The Tridentine Church

The Catholic Church's answer to the Reformation took decades to assemble and then held for four centuries. The Council of Trent met in three widely separated periods between 1545 and 1563, restating Catholic teaching on Scripture and tradition, justification and the sacraments, and — as important in practice — ordering bishops to reside in their dioceses and to found seminaries. What followed was wholesale standardisation: a Roman Catechism, a revised Missal and Breviary issued for the whole Latin church, and in 1622 a Roman office for the missions, Propaganda Fide. The same period produced the Roman Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books, and a wave of new active orders — Capuchins, Ursulines, Oratorians — doing work the older monastic rules had never been designed for.