The Council of Trent took place in the Italian city of Trento between the years 1545 and 1563 in discontinuous sessions and consisted of a series of meetings of cardinals, theologians and other important leaders of the Catholic Church in order to discuss doctrine issues, questions of the practical life of the members of the clergy and strategies to overcome a serious institutional crisis that faced the Catholic Church in those times mainly due to the beginning and accelerated expansion of the Protestant Reformation.
Protestant leaders in their majority exonerated clergy of the Catholic Church insistently requested the opening of a Council where their theological points of view were treated and answers were given to the denunciation of corrupt practices and financial abuses by the high clergy, with the purpose of unify the position of the Church and with the pretense that their claims are accepted.
The powerful Emperor Charles V, King of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain also exerted great pressure for the unification of the Catholic Church (including the Orthodox Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church and the incipient Protestant Church).
Finally, Pope Paul III, later known as the Reformer, convened the Council of Trent, where the debate on all the issues raised was deepened, but as a result it did not result in the unification of the Church but rather in the firm definition of the official position of the Roman Catholic Church, where most of the doctrinal points in discussion were ratified, important institutional reforms were made, abandoning some of the practices denounced by the Protestant Reformers and establishing new strategies of strengthening and future expansion of the Catholic Church Romana
In conclusion, the Council of Trento played a fundamental role in the Counter-Reformation, since it allowed the Catholic Church to set its position and make a definitive break with the new Protestant currents and with the one already split centuries before the Orthodox Catholic Church.
