| ### A HISTORY OF THE CHURCH To the Eve of the Reformation ### by Philip Hughes ### Vol. 3: 1274-1520 ### CHAPTER 1: GESTA PER FRANCOS, 1270-1314 ###  |

| #### 1. BL. GREGORY X AND THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF LYONS, 1270-1276 |

| #### #### IN the summer of the year 1270, terrible news came to France from Africa, and to all Christian Europe. The King of France, St. Louis, had died of fever in the camp before Tunis, and the crusade was over. A world of effort, of sacrifice, and of suffering had gone for just nothing; and something unique had passed from a singularly troubled world. The one leader whom, for his righteousness, all Christendom might have trusted was dead. #### In that summer of 1270 the figure of the great French king stood out with especial significance. It was now sixteen years since the last of the emperors had died, vanquished by that papacy which his house had striven to enthrall. In those sixteen years Germany had been given over to anarchy, while the popes, with very varied success, had worked to consolidate their new, precarious, hold on independence. In the end no way had offered itself to them but the old way, the protection of some Christian sovereign's defensive arm. To find some such prince, and install him in southern Italy as king of their vassal state of Sicily, was, then, a first obvious aim of papal policy. No less obviously, St. Louis IX was the ideal champion. Years of negotiation, however, had failed to persuade him to become a partner in any such scheme. The saint was by no means accustomed to accept unquestioningly the papal solutions for political problems. But, in the end, ten years' experience convinced him that, so long as the chaos in southern Italy continued. the popes must be wholly absorbed by the single problem of how to remain independent amid the ceaseless war of political factions. On the other hand, the general affairs of Christendom stood in too urgent need of the papacy's constructive direction for any such papal absorption in Italian politics to be tolerable: the Italian disorder must be ended; and so St. Louis had not only assented to the papal policy but had allowed his youngest brother, Charles of Anjou, to become the pope's man, and to lead a French army into Italy for the defeat of the last remnants of the Hohenstaufen kings of Sicily. [ ] #### The pope's chosen champion had now destroyed the pope's enemies -- but the papal problem remained. Already, by the time Charles had to fight his second battle, it was becoming evident to the pope who crowned him and blessed his arms -- Clement IV -- that the victorious champion threatened to be as dangerous to the papal freedom as ever the Hohenstaufen had been. Strong protests against the new king's cruelty and tyranny began to be heard from the apostolic see. This pope, French by birth and for the greater part of his life a highly trusted counsellor of Louis IX, bound closely to the king by similarity of ideals and mutual esteem, was ideally equipped for the difficult task of guiding the new French venture through its first critical years. His sudden death, in November 1268, only two months after Tagliacozzo, was an immense loss; and this swelled into a catastrophe; first of all when the cardinals left the Holy See vacant for as long as three years, [ ] and then when, while the Church still lacked a pope, death claimed St. Louis too. For long there had been no emperor, there was no pope, and now the King of France had died. The last sure hope of checking the ambitions of Charles of Anjou had gone. In St. Louis's place there would reign the rash simplicity of his son, Philip III. Charles would have an open field, every chance he could desire to build up a situation which the future popes would have to accept -- unless they were prepared to start a new war to destroy him, as he had destroyed for them the heirs of Frederick II. #### Of the two deaths the more important by far was that of St. Louis. Sanctity is rare in rulers, and rarest of all is the sanctity that shows itself in the perfection of the ruler's characteristic virtue of prudent practical ability. The pope's death found the Church in crisis -- it did not create the crisis; but the French king alone could have brought the papacy and Christendom safely through the crisis. One thing alone could have saved it, and he alone could have done that one thing -- namely, maintain the tradition, now two centuries old, of French support for the popes in the difficulties which arose out of their office as guardians of political morality, while yet refusing to be a mere instrument for the execution of the popes' political judgments. The papacy needed the French -- but it needed also to be independent of them; and Christendom needed that the French should retain their independence too, and not become mere tools of popes who happened to be politicians as well as popes. This difficult and delicate part St. Louis managed to fit to perfection -- as none, before or since, has fitted it. And never was the lack of a prince to fit the part productive of greater mischief than in the twenty-five years that followed his death. For one main event of those years was the reversal of the traditional Franco-Papal entente that had been a source of so much good to both powers and, indeed, a main source of the peace of Christendom. #### The Holy See, when Clement IV's death in 1268 delivered it over to the unprecedented calamity of a three years, vacancy, was already gravely embarrassed by the opposition of various Catholic powers to its leading policies. The popes were, for example, determined on a renewal of the crusade; but the great maritime republics of Genoa and Venice were all for peace with the Turks: war would mean the loss of valuable trade, defeat be the end of their commercial empire. The popes, again, had been favourably impressed by the Byzantine emperor's moves to end the schism between Constantinople and Rome that had gone on now for two hundred years; but Charles of Anjou wanted nothing so little as peace with Michael VIII, whom he was planning to supplant as emperor. The Lombard towns were the scenes of continual strife, the feuds bred by generations of civil war still active. The anti-papal forces in these cities found a curious ally in that wing of the great Franciscan movement which demanded a return to the most primitive form of the Franciscan life, and saw in this the kind of life all Church dignitaries