International Catholic University
This lecture will begin by continuing what we were discussing in our last lecture, Catholic attempts at reform. We will treat three aspects of pre-Trent attempts at reform. Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Memorandum of 1536, and before taking either perhaps it would be best to say a word about the Fifth Council of the Lateran, which is an ecumenical council of the Church and was held in the years 1512-1517. In fact it broke up just at a little more than half a year before Luther did the act of nailing those theses on the church door that is taken as the traditional date for the beginning of the Reformation.
The Fifth Council of the Lateran was called by Pope Leo X. He had no intention really of calling a Council, but some cardinals had got together and started a council; the derogatory Latin name for such a council is conciliabulum. And it was really the last gasp of conciliarism in a way. The pope was in a bind, though. He could not ignore it, or he was afraid of what would happen if he ignored it, so he called his own council, and that council met in the Lateran off and on for five years, and there are a number of noteworthy things about it. While the council was convened, Leo saw this as a chance to effect perhaps some reforms in the Curia or in the bureaucracy of the organs of papal government. His attempts failed. One noteworthy thing is that this council did declare that a pope was superior to a council, and that the council would derive its authority from the recognition and the approval of the pope.
When Martin Luther nailed the theses to the church door and began the Reformation, the best known and most famous man in all of Christendom was the Dutch priest Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus himself in his own person is an indicator of one of the abuses that was too current, too widespread in the Church in the early sixteenth century. His father was a priest, and Erasmus, as I said in the last lecture, was educated by the Brothers of the Common Life, and he went on to become a great Christian humanist. He is a priest, he, once he became famous, was able to do pretty much what he wanted, and he traveled around throughout Christendom. He visited England, for instance, he was in Germany, France, Italy. And he was very well known, and he became known through his writings. His best known writing is the Enchiridion militis christiani or Handbook of a Christian Soldier. Of this book Erasmus said,
I wrote the Enchiridion in order to correct the common mistake of those who think that religion is a matter of gestures and rules about material things that go beyond what even the Jews observe and who are marvelously negligent about piety itself.And at the end of it he said his purpose was to show the way which leads straight to Christ.
Some have gone so far as to call this the Manifesto of the Reform Movement. Erasmus was not attacking doctrine at all; he simply wanted to bring some relief to the layman or reform to the Church, and he just assumes that the Christian faith as it was known and understood in his time was right. He was not attacking, in other words, the Catholic Church. What he was urging his readers to do was to come to grips with the Scripture or to get to know Christ, or better, the philosophy of Christ, through the Scriptures. He wanted as much as possible to restore Christianity to its earlier pristine simplicity. Therefore he was for eliminating useless ceremonies and acts of piety that had little to do with faith. What he had in mind when he was doing this were such things as devotions to the saints expressed in pilgrimages to shrines and in reverence to their images, fasting, abstinence from meat, the monastic discipline of silence, wearing a special dress, the use of blessed water, blessed candles, tokens of the saints, on and on. In some ways it sounds like a manifesto for the program that the Protestant Reformation put into effect.
There has always been a wavering about Erasmus by members of the Church, and some ask the question, should we list Erasmus as a pre-reformer of Catholicism, or was he really on the side of Luther and the Protestants as they emerged? The fact is that the men and the women of his own time were not sure, because Erasmus was seen above all as a sharp and a sharp tongued critic of the Church. He was especially bitterly attacked for what he had to say about bishops, priests, and his generic name for religious monks. Once Luther began the process by which he would break away from the Church, the men and women of the time were curious and more than curious as to what Erasmus would do. Many thought that Erasmus would come out and endorse Luther in what was turning into Luther's program, but it didn't happen. Erasmus stayed not just a priest but a priest in the fold of the Church, and he died in the Church. Many think he was vastly misunderstood in his own lifetime. Some see him as a pointer, or pointing in the right direction for the Church to go, others see him rather as one who would water down Christianity. One author, David Knolls who wrote about religious life in England said that what Erasmus was really promoting was a kind of a low tension Christianity. Remove as much of the tension, the stress from the practice of the faith as you can. He was misunderstood, but he died Catholic and, as I said, he held for the Church. In other words he stayed loyal to the pope.
Final attempt at reform from within the Church occurred in 1536-37 after one of the sites picked for the council failed to materialize, a group of churchmen, ecclesiastics in Rome, was commissioned by the pope to draw up a memorandum on the Reform of the Church. They met for a while and in 1537 they submitted their report to the pope. And the shortened title of the report is, The Report or Advice on Reforming the Church. In this document which is found in toto in Olin, From Savonarola to Ignatius Loyola, and which I urge you to read carefully, the members of the council focus on four different kinds of abuses, or we can categorize the abuses that they talk about in fourfold division. Abuses concerning parishes or parochial, abuses concerning finances, abuses concerning the function of the courts or the exercise of the courts, and finally moral abuses in the Church.
