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This Fifth General Council of the Lateran really originated in the tangled
politics, national and international, of the last years of the reign of
Pope Julius II (1503-13). It was called as the pope's reply to the
summoning of an antipapal conciliabulum at Pisa, and this gathering owed
its existence to an alliance of the French king, Louis XII, with a small
group of cardinals hostile to the pope and his policies. This pope, a man
of sixty years at his accession was, it is true, a politician born. Trained
at the court of his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, his Franciscan simplicity all
too easily degenerated into the complicated outlook, political and
cultural, of the typical Renaissance prince. In Italian history, in the
popular saga, this pope, the patron of Michelangelo and Raphael, stands out
as one of the "terribili" figures of the time, by which is meant a man
possessed of awe-inspiring, demonic energy, in whom competence and high
temper combine to force through the execution of great designs and the
accomplishment of titanic ambitions. But the ambition of Julius II was not
merely personal. He proposed to make the pope really master in his own
States of the Church, ending once and for all the problem of the
feudatories and the restive municipalities; and he hoped to free Italy from
the yoke of "Barbarian" kings, thus making doubly secure the independence
of the popes from all control by the lay power.
War was, more or less inevitably, the principal occupation of his ten
years' pontificate and, given the age, this meant incessant diplomatic
campaigns also, where, in a pattern of the greatest complexity, alliance
succeeded alliance, enemies becoming friends and vice versa in rapid,
bewildering succession, the elements in the pattern being, besides the
pope, the emperor, the kings of Spain, France and England and the republic
of Venice. One of these sudden reversals by the pope, the peace with Venice
of February 1510, brought Louis XII of France into the position of chief
papal enemy. "These French want to make me a mere chaplain to their king,"
said Julius, "but I mean to be pope, as they will find out."[327] And now he
threw into the dungeons of Sant' Angelo the French leader of a long-
dissatisfied group of his own innermost council, the college of cardinals,
threatening the rest with the like fate. Whence the ensuing alliance.
The fury of the French king drove him very far. If the pope could say to
his ambassador, "I look upon your king as my personal enemy,"[328]
Machiavelli could report from the French court to his own state, "You can
imagine what is said here about the pope. Obedience is to be renounced and
a [General] Council hung round his neck. The complete annihilation of his
power, both temporal and spiritual, is the least of the penalties that
await him."[329]
Louis XII was, indeed, about to summon a national council of his bishops.
It met in September at Tours. In the presence of the king and the papal
nuncio the bishops gave their verdict: the king was in the right, in this
quarrel, and if necessary he could withdraw France from its obedience to
the pope, and disregard any sentences of excommunication. They also advised
that the king demand the calling of a General Council. Louis announced that
he would march on Rome, and himself depose the pope. And five of the
cardinals fled from Rome to join his army at Milan (October 1510).
By this time the pope had left Rome for the north and the seat of war. He
fell ill and all but died (October to December), made a marvellous recovery
and, in the snowy January of 1511, took part in the siege of Mirandola. But
a change in the French high command now brought victories for Louis XII,
and the papal negotiations to win over the emperor, Maximilian, failed.
Bologna, the second greatest city of the pope's state, was captured and
then, five days later (May 28), came the supreme insult and menace: Julius
was served with the proclamation of the rebel cardinals, sent to all the
leading princes of Europe, summoning a General Council to meet at Pisa,
September 1, and citing him to appear.
Louis XII was now master of northern Italy, the Venetian allies had been of
no service. If the Pisa council was ultimately to end in something like
farce, the move of the cardinals was, at the moment, heavy with menace.
Canonists could be found everywhere who would assent to the principles on
which the move was based: grave scandal given by the pope, a consequent
"state of emergency" in the Church--these, according to the famous decree
Frequens of the council of 1417, were the very matters that authorised
cardinals to summon the General Council. The minor of the cardinals'
argument was Julius II's disregard of the commands laid on him by Frequens,
and his failure to keep the oath, sworn in the conclave, to call the
General Council within two years. The cardinals had behind them the two
principal rulers of Christendom.
