In 1545, Pope Paul III called an ecumenical council, intended as a plenary meeting of the bishops of the Catholic Church. Such a council had been seen as a necessary step toward reforming Catholicism long before Luther had been heard from. But the Lutheran challenge and the several subsequent forms of doctrinal and political challenge had only increased the calls for a universal council, especially from those who saw that, without such an instrument, the very necessary Catholic reformation would remain impossible.
The popes had delayed and equivocated, fearful that the old bugaboo of Conciliarism—the theory that the pope was subservient to an ecumenical council—would again raise its head. Not a few of the popes were far too sunk in more worldly concerns—their political power, their art collections, their fortunes and those of their children, their sensual pleasures—to be bothered thinking about a council. In fact, even by the rather low standards that the papacy set for itself, there had not been a saintly pope since 1370, when (subsequently Blessed) Urban V had died in Avignon, hardly an appropriate home for the bishop of Rome (see this page). Over the centuries, indeed, few saints had occupied the supposed throne of Saint Peter, whereas the number of papal rascals and knaves had almost always outpaced the holy fellows. As the Renaissance dawned, the papacy had, as we saw earlier (this page and following), fallen into the clutches of one scoundrel after another. Because many princes had a hand in appointing their bishops and controlling them, the choice of a site for the council became a major obstacle. The emperor wanted the council to meet inside the Empire; the French king wouldn’t hear of it. At last, the Tyrolean town of Trent was chosen, just outside imperial territory and at the very edge of Italian influence.
Looking backwards from the twenty-first century, the results of this Tridentine council look shabby. The long-cherished hopes that such a council would find a way to reconcile the innovations of the reformers with Catholic traditions—or, at the least, open a dialogue with Protestants—proved wholly empty. Had the council met years earlier, such outcomes might have been possible. By the time the council fathers assembled amid the hills of the Tyrol, too much had happened too long ago and too many modes of dissent had turned into establishments of their own. It was probably impossible now to bridge the divisions. In any case, the bishops at Trent did not try.
Rather, without conceding anything to any dissenter, they proceeded to defend Catholicism in its most anti-Protestant and pro-Roman form. Against Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, Catholic tradition was also held to be a valid source of belief and practice. A human being’s justification was not by faith alone; good works were necessary. The true church, founded by Christ, was the Roman Catholic Church, a hierarchical institution with the pope at its summit. The role of the Catholic clergy was to interpret scripture and tradition; the laity’s role was to pay and obey. This true church rejoiced in its seven sacraments (no more, no less). Its central act was the mass, celebrated only by a validly ordained priest, in which the Sacrifice of Christ on the cross was mystically repeated, as it would be by priests throughout the world till the end of time in the supposedly sacred but increasingly unintelligible language of Latin.6
But even the conciliar bishops and their theological advisers realized that the bald reassertion of all traditional Catholic theological positions in their most extreme forms would not be enough. There needed to be a reform of clerical life if anyone was to take seriously this Counter-Reformation. So, strict and even punitive standards were set in place for the formation of clergy and vowed religious. Gradually, over succeeding decades, these reforms would be implemented to the letter, thus rooting out the more public forms of sexual laxity and worldliness that had afflicted the Church for so long. By the close of the council, it was inconceivable that a sitting pope would ever again appoint his bastards cardinals—though popes would, for several decades to come, continue to sire bastards. (Upon his election in 1534, Paul III had made two of his teenaged grandsons cardinals and awarded them lucrative ecclesiastical benefices, but once the Tridentine decrees were promulgated, such appointments began to be disdained as de trop.)
Henceforth, the pope and his bishops would permit no quarter to dissent from the Tridentine decrees. Bishops and theologians who had hoped for compromise were marginalized. Pope Paul saw to it that within the papal bureaucracy a new office was established called the Roman Inquisition, and its mission was to sniff out and extirpate heresy wherever it might take root. Eventually, the work of this gruesome body would be supplemented by a further instrument, the Index of Forbidden Books, which listed all the books one could not read without attracting the interest of the Inquisition.
The Council of Trent met off and on for nearly two decades, long after the pontificate of Paul III. When it opened, only thirty-odd bishops were in attendance. Attendance remained spotty throughout its infrequently summoned sessions. One might even question whether Trent could be called an ecumenical council in anything but name. Certainly, the Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII in 1962, presented a very different face to the world, as it refused to condemn anyone and insisted on input not only from the entire Christian spectrum but even from non-Christian religious figures, especially from the monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Islam. Its participants numbered in the thousands, splendidly accommodated not in a minor alpine town but for all the world to see—in the great nave of Saint Peter’s basilica, the building of which precipitated Luther’s original protest.
From a geopolitical perspective, the most astonishing difference between these two councils may lie in the national origins of their participants. Trent was a wholly European affair, reflecting Christianity as the exclusively European concern it was then thought to be. But even during the years of the Tridentine council, the map of Christianity was beginning to be redrawn in radical shifts that would make Catholicism the first worldwide religion. Missionary priests and brothers had already begun to sail on the ships that would eventually bring Europeans to every corner of the globe. The newly formed Jesuits, spiritual sons of Ignatius Loyola, were particularly keen to rack up conversions among the pagans of the world, setting up utopian sanctuaries for the horrifically hunted “Indians” of the New World, learning the obscurest languages of the Far West and the Far East, even inserting themselves into xenophobic East Asian courts as astrological wise men. One of their number, the Spaniard Francis Xavier, blazed a trail of baptisms through India, Malaysia, and Japan and died at the gates of China in 1552. In the seventeenth century, French Jesuits were tortured and martyred by Iroquois and Mohawk tribesmen in what is today upstate New York. Throughout this entire period, Catholics were the world’s only missionaries, showing up in one impossibly distant port after another, Jesuits and other priests of newly founded orders, Franciscans and other friars bound by medieval rules, all helping to create the worldwide numbers that would make Catholicism a religion of more than one billion souls, while neither Protestantism nor Orthodoxy would ever reach even half that number.
This aggressive global initiative on the part of reforming forces within Catholicism would also go a long way toward making up for losses of obedience within Europe itself. For by the close of Trent’s council, a wide arc of northern Europe—most of Germany, much of Austria, whole regions farther east, all of Scandinavia, all of Britain, most of the Netherlands, much of France—appeared to be permanently lost to the old faith and order. There would, however, be one additional shift within Europe, a shift that would depend principally on the undamming of vast rivers of blood during the continent-wide conflict we call the Thirty Years’ War. Before that horror occupies us, however, let’s have a look at England, where a sort of religious compromise was in the course of being built, if somewhat intermittently.