faith alone, and without the sacraments at all,
man can obtain from God the grace of Justification; that the sacraments
were instituted for the purpose of nourishing only faith; that the
sacraments do not contain and confer the grace which they signify--as
though they were but outward signs of the grace or justice received through
faith, badges of Christian profession that mark off the believer from the
infidel; that the sacraments do not themselves confer grace by the very
activity of the sacrament (ex opere operato), but that only faith in the
divine promises is sufficient to obtain grace; that all Christians have the
power to administer all the sacraments; that any pastor of the Church can
change the received and approved rites used by the Church in the solemn
administration of the sacraments.
As to the doctrine called the Real Presence,[361] the council condemns:
those who, denying that Jesus Christ, God and Man, is truly, really,
substantially present in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, hold instead
that He is only present as in a sign or image or manifestation of power (in
virtute); those who say that the substance of the bread and the wine
remains along with the body and blood of Christ, denying that marvellous
and unique changing of the whole substance of the bread into the Body [of
Christ] and the whole substance of the wine into [His] Blood, while the
appearance of bread and wine still remain--the change which the Catholic
Church most suitably calls Transubstantiation; those who say that the Body
and Blood of Christ is not there following upon the consecration (peracta
consecratione), but only while the sacrament is in use, while it is being
received, that is to say, but not before this or after this, and that in
what is left over of the consecrated hosts or particles after communion has
been administered, the true Body of the Lord does not remain; who say that
the main fruit, or the sole fruit, of this sacrament is the forgiveness of
sins; or that Christ the only begotten son of God is not to be adored in
this sacrament with the externals of the reverence called latria,[362] and
that those who do so adore Him in this sacrament are idolaters; that Christ
is shown forth in this sacrament to be received [by the communicant] in a
spiritual manner, and not also sacramentally and really; that only faith is
sufficient preparation for receiving this most holy sacrament.
The Council denies[363] that there is a divine command that all shall
receive Holy Communion under both the forms, i.e., of wine as well as of
bread, and that it is a necessary sacrament for little children It condemns
those who deny that the whole Christ is received when Holy Communion is
received under the form of bread alone.
There remain the canons attached to the decree about the sacrifice called
the Mass,[364] clear statements in everyday language. The Council condemns
those who say: there is not offered in the Mass a true and proper sacrifice
to God; nothing more is meant by this word "offered" than that Christ is
given to us to be eaten; Christ by the words Do this in commemoration of
Me,[365] did not constitute the apostles priests, or ordain them, so that
they and other priests should offer His body and blood; the sacrifice of
the Mass is a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving only, or a mere
commemoration of the sacrifice offered on the Cross, but not a sacrifice
whereby God is appeased; [the sacrifice] profits only those who receive
[Holy Communion]; Mass should not be offered for the living and the dead,
or for sins, penalties, satisfactions, and other necessities; a blasphemy
is inflicted, through the sacrifice of the Mass, on the most holy sacrifice
wrought by Christ on the Cross; the Mass takes away from the sacrifice on
the Cross; the Canon[366] of the Mass is full of errors and should be done
away with; the masses where none but the celebrating priest receive Holy
Communion are unlawful and should be abrogated.
It has been a simpler task to tell the story of what the council
accomplished, without any reference to the contemporary events of those
eighteen years, 1545-63. But, without requiring anything like the history
of those years, the reader is entitled to ask, Why was the council twice
interrupted, and for so long a period? In 1547 the cause was the outbreak
of the plague at Trent. The council hastily voted an adjournment to Bologna
(March 10) to the fury of Charles V (who took for granted that the plague
was mere excuse) and to the embarrassment of Paul III, who realised he
would be held responsible for what was, in fact, in no way his doing.
Several sessions were held at Bologna in 1547, a mere marking of time.
Meanwhile the emperor carried his attack on the pope to the uttermost
limits--ordering his own bishops not to leave Trent, proclaiming that this
handful was the real council and the majority at Bologna a mere
conventicle.
