Question 1
Evaluate the interpretations in both of the two passages and explain which you think is more
convincing as an explanation of the impact of the Council of Trent.
Passage A
As the Council dragged on for a seemingly endless eighteen years, [the leaders] came to realise with ever deeper anxiety and frustration what a treacherous game they were engaged in. The fact that of the twenty-five Sessions of the council fewer than half were able to publish decrees of any substance suggests that the course was anything but smooth. When it finally concluded on December 4, 1563, none of the players had reason to be perfectly satisfied with the outcome.
Although Trent failed at reconciliation with “the Lutherans”, it achieved reconciliation among Catholics. Further schism had been averted, and Catholic leaders had the satisfaction of knowing that they had brought to conclusion a project of defining importance that had often been at the point of spinning completely out of control. For the peace that resulted everybody had paid a price in compromises, some of which came back after the council to trouble the church. During the council three centres of authority wrestled with one another – the popes, the bishops, and the great monarchs. After the council each of the three claimed the right to interpret and implement it, and each could find in the council’s enactments justification for its claim…The rivalry, as well as the cooperation, among these three centres became a mark of Catholicism after the council as it had been before it. The difference was that now interpretation and implementation of the council often became the focal point. The ink was hardly dry on the document when, despite its careful language, disputes broke out among Catholics about how to interpret it.
Adapted from: J. W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council, published in 2013.
Passage B
It is a matter of history that the Council did not reunite all Christians nor did it perfectly reform Christian morality. It did, however, restore spirit and energy to the faltering Church. The years following the Council testify to the inner renewal which its reform program achieved. Theological scholarship, apostolic expansion, moral betterment, vigorous spiritual growth, the creation of new art forms, successful counter-attacks in the confessional struggle, and a sense both of victory and of rejoicing are characteristic. Self-defence and self-assertion fill the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the Tridentine age. The old had indeed passed away, but not totally; and the new, which had been discovered in the hard crucible of trial and error, held great promise of an incredible future.
The Catholic Reform was essentially personal reform – the reformation of the Church ‘in head and members’. As an expression of this reform, the Council of Trent was concerned more with the spiritual than with the organisational, more with the individual in the Church than with the Church as an institution. It aimed at transforming the whole by transforming the parts. Hence in the Tridentine age, personal spiritual renewal was of prime importance. The restoration of the spiritual involved the inner renewal of religious observance among the faithful.
Adapted from: R. McNally, ‘The Council of Trent, the Spiritual Exercises and the Catholic Reform’, in Church History 34:1, published in 1965.
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