The background leading to The Council of Trent is an intricate patchwork of political maneuvering, self-interest and preservation. The fact that the north German princes had adopted Lutheranism in their territories was an irritant to Emperor Charles for it provided them a club with which to keep him at bay. And this was a vexing annoyance because the Emperor’s attention was drawn continually to the threat of Islam to the east. The more he had to deal with intransigent Lutherans, the less he could focus on the march of the Saracens.
The growth of Protestantism was also a concern for Rome because the more territories that became Protestant the less cash flowed to the Vatican and the more doubt was cast on Rome’s claim to universalism. Additionally, Rome had been selling bishoprics to the highest bidder as a standard practice for a long time. Rich bishops, having procured multiple sees, were simply absent from their dioceses; a situation which caused the locals to wonder what, in the end, they were really paying for. This was another practice badly in need of reform.
Against this backdrop, Trent’s deliberations on the Eucharist were not an attempt to articulate what Catholic doctrine had been. Paul makes that clear at several points:
Trent dealt with the doctrine of the Eucharist in two of its sessions: XIII and XXII. In the former it formalized the doctrine of transubstantiation; in the latter it asserted the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist. Transubstantiation was one of several competing doctrines of the age. It “was never made official in the medieval Church, but got weighty backing even before Aquinas’s time when it was used in documents of the Lateran Council of the Church in 1215.” And this fact, that of competing Eucharistic doctrines, goes to the heart of our investigation. At the time of Trent, there was a lack of unity from Rome on this crucial matter. And transubstantiation itself required a foundation in the pagan philosophy of Aristotle, a philosophy that was not universally accepted even within the fold of Rome:From the fourteenth century, most philosophers and theologians, particularly in northern Europe, did not in fact believe this (Thomistic doctrine). They were nominalists, who rejected Aristotle’s categories… Nominalists could only say of transubstantiation as a theory of the Mass that it was supported by the weight of opinion among very many holy men in the Church, and therefore it ought not to be approached through the Thomist paths of reason, but must be accepted as a matter of faith. Once that faith in the Church’s medieval authorities was challenged, as it was in the sixteenth century, the basis for belief in transubstantiation was gone, unless one returned to Thomism, the thought of Aquinas. Those who remained in the Roman obedience generally did this; but in sixteenth-century Europe, thousands of Protestants were burnt at the stake for denying an idea of Aristotle, who had never heard of Jesus Christ.The purpose of the Tridentine declaration on transubstantiation was almost certainly motivated by politics and not strictly theology.
And as a result, “Reacting against the Reformers, Trent defined the Mass as a “true and proper sacrifice…but left it to the theologians…to argue over what sacrifice is….”:
And argue they did! In fact, [Robert Daly, S.J.] outlines four competing theories of “sacrifice” that resulted from the Tridentine proclamation in the fifty years following Trent; all with notable Roman Catholic theologians in support and none [of] which received magisterial approbation or rejection.
He says: “We can clearly see that the doctrine of ‘sacrifice’ as imposed by the Council of Trent resulted in more diversity of opinion, and not less. And rather than clarifying what had gone before, the Magisterium simply allowed theologians to ‘work it out’. When the theologians produced more diversity in doctrine Rome did not correct them or create any unity at all.”
Read more about it here.
No comments:
Post a Comment