Talk:Council of Trent

Two as promised or six as presented?

Summarize Fact Check

I believe the current wording on marriage In the decrees on marriage (twenty-fourth session) ... the validity of marriage made dependent upon the wedding taking place before a priest and two witnesses is quite wrong. If you read Session XXIV http://www.thecounciloftrent.com/ch24.htm you can see there is no mention of witnesses etc.

In fact, the relevant material is at the twenty-third session, where it says it is not to be doubted, that clandestine marriages, made with the free consent of the contracting parties, are valid and true marriages. http://www.thecounciloftrent.com/ch23.htm Chapter 1.

These marriages are valid even without parental agreement: as also those who falsely affirm that marriages contracted by the children of a family, without the consent of their parents, are invalid, and that parents can make such marriages either valid or invalid; nevertheless, the holy Church of God has, for reasons most just, at all times detested and prohibited such marriages.

So the prohibition of rash and secret marriages does not affect their validity.

Furthermore, the final sentence in this paragraph lso gives the wrong impression, IMHO. That sentence is However the council "refused … to assert the necessity or usefulness of clerical celibacy". But Session 24 says "CANON IX.-If any one saith, that clerics constituted in sacred orders, or Regulars, who have solemnly professed chastity, are able to contract marriage, and that being contracted it is valid, notwithstanding the ecclesiastical law, or vow; ... let him be anathema

I believe the relevant paragraph should be correct to:

In the decrees on marriage (twenty-fourth session) the excellence of the celibate state was reaffirmed, concubinage condemned, the validity of clandestine marriages made with consent was affirmed, the validity of marriages made without the consent of parents was affirmed, but public marriages now required the wedding taking place before a priest and two witnesses and after banns were read. In the case of a divorce, the right of the innocent party to marry again was denied so long as the other party was alive,[11] even if the other party had committed adultery.

With that last sentence replaced. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 07:26, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

The source for the statement that "the council refused … to assert the necessity or usefulness of clerical celibacy" is O'Malley, which I haven't consulted. But I'll offer a guess that, if the council dodged this question, they did so because they didn't want to offend the Orthodox churches (who of course allow priests to be married). Haven't made any changes to the text. Wgrommel (talk) 13:58, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

I believe it is generally inaccurate to say that the protestants excluded the apocrypha from the canon, as protestant bibles still carried the apocrypha (labeled appropriately) for the next 2 centuries. A better word might be “Marginalized”, which I have seen Dr. Dan Mcclellan use. 2600:1700:BF10:22B0:CD7:DB7:E1EF:E6BA (talk) 10:05, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

Carrying those books in their editions of the Bible was not meant to render them of equal status to the canon of Scripture. The labels you mention specify as much, that the "apocryphal" books are worthy of reverence and useful for spiritual reading but not to be considered inspired by the Holy Spirit so as to be an infallible source of doctrine. This is, by definition, an exclusion from the canon, which is not changed by their inclusion within physical volumes of the Bible. Theotokos Respecter (talk) 23:06, 24 February 2025 (UTC)