The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) continues to have a profound effect on Catholic life and thought today. The liturgical reform it inaugurated has shaped the experience most Catholics—and non-Catholics—have of the Church. What came before, what happened during, and what followed after the 21st Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church remains the subject of research, debate, and controversy. Are there any other major ecclesial assemblies in history that can be compared to it? The Council of Trent (1545–1563) may come closest in its reforming impetus and worldwide reach. In particular, the liturgical reform initiated by the 19th Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church is often compared to that of Vatican II. In a series of six articles, I will present the historical backdrop to Trent, familiarize the reader with the discussions on liturgy and related topics at the council, and consider the actual reform of the Church’s divine worship that followed. This will prove to be a long trajectory that takes us well into the 19th century, when the Roman liturgical books were fully introduced in France and elsewhere.

A Period of Transition

If we want to understand the epoch-making significance of the Council of Trent, we need to be aware of its historical context. Scholars see in the late 15th and early 16th century a period of transition from the late Middle Ages to early modernity. Around 1500, European societies experienced profound changes that also affected Christian belief and practice. The Jesuit historian Robert Bireley names five principal elements of transformation during this period.¹ First, in continuity with certain strands of medieval thought, there was the rise of the territorial state, which can be defined as “the consolidation and centralization of political authority over a particular geographical area, or the establishment of sovereignty.”² At the same time, the sense of belonging to a Christian commonwealth that surpasses regional or national allegiances, with the pope as its head, declined among European elites. The increased confidence of territorial princes and rulers exacerbated the (mostly juridical and financial) conflicts between the Church and civil governments, which were already common in the later Middle Ages. Second, many areas of Europe enjoyed social and economic growth: the population rebounded after the devastation of the bubonic plague pandemic (“Black Death,” 1347–1350); this recovery brought a new dynamic in production and trade, with increasing prosperity in cities and a flourishing of urban middle classes. Third, the colonial expansion of European powers, beginning with Portugal and the then-recently unified Spain, opened vast new horizons for evangelization and made the Catholic Church a truly global community. Fourth, the Renaissance changed the intellectual and artistic landscape in Europe. While its connections with the medieval world should not be overlooked,³ the Renaissance encouraged a new outlook on the world, a recovery of Greek and Latin antiquity, including Christian antiquity, and an optimistic attitude towards human nature and achievement. The invention of the printing press with moveable letters in Germany initiated a “media revolution” that allowed for a much faster and wider dissemination of ideas. Fifth, the Protestant Reformation shook Western Christianity to its very foundations.

Religious Practice and Liturgical Life

Modern historians often presented the later Middle Ages as a period marked by social decline and cultural exhaustion, as reflected in Johan Huizinga’s classic work, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Herfstij der Middeleeuwen), first published in 1919.⁴ The decaying religious culture of the age was interpreted as leading almost inevitably to the new beginning of the Protestant Reformation. However, revisionist historians in the last few decades have questioned long-held positions about the alleged decadence of the late medieval Church.⁵ While there is some truth to Huizinga’s thesis, insofar as 15th-century Europe did experience a general sense of crisis, and partly for religious reasons, the Church was remarkably successful in the care of souls that has always been her primary pastoral role, and the sacramental system was deeply embedded in the people’s cycle of life.

Religious practice in this period shows diverse, if not contrary, tendencies. On the one hand, movements such as the devotio moderna and the flowering of mysticism emphasized man’s interior relationship to God and privileged personal forms of devotion. Such religiosity came to fruition in early modernity, through both Protestant and Catholic reform movements.⁶ On the other hand, religious practice was characterised by a strong emphasis on external works and their number, as well as a focus on supernatural phenomena associated with material objects, including images, relics, and Eucharistic miracles.⁷ These divergent tendencies cannot be neatly organized with the categories of elite and popular piety. Rather, they are found across the social spectrum, as evident, for instance, in the tangible devotion to the holy face of Christ, which was shared equally among the illiterate populace, well-educated nuns, and rulers such as the powerful Duke of Burgundy.⁸

Liturgical life in the late medieval Church does not offer a homogeneous picture either.⁹ Spearheaded by the rapidly expanding Franciscan Order, there was a movement towards unifying liturgical books after the model of the missal and breviary of the Roman Rite in the form used by the papal curia. Many dioceses and religious communities adopted the “Order of Mass according to the custom of the Roman curia” (Ordo missalis secundum consuetudinem Romane curie). The period also witnessed an increasing codification of ritual, which found its most influential expression in the Ordo Missae of the papal master of ceremonies Johann Burchard (d. 1506). The work’s second edition of 1502, which offered intricate and extensive instructions to priests on how to say Mass, became the foundation for the rubrics of the Missale Romanum of 1570. At the same time, however, we can observe a movement towards diversification with the introduction of new saints’ feasts, the composition of prefaces, tropes, and sequences (of varying quality), and the proliferation of votive Masses that were inspired by popular devotions. The new, dynamic, and unregulated printing industry initially contributed to an ever-greater liturgical diversity. Most diocesan bishops did not have effective control over the production of liturgical books in their territories.