An old, very familiar pattern was taking shape, and with a real uncertainty
about the future in his mind, Julius made his way back to Rome--but only
the more determined. What really saved him now was the wavering,
vacillating character of the enemy. Louis, "whether from religious awe," or
from fear of the reactions of other princes, made no use of his victory.
But in that long march back, with such advisors in his company as the
Dominican Master-General, Cajetan, the pope thought out carefully the
details of his counterstroke. He reached Rome on June 26, and on July 18 he
set his signature to the bull convoking the General Council. It was
summoned for April 19, 1512, to meet in the pope's own cathedral church,
the Lateran Basilica.
The rebel council was, by this time, in dire straits. It did indeed open
its proceedings at Pisa, but on November 1. And with no more than sixteen
French bishops; and not in the cathedral, for the canons had barred the
doors against the assembly. Nor had the bishops been able to secure
lodgings, until the Florentine government intervened forcibly. For ten days
or so the motions of a General Council were gravely imitated while the
citizens outside fought the French guards, and by night serenaded the
cardinals with threats of death. On November 12 the bishops renewed the
antipapal decrees of Constance, pronounced that they would not separate
until the whole Church had been reformed and peace established between all
Christian princes--and also that the council, being in danger from the
citizens of Pisa, would forthwith be transferred to Milan. And here, from
December 1511 to June 1512, it continued its futilities, amid a population
no less hostile, but protected from this by the arms of Louis XII. When,
after the great French victory of Ravenna (April 11, 1512) the French
cause, unexpectedly, fell into desperate straits, the council moved to
Asti, and thence across the Alps to Lyons, where it finally petered out
without any particular final formalities. Its last definite act had been at
Milan where, taking new courage from the victory of Ravenna it had
suspended Julius II and forbidden him to exercise any of his functions as
pope.
This General Council which Julius had called was to last a good five years,
until March 16,1517, in fact--just seven months before Luther's dramatic
defiance, the theses against Indulgences. The juxtaposition of these dates
is, surely, significant. That, in the years when Luther was inwardly being
turned from a Catholic friar into a Protestant apostle, a General Council
should be in session whose raison d'etre was reform--this is an historical
coincidence that at first sight takes the breath away. It is no doubt true,
as the modem historians seem to agree, that it was not the need of reform
in church administration that started the engines of revolt in 1517, but a
spiritual crisis in Luther wherein was mirrored the crisis in a myriad
other souls. But why did the Fifth Council of the Lateran have all but no
effect upon the life of the Church? Without professing to solve this
question, we can examine how the council worked, what it actually decreed,
and say something of the personages whose character influenced what was
done.
There was an average attendance at the council of about go to 100 bishops,
and almost all of them were from sees in one or other of the Italian
states, subjects, that is, of the King of Spain, of Florence, Venice and
the rest, as well as of the pope. There were no more than twelve public
meetings of the council in all: four in 1512, four in 1513, and one in each
of the years 1514, 1515, 1516, 1517 The legislation of the council appeared
in the form of papal bulls, published in the several sessions. Of the
organisation of the council, and the discussions that preceded the drafting
of these documents we know very little, save that it was the Curia that
decided what was to be enacted in the sessions of the council, in detail;
and that the bishops were allowed to elect a committee of twenty-four to
discuss these drafts (or proposals) while in this formative state. The
twenty-four were formed into three groups of eight, according to the matter
to be studied: the question of the schism and of international peace; the
reform of the Church; the faith, and the problem of the French law, called
the Pragmatic Sanction,[330] which for seventy years had, in effect, given
indirect official recognition to the condemned Council of Basel. To each of
these commissions of eight the pope added eight cardinals and two Generals
of religious orders--a means of securing that the bishops should not overdo
the business of radical reform in, say, the practice of the Curia or the
life of the mendicant orders. Finally, the whole body of bishops debated
the draft at a "general congregation."
These arrangements--which, from the bishops' point of view, were an
improvement on those originally made--were the work of the new pope, Leo X,
elected after the council had held six sessions. For Julius II died within
a week of the sixth session, on February 22, 1513. The new pope, Giovanni
de' Medici, thirty-seven years of age, and not yet ordained priest, was
elected March 11, and first presided at the council in its seventh session,
April 27.
