Council of Trent
Council of Trent
The Council of Trent was an important church council, attended by cardinals, bishops, archbishops, and papal legates (representatives), who convened to make decisions on church doctrine and ceremony and to oppose the spread of the Protestant Reformation. The council met at the northern Italian city of Trent between 1545 and 1563. It refuted Martin Luther's ideas on the importance of certain books of the Bible, condemned the idea of grace by faith alone, and affirmed the traditional nature of the seven church sacraments. The council set down the liturgy of a standard Catholic Mass, known as the Tridentine Mass, and held that Christ was actually present in the bread and wine of the ceremony. It affirmed the rule of celibacy for priests, the need for infant baptism (which some Protestant sects considered optional), upheld the doctrine of purgatory and the veneration of relics, created an Index of forbidden books, and set down strict guidelines for marriage and divorce. The decrees of the council were ratified by Pope Pius IV in a papal bull of 1564. The council condemned the ideas of the Reformation and reserved to the church the right to punish Protestant heresy as it saw fit; many of its proclamations and decrees have been affirmed by the modern Catholic Church.