The parochial abuse that they centered on was the neglect of the cure of souls, because many of the candidates who were ordained were unworthy, unfit really to be priests, and they were ignorant, uninstructed. Foreigners were given sees that they couldn't serve, and many of the clergy were constantly and consistently away -- in other words non-resident. The financial criticism centered around the benefice and the trading of benefices, the selling of benefices, the buying of benefices for one, the practice of simony and abuses in indulgences, which as we know was what triggered Luther's criticism of the Church in 1517. As far as the judicial abuses were concerned, they complained of the ease with which dispensations were granted, and usually the granting or the non-granting of a dispensation from the law of the Church was dependent on whether the petitioner could pay for the dispensation or not. Finally there were the moral abuses, and what they especially deprecated was the position of honor that was accorded to prostitutes in Rome. They did not mention clerical concubinage as a special abuse.
But if you read the report it's quite obvious that finances are at the heart of many of the criticisms of the committee and at the same time they want to really effect, if they can, a root and branch reform of the Church. And that more than anything is probably why this memorandum was not put into effect, and why the pope took it and really did not try to implement it, because if he had done so more than likely he would have brought down a hornet's nest about his head. By this time the pope himself, Paul III, could see, if there was going to be reform in the Church, that somehow or other, dangerous as it might be, it would have to come through a council. Or a council at least would have to be called and address the problems that were raised by Luther. And by the time the council met there were problems raised by Calvin, by Zwingli, and by Henry VIII in England. In other words, the Reformation was in full swing by the time a council finally met. We know that the council that met was the Council of Trent.
By almost universal agreement, the counter-attack of the Church to the movement that is known as the Protestant Reformation begins seriously with the Council of Trent. The first thing we should note is the date of the council. The council was convened and began to sit December of 1545. Martin Luther starts the Reformation in 1517. So we are almost thirty years before we have an official and a concerted attempt by the Church to deal with the questions raised by Luther and his Protestant followers. The Council of Trent opens in 1545, it closes in 1563. That's a total then of 18 years. It was not in session all those years; it broke up, and it was prorogued at times, and it had to move. But over a period of 18 years the council met and discussed the questions and the issues raised by Luther and also the question of reform.
There had been talk of a council from almost the morrow of Luther beginning the Reformation. As early as 1520 there had been talk of having a council just three years after the closing of the Fifth Council of the Lateran. But there were a number of things that made the pope hold off and not call or convoke a council. The pope himself was afraid of the council, he was afraid of conciliarism. As we can see there had been a rogue council just nine years before in 1511 at Pisa. The pope had good reason to fear that if he convoked a council right now that it might declare itself to be superior to him and he would be enmeshed again in the old question of conciliarism. The pope at the time, Leo X, had condemned forty one propositions from the writings of Luther in 1520. This was known that this condemnation was not final, and many on both sides, we'll call them now Catholics and Protestants, believed that a council was necessary.
In 1523 both Catholics and Lutherans demanded a free Christian council on German soil. One of the principles they followed was that the council should be called and it should meet at the place which is the occasion or the reason for the calling of the council, as the early councils were. The first council of the Church met at Nicaea, and we had some at Constantinople, one at Ephesus, because there were specific problems in the Church or the churches there, and they wanted to follow the same principle. But they had changed a number of things. When they said "free" what they meant generally was free of the pope. When they said "Christian" they were saying that the Bible alone would be the touch stone and that the laity would be at the council. They wanted the laity there and on German soil. By that they meant within the boundaries of the Empire. But war had already broken out between Emperor Charles V and the King of France. These intermittent wars would help to delay the convening of a council plus the not unfounded fear of the pope of what a council would do.
The next pope, who was Paul III, was willing to call a council, and he wanted it to be held in Mantua. But the Duke of Mantua stepped in and laid down certain conditions for the bishops coming and leaving in his territory, and the pope could not accept the conditions laid down by the Duke, so it came to naught. It was really the failure of the council to meet at Mantua that led to the concilium on correcting or reforming the Church.
Attempts made to rectify the situation, to get secular rulers to get churchmen to agree that we have to have a council, failed, and finally in May of 1542 the pope summoned the council to meet at Trent. In 1542 he's serious and the Church is becoming serious about having a council, but it still takes three years before the council actually meets. There were various things that prevented it or caused delays. War again, poor attendance of bishops, and other conditions simply delayed and helped the time of the council to be pushed back. Finally the convocation date was set for March in 1545. They didn't meet that date, and the council finally opened only on the thirteenth of December 1545.
