Update Twenty One

v: The Council of Trent

Finally the Church had done enough to take what it saw as the ultimate step towards ending the protestant menace. Three years into the Inquisition the Pope was finally successful in calling for an Ecumenical Council. After a compromise between the Emperor and the Pope the Council was set in Trent, a small town in the Holy Roman Empire. Since 1520 members of the Church, first Martin Luther and then Popes and Emperors, had tried to convene an Ecumenical Council. For twenty-five years it was delayed. Locations wouldn’t work out, Protestants refused to come, wars broke out. Eventually a Council was set in place in 1545, but no longer was the Pope sympathetic to reconciliation. Rome was out for blood. This council is considered by many to be the greatest council of the Church. It created what is the modern Catholic Church. Lasting for twenty years and five Popes and two emperors, the council dealt with an enormous amount of issues. The goal of the Council was to set into inviolable practice all those things which would make Protestants t be heretical. To this end the Council set out a number of Canons to be followed:

Priesthood
CANON I.--If any one saith, that there is not in the New Testament a visible and external priesthood; or that there is not any power of consecrating and offering the true body and blood of the Lord, and of forgiving and retaining sins; but only an office and bare ministry of preaching the Gospel, or, that those who do not preach are not priests at all; let him be anathema.
CANON III.--If any one saith, that order, or sacred ordination, is not truly and properly a sacrament instituted by Christ the Lord; or, that it is a kind of human figment devised by men unskilled in ecclesiastical matters; or, that it is only a kind of rite for choosing ministers of the word of God and of the sacraments; let him be anathema.
CANON IV.--If any one saith, that, by sacred ordination, the Holy Ghost is not given; and that vainly therefore do the bishops say, Receive ye the Holy Ghost; or, that a character is not imprinted by that ordination; or, that he who has once been a priest, can again become a layman; let him be anathema.
CANON VII.--If any one saith, that bishops are not superior to priests; or, that they have not the power of confirming and ordaining; or, that the power which they possess is common to them and to priests; or, that orders, conferred by them, without the consent, or vocation of the people, or of the secular power, are invalid; or, that those who have neither been rightly ordained, nor sent, by ecclesiastical and canonical power, but come from elsewhere, are lawful ministers of the word and of the sacraments; let him be anathema.
Justification
CANON IX.-If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema.
CANON XXX.-If any one saith, that, after the grace of Justification has been received, to every penitent sinner the guilt is remitted, and the debt of eternal punishment is blotted out in such wise, that there remains not any debt of temporal punishment to be discharged either in this world, or in the next in Purgatory, before the entrance to the kingdom of
CANON XXXII.-If any one saith, that the good works of one that is justified are in such manner the gifts of God, as that they are not also the good merits of him that is justified; or, that the said justified, by the good works which he performs through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ, whose living member he is, does not truly merit increase of grace, eternal life, and the attainment of that eternal life,-if so be, however, that he depart in grace,-and also an increase of glory; let him be anathema
These and many, many more Canons and dogmas made the Council of Trent the deciding council of what the Roman Church was. Now the division between Protestants and Catholics was set in stone. The Church made unspoken tradition unassailable dogma, anyone speaking against or insulting it being in the danger of excommunication. Purgatory was put in the books while indulgences for money were written out. Trent made the Latin Vulgate bible the official bible, including the books we know of as the Apocrypha. By the standard of Trent, there could be no reconciliation any more. It gave the Protestants the options of submitting to Roman dogma or being exterminated in the ever increasing Inquisition. But in this the Roman Church had played its hand to far. The Protestants would not just go quietly in the night. This ultimatum solidified the Protestant positions. They would fight to the death for their beliefs, and as it turned out often to the death of Catholic forces. War was here. No longer was it veiled in political schemes. This was a religious war.