The six sessions under Julius II were chiefly taken up with the leisurely
business of the formal organisation of the council, with the condemnation
of the schismatic manoeuvres of the rebel cardinals (sessions 3 and 4, May
17 and December 3, 1512), the appointment of a commission to study the
question of the Pragmatic Sanction, which Julius was determined to bring to
an end and, one of the spectacular events of the council, the emperor's
formal repudiation of the Pisa Council and his solemn acceptance of the
Lateran Council as a lawful General Council (December 3, 1512).
For the session of February 16, 1513, the pope had ordered the presentation
of a bull against simony in papal elections. He was manifestly dying for
some weeks before the day appointed came, but almost his last words were
that this should be enacted. The bull provides briefly, among other things,
that if anyone secures election as pope through simony, through bribes
whether of money or of position or promise of favours, his election is
null; and the elect, and those who have taken the bribes, are by the fact
excommunicated, and they remain so until a pope lawfully elected absolves
them. This bull, Si summus rerum opifex,[331] was the most useful piece of
work accomplished in the council, and because of the way it was drawn, the
one act wholly effective.
It is, however, with the successor of Julius that the Fifth Lateran Council
is chiefly associated, through the twelve decrees promulgated in the four
years 1513-17. Within two months of the first session of Leo's reign, the
pope had the satisfaction of receiving the submission of the two surviving
rebel cardinals, who (to their great chagrin) were commanded to make their
public submission dressed simply as priests--their deposition by Julius II
was no mere formality, and it was as priests they were received back,
reading out a prepared formula of contrition and repudiation in which their
great crime was explicitly set forth and the justice of their punishment
acknowledged. And then the pope magnanimously restored them to their rank,
but not to the benefices they had held, June 27. These, in the interval
following their deposition, had been conferred on others. Thousands flocked
to the Vatican to gloat over this spectacle of humiliation, so many indeed
that officials feared that the stairs and the floors of the state
apartments would give way.
It was next the turn of the King of France. The new pope came of a family
traditionally friendly to France, and personally he was disposed to give up
the cause of the Holy League that Julius II had formed. But on June 10, the
pope's Swiss allies defeated the French so thoroughly at Novara (near
Milan) that it was a mere remnant that got back to France. Louis XII was
crippled, to the delight of all Italy and of Rome especially, where mobs
paraded, crying "Victory" and "Julius II." The new pope did not dare to do
more for Louis than to keep away from the victory celebrations. And soon
the king, alarmed at the new anti-French coalition where the pope had no
part, sent commissioners to Rome to treat of submission. A means was found
by which the necessary act could be done with due "saving of face." On
December 19, 1513, the French envoys appeared in the council, and announced
their master's formal repudiation of the schism and his acceptance of the
Lateran council as truly a lawful General Council of the Church. This was
but a more public repetition of what had taken place privately where, as
the pope absolved the French king, he explained that this was only being
done for the great safety of his soul, the sentence of Julius II against
the Council of Pisa and its supporters not having been meant as against
Louis XII. But the general opinion of the day laughed at the notion that
there was any sincerity in the king's submission. And there still remained
the question of the Pragmatic Sanction!
It is sometimes harshly said that almost more important than what was done
at this council is the question why almost nothing came of its various
activities. But in the first of the sessions under Leo X where decrees were
voted, December 19, 1513, there is an important definition regarding the
faith. The occasion of this was the reappearance of the atheistic
philosophy of Averroes, particularly in the university of Padua in the
teaching of a leading thinker of the day, Pietro Pomponazzi. The council
now condemns (with no mention of any particular teacher) all who assert
that the intellectual soul in man is mortal, or that there is but one
single intellective soul [operating] for the whole human race. The
intellectual soul is, per se and essentially, the form of the human body,
as Clement V at the General Council of Vienne has taught already. This soul
is immortal, and is single for each individual of the multitude of human
beings. "Moreover, since one truth cannot contradict another truth, every
assertion contrary to the truth of faith we define to be altogether false"-
-this against those who say that these errors about the immortality of the
soul and its singularity (i.e., that for each human being there is a
separate individual intellectual soul ) are true, at least philosophically
speaking. All who teach otherwise than the council are condemned as
heretics and infidels, and must be punished accordingly.[332]
A second decree, published in the session of May 14, 1515, includes a
declaration on a point of morals. This decree is meant to end a long
controversy about practices in the loan offices set up by pious
associations as a charity whereby poor people may borrow money and yet
escape the usury of the professional moneylenders. The question has been
raised whether these charitable agencies (called in Latin montes pietatis)
are guilty of the sin of usury if they ask from their clients not only the
full sum lent to them but also a small charge to help to cover the running
expenses of the office (not however a profit in any way for the office).
