ERETICOPEDIA

Dictionary of Heretics, Dissidents, and Inquisitors in the Mediterranean World
Edizioni CLORI | Firenze | ISBN 978-8894241600 | DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1309444
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The Council of Trent arose as a response to the Protestant Reformation. While, at first, many of its promoters (among them Emperor Charles V and the curial faction of the “spirituali”) viewed it as a means to heal the Lutheran schism, in the end the council—whose development was profoundly shaped by contingent politico-ecclesiastical events—pronounced the harshest condemnation of heresies and reorganized the Catholic Church. It defined the canons of orthodoxy and liturgy, as well as new norms on clerical discipline and on the role of bishops and the hierarchy, which came to characterize the face of the modern and contemporary Church. A special cardinalatial congregation, the Congregation of the Council, was created by Pope Pius IV on 2 August 1564 with the apostolic constitution Alias nos to coordinate and oversee the implementation of the Tridentine decrees. This congregation, progressively weakened in the contemporary era, ceased to exist in 1967 when Paul VI established the Congregation for the Clergy, which absorbed its remaining functions.

The council as an instrument to resolve the conflict with the Protestants

Already Luther, following the bull Exsurge Domine (15 June 1520) by Leo X, which condemned him, invoked the traditional instrument of a council to resolve the conflict. For Luther, however, the council had to be free and neutral and take place in Germany—an option the papal representative at the Diet of Worms (1521), Girolamo Aleandro, could in no way accept.
In 1537 Paul III attempted to convoke the council first in Mantua and then in Vicenza, but the plan was soon shelved. The path of religious colloquies with the Protestants was then tried: the most important of these, the Regensburg Colloquy of 1541—which saw the participation of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, the most active advocate of reconciliation—failed miserably. In order to reach agreement on the question of salvation, Contarini had proposed to Lutherans who upheld iustificatio sola fide the theological formula of “double justification” (a person is justified by faith, but must concretely confirm this justification through works). Beyond doctrinal issues, what divided the parties was a profoundly divergent idea of the Church.

The Council of Trent and the definition of the new Counter-Reformation orthodoxy: organization, vicissitudes, and decrees

The first phase of the council (Trent and Bologna, 1545–48)

In 1542, the year of Contarini’s death, the first summons to Trent was issued. The venue seemed a good compromise, being a prince-bishopric within the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V, whose prince-bishop was doubly bound to pope and emperor. Nothing came of it, however, until December 1545. The council—presided over by the legate-cardinals Del Monte, Cervini, and Pole, with Monsignor Angelo Massarelli as secretary-general—opened with only 31 bishops present, almost all Italians. Charles V’s war against the Schmalkaldic League, begun in April 1546, prevented Protestant delegates from attending.
The council organized itself into three congregations, which examined the agenda items in succession: a) the theologians; b) the general congregations of all prelates; c) ad hoc deputations. Bishops, the priors general of religious orders, and representatives of monastic congregations possessed voting rights.
A first important decision, contrary to the Protestant conception of the primacy of Scripture, was taken at the fourth session on 8 April 1546: the foundations of faith were, with equal authority, Scripture and Tradition. Another important decree was promulgated at the fifth session on 17 June 1546, on Original Sin: it established, against the Protestant view, that it is completely cleansed by baptism.
While the war raged and Protestant troops threatened to invade the Trentino-Tyrolese territories, debate unfolded on the most thorny theological issue, justification. After long and painful discussion, the final decision was approved at the sixth session (13 January 1547). The decree stressed cooperation between justifying grace and human merits in achieving salvation. The excessive insistence on merits prompted dissent from Cardinal Pole, who withdrew from the council under the pretext of illness so as not to vote for a resolution he did not share. In the same session, the decree obliging bishops to reside in their dioceses (an unjustified absence of more than six months was deplored) and the decree on the sacraments—fixed at seven in number—were approved. The latter likewise amounted to a severe condemnation of Protestant doctrine, which considered only Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist) to be sacraments.
Following a typhus outbreak, the eighth session of 11 March 1547 decided to transfer the council to Bologna. In fact, the epidemic—though it did claim some prelates’ lives—offered an excellent pretext to move the assembly to a city under the direct political control of the pope, within the Papal States, thereby limiting the emperor’s influence, to which he vigorously objected. On 24 April 1547, at the decisive battle of Mühlberg, Charles V inflicted a resounding defeat on the league of Protestant princes, effectively annihilating it: now Protestant participation in the council—and consequent reconciliation—could be imposed manu militari. The Augsburg Interim effectively imposed Roman Catholic doctrine on the Protestants, with some concessions (e.g., communion sub utraque specie and clerical marriage). Moving the council to Bologna threw a wrench into the emperor’s plans; he had even managed to compel the Protestants to send a delegation to Trent (impossible in Bologna, within the Papal States). Precisely because of imperial opposition, proceedings at Bologna were short-lived, and the council was effectively suspended in 1548.

