Trent

What Happened at the Council

John W. O'Malley

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674071483
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Winner of the John Gilmary Shea Prize The Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Catholic Church's attempt to put its house in order in response to the Protestant Reformation, has long been praised and blamed for things it never did. Now, in this first full one-volume history in modern times, John W. O'Malley brings to life the volatile issues that pushed several Holy Roman emperors, kings and queens of France, and five popes—and all of Europe with them—repeatedly to the brink of disaster.During the council's eighteen years, war and threat of war among the key players, as well as the Ottoman Turks' onslaught against Christendom, turned the council into a perilous enterprise. Its leaders declined to make a pronouncement on war against infidels, but Trent's most glaring and ironic silence was on the authority of the papacy itself. The popes, who reigned as Italian monarchs while serving as pastors, did everything in their power to keep papal reform out of the council's hands—and their power was considerable. O'Malley shows how the council pursued its contentious parallel agenda of reforming the Church while simultaneously asserting Catholic doctrine.Like What Happened at Vatican II, O'Malley's Trent: What Happened at the Council strips mythology from historical truth while providing a clear, concise, and fascinating account of a pivotal episode in Church history. In celebration of the 450th anniversary of the council's closing, it sets the record straight about the much misunderstood failures and achievements of this critical moment in European history.

1

The Fifteenth-Century Prelude

In 1522–1523, less than two years after Luther’s excommunication, the Imperial Diet, the Reichstag, met in Nuremberg. This large assembly of German princes and representatives of other political units of the Holy Roman Empire received from the new pope, Adrian VI, a document frankly confessing that the sins of the clergy were responsible for the current religious turmoil and promising to remedy the situation. On February 5, 1523, the Diet responded by demanding from Adrian a “free Christian council in German lands,” which it considered the appropriate and traditional institution to settle the controversy over Luther and to undertake the often-promised, long-awaited reform.¹

Underlying the Diet’s demand were four assumptions that were of great import for the future: first, the papal bull Exsurge Domine condemning Luther’s teaching and threatening excommunication was not the final word in the matter; second, only a council could be counted on for the impartiality required to judge Luther’s case; third, that case was primarily a German concern and should be handled in Germany; fourth, reform of the church could not be conceived of apart from a council, a connection that was part of the legacy of the Council of Constance of the previous century but was also a traditional conviction. The demand thus fatefully linked Luther’s cause and the reform of the church—twins conjoined at birth.

Even at this early date, the cry for a council had begun to resound fairly widely, principally in Germany but also in other parts of Europe. It soon swelled into a crescendo that grew ever more insistent with the passing of the years. No one took up the cry more consistently and passionately than the most powerful person in Europe, Emperor Charles V. His efforts for the convocation of a council intensified as the political and military situation in German-speaking lands became ever more ominous. Yet the council did not meet until twenty-two years after the Diet at Nuremberg called for it—a full generation. Why the delay?

Popes and Councils from Constance to Lateran V

The Council of Constance, which met from 1414 to 1418, precisely a century before the outbreak of the Reformation, inaugurated a new relationship between popes and councils.² This new relationship was an essential factor in delaying the convocation of Trent. In the three centuries before Constance, popes had called and presided over a number of synods and councils in which, despite disagreements, a generally smooth relationship prevailed between them and the bishops. That changed with Constance. The change made the popes wary. They learned to their dismay that a council could be used as a weapon against them.

Constance met to resolve the Great Western Schism, when two and then three men claimed to be pope. Among the three was John XXIII, now considered an antipope but at the time, and even into the twentieth century, widely considered legitimate. Under pressure from Emperor-elect Sigismund, he convoked the council at Constance, which proceeded to depose him and another contender and to intimidate the third into resigning. The council then elected a new pope, Martin V (1417–1431), who received almost universal recognition as the legitimate successor of Saint Peter. As the council drew to a close, it issued the decree Frequens stipulating that henceforth the popes had to convoke a council at regular intervals in perpetuity—the first two at intervals of five or, if necessary, seven years, and thereafter every ten years.

In these actions the council acted on solid if not uncontested canonical grounds, as evidenced above all by the fact that its depositions of the contenders and its election of a new pope were at the time and subsequently accepted almost unanimously. A standard axiom of canon law stated that the pope could be judged by no one “unless he should deviate from the faith” (Papa a nemine dijudicatur nisi deprehendatur a fide devius). Canonists and theologians serenely discussed, therefore, the possibility that a pope might fall into heresy and that, if he did, he could be “judged,” that is, deposed. They came to define heresy broadly so as to include grave scandal, for such scandal led the faithful into heresy or schism.³

But judged by whom? The traditional court of appeal in the church from the earliest years was a council, so it is not surprising that councils were the bodies to which canonists assigned the task. Thus, as the Schism dragged on and all efforts to persuade or threaten the contending popes to settle the matter by other means came to naught, the idea that a council was needed gained strength and was ever more widely proposed as the only possible remedy. This was the situation in which Conciliarism was born, a theory about the superior authority of councils in relationship to the papacy.