The bull gives the decision that this practice is perfectly lawful, and
that such loans are by no manner of means to be considered an act of usury.
All who, after this decree, continue so to stigmatise such loans, whether
laymen, priests, or religious, incur the penalty of excommunication.[333]
Another decree of this same tenth session, after an eloquent compliment to
the new invention of printing, establishes the principle of the censorship
of what it is proposed to print--pornography has already begun its long,
profit-making course, and books are appearing dangerous to a Christian's
faith. We are, in 1515, only two years away from the great publicity
campaign--Lutheranism--where, for the first time, the possibilities of the
new invention will be shown in all their fullness. The censor, ex officio,
of all books everywhere is the diocesan bishop, and his licence to publish
the book is to be clearly printed in it. No charge is to be made for this
censorship service.[334]
That preaching, at this time, had fallen on evil days we should know even
though the council did not explicitly say so--it is a commonplace of all
the contemporary literature. While too many priests are too ignorant to
preach, says the council, very many others do no more than divert
themselves, learnedly or foolishly, whenever they find themselves in a
pulpit. So the council recalls the simple ideal and, passing to abuses that
call for correction, it sharply forbids the common practice of preachers'
prophesying, e.g., that the last day is at hand, that Antichrist is abroad,
that the Divine wrath is about to consume us, etc. "Those who have made
such predictions are liars." The preacher is forbidden to draw from Holy
Scripture conclusions as to any future happenings, or to say he has been
sent by God to say this, or that he knows it by a revelation. A second
chronic source of mischief in the Middle Ages is also rebuked--preachers
are strictly forbidden to preach about the sins of other clergy, "publicly
defaming the character of bishops, prelates and others in authority." By
"the preacher" is meant, given the age, a friar of one of the four
mendicant orders, for almost the whole of what preaching was done was their
work. Their superiors are now warned to see that they are fit and competent
for the office, and the preachers are bidden to show the local bishop these
testimonies to their piety and fitness. Preachers who offend against the
decree are, of course, to be stringently punished.[335]
Leo X is a pope for whom the ecclesiastical historians have harsh words.
This Lateran Council is never reckoned among his claims to a revised
verdict. Nowhere is it a more tragic disappointment than in the reform
decrees of its ninth and tenth sessions (May 6, 1514, and May 4, 1515). The
parlous condition of ecclesiastical life at this time is a commonplace of
all the historians. It was almost the single topic of the sermons preached
to the council. And in no place was what was seriously wrong so indecently
flaunted as in the city of Rome, and at the very court of Leo X. The
gravest of all pro-papal historians, Ludwig von Pastor, presents the life
of the court as the effect of a pope whose one interest in life was
pleasure--intellectual pleasure, music, sculpture, painting, poetry, the
drama; and the chase, for this seems to have been the first pope who
hunted, it was his great passion. What are called the graver vices left him
untouched--not so, only too often, the men whom he promoted to the highest
ecclesiastical rank. As to public affairs, the pope's main problem was to
maintain a balance in Italy between the foreign rivals who dominated, the
kings of France and Spain The papal policy was one of systematic deceit,
the pope steering always by two compasses, as Muratori was to write, never
trusted by either side. And behind all this diplomatic trickery--which
failed more often than it succeeded--lay the timorous young pope's chief
care, that his family's precarious hold on Florence should be transformed
into a permanent, recognised, quasi-royal position. The thought of such a
personage, "gilded butterfly" indeed, passing from the comedians and
buffoons of his palace to the reform debates in the General Council leaves
one aghast.[336]
Little wonder that, as the historians have read the decrees, they discount
as platitude the conventional expressions of horror at abuses, and sneer at
sternly worded reform laws which are peppered with exceptions, and legal
loopholes to make disobedience lawful. The magnificent gesture, only too
often, peters out in the feeble conclusion, "We therefore ... repeating all
our predecessors have said, renew all they have decreed...." Certainly, to
