| #### 6. THE FIRST GENERAL COUNCIL IN THE WEST |

| #### #### The Concordat of Worms marked a very definite stage in the long effort of the Roman Church to reform itself and the churches it governed. One of the chief instruments it had employed, in order to correct abuses and to introduce the new discipline, was the council of local prelates presided over by the pope or by a legate representing him. It was only fitting that a greater council than any hitherto seen in the West, the first general council to be held in the West, should seal the treaty which promised the beginnings of a new age. This was the council announced as early as June, 1122, and summoned to meet in the Lateran basilica of Rome for the first Sunday of Lent, 1123. #### The official record of the council’s proceedings has perished; but its canons survive, and there are accounts of the proceedings in contemporary chronicles. Apparently some five hundred bishops took part in it, and Calixtus II himself presided. There were two, perhaps three, public sessions at which the decrees were published. the first on March 18, the last on March 28. Of the machinery by which the decrees were prepared, of the discussions which preceded their introduction in the public sessions, we know nothing. The texts of the Concordat of Worms were read out and solemnly approved, and six of the council’s canons form a kind of supplement to the pact. Laymen are forbidden to dispose of Church property; no bishop is to be consecrated who has not been canonically elected; the ordinations of the different anti-popes are declared null and void, as are all alienations of Church property made by them, except where these have been done with the consent of all the clergy of the churches concerned. In its preoccupation with the practical problems of church discipline and the extirpation of abuses, in its concern for the general social well being, the council only reflected the close relation of the two societies, civil and religious; and it set the pattern for all the other six councils of the Middle Ages. Of its twenty-two canons, five repeat previous legislation. [ ] Of the remaining seventeen, the most important is the twenty- first, which by making the reception of Holy Orders a diriment impediment to marriage completes at once the long Western development of clerical celibacy and the restorative legislation of the previous seventy-four years. Until now the cleric in major orders who, in contravention of the existing canons, contracted marriage, had been regarded as the equal of the cleric who kept a concubine: he must choose between his clerical career and the woman with whom he lived, whether she be his wife or not. Under the new legislation it is taken out of the cleric's power to contract a marriage at all, once he has received Holy Orders. #### The whole body of the Church had been roused to recognise in the layman's hold on ecclesiastical appointments the root of all the troubles that had for too long degraded it, and to see in a married clergy, not merely a dangerous innovation in discipline that made graver clerical abuses easier still, but one of the layman's most powerful aids in maintaining that hold. The council of 1123 marked the end of the long campaign of propaganda and the victory of the ancient tradition. Free of two, at least, of the chains that hampered its freedom the Church should go forward more easily in its mission of supernaturalising the life of mankind. |