Lay Experience of the Liturgy

The laity’s experience of the Church’s worship was clearly separate from that of the officiating clergy, not least because of the use of Latin as a sacred language. The penitential rite after the sermon and the prayers of the faithful introduced vernacular elements into the parish Mass, but most of the rite was conducted in a language that required a considerable level of education to be understood fully. However, popular participation was not limited to comprehension of texts. The rich non-verbal symbolism of the Mass spoke powerfully even to people who were not able to follow every word of the rite. The faithful’s participation was not regulated by the official liturgical books that gave increasingly detailed ritual instructions to the clergy. Hence, the people engaged with the Mass in a variety of ways that are not easy for us to grasp precisely because they were not scripted. Paul Barnwell speaks of “the meditative and affective nature of much lay devotion in the period.”¹⁰ The sensory dimensions of the late medieval liturgy offered important stimuli for such meditation: the images on the rood screen and on the walls of the church visualized the communion of the saints, while funeral monuments were an incentive to pray for the dead. The faithful who attended Mass weekly (and many of them daily) would be familiar with the stable chants of the ordinary and have a basic understanding of their meaning.

The social anthropologist Mary Douglas has spoken of “non-verbal symbols,” which “are capable of creating a structure of meanings in which individuals can relate to one another and realize their own ultimate purposes.”¹¹ To quote an influential essay by the historian John Bossy, the Mass was a “social institution”¹² and created a bond that was not only expressed verbally through praying for one another, but became tangible in particular rites, such as exchanging the kiss of peace by means of the pax (also known as pax-brede or pacificale), a tablet made of glass, wood, or metal and often adorned with an image of the crucifixion or the Lamb of God. The pax was passed from the clergy to the laity and was kissed in turn.

By the early 16th century, there was a wide consensus that the Church needed some reforms, especially regarding the entanglement between the spiritual and the temporal spheres. At the time there was no separation between Church and state. Where ecclesiastical institutions acted as political and economic players, for instance, as landowners, they were vulnerable to criticism, even in societies that were deeply rooted in Christian faith and practice. The liturgy in particular was not in a general state of decay and decadence, as liturgical handbooks still tend to suggest,¹³ but there were certainly aspects of it in need of correction—there are in every age. The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517)—counted as the 18th Ecumenical Council—embraced a program of practical renewal. The conciliar decrees were never effectively implemented, but they served as reference points for the discussion at Trent. The need for reform (reformatio in ecclesiastical Latin) was felt by many, but no one could have anticipated the singular upheaval and rupture that began with the publication of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses at a provincial German university on October 31, 1517.

The second installment of this series will consider the political and religious difficulties that surrounded the convocation of the Council of Trent. In particular, I will discuss why it took the papacy so long to respond effectively to the Protestant challenge and why the council sessions were extended over a period of 18 years.

Watch for future instalments of Trent and its Liturgical Reform in AB Insight, our monthly electronic newsletter.

1. See Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 8-15.
2. Robert Birely, The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 9.
3. See Erwin Panofsky, “Renaissance and Renascences,” in The Kenyon Review 6 (1944), 201-236, at 202.
4. See now the translation of the second Dutch edition of 1921: Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
5. See for instance, Robert N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215 – c. 1515, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 342: “Does that mean that ‘the Reformation’ was unforeseeable in 1515? Probably. Does it mean that pre-Reformation religion was in fact vital and progressing (whatever progress is) rather than decadent and ready to fall? Almost certainly.”
6. See Christopher Dawson, The Dividing of Christendom (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009; originally published in 1965), 33.
7. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011).
8. See The European Fortune of the Roman Veronica in the Middle Ages, ed. Amanda Murphy, Herbert L. Kessler, Marco Petoletti, Eamon Duffy, and Guido Milanese, Convivium Supplementum 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017).
9. For a fuller treatment, see Uwe Michael Lang, The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 307-342.
10. Paul S. Barnwell, “How to Do Without Rubrics: Experiments in Reconstructing Medieval Lay Experience,” in Late Medieval Liturgies Enacted: The Experience of Worship in Cathedral and Parish Church, ed. Sally Harper, Paul S. Barnwell and Magnus Williamson (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 235-254, at 238.
11. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 53. While describing this system of symbols as a language with grammatical rules and a specific vocabulary, it is not necessary to commit oneself to a structuralist model. On the usefulness and limits of “linguistic” approaches to the liturgy, see Victor Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic,” in Worship 50 (1976), 504-526, at 510.
12. John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700,” in Past & Present, no. 100 (August 1983), 29-61; see also Thompson, Cities of God, 235-271 (“The City Worships”), and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1570, 2nd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 91-130 (“The Mass”).
13. See, e.g., Anscar J. Chupungco, “History of the Roman Liturgy until the Fifteenth Century,” in Handbook for Liturgical Studies, Vol. I: Introduction to the Liturgy, ed. Anscar J. Chupungco (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 131-152, at 150.