This crisis had come, in fact, at a moment when the political relations of
emperor and pope were at their worst. The opening of the council in 1545
had found them allies in Charles' often-delayed, but now about to be
executed, war against the German Protestant league. But by the time of
Alva's crushing defeat of the princes at Muhlberg (April 24, 1547)
relations between the chiefs were strained. The pope's unsatisfactory son,
Pierluigi, whom he had invested with the duchies of Parma and Piacenza,
against the emperor's will (and possibly against his rights) in 1545, was a
thorn in the emperor's side. The imperial viceroy in Milan arranged the
duke's assassination (September 10). Was Charles V privy to this? It is
hardly likely, but he had assented to the plan to expel Pierluigi by force
(May 31). This crime was committed in the early weeks of the Bologna period
of the council. Charles, by virtue of Muhlberg, was master of Germany as no
emperor had been for hundreds of years. A brittle glory it was to prove,
but the threat of this prince, already ruler of half of Italy, to the
independence of the pope was real indeed. And the emperor used his mastery
to impose on Catholic and Protestant, in Germany, a religious settlement of
his own, the so-called Interim. Was Charles now going to prove himself a
Spanish Henry VIII? The old pope found somewhere a reserve of patience, and
the explosion never happened. The bishops went home from Bologna, and from
Trent, and then in November 1549 the pope died.
There followed the long dramatic ten weeks' conclave of 1549-50, in which
Pole almost became pope, and from which the senior president at Trent, Del
Monte, emerged as Pope Julius III. And now began the old weary business of
persuading Charles to cooperate in the reassembly of the council, and the
French king too. Charles had a new point to urge--the reassembled council
should be a new council altogether; the Protestants would be pleased if all
the matters defined at Trent were treated anew as open questions. The
French king, Henry II, whose reign[367] had barely begun utterly refused to
have anything to do with the council. He was, in fact, on the verge of war
with the pope, the casus belli being the revolt of Paul II 's grandsons
against the new pope. The French king had taken up their cause. Julius III,
as more than one incident at Trent, especially with Charles V's bullying
commissioners, had shown, had one of the great tempers of the day. But
somehow he managed to stifle it, and despite some bad blunders and
vacillation he managed to get the council on its feet again in 1551. It was
in this period that the Protestants accepted the invitation to come to the
council--an incident which merely showed beyond all doubt that the new
doctrines were not reconcilable with the old.
And now in Germany the war with the Protestant League took up once more.
This time it was the emperor who was defeated and his army destroyed, in
southern Germany. he pursuit was so hot that Charles himself narrowly
escaped capture, and as he made his way over the mountains to a precarious
safety at Innsbruck, the bishops of the council decided it was high time
they, too, moved south. So ended the Julian period of the Council of Trent.
Julius III died in 1555, to be succeeded by his one-time colleague at
Trent, Cervini, whose reign lasted but a short three weeks. Then came Gian
Pietro Caraffa--Paul IV--a hale old man of seventy-nine, the grimmest
reformer who ever sat in St. Peter's chair. As a young bishop, forty years
earlier, he had sat in the all but futile Fifth Council of the Lateran.
Perhaps it was here that he developed his strong belief that little good
came of councils. He had other methods, and for heretics they were simple
enough--the stake. Paul IV's four years of government in Rome was a reign
of terror for evildoers and lawbreakers of every sort, clerical as well as
lay.
His death was followed by a conclave that lasted four months. From it came
forth a pope as great a contrast to this passionate, unbalanced Neapolitan
as could be imagined, Gian Angelo de' Medici, a Milanese, who took the name
Pius IV. He was by training a lawyer, and by his career a professional
administrator, who had governed one city after another for Clement VII and
Paul III; and for his moderation he had found it prudent to leave Rome, in
the days of Paul IV. His election had produced the ideal character for the
delicate business of reconciling to Rome the various Catholic princes
recently alienated--particularly the Hapsburgs for whom Paul IV had had an
unconcealed personal hatred.