ought to lead. The anarchic element in this movement, which threatened the existence of all ecclesiastical authority, was naturally welcome to rulers who, in every city of Italy, and beyond Italy too, aspired to restore the arbitrary omnipotence of the emperors of ancient Rome and secure thereby the exclusive triumph of material interests. [ ] This active unnatural alliance of Franciscan Spirituals and totalitarian capitalists of one kind and another, the popes were bound to fight; and here they were gravely hampered by a legacy from the papacy's own recent past. In the long struggle against the last great Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II, the central authority in the Church, under the popes Gregory IX (1227-1241) and Innocent IV (1243-1254) "saw itself compelled to turn all its activity towards those resources and influences of a temporal kind that were necessary for its defence, and to expand the whole system of its temporal activity in order to secure itself against the attacks of its tireless foe." [ ] #### This use, by the Vicar of Christ, of fleets and armies to maintain his independence -- and the chronic need for this use in the "Ages of Faith" -- this willing acceptance by the popes of suzerain status in the feudal world over more or less reluctant royal vassals, John of England in one generation, Charles of Sicily in another; this raising of huge sums of money by loans from bankers and by levies on all the sees of Christendom in turn; this use of the crusade ideal and formulae to describe and characterise wars against European princes who remained the popes' children in the Faith despite their disobedience; all this, to the modern reader, seems often to need a great deal of explanation. And the popes who defended, in this particular way, those rights and that independent status which, undeniably, were the bases of the general recovery of Europe from barbarism, had to meet, as we shall see, much criticism of a similar kind from their own Catholic contemporaries. #### Naturally enough the first form the criticism took was resentment, well-nigh universal, at the financial levies. From the moment when, in 1261, the newly elected French pope, Urban IV, began the great move to haul the papacy out of the political slough where he found it, the popes' need of money never ceases. Both the bad effect on those who collected the money, and the resentment of those from whom it was extorted, are henceforth permanent active elements of the state-of- the-Church problem. Already by the time Charles of Anjou had established himself in the kingdom of Sicily (1266) there was -- we can now see -- cause for anxiety on this score. #### At the other pole of the main axis of European affairs the French State, too, had its serious chronic problems. The traditional policy which had, by 1270, secured the Capetian kings' uniquely strong hold as rulers of a great nation, has been well described as "the slow collaboration of interests and public opinion." [ ] In a century when popes are to be counted by the dozen, France had been so lucky as to have but two kings and both of them really great rulers. [ ] Their achievement was very great, but it was not complete; and a modern French historian [ ] has well described some elements of the problem St. Louis left to his son, Philip III, and which, aggravated by the fifteen years of this king's weak rule, faced the next king, one of the most enigmatic figures of medieval history. This was Philip the Fair, whose reign (1285-1314) was a turning point in the history of the papacy and the Church. " France was falling to pieces. One after another the institutions upon which the whole fabric rested were breaking up and giving way. . . . Some of the feudatories were as powerful as the king himself, the Duke of Aquitaine, for example, who was also King of England; others, such as the Duke of Brittany or the Count of Flanders, ruled provinces that were really foreign countries in their way of life; in Languedoc the people detested the French. From one end of the country to the other, a myriad contradictory uses, customs, traditions, jurisdictions, privileges contended and struggled; none of them subject to royal regulation. The great mass of the nation was set against the classes that ruled. . . everywhere the national life was disorganised; anarchy seemed imminent, and it seemed only too likely that several important provinces would become independent states or fall under foreign rule." #### Philip the Fair would meet his problems with new resources and a wholly new combination of strength and ruse. In his bid to be really master of every element of French life, not only would he come into violent conflict with the papacy -- as other French kings had done in their time -- but he would inaugurate a new tradition in the relations of the principal monarchy in Europe with the Holy See. He would not be the partner of the pope, but his master. In his grandfather, St. Louis, there had been seen the perfection of the older conception, the French king allied with the papacy in an implicit pact of mutual assistance, a true defender of the independence of religion and at the same time just as truly defender of the rights of the French clergy-rights to property -- against the papacy itself. This devotion of St. Louis to the cause of the papacy did not ever entail any blind following of every detail of the papal policies. The king refused to allow Frederick II to capture Lyons while the General Council assembled there that was to condemn him; he even assembled an army in case Frederick should move. But, on the other hand, he did not, once Frederick was condemned and excommunicated and deposed by the pope, offer the pope his aid to carry out the sentence. St. Louis remained carefully neutral. Again "In his relations with the French episcopate, whether it was a matter of fiefs or even of applying disciplinary power, Louis IX showed a care to exercise control, and a susceptibility about his rights which conflicted only in appearance with his zeal for the interests of religion. It was his conviction that the prerogatives of the crown were necessary to the good order of the community, and thus the saint made it as much a matter of conscience to defend them well as to use them rightly; the prestige of those to whom religious jurisdiction was confided did not obscure the saint's clear vision of what was right, and in all matters he paid less attention