read the opening passage of the decree that is to provide better bishops
for the future, and better abbots, is an experience to try one's patience;
or to read the reforms imposed on the cardinals of the Roman Curia,
solemnly saying their servants must not wear long hair or grow beards and
the like, while at every step, in the gravest matters, the most
extraordinary exceptions are legalised. All the main topics that had caused
reformers and saints to groan for a good two hundred years and more are
mentioned--benefices (sees among them, of course) given to bad men or to
good men otherwise altogether unsuited; plurality of benefices (whose
duties are incompatible) given to the favoured minority; abbeys given "in
commendam," that is to say to clerics not monks at all, whose sole purpose
is to take from the monks their revenue, for the profit of the absentee
secular priest or bishop. All these wonders by means of papal
dispensations. So, no more abbeys are to be dealt with in this way,
"unless" (almost the key word in this unhappy legislation) "in
consideration of the present state of things ... it should be considered
expedient to do otherwise." Pluralities of incompatible offices--to be a
bishop in Spain and at the same time an archbishop in France and an abbot
in Italy, to hold canonries in half a dozen cathedrals at once--
dispensations for these are to be limited, and so, "those who hold more
than four such, are to resign all but four" within a given space of time,
two years. Monasteries given in commendam for the future are to go only to
cardinals and well-deserving persons, and the commendatory's financial hold
on the abbey is somewhat restricted.
There were two running fights through the greater part of this council, and
it was one of Leo X's anxieties to keep them within due limits, the fight
between the bishops and the cardinals of the Roman Curia, of which the
reforms just mentioned are a faint echo, and the fight between the bishops
and the orders of friars, which went on for a good three years and
threatened, at one time, to wreck the council. Its monument is the decree
of the eleventh session (December 19, 1516): Dum intra mentis arcana.[337]
The burden of the bishops' complaints was that the friars- thanks to the
privileges lavished on them by pope after pope for centuries-had become a
law unto themselves, and that their superiors were unable, or unwilling, to
keep them in order. From time to time reform movements had sprung up in one
order after another, and had received every encouragement from Rome, and
the reformed had been given a kind of autonomy. But the original stocks,
called the conventuals, were the cause of endless trouble. The bishops
called for a wholesale cancelling of the privileges that put the friars
outside their control, and even-some of the bishops -for the suppression of
the conventual orders. It was the good fortune of the friars that, at this
moment, two of the very ablest men in the Church were friars, and general-
superiors of their respective orders: Cajetan, of the Dominicans and Egidio
Canisio of the Augustinians-men for whom there were higher considerations
than the mere prestige of their order.
It was an easy task for the friars to retaliate on these Renaissance
bishops the charges of worldliness, materialism, and ill-living, and to ask
how else (were the friars to disappear) the ordinary people would gain any
knowledge of religion, or find confessors with knowledge enough to
administer the sacrament properly. It was the pope's mediation that stilled
the tumult, and Cajetan went so far as to say, publicly, that Leo alone at
this crisis stood between the orders and destruction.
The new decree set out in great detail the rights of the bishops to
intervene when religious superiors are negligent, and the limitations to
the spiritual activities of the friars vis-a-vis the rights of the resident
parochial clergy. Bishops are given power to examine those presented by
their superiors to be confessors. Friars have no power to absolve from
excommunications imposed by the bishop. It is to the diocesan bishop they
must have recourse for ordination, consecration of churches, altars,
cemeteries, and the like. They are not to marry people unless the pastor of
the contracting parties consents. They are to remind those whose
confessions they hear of their obligation to pay tithes to their pastor,
and to instruct people about this in their sermons. And so the list goes
on, twenty-two points in all. But whatever rights, whether of bishops or of
friars, are not mentioned here remain unchanged. Also the new law applies
to all the other religious orders.
