True History - Veritas Card # 31 (Orange Card) - The Council of Trent

The Council of Trent - 1545 - 1563

    There were different councils during the Middle Ages that served to define what a particular group of people believed about the Bible, God, Jesus, etc. A few of the councils were a response to heresy. Today we are going to learn about a council that came about by the Roman Catholic Church.
   The Roman Catholic Church was responding now to the Protestant Reformation. Obviously, they would not have agreed with the Reformation and what it stood for. They will now set forth officially the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.
   This council was called by Pope Paul III in 1545. It met periodically until 1563. It set forth the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. It also addressed the moral abuses that were going on, such as simony. There were also people selling Indulgences to make money, and this was addressed as well. Indulgences, however, were not completely done away with. (Indulgences are slips of paper that people buy, and as a way to encourage people to pay for them, they received assurance of salvation through them).
   Another result of the Council of Trent was to establish the authority of the papacy. The Roman Catholic Church rejected the idea that a person is saved by faith alone. They insisted that salvation was the result of faith plus works. This doctrine does not line up with Scripture, which states that a person is saved by faith alone. Good works are the result of salvation, not the cause. They also preserved the tradition that the Roman Catholic Church was an additional infallible authority.
    The Council of Trent basically said that the Protestants were 'anathema' which means cursed by God. The Protestants and Catholics were now going to have a gulf that was deep and lasting between them. So now it was clear what the Roman Catholic Church had believed in, which was what they had already believed in for centuries before.