Charles V had died a few months only before Paul IV. In the empire his
brother, Ferdinand I, had replaced him; in the rest of his dominions his
son, Philip II. In France too there was a new ruler since June 1559, when
Henry II was killed in a tournament--his fifteen-year-old son, Francis II.
This boy, whose wife was Mary, Queen of Scots, lasted barely a year and a
half, and the sovereign with whom Pius IV had to treat was this boy's
mother, Catherine de' Medici, the queen-regent for his still younger
successor. Add that in England the short-lived Catholic restoration of Mary
Tudor had just ended, and that Pius IV faced the fait accompli of a
restoration of the entire Protestant regime, with Catholicism proscribed
utterly in legislation that culminated in the death penalty, and with all
the bishops the new queen's prisoners. The queen was, of course, Elizabeth
I.
Given this unusual array of talent among the leading princes, and the fact
that all the old preposessions of those who were Catholics still survived--
the instinct to take control of the religious crisis into their own hands,
to settle the problems of their own realms, for example, by a national
council not under papal influence--given all this, the fact that Pius IV
succeeded in reassembling the council, at Trent, within little more than
two years would suggest that he is a more important figure than has usually
been recognised.
With patience and prudence and a constantly firm purpose, he guided the
council through what proved to be the major part of its work, and through a
continuity of passionate discussions where Spanish and French bishops, as
well as Italian, had to be considered and managed. The most dangerous
moments were when the Spaniards strove for a decision that the personal
obligation of the bishop to live in his diocese was an obligation of divine
law, and not merely of synodal legislation. The danger was that this
excellent idea masked a point of theology, and was meant to lead to a
discussion of the loaded question, Is the pope the superior of the General
Council or its servant? the question that had racked the Church of the
previous century, and for a renewal of which the Church of the sixteenth
century was by no means yet sufficiently healthy. That the premature
discussion of this particular application of the defined doctrine of the
papal supremacy was averted was due, in especial manner, to the great
cardinal whom Pius IV sent to preside at the last months of the council,
Girolamo Morone.
The great council[368] ended with what jubilation about the work done may be
imagined. The pope by a special bull confirmed all it had decreed, and by a
second bull forthwith abolished all privileges and exemptions previously
accorded by his predecessors which went contrary to the decrees; and to
settle authoritatively all questions arising out of the interpretation of
the decrees he created a permanent commission of cardinals, the
Congregation of the Council of Trent, a body which developed into a kind of
permanent Ministry of the Interior of the Catholic Church, and which
functions to this day as one of the most important instruments of the
government of the Church. The matter of providing the revised edition of
the official Latin translation of the Bible, a revised Breviary and Missal,
a Catechism and an Index of books dangerous to Faith and Morals, the
council had left to the pope.
It was the immediate successor of Pius IV who saw to all these, except the
new Bible. This successor was the Dominican, Michele Ghislieri, known to
history as Pius V (1566 72), in whom the aspirations of good men for
centuries were realised, a living saint ruling the Church. Of all the
services rendered by St. Pius V (he was canonised by Clement XI in 1712)
none was greater than this, that in his ruling of the Church he was as
scrupulously obedient to the laws of Trent as he had been obedient to the
Dominican constitutions during his long life as a friar. He set an example
which none of his successors could ever ignore; and perhaps nowhere more
powerfully than in what he did with the task from which the council, in its
last moments, shrank--the reformation of the Catholic Princes, i.e., the
defence of the rights of religion against the encroachment of the Catholic
state. But to say more about this would be to write the tragic history of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of a fight where there were
defeats, but no surrenders. The ideal of the example set by St. Pius V was
at times obscured. It was never forgotten. And never, since his time, has
there been any such moral falling away--nor anything remotely recalling it-
-as what, in almost all his life before his election, he himself had been
witness of in the highest place of all.
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