The Tridentine Profession of Faith

The Council of Trent closed on 4 December 1563 after eighteen years and three separate periods of session, and Pius IV confirmed its decrees the following month. Confirming them settled what the Roman church taught; it did not settle how anyone would be held to it. The profession promulgated on 13 November 1564, in the bull known from its opening words as Injunctum nobis, was the instrument for that, and its structure carries the whole intention.

It begins with the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, word for word, the text every party to the sixteenth century quarrel already accepted. Then it continues in the same first person singular voice, without a break in the grammar, into the matters nobody agreed on: the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions, Scripture read in the sense the Church holds and by the unanimous consent of the Fathers, the seven sacraments, the Tridentine decrees on original sin and justification, the mass as a true and propitiatory sacrifice, transubstantiation, communion under one kind, purgatory, the invocation of the saints and the veneration of relics and images, indulgences, and true obedience to the Roman Pontiff as successor of Peter.

The effect of joining the two halves is that a man swearing the second is swearing it in the same breath as the first, and cannot separate the ancient faith from the Tridentine one. It was required of bishops on taking office, of clergy holding benefices, of teachers and graduands in Catholic universities, and of converts received into the Roman church. Trent had spoken as a council about doctrine; this made each person answer for it individually.

Because the added articles list exactly the points at issue and nothing else, the profession is unusually useful as a historical document. Read beside the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, settled in the same decade, it lines up almost item for item: where one affirms the propitiatory sacrifice of the mass, transubstantiation, purgatory, indulgences, the invocation of saints and the papal jurisdiction, the other denies each in turn. The two documents are the same argument written from opposite ends, and neither can be fully read without the other.

The form did not stay fixed. After the First Vatican Council of 1870 defined the primacy and the infallibility of the Roman pontiff, those definitions were added to what a person professing the faith affirmed, so the same instrument that bound the Tridentine settlement went on to bind the later one. In 1910 Pius X required an additional oath against modernism to be taken alongside it by clergy and teachers, and that oath was set aside in 1967.

After the Second Vatican Council the profession itself was replaced by shorter formulas issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, revised again toward the end of the century, which state the creed and then a general assent to what the Church definitively proposes rather than reciting a list of sixteenth century controversies. The Tridentine profession accordingly has no current use in the Roman church. It survives as the sharpest available statement of what the division of the sixteenth century actually consisted of, in the words of the side that drew it up.