For every momentous action in history there is an inevitable reaction. The Catholic reaction to the Protestant Reformation found its most official voice in the convening of a General Council of the Church which met in the city of Trent (with a few sessions in other cities) in Northern Italy in a number of sittings that began in 1545 but did not finally finish until 1563. Its deliberations and ordinances were so influential that scholars have frequently described the period of the modern history of the Catholic Church by the adjective “Tridentine,” a neologism developed from the Latin word for Trent.
It was in the twenty-fifth and final session of the Council of Trent (December 3–4, 1563) that the assembled bishops took up the matter of the veneration of the saints. They stipulated the traditional teaching of the church on this subject, directing the bishops of the Catholic world “to instruct the faithful carefully about the intercession of the saints, invocation of them, reverence for their relics, and the legitimate uses of images of them.” They further took pains “to root out utterly any abuses that may have crept into these holy and saving practices, so that no representations of false doctrines should be set up which gave dangerous error to the unlettered.” Reflecting bad practices of which they were undoubtedly aware, they went on to warn that all “superstition must be removed from invocation of the saints, veneration of relics, and use of sacred images; all aiming at base profit must be eliminated, etc.” Bishops were further instructed that the feast days of the saints were not to degenerate into drunken feasting (saints’ days were frequently also civic holidays with no manual work done on that day) and that no new relics were to be exposed or miracles to be reported without the bishop examining and then approving them.
A year after the Council closed in 1563, Pope Pius IV issued a profession of faith (November, 1564) which every bishop and candidate for a clerical benefice had to make publicly before assumption of office and every convert to Roman Catholicism had to make at the time of reception into the church. This solemn declaration was to be made in the name of God and “these holy gospels” (i.e. sworn with a hand on the Bible). Its declarations included the following: “that the saints are to be venerated and invoked; that they offer prayers to God for us and that their relics are to be venerated. I firmly assert that the images of Christ and the ever-Virgin Mother of God, as also those of the other saints, are to be kept and retained, and that due honor and veneration is to be paid to them.”
The Council of Trent, then, did two things. First, it reiterated the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church on the legitimacy of the invocation of the saints, the veneration of their relics, and the proper use of images within the context of Catholic worship and devotion. Second, it issued some practical instructions for bishops to check abuses in the cult of the saints and for the proper ways of fostering correct devotion. The first point affirmed traditional Catholic teaching, while the second point implicitly acknowledged past abuses and argued for vigilance against their repetition.
The Council of Trent represents the attitude of the Catholic Church in its juridical understanding. The Catholic Reformation also understood that the recognition of saints by canonization served as a strong instrument of evangelization by emphasizing that within the church there existed the means by which people reached the heights of holiness. Saints could serve as paradigmatic types, indicating how the holiness of the church was realized in the lives and doctrines of its best members.
Scholars have long noted that once canonization became formalized there was a certain sociological profile of who got canonized. Men outpaced women by a margin of four to one. Women who were canonized were either high-born aristocrats or religious superiors (or both). Men, by and large, came from the ranks of either the established (Benedictine) or emerging religious orders. Few lay persons were canonized and those who were, typically, did not come from the lower classes of society. Enough careful research has been done to demonstrate empirically the generalizations just made. The point to remember is that every canonization is a sociological, theological, and political statement. The process says, in effect: here is one whom we admire and hold up as a model.
The Age of the Reformers