The Bull of Convocation for the council, that the pope had published earlier, called for a threefold agenda for the council. It should heal the confessional splits that were now in place in many parts of Germany and elsewhere, what today we would call Lutherans or Protestants. Secondly he wanted reform of the Church. There were abuses and the abuses had to be dealt with; the time was finished when they could be papered over. And third was the establishment of peace, so that Christians could with eyes clear see the threat that was there to Christendom from the Ottoman Turks.
Two things should be noted about the dates of the Council of Trent, 1545 to 1563. The first thing to note is that the council was not in continuous session in these years. The second thing to note is that the council did not always meet or sit in Trent. The best way to summarize the years of sessions of the council is to say that there were fourteen years when there was no council. It was prorogued and the bishops were back in their dioceses. So we can divide the councils into three parts. The three parts would run from 1545-1547, 1551-1552, and 1562-1563. So there were fourteen years when the council was not in session at all. The second thing to note is that it did not always meet in Trent, although for the most part it was there, but in 1547 they had to leave Trent because of the plague. This is a constant recurrence in the history of individual cities or duchies or countries in the sixteenth century. Suddenly a plague strikes and almost all activity ceases while the district deals with the greater threat of the threat to life itself. So for reasons of health then there were a few sessions held in Bologna.
The pope did not attend the council in person, but he made his mind known through his legates. These are the papal legates who were charged with the direction of the council, and there were three at the first session, two Italian, and the third, Pole, an Englishman. The two Italians go on to become future popes. The Englishman came very close to being elected pope once but was not. Once the council fathers or the bishops had gathered in Trent in December 1545, they had to decide how they would act, or what procedures they would follow in the council. It would be the bishops and the heads of religious orders who would have the right to vote. This was one of their first decisions. This means that those who were there to advise or to inform, called the periti, were the experts, which Jeden calls the technicians. But the technicians, the theologians, would not have a vote. There were certain procedures that they followed regularly before something could be brought to the floor and voted upon. The first step in that was that the periti or the technicians, that is the theologians, would discuss matters with the bishops. The bishops would be the audience and the technicians would be speaking to them or instructing them.
Then there would be a general session at which the bishops would debate a point, and only the bishops; the theologians would not be taking part. And then there would be a session at which various propositions were voted upon, and it was an open vote that was taken. At the beginning they also had to decide what were they going to treat or what would be the subject matter of the council. Or to make it more practical, should the council address doctrine or dogma first, or should it address reform? Remember we are dealing with a movement of a Counter-Reformation, or Counter-Reform is the name given in many circles to what the Church set about doing in its counter to the reform or the Protestant Reformation. The pope himself was in favor of treating dogma first and then only coming to the treatment of morals or reform, because by this time conditions had come to such a task in the Church that it was questionable whether they would be able to bring the Protestants back into the fold, to the Church. They somewhat compromised; they decided that they would treat both dogma and morals simultaneously. In other words, they would not do first dogma then reform or morals or vice versa. But take the two of them in tandem and then proceed.
Two things should be noted about the attending bishops who were at this council. The first is they were by any standards few in number. The second thing to note is that most of them were Italian. At the opening session in December of 1545 there were only thirty-two bishops in attendance plus the three papal legates. In future sessions the number would go up. In the first and the second sessions the number got as high as 68. In the third session the number jumped, almost sky rocketed, between 105 and 228. At the closing session of the council there were 176 bishops in attendance. There were also in attendance with the right to vote the generals of some religious orders, but by any standards the number is small.
The second thing is equally notable throughout the council. Most of the attending bishops were Italian, though in the later sessions there were some French and some Spanish bishops present. But together non Italian bishops never equaled or outnumbered the Italian bishops who were there. The theologians who were there came largely from the Mendicant orders, pride of place going to the Dominicans. The breakdown or the composition of the council and of the theologians who were there, the numbers and the orders from which they came or to which they belonged, can all be found in Greengrass in his chapter on the Counter-Reformation, in the center of which is the Council of Trent.
The council was prorogued, or it broke up twice between 1545 and 1563. The first time was because of the plague in Trent, and the fathers moved to Bologna, where they held a few sessions. And then the death of the pope delayed the reassembly until 1551 and 1552. And then something came up and the council was prorogued or broke up because of conditions in Germany and in England and France, and there were more pressing needs. It took 10 years for them then to come back together. So their moving may seem to be dawdling or delaying. But by terms and standards of the times they had come to grips with the problem, and there were conditions that did make it questionable whether they should come. And they were moving, perhaps not as quickly as we would like, but when we read the results of what they did we cannot say that they did not come to grips with the problems facing the Church and deal with them straightforwardly.
