Sunday, November 3, 2013

Do things just stay the same after reform?

As a young child educated in Catholic schools, I remember being impressed in my study of Catholicism with the importance of the Council of Trent in solidifying and unifying our Catholic faith in the face of challenges made by the Protestant Reformation. As a young Catholic growing up in the 1950s the Reformation was the great enemy of our faith. There was nothing good about it. It upended and destroyed the Catholic faith that I understood made me the Catholic that I was. We always regarded the neighborhood kids who attended P.S. 82, the public school two blocks from my Catholic school, as less than human. They were, after all, Protestants.

That view has been altered since I finished reading Fr. John O'Malley S.J.'s book on the Council titled Trent: What Happened at the Council. Primarily I was left underwhelmed by the results of the Council's work. Given the corruption that existed in the Church of the 16th century, that the Council had any effect at all is most remarkable. Reform was not encouraged so much by churchmen themselves so much as by the political powers of laymen in the form of kings and emperors and their representatives who realized Europe was being torn apart by religious controversy. What was needed was not so much churchmen making changes but churchmen living the ideals they claimed for themselves.

By the time it closed after 18 years the Council had not really accomplished all that much. What really made its decrees work were the efforts of individuals - Charles Borromeo is specifically an example - who understood the necessity of reform and who began implementing reform in their own home dioceses. Just residing in your own diocese was a huge change for bishops who, to that time, often either lived elsewhere or who headed several dioceses at once.

Among the myths about the Church that I grew up with was the distinction between the authority of Scripture (important to the Protestant Reformers) and the authority of Tradition (important to Catholics). Yet, as O'Malley explains, Trent never spoke of Tradition but only of traditions. The Council did not decree a global category of transmission but only of specific traditions, e.g. doctrinal traditions, pastoral traditions, liturgical traditions, etc. The Council decreed there were two ways in which God's message is communicated - Scripture and traditions - but it did not determine the relationship of those two media.

The Council had begun with an eye toward reconciliation with the Lutheran Reformers and it might have happened but because of internal squabbling within the Roman Church and because the backs of Protestant Reformers were by then in fixed positions, any attempts failed. So we have today what we have. What most impressed me is that men like Charles Borromeo among others carried out real reform in their dioceses and so began real reform that continues well into the present day. Trent did not solve all the problems that existed in the Church of its time. But it did set in motion the possibility of reform and also real discipline by recognizing the dangerous path the Church was traveling by not striving toward internal holiness.



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