Lumen Gentium III: The Gamble of the Council of Constance

The Council Lateran IV [1215] was conducted under the energetic Pope Innocent III. A complex man, Innocent saw himself as the ultimate authority over Church and state alike. He attempted to renew the Medieval Church by the enforcement of order and law, and his IV Lateran Council was not a “listening session.” Like a powerful general he issued his orders, and his ecclesiastical subjects swore to carry them out—to eliminate abuses and intensify the spiritual life of the Church. He put a stop to the foundation of new religious orders—though he famously granted an exception to Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone when the latter and his dozen poorly clad brethren came to Rome to seek permission to live a penitential life in common with the Gospel itself as their rule. Today Franciscans remain grateful for Innocent’s approval. One wonders what Innocent might have achieved had he not died at a young fifty-two.
 
It would be two hundred years before the next Council, and not even a man of Innocent’s acumen could have foreseen the events that lie ahead after his death, some of which he himself inaugurated. By the 1200’s and 1300’s nations were taking shape, nations with kings and princes who were not to be trifled with. This was certainly the case with France, which was beginning to find papal taxation, levies for crusades, and other Roman interventions vexing, to say the least. England was another such region; in fact, the Hundred Years War between France and England was in full tilt by the mid-1300’s. Of this war Wikipedia writes: “The Hundred Years' War was a series of armed conflicts fought between the kingdoms of England and France during the Late Middle Ages. It originated from English claims to the French throne. The war grew into a broader power struggle involving factions from across Western Europe, fueled by emerging nationalism on both sides. The periodization of the war takes place over 116 years, wherein the war was interrupted by several years of truces.”
 
One such “truce” was more fatal than any battle: the Black Death, which arrived in the West in 1347. Curiously, I discovered that I had reviewed John Kelly’s The Great Mortality in 2005 in which I described the plague in considerable detail. I had not read the review in nearly twenty years, and reading it today, after several years of Covid, made me reexamine the Plague in a new light. Scientists and historians tend to agree that the mean death toll across Europe [1347-1352] was 50%. American military planners still use the Black Plague as a measuring stick for atomic damage in the twenty-first century.
 
It is hard to imagine the impact of the plague on the Church. I recall my sixth-grade teacher explaining that the “good priests” stayed in the cities and ministered to the dying, while the bad priests fled to the mountains and partied. Kelly’s book affirms this to a point; he notes that the population took either a despondent approach to the disease or a “bacchanalian one.” In any case, the disruption to European Church life caused by the plague is scarcely imaginable. The severity of this plague –after all, there were others throughout history—was exacerbated by several decades of poor weather and a limited food supply, which touched off unrest among feudal peasants and created a flight to the cities, which became hotbeds of unhealthy living and social unrest. There was a surge of populism that included segments of the Church. Two of the most famous reformers were John Wycliffe, [1328-1384] who among other things translated the Gospels into the vernacular or local tongue of his native England; and the Czech Jan Hus [1370-1415]. Hus was a social and religious warrior for the rights of the Church laity; he is famous for his advocacy of the laity receiving communion from the chalice.
 
Innocent III had been a respected if not necessarily beloved pope, but the quality of the men who followed him declined over the next century. There is a dynamic at work here: as secular rulers became stronger and habitually ignored the popes, Innocent’s successors felt compelled to claim with greater volume and energy their rights as supreme rulers over “altar and crown alike.” This crescendo came to a stunning halt during and immediately following the papacy of Boniface VIII [r. 1294-1303], who in 1302 issued the encyclical Unam Sanctam. Wikipedia cites the noted historian Brian Tierney’s assessment that this encyclical was "probably the most famous" document on church and state in medieval Europe.
 
In truth, the document was a death knell for absolute papal expansion into civil affairs. Unam Sanctam laid down dogmatic propositions on the unity of the Catholic Church, the necessity of belonging to it for eternal salvation, the position of the Pope as supreme head of the Church and the duty thence arising of submission to the Pope in order to belong to the Church and thus achieve salvation. The Pope further emphasized the higher position of the spiritual in comparison with the secular order. Boniface was, in effect, claiming the same power as Jesus himself: Consider the post-Resurrection encounter of Jesus with his disciples [Matthew 28: 18-20]: Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
 
This was the straw that broke a lot of backs. One of those backs was King Philip IV of France. Tired of French wealth taxed for Roman coffers, Philip sent an army to Rome which physically assaulted the pope, leading to his death in 1303. [Interestingly, Dante, in his Inferno, puts Boniface in the eighth circle of hell.] The next pope, Clement V, found the atmosphere of Rome too contentious, and accepted the French invitation to move the papacy to France, thus beginning the “Avignon Papacy,” 1309-1377. Over the years of teaching, I discovered that most Catholics have no idea that the popes lived outside of Rome for nearly a century and find the fact quite surprising. It was Pope Gregory XI who reestablished the papal capital in Rome in 1377, but this move did not stop the Avignon court of cardinals to elect a second pope. Soon a council In Pisa put forth a third pope.
 
Thus began the papal Western Schism [1378-1417]. For forty years Europe was divided in its loyalties. The Western Roman Church faced a test of its own internal powers to correct itself and obey the call of Jesus to be at one, “just as the Father and I are one.” The intelligentsia of the Church—the men and women of letters, university faculties, many bishops, cardinals, and even state sovereigns—were deeply alarmed by this seeming disintegration of the papacy. Those with the slightest grasp of history were aware that the Church was broken by Islamic conversions and the major split between Eastern and Western Christianity in 1054. Now the once solidified Western Roman Church was fragmenting, too.
 
