The main purpose of the Council of Trent was to fix the position of the Church in the face of pressures of change driven mainly by the Protestant Reformation and to adopt a strategy that would allow the Catholic Church its maintenance in force and future growth.
The Catholic Church had taken place a first great division in 1054 called the "Schism of the East" when it split into two different institutions: the Roman Catholic Church, the seat in Rome and the Orthodox Catholic Church, the seat in Constantinople.
During the sixteenth century, another important break occurred called "The Protestant Reformation", which began in 1517 from when the priest and theologian Martin Luther published his famous 95 theses in the Castle of Wittenberg, where he established a series of practical practices and doctrinal aspects that the Church should change.
Luther argued that Salvation is granted by divine grace to people who reach it by faith, and objected that the Catholic Church raised salvation by works and collected large sums of money in exchange for indulgences (pardons) for people and families. members of your family. He said that the Church needed to raise large sums of money to build St Peter's Basilica and objected that the high clergy led a kind of life of luxury and abuse that was unacceptable.
Another central point was that Luther considered that the Bible is the only source of doctrine, while the Church based most of its doctrines on other sources such as tradition, the fathers of the church, the Pope, etc.
Luther translated the Bible into German and published the first printed edition in the Gütemberg printing house and this made possible its rapid distribution in the German-speaking population and later throughout Europe.
This caused great changes in the way of understanding Christianity in several priests and many believers. From 1518 many priests requested the creation of a Council to settle differences to unify the Church around the ideas that arose from a deep debate between the different positions.
At that time there were important kings and popes who pushed for the doctrinal and / or institutional unification of the Catholic Church.
Finally the Council was held in the city of Trento in discontinuous sections between 1545 and 1563 and resulted in the explicit separation of the Catholic Church with both the Orthodox Catholic Church and the different Protestant denominations.
Deep changes were made in religious and administrative practices and several doctrines were definitely fixed that were in question such as the existence of purgatory, reverence to the Virgin Mary and the Saints, the 7 sacraments, the Catechism, etc.
Many incorporations were introduced promoted by "The Company of Jesus" which was a newly created order but with rapid growth and power, especially in Spain. Among them we can mention:
- The residence of the Bishops
- The double Sacrifice of the Mass and the Cross
- The Communion under the two species
- Sacrament of the Episcopal Order
- Creation of clerical seminars