The Council of Trent responds
The Catholic Counter-Reformation begins
The Catholic Church has been under pressure to reform since Wycliffe, arguably since the Avignon papacy, certainly since Luther. The Council of Trent, convened in 1545 and meeting in three sessions over eighteen years, is the institutional church's response — not to the Reformers' positions, but to the internal corruption and theological confusion that gave the Reformers their opening.
The council does both things at once: it genuinely reforms the church and it clarifies and hardens the Catholic positions that the Reformation had challenged.
On corruption: Trent mandates that bishops must reside in their dioceses, that clergy must be educated and celibate, that seminaries must be established for priestly formation. These are genuine reforms of genuine problems.
On theology: Trent affirms tradition alongside scripture as a source of authority — rejecting the sola scriptura of the Reformers. It affirms the role of human cooperation with grace — rejecting the sola fide position. It affirms transubstantiation, the seven sacraments, purgatory, indulgences (though reformed in practice), the veneration of saints.
In each case, Trent is doing what councils do: responding to challenge by clarifying what was previously assumed. The positions it affirms were all held before Luther — they are now formally defined precisely because Luther questioned them.
Trent produces the Catholic Church that will exist for the next four centuries — clearly defined, internally reformed, externally hardened against Protestant influence.
“If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone, let him be anathema.”
— Council of Trent, Decree on Justification, Session VI, 1547 AD
“You see then that by works, a man is justified, and not only by faith.”
The Council of Trent produced the Catholic Reformation — a genuine renewal of the church that the Protestant critique made necessary.
This is the uncomfortable truth that both traditions have sometimes been reluctant to acknowledge: the Reformation made the Catholic Church better. The pressure of Protestant critique forced a council that cleaned up genuine corruption, educated a previously ignorant clergy, and clarified what Catholicism actually taught.
Simultaneously, the Catholic response sharpened what was distinctive about it — the role of tradition, the cooperation of grace and human will, the sacramental system — in ways that produced a more defined and defensible Catholicism.
Competition, even hostile competition, has made both traditions more theologically serious than they might otherwise have been.
What critique of your beliefs — even hostile critique — has made those beliefs more carefully held, more honestly examined, more genuinely yours?