Unfortunately, since the term covers at least two understandings of that relationship, it has led to considerable confusion. The first, agreed to by mainline canonists at the time and even later, was that under certain dire circumstances a council might have to act against a pope. Reputable scholars argue that this was the interpretation operative at Constance, as expressed in its famous decree Haec Sancta. The second was more radical and, at least in the West, untraditional: not only are councils the supreme authority, but the popes are little more than the executors of their will. This understanding gained ground in many circles after the Schism was resolved, and it provoked, of course, strong papal reaction. There were, besides, many variations on both these interpretations.

Popes feared Conciliarism in all its forms. They recognized but also feared the role temporal rulers claimed in church affairs. Although John XXIII convoked Constance, Emperor Sigismund had taken the initiative and forced the pope to do so. In that initiative Sigismund had good historical precedent. He was simply making use of the traditional role of the emperor as Protector of the Church. His sixteenth-century successor, Charles V, took that role extremely seriously.

Contrary to what is sometimes implied, Constance, no matter what its relationship to Conciliarism, was not antipapal. It acted, rather, to save the papacy, which for the forty years of the Schism proved incapable of saving itself and seemed to be heading for self-destruction. The council was a last-ditch effort—and a successful one—to solve the scandalous problem after all else had failed. Even though Constance was successful in reestablishing the papacy, the Schism had inflicted almost irreparable damage on belief that the popes could be counted upon to handle properly their own affairs and the affairs of the church. The decree Frequens was a massive vote of no-confidence.

Besides resolving the Schism Constance set itself two other goals—the reform of the church “in head and members” and the eradication of heresy.⁴ Even before the Schism, resentment had been building against “the head” because of three interrelated developments: the growing centralization of authority in the papal Curia at the expense of episcopal authority, the questionable financial implications of the procedures adopted by the Curia in the awarding of ecclesiastical offices, and, finally, the taxes and fees exacted from the higher clergy and others throughout Europe. Complaints against these developments never flagged. They continued all the way up to the Council of Trent.

In its attempt to reform the head, Constance got down to specifics. On October 30, 1417, it published a list of reforms that it bound the new pope to undertake. The list took account of the major complaints and anticipated many of the abuses, including indulgences, that Luther denounced with such impact a hundred years later in his “Appeal to the Ruling Class.” Among them:

1. The number, quality, and nationality of the lord cardinals.

2. Reservations of benefices to the Apostolic See. The reservations gave the popes power to make appointments to bishoprics and other offices, which entailed direct or indirect financial benefit to the papacy.

3. Annates, common services, and petty services. These are forms of taxation.

5. Cases that are, or are not, to be heard at the Roman Curia.

12. Not alienating to relatives and others goods of the Roman church and other churches.

13. The reasons and means by which a pope can be corrected or deposed.

14. The eradication of simony, the buying or selling of church offices.

15. Dispensations.

16. Revenues of the pope and the cardinals.

17. Indulgences.⁵

The council itself then issued decrees addressing a few of these problems.⁶ These provisions made little headway after the council, but from this point forward reform of the cardinals surfaced again and again in official reform proposals as an object of major concern.⁷ It would be a hot point of contention at the Council of Trent. Of greater practical impact, as things turned out, was Constance’s ratification of the expression “reform in head and members.” For the next century the expression served as a rallying cry for individuals and institutions nursing all manner of grievances. From 1417 until 1517, reform, understood in different ways by different parties, became one of Europe’s most insistently recurring and inflammatory words.

The manner in which Constance handled “the extirpation of heresy,” which specifically meant the condemnation of the teachings of John Wyclif and his two Bohemian followers, Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, had important repercussions for Luther and thus for the convocation of Trent. Constance condemned, first, eighty-five and then another forty-five propositions attributed to John Wyclif, the long-dead English theologian. It then summoned Hus, very much alive, to answer for his teachings. Granted a safe conduct by the Emperor-elect Sigismund, Hus came to Constance only to be condemned there and, despite the safe conduct, handed over to the “secular arm” to be burned at the stake. A century later, Luther and his supporters cited the Hus case again and again as a reason for Luther, even when his safety was assured, to evade or outright reject summons to a trial.

Besides the propositions of Wyclif, Hus, and Jerome of Prague, the council also singled out for condemnation the teaching of Jacob of Mies (Strbro), an associate of Hus at Prague, who maintained that the laity had the right to receive Communion under the form of wine as well as bread. In its condemnation of Mies’s position, the council put forth the teaching that “the whole body and blood of Christ are truly contained” under each of the forms.⁸ Therefore, the Eucharistic cup could legitimately be withheld. This issue returned in urgent form at the Council of Trent.

