Thus the council, now augmented by Swiss and many other bishops, while
all the chief Catholic powers except Poland were represented by
ambassadors, could venture to approach those questions of dogma which
the Emperor would gladly have seen postponed, so long as he was still
pausing on the brink of his conflict with the German Protestants. The
Pope, on the contrary, while ostentatiously displaying on the frontier
the auxiliary forces which he had promised to the Emperor, was eager to
proclaim through the council as distinctly as possible the solid unity
of the orthodox Church. The doctrine concerning original sin having been
promulgated in the teeth of imperial opposition, the legates pressed for
the issue of the decree concerning justification. In the midst of the
debates the Smalkaldic War broke out (July, 1546).
For a time it seemed as if at Trent, too, the opposing interests would
have proved irreconcilable. Pole, as the justification decree began to
shape itself, had, "for reasons of health," withdrawn to Padua;
Madruccio and Del Monte exchanged personal insults; Pacheco accused the
legates of gross chicanery, and they in their turn threatened a removal
of the council to an Italian city, where, in accordance with what they
knew to be the papal wish, the council might deliberate without being
either overawed by the Emperor or menaced by his Protestant adversaries.
Soon, however, the case was altered by the manifest collapse of the
latter, notwithstanding their expectations of support from England,
Denmark, and France, long before their final catastrophe in the battle
of Muhlberg, April 24, 1547. The Emperor would not hear of the removal
of the council to Lucca, Ferrara, or any other Italian town, and in
consequence the plan of campaign at Trent was modified, in order at all
events to make the breach with the Protestants impassable. The debates
on justification were eagerly pushed on, and, after some further trials
of _finesse_, the decree on the subject which anathematized the
fundamental doctrines of the Lutheran Reformation was passed in the
sixth session of the council, January 13, 1547.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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