Trent and Beyond. The Council, Other Powers, Other Cultures

For centuries, the Council of Trent has been studied as a fundamental episode in European history wherein doctrinal and institutional unity was lost. Although the Council decrees nowhere refer to the contexts of the peoples met by Christopher Columbus, nor to the Cathay regions rediscovered by missionaries, nor to their religions, their superstitions or their political systems, the Council was nonetheless a global event. The Roman Church, which lost doctrinal control of the considerable part of Europe captured by different forms of Protestantism, imposed itself upon its followers through the application of conciliar decrees. Freed of its exclusively European perspective it opened up to cultures of the rest of the world. The customs and traditions thus encountered, the relationships with political authorities, possibilities for the construction of a new Christianity offered by New Worlds, disclosing spaces and contexts to the Tridentine Church, with accommodations and cross-fertilizations, with a return to origins and tradition, obliged that it begin to think of itself, perhaps for the first time, as a universal Church.

The Council and Beyond suggests not only reconsideration of Europe through the prism of the Tridentine decrees and the long processes of their dissemination, but also through an intercontinental consideration, a spatial perspective that would become universal to the Church and to the normative texts that had been elaborated at Trent.