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THE COUNCIL OF TRENT

The Catholic Church was not long on the defensive after the Reformation. It was almost immediately able to win back some of the territories initially lost to Protestantism in Germany and Central Europe, at the same time more than compensating for its losses through a rapidly growing presence further afield, thanks to Spanish and Portuguese expansion into the New World, and Asia. The missionary activities included remarkable liturgical experiments drawing on the culture and languages of the indigenous populations, until the mass of 1570 was enforced even for the new Catholics on the far side of the Atlantic. What came out of the reforms agreed by the Council was a confident, reorganised, and centralised international church with a standard version of the liturgy, which remained more or less unchanged until the Second Vatican Council 400 years later. Although this ‘new’ missal of 1570 is often referred to as the Missal of Pius V, its content was not new at all. It was largely based on the existing and influential fifteenth-century version of the missal current at the papal court. This derived from the ancient Romano-Frankish liturgies of the ninth and tenth centuries, which in turn had incorporated and consolidated even older material.^[1] The radical aspect of the reform lay in the ruling by Pope Pius V that it was to be the sole permitted missal throughout the Latin Church and that nothing in either the text or rubrics of the mass was to be changed except by papal decision.  Local missals differed from the new standard Roman missal, usually in relatively minor ways.  As Monti points out, and his book illustrates, local traditions such as the distinctive Holy Week customs in Spain lent colour to the mass without compromising its unity, because the basic form of the Roman mass served as a common template.^[2] Nonetheless, from this point on the only exceptions allowed were to be regional rites older than 200 years. These revolutionary measures were to prove easier to implement and police thanks to the arrival of the printing press.

The reformed mass associated with the Council of Trent (which ran from 1547 to 1562, with interruptions because of war), finally emerged in 1570, well after the end of the long-drawn-out Council, because of its decision to remit consideration of the missal and related matters to the pope, with the resulting decrees appearing in the Council’s name between 1568 and 1614.  As the work of more than one pope, they indicate how responsibility for the mass and the liturgy had institutionally passed from the local bishops to the centre, the papacy. Given the ultramontane spirit of the church in the following centuries, the popes were to have a more or less free hand when it came to liturgical initiatives. More recently, however, Benedict XVI has stressed that the pope too is constrained by tradition and has no right arbitrarily to change the liturgy.^[3]

The centralisation and the resulting tight control over the liturgy are in keeping with the general approach taken by the Catholic Church in facing up to the dual challenge of the rise of Protestantism and its global missionary role in the Americas and Asia. That approach demanded a coordinated response and in the circumstances centralisation had much to recommend it, indeed, it is hard to see any other response being up to the scale of the tasks then facing the church. The structures and reflexes of the mediaeval church could not have coped. Seminaries were reformed, the requirement for priests and bishops to be present in their parish or diocese was enforced, as was celibacy, with priests required to leave or expel their concubines and bishops to give up their mistresses. The Pope himself took over the nomination of bishops, who were to report in person to Rome every five years.

As for the liturgy, the unchanging mass was to remain in an unchanging language, although the Council of Trent had seriously discussed the advantages of having some or all of the mass in vernacular languages, and Protestants had even attended some of its sessions, having been given a guarantee of safe passage. However, it would have been unthinkable to give up the Latin mass when it was under assault. The same applied to other distinctively Catholic practices, such as Marian devotion, the stress on the authority of tradition alongside that of scripture, and priestly celibacy. Those practices and doctrines most at variance with those of Protestants were emphasised. Mitchell points out that in the end, while the Catholic Church took determined steps to repair the specific organisational weaknesses revealed by the partial success of the Reformation, the Council of Trent made no doctrinal concessions to it, nor did it follow its example in any important respect.^[4]  Seriously addressing the theological issues raised by the Reformation would come with all the force of a too long-delayed adjustment four hundred years later, which probably goes some way to explaining the at times rather uncritical attitude towards the Reformation churches taken at the Second Vatican Council.

Klauser refers to the regime established by the Council of Trent, so stable that it outlasted its time, as an ‘era of codified liturgy and rubrical rule’[7], while the liturgical historian Joseph Jungmann memorably likened the effect of the missal of Pius V on the development of the liturgy to that of a mighty dam. It held back the waters of change, channelling and directing them into well-constructed canals, but at the cost of diverting them from the river valley, which lay barren.^[8]  Trent’s version of what was essentially a fifteenth-century liturgy still defined the status quo facing the bishops of the world as they gathered in October 1962 for the opening session of the Second Vatican Council. To describe the atmosphere on the eve of the Council, a German scholar who was present in Rome at the time also uses the metaphor of a dam, but this time not in the context of holding back the waters of liturgical creativity, but of one about to break.^[9] Four hundred years is a long time.

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