After a generation of multiple popes, these leaders of church and state came—with considerable reservation—to the consensus that a power greater than the pope had to reform the Church. No king could do this. The reform would need to be led and sustained by churchmen. Among them was the remarkable Jean Gerson, [1363-1429], Chancellor of the University of Paris, then one of the intellectual centers of the Church. Gerson articulated what many had been thinking: that in an emergency such as this, the supreme authority of the Church reverted to an ecumenical council which could override papal authority and correct the papal line of succession. [See my review of Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (2005) by Brian Patrick McGuire here.]
 
A council in Pisa in 1409 had attempted to solve the papacy issue but fell short for too many reasons to cite here. However, a larger and much more effective Council began a four-year congress in 1414, known today as the Council of Constance, it is considered one of the twenty-one legitimate Councils of the Church—remarkable in that the Church later rejected its working principles.
 
The Council of Constance did not get off to an exemplary start. Deeply worried about radical ideas proliferating in the absence of a strong papacy, the Council issued a flag of safe conduct to Jan Hus [cited above] to discuss his theological concerns. When Hus arrived, his pledge of protection was lifted, he was tried as a heretic, and burned at the stake during the Council.
 
Turning to its major concern, the Council of Constance passed three reforms for future stability of the Western Church. First, it established that a universal council was the highest authority in the Catholic Church, a principle which came to be called conciliarism. Second, it legislated regular Church reform councils at five-year intervals. This was a remarkable product: no longer would Councils be called just in cases of emergencies. Rather, the leadership of the Church would take a universal pulse on a regular basis and address the strengths and weaknesses of the Church before there were wholesale divisions and misunderstandings.
 
The third reform was the ouster of all three papal contestants and the Council’s election of Pope Martin V in 1417, with the stipulation that he call another council in 1423. Martin proved to be an industrious pontiff who oversaw a restoration of the old beauty of Rome. He was credited with a “Roman Renaissance,” and he founded the University of Louvain in modern Belgium. He called for a crusade to Africa to deal with the slave trade, and another to address the Hussite risings after the burning of Jan Hus at the Council in 1415. A third crusade was dispatched in 1420 against the Ottoman Empire but it was unsuccessful; Constantinople was defeated by the Turks in 1453 and its name changed to Istanbul.
 
Martin dutifully called for an Ecumenical Council in 1423, but it was poorly attended and never called to order. Seven years later, as Martin lay dying, the Council of Basel-Florence was convoked [1431-1449] to address a wide range of topics which netted only modest results. The next Council, Lateran V, [1512-1517] was convoked by Pope Julius II “to restore peace between Catholic rulers and to assert the authority of the pope.” If the saying “timing is everything” has any truth to it, consider that this Council concluded on March 16, 1517. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his theses on Church errors to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg.
 
WHAT CAN WE SAY ABOUT THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE?
 
One of the most curious facts about this Council is that it saved Western Christianity from shattering into chaos, and yet later the ways and means of its accomplishments were modified and/or condemned by later generations of the Church. This Council dared to state for the record that grave defects in the office holder of the Chair of Peter could be overridden by the actions of a universal council. History supports the claim that the Council of Constance had no other option. For all of that, the Church later fell into a retrospective post-traumatic shock to what it had done in Constance and immediately disengaged from such drastic action in the future. Conciliarism as a principle was condemned at future councils, most recently Vatican I [1869-1870] which, incidentally, was the same council to define papal infallibility.
 
Constance established another principle which was not acted upon, this time with dire consequences. The story of Jan Hus and the subsequent revolution of his followers was a powerful lesson in how society was changing in the early Renaissance era and required the Church to pay much more attention to its pastoral woes. Constance’s call for future councils at regular intervals [five years or ten years] was brilliant, particularly when one considers that Luther and Calvin were less than a century away. The 5–10-year plan was never followed through, because future popes feared the echoes of conciliarism.
 
It was not until Vatican II [1962-1965] that the power structure and working relationship between the pope and bishops was openly discussed in, among other places, Lumen Gentium. In paragraphs 18-29 the term “episcopal collegiality” broaches the idea of collective authoritative consultation. Vatican II reemphasized the identity of the pope as a bishop in union with his fellow bishops, who were true and distinct successors of the apostles. Wikipedia describes the process: “the pope as a member and the head of the college of bishops forms with it at all times an organic unity, especially when the council is gathered in a general council.” Vatican II never recommended the diminishing of the position of the pope as the Vicar of Christ. Rather, it envisioned a church where the pope would join with his brother bishops in discerning the will of the Holy Spirit for the Church. It is worth noting, though, that Popes John XXIII and Paul VI did not allow discussion of certain topics at Vatican II, notably the possibility of marriage for priests of the Latin Rite, and the prohibition of artificial birth control.

Pope Francis [r. 2013-] has attempted to add another dimension to church life and governance: attention to the consciences and experience of the laity through his planned “Synod on Synodality” in 2024. The lukewarm response of many in Church authority in the United States and elsewhere to the listening process is a dysfunction that calls for the attention of those ordained to the apostolic ministry.
 
NEXT: The Council that came too late: Trent [1545-1563]