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Pope Paul Iii: General Council
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Pope Paul III was elected pope in 1534 partly on the strength of his promise to convoke a council. After aborted attempts to meet at Mantua (Mantova) in 1537 and at Vicenza in 1538, the council finally opened at Trent, in northern Italy, on December 13, 1545. Sparsely attended at first and never free from political obstacles, the council grew in numbers and prestige over the course of the three periods during which it met.
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The Roman Catholic response to the Reformation (see Counter Reformation) began with Pope Paul III (r. 1534–49). By taking care to appoint worthy men to the College of Cardinals, he tried to guarantee a morally upright papacy in the future. The Council of Trent (1545–63) did not deal with the role of the papacy in the church, although it formulated most of the doctrines and practices of the modern Roman Catholic church.
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At the request of Charles V, Pope Paul III agreed to hold an ecumenical council which would put an end to the religious conflict as the Council of Constance had done in 1415. The council eventually was convened in 1545 at Trento, an Italian town in the Alps ruled by a prince-bishop and which because of its position close to Germany was a sort of neutral location.
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Paul III was in earnest in the matter of improving the ecclesiastical situation, and on June 2, 1536, he issued a papal bull convoking a general council to sit at Mantua in 1537. But at the very start the German Protestant estates declined to send any delegates to a council in Italy, while the duke of Mantua himself set down such large requirements that Paul III first deferred for a year and then discarded the whole project.
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Paul III finally decided to summon a General Council. Arranging this Council took some time because of all the fighting between the emperor and the king of France, but in 1542, Paul spotted a window and grabbed it. The Pope invited all the bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and universities of Europe to send representatives to a Great Church Council to be held at Trent in northern Italy.
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