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The Council of Trent (Italian: Trento) was an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church held in discontinuous sessions between 1545 and 1563 in response to the Protestant Reformation. It clearly specified Catholic doctrines on salvation, the sacraments and the Biblical canon, in opposition to the Protestants, and standardised the Mass throughout the church, largely abolishing local variations; this became called the " Tridentine MassA surviving pre-Vatican II altar with reredos The altar is preceded by three steps, as was most common for a church’s main altar, though some main altars, such as that in Saint Peter’s in the Vatican, had (and have) much more than three. Side altars usual", after TrentTrento (English Trent Italian Trento (TREN-to), German Trient (tree-ENT), Latin Tridentum (The Latin form is the source of the adjective Tridentine), is in the Trentino-Alto Adige ( South Tyrol) Region of Italy. It is the capital of the region and of the.
The nineteenth (or, according to another reckoning, the eighteenth) of the ecumenical councils recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, the Council of Trent takes its name from the place where it was held, a city in the southern and Italian part of the Tyrol (73 miles north west of Venice), and lasted, with interruptions, from December 13, 1545, to December 4, 1563.
From a doctrinal and disciplinary point of view, it was the most important council in the history of the Roman church, fixing her distinctive faith and practice in relation to the Protestant Evangelical churches. Its decrees were supplemented by the First Vatican Council of 1870.
1 Occasion, sessions, and attendance
In reply to the Papal bull Exsurge Domine of Pope Leo X (1520), Martin Luther had burned the document and appealed to a general council. From 1522 German diets joined in the appeal, and Charles V seconded and pressed it as a means of settling the controversy started by the Reformation and of reunifying the Church. Pope Clement VII ( 1523- 1534) was vehemently against the idea of a council, agreeing with Francis I of France. After the deliverances of Pope Pius II in his bull Execrabilis (1460) and his reply to the University of Cologne (1463), setting aside the theory of the supremacy of general councils laid down by the Council of Constance , it was the papal policy to avoid councils.
Pope Paul III, seeing that the Protestant Reformation was no longer a few preachers, but that various princes had joined in the new ideas, desired a council, but when he proposed the idea to his cardinals, it was unanimously voted against. Nonetheless, he sent nuncios throughout Europe to propose the idea. France and most of the German Protestants refused the invitation. Unable, however, to resist the urgency of Charles V, the pope, after proposing Mantua as the place of meeting, convened the council as exclusively Roman at Trent (at that time a free city of the Holy Roman Empire under a prince-bishop), on Dec. 13, 1545; it was transferred to Bologna in Mar., 1547 from fear of the plague; indefinitely prorogued, Sept. 17, 1549; reopened at Trent, May 1, 1551, by Pope Julius III; broken up by the sudden victory of Elector Maurice of Saxony over the Emperor Charles V., and his march into Tyrol, Apr. 28, 1552; and recalled by Pope Pius IV for the last time, Jan. 18, 1562, when it continued to its final adjournment, Dec. 4, 1563. It closed with " Anathema to all heretics, anathema, anathema."
The history of the council is divided into three distinct periods; from 1545 to 1549, from 1551 to 1552, and from 1562 to 1563. The last was the most important. The number of attending members in the three periods varied considerably. It increased toward the close, but never reached the number of the first ecumenical council at Nicaea, (which had 318 members), nor of the last of the Vatican (which numbered 764). The decrees were signed by 255 members, including four papal legates, two cardinals, three patriarchs, twenty-five archbishops, 168 bishops, two-thirds of them being Italians. Lists of the signers are added to the best editions of the decrees. England was represented by Reginald Cardinal Pole, Richard Pate, bishop of Worcester, and after 1562 by Thomas Goldwell, bishop of St. Asaph; Ireland by three bishops, and Germany at no time by more than eight. The Italian and Spanish prelates were vastly preponderant in power and numbers. At the passage of the most important decrees not more than sixty prelates were present.
