April 8, 1546

Council of Trent

Trent’s Fourth Session issues its decrees on Scripture and the Vulgate

One of this event's most famous numbers — "16 abstentions" — appears to be a bookkeeping error that turned an alternative minority count into a third voting bloc.

8 April 1546: two decrees, not one

At its Fourth Session on 8 April 1546, the Council of Trent promulgated a decree receiving the listed books of the Old and New Testaments as sacred and canonical, and receiving apostolic traditions concerning faith and morals with equal reverence.

That canon decree declared anathema anyone who knowingly rejected the listed books in their entirety, as customarily read in the Catholic Church and contained in the Old Latin Vulgate, or deliberately rejected the specified traditions.

A separate decree the same day governed the edition and use of Scripture. The two were distinct enactments of one session.

What "authentic" actually covered

The second decree declared the Old Vulgate authentic for public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions. It did not simply proclaim one particular printed Bible the Church's universally exclusive text.

There was no single standardized Vulgate printing in 1546. The same decree ordered Scripture — especially the Vulgate — printed as correctly as possible, and required ecclesiastical examination and written approval of books on sacred subjects, to be supplied free of charge.

The session did not resolve whether vernacular Bible translation and reading were legitimate, and practices continued to vary across Catholic regions.

The vote that was not this vote

The frequently repeated tally of 24 to 15 with 16 abstentions was not the vote by which the 8 April decree was promulgated.

Hubert Jedin's account treats 15 and 16 as alternative minority counts of a single preliminary vote — one taken on 15 February 1546 — rather than as 15 opponents plus a separate bloc of 16 abstainers.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The event and date are secure. The uncertainty concerns the famous vote tally: Hubert Jedin’s account treats 15 and 16 as alternative minority counts in a preliminary February vote, not as 15 opponents plus 16 abstainers in an April 8 vote.
“Authentic” has generated substantial interpretive debate. The decree selected the Vulgate from the Latin editions then circulating and specified public uses; it did not expressly abolish study of Hebrew and Greek.