Within three decades after the council, Frequens had become a dead letter. In accordance with it Martin V had dutifully, though with misgivings, convoked a council to meet in Pavia then Siena in 1423–1424, and then another to meet in Basel in 1431. He died, however, five months before Basel opened, leaving it in the hands of his successor, Eugene IV (1431–1447). The new pope almost immediately ran into trouble with the council, whose necessity he did not see and whose potential for mischief-making he feared. It did not help matters that the council met hundreds of miles from Rome, a situation that increased the potential for misunderstanding.

Partly as a result of clumsy or ill-advised moves on Eugene’s part, the council turned ever more radical and antipapal. The two parties were soon racing toward each other on a collision course, especially as the council took up “reform of the head.” On March 26, 1436, it limited the number of cardinals the pope could appoint, invested them with pastoral obligations, and imposed upon them a modest lifestyle. It forbade the pope to name nephews as cardinals.⁹ More devastating was the decree published a year earlier, on June 9, 1435, in which the council abolished throughout Christendom annates, an onerous form of papal tax on new incumbents in ecclesiastical offices that was for the popes a major source of income.¹⁰ Eugene immediately denounced the measure and sent a solemn protest to all Christian rulers.

Meanwhile the Ottoman Turks continued to press against the great city of Constantinople (Istanbul), whose fall would not only mean the end of Christian rule there but also open the Balkans and Eastern Europe to Turkish armies. Reunion with “the Greeks” had been a papal priority ever since the Schism of 1054 between the two churches. When John VIII Paleologos, the emperor in Constantinople, showed himself interested in reunion, both Eugene and the council responded positively. The council offered several cities as possible sites for a council of reunion, but it excluded Florence and Modena because Eugene had proposed them. The Greeks favored the papal choices as cities of easier access for them, and, more important, because they realized that for the reunion to work (with its almost certain subsequent military aid to Constantinople), it had to be effected under the auspices of the bishop of Rome.

With that, Eugene’s moment had at last arrived. He transferred the council from Basel to Ferrara and then to Florence, where the Greeks arrived in February 1439. He had struck a mortal blow to Basel. Although a considerable number of bishops at first remained there and were supported by the French monarchy as well as by other princes, they posed the danger of another schism. The prospect of a council of reunion, legitimately convoked by the pope, was as appealing as the prospect of another schism was horrifying. In January 1438, the still sizeable remnant in Basel suspended Eugene. The next year it declared him deposed and elected a new pope, Felix V, to succeed him. But as the council at Florence moved to a happy conclusion, Basel lost support and bit by bit sputtered to extinction. It was not, however, forgotten.

Long before its demise though, the council at Basel had in 1432 and 1434 declared that general councils were the supreme authority in the church. Then on May 16, 1439, it declared that doctrine a matter of faith, so that rejection of it was heresy. Whereas the action of the Council of Constance against the three papal contenders can be interpreted as an emergency measure in a time of supreme crisis, the decrees of Basel raised the superiority of councils over popes to the rank of a constitutional principle, valid at all times and in all circumstances. As to be expected, at Florence Eugene, in the bull Moyses vir, which was approved by the council on September 4, 1439, explicitly condemned the decree as “an abominable crime committed by certain wicked men dwelling in Basel so as to breach the unity of the church.” Eugene used the bull, moreover, as a bill of indictment against Basel and as a long, self-justifying apologia for the way he had dealt with it.¹¹

Although with Moyses vir Eugene carried the day at Florence, not everyone was convinced that his position was correct. The previous year, 1438, King Charles VII of France assembled a national council at Bourges, where he issued a decree, the Pragmatic Sanction, that essentially supported Basel on the supremacy of council over pope and on the necessity of holding general councils at regular intervals. The Sanction, which adumbrated Gallicanism and helped justify it, hung like a sword over the heads of the popes, especially when after the Hundred Years’ War France emerged as the strongest and wealthiest political force in Europe. After Charles the French kings continued to confirm the Sanction, insist upon it as a national policy, and refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the Council of Florence.

Meanwhile, in its quest for reunion the council at Florence focused on several long-standing differences between the Greeks and the Latins, but the sticking point of course was the authority of the papacy. Some Greeks were persuaded by arguments, some simply bowed to pressure, but they in any case agreed to a remarkably strong statement: the pope had “full power of tending, ruling, and governing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Fifteenth-Century Prelude
• 2. The Struggle to Convoke the Council
• 3. The First Period, 1545–1547
• 4. The Middle Years, 1547–1562
• 5. The Council Resumes, 1562–1563
• 6. The Council Concludes
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: The Twenty-Five Sessions of the Council of Trent
• Appendix B: The Tridentine Profession of Faith
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index