Impact Of The Council Of Trent On The Catholic Understanding Of Sacrament

In this essay I will discuss the impact of the Council of Trent on the catholic understanding of sacraments. I will briefly outline the history of the sacrament and include background information on the council of Trent. I will discuss the council’s decisions and teachings in relation to the sacraments and how the council has distinguished between the catholic understanding of sacraments and the protestant understanding of the sacraments.
The term sacrament derives from the Latin sacramentum. In early Christian times a sacramentum was a sum of money which had to be given to the temple by both people involved in a lawsuit or contract and whoever lost the suit or broke the contract forfeited the money. It then later came to mean an oath of allegiance that soldiers made to their commander and gods of Rome. In both cases it involved a ceremony in a sacred place.
The question was raised if these sacraments were still valid. The council’s general answer to this question was that they remained true sacraments in the catholic sense if the persons performing them kept a catholic understanding of the sacraments. For example if bishops ordained ministers without intending to ordain them as priests in the catholic sense, those ordinations were not valid as far as the Catholic Church was concerned. Or if two protestant Christians married with the idea that they could someday divorce and remarry, theirs was not a sacramental marriage in the eyes of the Catholic Church. The council formulated the catholic position on each of the seven sacraments as well as treating them in general. It indirectly imposed a standard sacramental practice and theology on all of Catholicism. The central issues were settled and there was very little change to sacramental theology over the next four centuries following the council of