The council was held in Trent because it was an imperial city. It was not in what today we would call Germany, but it was close to Germany. In fact it was only 80 miles away from the headquarters, or the palace of the emperor in Innsbruck, because he was the Count of Tyrol, and so it was closer to German lands than to Rome, or to the pope in Rome. And it was an imperial city on the high road from the Italian peninsula leading into Germany. The question of what should be addressed, reform or doctrine, as I said, was settled that they would both be taken together. What the fathers did in sessions, how they came about treating this teaching or dealing with this matter of morality that called for reform, can be followed quite well in Hsia and in Greengrass, our text and our co-text.
Here I would just like to call attention to three decrees or three subjects that the council grappled with and pronounced on. The first is justification. How are we justified? This was a problem that plagued Luther, and his response, or the Protestant response to the question, how are we saved, would be by faith alone. The Catholic response to that question was, by faith and by works, and this was asserted quite clearly and forcefully by the council. A second question that came up was bishops and where they lived, or the residence of bishops. In his second volume on the history of the council, Jedin has a chapter on the residence of bishops and he calls it "The Pivot of Church Reform". In other words, it's the test, really. There would be reform in the Church if the council would force or require the bishops to live in their diocese. And then you can go a step further, if the bishop is required to live in his diocese then the priest is required to live in his parish and not be absent. And finally, the council said something about the preparation or the training of priests and it called for seminaries.
Before going further I think it would be best simply to summarize for you what the council itself said about Catholic doctrine. Many of the things that we as Catholics today take for granted were either declared formally for the first time by the Council of Trent or were reaffirmed by the Council of Trent, sometimes in reaction to the Protestants. When it comes to statements about Catholic doctrine, this is what the council had to say. It declared that justification comes from works and faith combined, that the two are necessary for salvation. It enumerated seven sacraments and defined them exactly, and it affirmed that a sacrament is a channel of grace independent of the spiritual state of him who received or administered it. It reaffirmed transubstantiation or what was by this time the traditional Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. It declared that the priesthood was a special estate set apart from the laity by the sacrament of Holy Orders and endowed with the supernatural power transmitted from Christ and the Apostles. It put Scripture and tradition on an equal footing as sources of Catholic faith; it thus rejected the Protestant claim to find true faith in the Bible alone, or as the way it was customarily expressed in a formula sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. That was rejected. It declared the Vulgate, the translation of the Bible by Saint Jerome, to be the only version of the Bible on which authoritative teaching could be based. It denied private judgment, the right of individuals to believe that their own interpretation of Scripture was more true than that of Church authorities. It retained and prescribed Latin as the language of religious worship. It maintained celibacy celibacy for the clergy. It upheld monasticism or the religious life. It reaffirmed the existence of Purgatory. It restated the true theory and correct practice of the granting of indulgences. It approved the veneration of the Saints, the cult of the Virgin, the use of images, relics and pilgrimages as spiritually useful and pious actions.
With regard to reforming abuses, it was easier for the council to define doctrine than it was to reform abuses, since the abuses consisted of the habits of thousands, if not millions, of peoples lives. But the council decided that it had to address this. It knew that it had to if it was going to be taken seriously by the Christian world at large. So the council began by decreeing a drastic reform of the monastic orders, or of religious life, requiring various orders to put their house in order. It acted against the abuse of indulgences while upholding the principle that indulgences were a legitimate activity. It ruled that bishops should reside habitually in their dioceses and attend more carefully to their proper duties. If I have time I may say a further word on that. It gave bishops more administrative control over clergy in their own dioceses. It checked the abuse by which one man held several livings at one time, plurality of benefices. It established the principle of one man one benefice. It took steps to see that Church officials should be competent and finally to provide an educated clergy. It ordered that a seminary should be set up in each diocese for the training of priests. In summation we might say that it is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Council of Trent. It laid the foundation for a true reform of the Catholic Church and fixed Catholic doctrine on broad and systematic lines. It begins a new epoch in Catholic life. But we should be clear, the council disbands in 1563. Abuses are not uprooted or eliminated immediately; it takes time for the council decrees to take effect in the lives of Christian men and women, and especially to take effect in the lives of the bishops and the priests.
One special word about this obligation of residence. I want to stress this rather than the doctrine, although both are important. But what we are dealing with is the question of reform. The Protestants claim to be reforming the Church in accordance with the dictates and the mandate of Scripture. The Church made the same claim, and to show how serious they were they addressed this problem of plurality of benefices, which was really the bane of the Church in the sixteenth century. This is what a decree in the twenty-third session said. This is almost at the very end of the council:
This holy council declares that all who under whatever name or title, even though they be cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, preside over patriarchal, primatial, metropolitan, and cathedral churches are bound to personal residence in their Church or diocese. They have to be there in person where they are obliged to discharge the office committed to them and from which they may not absent themselves except for the reasons and in the manner subjoined, there are exceptions.
But it could not be stated more clearly: if you are a bishop be in your diocese; if you are a priest be in your parish.