The second Tridentine phase (1551–52)

The council was reconvened by Pope Julius III for 1 May 1551 in Trent, under the direction of the legate-cardinal Crescenzio, assisted by the bishops Pighino and Lippomano. The most important of the decrees approved was that on the Eucharist (11 October 1551, thirteenth session), which confirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation against Protestant consubstantiation. This phase of the council saw the short-lived participation of a Protestant delegation. In March 1552 Maurice of Saxony, having placed himself at the head of the Protestant princes and allied with France, resumed hostilities against Charles V. The emperor, caught by surprise, had to flee in haste from Innsbruck, where he had been staying to follow the council’s progress closely. As the politico-military situation deteriorated, on 28 April the council was suspended indefinitely.

The third and final phase (1562–63)

For several years nothing more was said about the council. Although hostilities between Charles V and the French were halted by the Truce of Vaucelles (February 1556), the intransigent Pope Paul IV, fiercely hostile to the emperor, deplored the idea of a council in Protestant territory. For his reforming activity, Pope Carafa made use of a special Congregation for Reform and even contemplated a council in Rome under his personal direction. Paul IV then undertook war against Charles V and Philip II (September 1556–September 1557) and persuaded the French to resume hostilities against the emperor (January 1557). Thereafter France, increasingly undermined by internal religious conflicts that would erupt in the 1560s, suffered a heavy military defeat at Saint-Quentin (August 1557) and was forced to sign the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559). Only with the advent of a new pope, Pius IV, could the council be reconvened (bull of 29 November 1560), but in a radically different context: Charles V’s Empire no longer existed, divided between the Spanish dominions of Philip II and the German lands of the new emperor Ferdinand; the Protestant rupture was now irreparable—Europe had entered the age of opposing confessionalizations.
The council therefore reopened in Trent on 18 January 1562, directed by the legate-cardinals Seripando and Gonzaga. A grave conflict erupted over the nature of the bishops’ obligation of residence. Part of the assembly claimed it was sanctioned de iure divino, which would override papal authority. Moreover, in March 1563 both legate-cardinals died (Gonzaga on 2 March and Seripando on 17 March). They were replaced by Giovanni Morone, who had been persecuted for heresy by Paul IV but was acquitted by Pius IV, and by Bernardo Navagero, former Venetian ambassador to Rome under Pope Carafa and raised to the cardinalate by Pius IV. While Navagero’s role was more secondary, Morone’s action gave fresh momentum to the assembly’s work, which approved the important decree on seminaries (14 July 1563, twenty-third session) and subsequently enacted a significant series of decrees on Church reform and further dogmatic definition (twenty-fourth session, 11 November 1563; twenty-fifth and final, 3–4 December 1563). The reform decrees concerned the duties of cardinals, bishops, and priests; the organization of dioceses and ecclesiastical provinces (and related synods and councils); regulation of religious orders; etc. On the dogmatic front, the sanctity of marriage was reaffirmed and its criteria of validity were fixed; specific decrees were issued on the doctrines of Purgatory and indulgences, as well as on the cult of saints, relics, and images.
Finally dissolved by Cardinals Morone and Navagero in December 1563, the council’s decrees were confirmed by Pius IV on 26 January 1564, and the Congregation of the Council was instituted. It then fell to his successor, Pius V, to have the decrees published and the printed text sent to bishops across the world, and to promulgate the Roman Catechism—a summa of Tridentine doctrine for parish priests—as the council itself had desired.

