In this article, Vinicius looks at the Tridentine reform of the clergy and its great focus on caring for and educating the faithful.
One of the first aims of the Council of Trent (1546-1563) was to define the true nature of the Church and the way it cares for and teaches the faithful. On one hand this was to counter Protestant heresies that viewed the Church as invisible or as a mere collection of believers.
The divine constitution of the Church meant that communion with it must be through a visible, juridically independent institution led by the Pope, not an amorphous mass of self-taught believers.
Saint Robert Bellarmine wrote (in his treatise, Concerning Councils),
“Luther claims that the Church is nothing but the faithful people of Christ… [but the true Church is no less] a visible and palpable assembly of people than the people of Rome, the king the kingdom of France or the republic of Venice”.
The First Council of the Vatican later made this visible nature clearer, defining as Catholic dogma that the See of Rome in particular would remain until the end of time to guide the faith. The Pope is not just a “court of appeal” but the Church’s first teacher, as Vatican I defined.
Since the Council of Trent, the Pope has been able to fulfil this ancient role better than ever because of improved transport, communication, and freedom of the Church.
It is heretical to assert that the Pope should be a teacher of the faith primarily in the diocese of Rome. The post-Tridentine Popes taught so well and so universally (until the 1960s) that many assumed the Church’s golden age would go on forever and never return to the long periods of factionalism and associated immorality of prior ages; Trent finally put a stop to the secular and widespread co-habitation of clerics with concubines, something which the faithful rarely had to confront in the last few hundred years, until the post-Vatican II period.
The Church cannot exist without this hierarchical structure. There is no Eucharist without it. Nor can the teaching Church exist without it. Indeed, parts of the Church that have been deprived of clergy have withered relatively quickly.
After a generation or two of Protestantism in England, only a quarter of the people (who had mostly been very unwilling to abandon the faith) were still Catholic; another century later, only five per cent remained faithful, and this was only due to the continued presence of a few priests. In Japan, where there was no contact with the Church for 250 years, the faith was not integrally preserved, but eventually syncretised with other religions. There was still a memory of the missionaries in some communities, hence the joy on the part of some when missionaries reappeared in the nineteenth century. But the idea that Catholics can preserve the faith any length of time without clergy has been something of a myth.
Trent defeats the Renaissance and checks Protestantism
Renaissance humanists and Protestants wanted to change the Church’s traditional method of teaching by concentrating on individual self-catechising and study of the Bible. Even before Luther, so-called pietism was emphasising individualist self- inspiration instead of the teaching authority of the Church.
At Trent, Dominican theologians argued that such individualist tendencies were heretical. To remedy this state of affairs, the Council of Trent devoted fourteen out of twenty-five sessions to reforming the Church to correct the abuses of the Renaissance period which allowed
Protestantism to emerge.
The post-Tridentine Church would be a history of expansion and solidity in piety and belief, until the surge of modernism in the twentieth century. The Church’s unity and strength in the period was unparalleled in its entire history.
The Renaissance Church had become deficient in pastoral care of the faithful. Sermons were largely the work of itinerant preachers from mendicant orders. The Council of Trent sought to make the Mass and the parish the centre of religious life once again. The Council strove, not only to have the regular clergy better educated and able to care for the faithful, but to have bishops and priests live in their dioceses and parishes in order to properly fulfil their functions. Episcopal absenteeism was a great abuse in the pre-Tridentine Renaissance Church.
The quality of the clergy improved immeasurably after Trent. The high level of morals, formation and piety attained became the norm until recent generations. The parish priest, now better educated in the Tridentine seminary system, was in the front line of the push to ensure that people received the sacraments and understood them properly, which had not always been the case. The aim was to make the local church, rather than the individual, the centre of religious and devotional life. The Mass was the essential condition for all this of course, being the most important part of any Catholic’s religious life.
The Council of Trent reaffirmed the Church’s traditional liturgical artistic expression, which had always been rich and elaborate. Church architecture following Trent made the Mass the centre of worship, opening up cluttered Church interiors to allow the faithful to view the liturgy, especially the Elevation. The Council affirmed Gregorian
chant as the heart of the liturgy’s musical expression, and demanded strict guidelines for polyphony, which often sounded worldly and not liturgically oriented.
The century after Trent has been called the Golden Age of Catholic biblical scholarship. This is ignored by the anti-Catholic myth that claims that biblical and patristic studies were overshadowed by “dry” scholasticism. In fact, both scholastic theology and philosophy constantly sourced itself back to the saints, to the Fathers of the Church, and to the scriptures. In the period there were many excellent
translations of the Vulgate (like our Douai Rheims Bible) and biblical studies and commentaries.
The Society of Saint Pius X has been able to ensure that in its part of the Church, the faithful (unlike the Catholics of Elizabethan England and Japan) are not left without pastoral care and teaching.
By Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
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