The submission of Louis XII had left the question of the Pragmatic Sanction
entirely untouched--for all that a commission of the council was studying
it. Relations between king and pope were too tense, no doubt, for any
mention of it to be safe. It was, however, to be solved very speedily and
in a way none could have guessed. Louis survived his reconciliation just a
year, dying on January 1, 1515. His successor was the somewhat distant
cousin, the Count of Angouleme, who had married Louis' elder daughter--King
Francis I, a young man just reaching his twentieth year. This new king took
up his father-in-law's plans for a renewal of the Italian war, but with
much greater energy, and without any of the older man's vacillation. In
September 1515 he won a victory at Marignano that washed out all memory of
the French disasters. All Italy was now at his mercy, Medici Florence of
course, and even the Papal States. And it was the pope's misfortune that he
had been leagued with the defeated Swiss. Leo X had no choice, as a
temporal ruler, but to await the terms the conqueror would impose.
The two men met at Bologna, in December 1515. For a week they lived
together in the same house, meeting daily for long conversations with not
even a secretary in attendance. No detail of these momentous talks ever
leaked out. But Francis left the Medici in Florence, and made no further
advance into Italy. The coveted Duchy of Milan he, of course, took for
France. And, in a bold gesture, he suddenly asked Leo to confirm the
Pragmatic Sanction. It was an impossible request, and the king knew it. But
it meant that the pope must make some settlement that would leave the king
in possession. And so there came into existence one of the most famous
treaties in all Church History, the French Concordat of 1516. By this the
pope gave the kings of France the right to choose and present for
appointment (which meant, in practice, to appoint) all the 93 bishops of
France, all the 510 abbots and priors (with a few exceptions), and a host
of other major beneficiaries--offices whose revenues were almost equal to
that of the nation itself. But in return the king abandoned the Pragmatic
Sanction--the Church in France would no longer be operating on a
quasischismatical basis, and its connection with the condemned schismatical
Council of Basel would be at an end.
To the modern Catholic it is usually the pope's surrender that is the
striking feature of these arrangements. But to the French, in 1516, it
seemed that the pope had got the better of the king. Their fury rose to
great heights, and the Parlement de Paris staunchly refused to register the
royal edict and thus give the arrangements force of law. It took nearly two
years of campaigning before Francis I overcame the opposition, and he only
did so by an altogether unusual act of the royal authority. Meanwhile, in
December 1516, the pope laid the two bulls before the council, explaining
what they effected, and asking the council to approve. There were critics
among the bishops and hostile speeches, but the council approved.
The bull Pastor Aeternus which records the surrender of the Pragmatic
Sanction has a much wider interest than that of a mere change in the local
French situation. It was an opportunity for the pope to reaffirm the
doctrine that the Roman See is the mistress-see of the whole Church of
Christ, and so to describe the regime which the Pragmatic Sanction had set
up as an outrage on the divinely founded authority of the papacy. None of
the bishops named by the various kings--in the years it endured--had been
more than "tolerated" by the popes. It was an opportunity, no less
evidently, to comment on the Council of Basel as it continued in defiance
of the translation to Ferrara, and to deny that it was then an assembly
with any authority at all. Like Pisa, in 1511, it was a mere conventicle
(conciliabulum). The pope says plainly that the reigning pope alone can
call a General Council into being.[338] He can at will adjourn it or
dissolve it. And the reminder that the Roman See is sovereign in the Church
was driven home by a renewal of the famous bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface
VIII (1302). If such a reign as Leo X's can be said to have a climax, this
was surely the day when the pope saw the General Council endorse this bull
Pastor Aeternus, and as it came to him to give his vote in the council the
pope could not contain himself. "Non solum placet," he called out, "sed
multum placet et perplacet."[339]
Three months later the eighteenth General Council came to an end, March 16,
1517, with a decree forbidding the looting of the cardinals' palaces during
vacancies of the Holy See, and a second that imposed a special tax on all
benefices, for the expenses of the war against the Turks.
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