The disciplining of the clergy and criminal clergy

Throughout almost the entirety of the early modern period, homicide, usury, acts of violence, sexual practices of every kind, extortion, fraud, forgery of documents or coin, smuggling, and abuses tied to priestly ministry frequently brought clerics before the courts.
It should be specified that clergy crime rates remain in the shadows due to the limited scope of judicial interventions (restricted to diocesan tribunals) and, even more, because courts tended to resolve disputes through settlements between defendants and injured parties (judges avoided severe penalties, seeking remission of complaints, reconciliation of parties, or rapid compositions).
Before the Council of Trent (which sought to stem the clergy’s moral drift), a minority of dioceses nonetheless observed a rigorous respect for God’s word: above all Verona under Gian Matteo Giberti, where from 1525 to 1542 delinquent clergy (cohabiting, non-confessing, heretical, usurious, etc.) were duly punished—albeit with some exceptions, especially regarding forbidden concubinage, where parish priests tried by the courts were readmitted by the curia to the care of souls (often upon payment of a fine to revoke suspension a divinis). Generally, however, in early sixteenth-century Italy the disordered lives of many churchmen severely strained ecclesiastical authority. Neither pastoral commitment nor condemnations succeeded in countering abuses. The “black-sheep” clergy had many escape routes thanks to benefit of forum and to playing one jurisdiction off against another—between state judges and Rome.
Traces of these “scenic apparatuses” appear from the very first acts of Trent: the precarious state of the Church’s criminal justice was well known to the council fathers. In 1551 (session XIII) an important issue arose: many bishops avoided proceeding against their subjects, fearing they might themselves end up on trial due to false accusations by defendants. The council fathers responded by immediately setting “protective barriers” around ecclesiastical authorities to facilitate their leadership in reforming the clergy; moreover, they decided that cases in which prelates had to appear in court were to be referred to the pope and concluded by him. In this situation, it seemed that only the Holy Office could discipline these sinners in cassock, thanks to the expansion over time of its competencies at the expense of other courts. Nevertheless, this broadening only partly managed to check the drift of criminal clergy, for where the tribunal of faith could not extend its reach, prospects for intervention were limited to heretical blasphemy, bigamy, sorcery, and solicitation in the confessional. At that time heterodox doctrine was spreading throughout Italy and threatened to undermine the Church: this was the Inquisition’s chief concern. Once the enemies of orthodoxy were eliminated, there would be time to punish clerical abuses.
Several manuals on the subject were written in the sixteenth century. Notable examples include the Praxis criminalis canonica (1543) by the Bishop of Calahorra, Juan Bernardo Díaz de Lugo, and Pietro Follerio’s Canonica criminalis praxis (1580), which shared the same conclusion: the need to avoid excess in judging unrepentant clerics during trials against them.
One of Trent’s main objectives was the reform of clergy and laity alike, and therefore a central role in the education of both was entrusted to bishops. It was decided that they had the authority to proceed against exempt clerics as delegates of the Apostolic See. To transform episcopal curias into engines of robust reform, the spread of exemptions and dispensations was curbed: only apostolic delegations aimed at strengthening local Churches were approved. Bishops were required to exercise strict control over ordinations and to scrutinize clerical abuses. The only limits to their criminal forum concerned the excesses of friars and monks and the crimes committed by churchmen from other dioceses. For the former, competence remained with their respective orders; for the latter, even when equipped with special delegations, diocesan ordinaries were to cooperate with their colleagues in the competent dioceses. More than repression, however, prevention and correction of clerics were emphasized: no one could be ordained or even tonsured without holding a benefice sufficient for a decent life. Bishops, in short, were to ensure that those embarking on the priesthood were not doing so to evade justice; for parish priests, competence and integrity became mandatory requirements. Those who caused scandal had two alternatives: return to the right path or face admonition and punishment, along with removal. Regarding games, dances, revelry, and secular activities forbidden to the clergy, individual prelates were granted the faculty to tighten existing penalties as they saw fit. On the competences, procedures, and penalties of the Church’s criminal justice, however, there were no significant interventions. It was established that first-instance trials be concluded within two years from inception; only if that deadline was not met could appeal to higher judges be made (who in turn were