Sixteenth Century

To commemorate the closing of the Council of Trent, the Catholic University of Leuven, in collaboration with the Europäische Melanchthon Akademie in Bretten and the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose in Bologna, sponsored an international conference entitled "The Council of Trent: Reform and Controversy in Europe and Beyond (1545–1700)." It was held in Leuven precisely on the 450th anniversary of the council's final, two-day session, on December 4–6, 1563, and was organized by Wim François of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies and by Violet Soen of the Faculty of Arts. The contributions from that conference published in its proceedings number forty-four. They are distributed among three volumes: Volume I: Between Trent, Rome, and Wittenberg contains sixteen papers; Volume II: Between Bishops and Princes also has sixteen; and Volume III: Between Artists and Adventurers has twelve. Most of the papers are in English, but several are in French and German. Their authors come from Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the Ukraine, and the United States of America. They are serious works of scholarship that provide new understandings, questioning and modifying old orthodoxies. The emphasis of these studies is not on what happened at the council, but on its aftermath: how its conciliar decrees were interpreted and implemented, the tensions between efforts to centralize and provide uniformity throughout the Catholic world and counter movements to adapt to local conditions. What roles the Congregation of the Council, local bishops, and civil rulers played in the implementation of the decrees is explored. The council's influence on artistic representations of religious subjects and sacred music are investigated through an examination of treatises and individual works of art and music. True to its title, these topics are treated not only in a European context, but also in the Spanish and Portuguese missionary lands, ranging from Peru to Ethiopia and Japan.

The first volume is introduced by the editors, who survey the themes of the forty-four papers published in the collection. A magisterial overview of the historical context in which the council met is provided by the late Robert Bireley, who shows how the Catholic Church tried to adapt to the demands of urban laity for a deeper spirituality, to the individualism of the Renaissance, to the growing power of centralizing states, to the European expansion with its missionary activity, and to the calls for institutional and doctrinal reforms. His fellow Jesuit and pre-eminent conciliar historian John W. O'Malley produced two essays for this volume. The first distinguished what the council actually did from what it did not do. Far from providing a comprehensive program of reform, the council concentrated on the office of bishop, requiring him to reside in his diocese, preach, and provide pastoral care by visitations, synods, and the proper training of his clergy. Not treated by the council were such topics as the missions, inquisition, schools, a reform of the Roman Curia, and the role of the papacy. Among the myths he debunks are the council's imposition of monochromatic reforms, its program of disciplining the laity, and its restraining artistic expression. While not intending to increase the power of the papacy, it nonetheless did so by allowing the pope to become the sole interpreter of its decrees. O'Malley's second essay compares the membership, organization, functioning, and goals of the Council of Trent to that of Vatican Council II. The essay by Günther Wassilowky deals also with the issue of the false images of Trent, the openness of Trent, and the more rigid later phenomena of Tridentinism, Baroque Catholicism, and Catholic confessional culture that nonetheless expressed itself in various ways. Two contributions treat Trent's influence on the Vulgate (Jan...