One intriguing factor I see is that prior to the Council of Trent, the mass, ordination rituals, etc were all different in different places; there was an enormous amount of variation in all of the rites of Medieval Catholicism. There wasn't even a single official version of the bible either, with debate occurring about which books to include, which language to use, etc. Then, the Council of Trent decided to try to codify things, including the ritual forms of the church, and in symbolic terms I suppose it could be said that they tried to recreate the Tower of Babel.

I wonder if the radical reduction in the power and authority of the Church around this time, and the way it seems to have stepped from one self-imposed disaster to another since then, is related...