bound to decide promptly); and that, in criminal and matrimonial cases, no ecclesiastical jurisdiction of rank lower than the episcopal one was competent. With the end of the heretical emergency and the council’s closure, however, the unity of purpose between Church and State began to fray. In this context, making ecclesiastical criminal courts efficient proved difficult: Pope Pius V sought, with the bull Cum primum (1566), to stiffen penalties for blasphemous churchmen, simoniacs, and sodomites and insisted on their obligation of residence and on oversight of their conduct; yet despite these measures, for this pope too the privilege of forum was at least as important as his reforming zeal. Protecting the clergy’s good name took precedence over the goal of repressing their crimes. In Italy, models of governing clerical criminality increasingly diverged from those approved at Trent. One expedient was to strengthen the reach of the nunciatures, implemented to reorganize the Church within the peninsula. The consequence was the downsizing of the bishops’ role: their criminal forum lost importance (already undermined by the development of local Holy Office courts), which meant the practical marginalization of those judging bodies from controlling orthodoxy. Since, even pastorally, the only alternative to slothful bishops—or those too attentive to internal balances—was intervention by papal diplomats (the diocesan ordinaries themselves were often accused of complicity or of overlooking repeated abuses), it is not hard to see that, in ecclesiastical criminal justice, the role of the nunciatures was enhanced after Trent with specific, carefully dosed privileges that at times provoked irritated reactions among those concerned. In 1567 Pius V obliged nuncios to keep a register of decisions taken under their special faculties and to report quarterly to Rome, to avoid misuse of such faculties. This initiative, with limited application, concerned excommunications reserved to the pope rather than judicial activity. In sum, after Trent the privileged axis of ecclesiastical criminal justice was that centered on direct agreements between papal diplomats and the leaders of individual states, always under Rome’s supervision. Nuncios, from their mandate to address the thorniest issues of the norms (especially concerning application of the death penalty), came to acquire competence over many lesser criminal cases. Even so, difficulties abounded: judicially, they had to re-establish boundaries between competing jurisdictions, restore the Church’s rights, and end outside interference. Outcomes varied by territory, but for Rome’s leaders and for the nuncios alike, none of this augured a reform of ecclesiastical criminal justice along the Tridentine model of diocesan courts’ centrality. Bishops were the weak link. Containing the problem seemed impossible, since the most hardened fringes of delinquent clergy continued to play off jurisdictions against each other, where bishops could do little. The bishops’ downsizing was accentuated by the creation, in the early 1570s, of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars. Although Sixtus V’s Immensa aeterni Dei forbade this congregation from operating at the judicial level, in 1588 (the very year of that papal bull) a consistory approved new regulations for its judicial competencies, thus canceling the limits set by Sixtus’s decree. The first message sent to bishops by the cardinals was the expectation that orders be executed without objection. Proof that the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars aimed to intimidate bishops and limit their autonomy—rather than apply Tridentine decrees—lay in two powerful instruments: first, apostolic visitations, i.e., inspections of dioceses entrusted to Roman delegates (to reaffirm that the development and leadership of renewal processes belonged to the Roman Curia, not to bishops); second, the dispatch to a given diocese of an apostolic vicar, a papal commissioner invested with its governance for variable periods in place of a bishop failing in his ministry (all at the latter’s expense). The new dicastery’s over-mighty power and the massive presence of apostolic visitors provoked strong protests against the latter, to the point that the cardinals moderated their measures. The combined effect of the opposition encountered and of the rebalancing of powers between local and central ecclesiastical authority—entirely to the advantage of the latter—meant the visitors’ incursions achieved modest results. In the council’s aftermath, the model employed by the Congregation’s cardinals lay outside any real interest in reorganizing clerical criminal courts and diocesan tribunals. Their guiding logic was to appeal to the great central institutions: if no one reported abuses of any kind to Rome, there was no reason to take an interest in the Church’s criminal justice. Different was the case of the Holy Office, which established a network of local tribunals applying a flexible model of judicial centralization: judges were to assess whether and how to try alleged clerical offenders without redundantly involving Rome.
