Trent, Council Of
TRENT, COUNCIL OF. Also known as the nineteenth general council of the Roman Catholic Church, this council opened on December 13, 1545, and closed on December 4, 1563, after twenty-five formal sessions. The road to Trent, long and tortuous, passed through Constance, Basel, and Pisa. The cry for a sweeping reform of the church from top to bottom—"reformatio capitis et membrorum"—had been raised one hundred years before Luther posted his theses. It continued to ring out through the fifteenth century, accompanied more often than not by the insistence that serious reform could be achieved only within the framework of a general council. Basic to this coupling of reform and council was the widespread conviction that the papacy was incapable of or unwilling to put right the tangle of abuses that threatened to smother the ecclesiastical life of Christendom. Indeed, it was argued by many that the popes' chronic misuse of their dispensing powers, particularly with regard to the appointment to benefices, was the root cause of those abuses.
The demand for a council became the standard rhetoric not only of churchmen but also of princes and statesmen. Conciliar preeminence assumed doctrinal status in many of the best universities in Europe and found its way into a thousand pamphlets, treatises, and broadsides.
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