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To those Protestants who express umbrage that the Catholic Church has supposedly “condemned them to Hell” by the standard formula “anathema sit” (let him be anathema) attached to the dogmatic decrees of Trent (and other General Councils), I say, CALM DOWN! No one has declared you damned! “Anathema sit” does NOT mean “let him be damned”, but rather “let him be cut off from fellowship, excommunicated”. The Catholic Church has never declared anyone damned. No one is damned until he reaches the judgment seat of Christ and is declared so by Christ. Until then, no man has the knowledge to say that someone is damned.
The standard formula that has been used for many centuries in defining a proposition P to be a dogma is “If anyone say that P is not true, let him be anathema”. That has the form of a sentence of excommunication for denying the proposition. But really, it is just a formula, that in effect means simply: “this is a heretical proposition.”
What all this illustrates is the inherent danger involved in the habit some Protestants have acquired of thinking that the meanings of texts are all obvious on their face and that anyone, however untutored, however inexpert, coming from whatever background, can immediately know the real meaning of any text he comes across. Well, maybe you don’t need a Catholic Church to tell you what a text in the Bible means, but you SURE DO need the Catholic Church to tell you what the Catholic Church means by the texts of her own decrees! It is pure silliness for a person who has very little knowledge of Catholic doctrine, canon law, etc. to start telling the Catholic Church what Catholic documents mean.
Besides which, the Catholic Church says that in order to commit a “mortal sin” (i.e. one that leads to damnation -—
see 1 John 5:16) a person has to (a) know that what he is doing is gravely sinful, and (b) do it freely. But the vast majority of Protestants are unaware that the Catholic Church has authority to condemn false doctrine, and so they do NOT know that in embracing those condemned doctrines they are doing anything wrong. So they are NOT necessarily committing mortal sin (according to the Catholic Church) by doing so. So the Church could NOT possibly declare them to be in “the state of mortal sin” and hence damned.

All this nonsense about how Trent “damned” Protestants is, frankly, ignorant nonsense. Catholics who read these claims about the Church “damning people” just laugh to themselves at the ignorance involved.