A significant issue is the ad limina Petri visits. Instituted by Sixtus V with the apostolic constitution Romanus Pontifex (1585), these were periodic journeys to Rome to meet the pope and consult him in order to receive guidance useful for governing local Churches. Bishops had to present the pontiff with a report on religious life in their communities at fixed intervals proportional to their distance from Rome: every three years for bishops in the Italian peninsula, every four or five years for those in Europe and North Africa, and every ten years for all others. This was yet another proof of the central control exercised by the Roman Church (these reports later fell within the competence of the Congregation of the Council). Even so, the new obligation was felt as burdensome, as shown by numerous requests for extensions. Another striking aspect is that the Congregation of the Council’s assessment of such omissions concerned chiefly synods, pastoral visitations, and the establishment of seminaries—not the fight against clerical abuses.
Despite exceptional cases in the post-Tridentine period of dioceses scrupulously applying the council’s decrees (Borromean Milan was sui generis), the intransigent approach derived from Charles Borromeo did not take root across the peninsula. The jurist Marco Antonio Genovese, in the Praxis archiepiscopalis curiae Neapolitanae (1602), stated that if clerical abuses did not cause scandal, infamy, or harm to third parties, ecclesiastical visitors should abstain from prosecuting and condemning such clerics: a pastoral visitation ought to aim at correction, not repression. Following his view, many manuals for visitors and judges asserted that the competent magistrates’ intervention should be prompt but not zealous. Publicizing repressive measures had to be avoided. Nor should it be forgotten that even the harshest sentences were subject to moderation or commutation, reserved to the visitors themselves, to nuncios pro tempore, or—by their delegation—to the patriarchal vicar. In short, the novelty of the late sixteenth century, in all cases involving clergy, was chiefly the ability to steer complaints toward ecclesiastical rather than state courts. This was to vindicate the privilege of ecclesiastical forum, to the point that even when clerics’ crimes were reported to secular courts, the transfer of files to the ecclesiastical forum was customary. The interests and honor of delinquent clerics had to be safeguarded regardless of the gravity of their crimes: sentences in clerical criminal justice were invariably lenient, with strikingly light penalties and without removal from office (often the only “adequate” sentence was exile—a penalty that drew little attention—frequently remitted). Another noteworthy aspect is that, over time, culpability for certain grave offenses (such as sodomy, pedophilia, homicide, or rape) was entirely relative: for crimes to receive an adequate sanction, they had to be repeated and accompanied by a declaration of incorrigibility.
With the beginning of the seventeenth century, no major changes emerged regarding the prosecution of clerical criminality in ordinary ecclesiastical courts. Only toward the century’s end (1693) can we note a shift in the Sistine Immensa aeterni Dei with a decree modifying its ordinances: after a century in which dicasteries such as the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars had operated in the judicial sphere, contrary to Sixtus V’s provisions, they lost those faculties for good. Cardinals heading these congregations were forced to confine their coordinating activities to the pastoral/religious domain, without interfering in the resolution of cases, which returned to the Roman judicial institutions holding appellate powers. From then on, all criminal cases brought before the cardinalatial congregations had to be followed by other central judges (except for sentencing).
As for penalties against clerics, the seventeenth century saw in 1627 the birth of the “Pious House of Penance of Corneto,” better known as the Corneto Prison. It was a place of confinement for ecclesiastical criminals sentenced to hard labor or to the galleys. The intent of this prison was a clear separation of status between men of God and common criminals (destined for state or inquisitorial prisons). In the seventeenth century, therefore, indifference toward crimes perpetrated by the clergy remained largely constant, perpetuating a situation not unlike the pre-Tridentine period.

Bibliography

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Nota bene

The sections “The council as an instrument to resolve the conflict with the Protestants” and “The Council of Trent and the definition of the new Counter-Reformation orthodoxy: organization, vicissitudes, and decrees” were written by Daniele Santarelli; the section “The disciplining of the clergy and criminal clergy” was written by Luca Al Sabbagh.

Article written by Luca Al Sabbagh & Daniele Santarelli | Ereticopedia.org © 2013-2016 | English version 2025

et tamen e summo, quasi fulmen, deicit ictos
invidia inter dum contemptim in Tartara taetra
invidia quoniam ceu fulmine summa vaporant
plerumque et quae sunt aliis magis edita cumque
[Lucretius, "De rerum natura", lib. V]