to the noisy demands of the representatives of the clergy than to the canonical rules which ought to be the inspiration of their conduct." [ ] #### Such was the delicate situation and such the prince lost to the Church, to Christendom no less than to France, on August 25, 1270. Charles of Anjou, supreme for the moment, took charge of the crusade. He made a pact with the Sultan which brought the whole affair to an end (October 20) and, a month later, re-embarked the armies and sailed back to Europe. #### Meanwhile, at Viterbo, the papal election continued to drag on. Holy men appeared to harangue and to warn the sixteen cardinals. The General of the new Servite Friars, St. Philip Benizi, fled from the offer of the honour. The kings of France and Sicily tried what a personal visit might effect. Then the people of Viterbo, in desperation with the cardinals' indifference to the scandal caused by their incompetence, took a hand and stripped of its roof the palace where the electors met. At last, on September 1, 1271, the cardinals gave power to a commission of six of their number to elect a pope, and that same day the six found their man. He was Theobaldo Visconti, not a cardinal, nor a bishop, nor even a priest, but the Archdeacon of Liege; and at this moment away in the Holy Land, encouraging the heir to the English crown in the forlorn hours of the last of the crusades. It was weeks before the archdeacon heard of his election, and months before he landed in Italy to be ordained, consecrated and crowned as Pope Gregory X (March 27, 1272). #### The new pope, a man perhaps sixty years of age, was one of those figures whose unexpected entry into the historical scene seems as evident a sign of God's care for mankind as was ever the appearance of a prophet to Israel of old. He was largehearted, he was disinterested, a model of charity in his public life no less than in private, free from any taint of old political associations, simple, energetic, apostolic. His first anxiety was the restoration of Christian rule in the East: to this the European situation was secondary. But for the sake of the Crusade, the European complications must be speedily resolved, despite all the vested interests of long-standing feuds. In this work of reconciliation Gregory X's apostolic simplicity, and his aloofness from all the quarrels of the previous thirty years, gave to the papal action a new strength. A vision now inspired it that transcended local and personal expediency. #### There was, the pope saw, no hope for the future of Catholicism in the Holy Land, no hope of holding off the Saracen from fresh conquests, so long as Rome and Constantinople remained enemies; and it was the first action of his reign to take up, and bring to a speedy conclusion, those negotiations to end the schism which had trailed between the two courts for now many years. That this policy of reunion, an alliance with the Greek emperor, Michael VIII, cut clean across the plans of Charles of Anjou to renew the Latin empire at Constantinople, with himself as emperor, and across his pact with Venice to divide up the Christian East between them, did not for a moment daunt the pope. Nor did the claims of Alfonso X of Castile to be emperor in the West hinder the pope from a vigorous intervention in Germany which resulted in the unchallenged election of Rudolf of Habsburg, and a close to nineteen years of civil war and chaos. A Germany united and at peace with itself was a fundamental condition of a peaceful Christendom. #### This admirable pope knew the problems of Franco-German Europe by personal experience, from the vantage point of life in the middle lands that lay between the rival cultures. His direct diplomacy had thwarted the plan of Charles of Anjou to force the election of his nephew, the King of France, as emperor, and now the pope so managed the diplomatic sequence to the election of Rudolf of Habsburg that it brought these rivals into friendly collaboration. And he managed, also, in a personal interview at Beaucaire, to soothe the disappointed Alfonso of Castile. Nowhere, at any time, did Gregory X's action leave behind it resentment or bitterness. #### The Crusade, reunion of the separated churches of the East, and the reform of Catholic life, thrown back everywhere by the fury of the long war with the Hohenstaufen, were Gregory X's sole, and wholly spiritual, anxieties. Christendom must be organised anew, refitted throughout for the apostolic work that lay ahead. The first, most obvious step, was to survey its resources, to study its weaknesses and then find suitable remedies. This would best be done in a General Council, and only four days after Gregory's coronation the letters went out to kings and prelates, convoking a council to meet at Lyons in the summer of 1274. #### Gregory X is, above all else, the pope of this second General Council of Lyons. Nowhere in his well-filled reign is his largehearted trust in the better side of human nature more evident, his confidence that charity and a right intention in the pope would call out the same virtues in others. And certainly the greatest charity was needed in whoever hoped to heal the long, poisoned dissension that kept the churches of the East estranged from Rome. The schism, in its causes, went back centuries. Latin despised Greek as shifty and treacherous: Greek despised Latin as barbarous and uncivilised. The association of the two during the various crusades had steadily sharpened the antagonism. Finally there was the memory of the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, the sack of the great city, the massacres, the expulsion of the Greek ruler and his replacement by a Latin, with a Latin bishop enthroned as patriarch in the see of Photius and Cerularios. That Latin regime had endured for less than sixty years. On July 25, 1261, the Greeks had returned under Michael VIII. Constantinople fell to him with scarcely a struggle, and with the Latin empire there crashed the Latin ecclesiastical establishment. That the immediate reaction of the then pope -- Urban IV -- himself a one-time Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, was to plan a great crusade of recovery, was most natural. That never before in their history were the Greeks so hostile to the Latins, was natural no less. And if this was the moment when Michael VIII proposed to the pope to bring the schism to an end, the observer might see in his action no more than the clearest of signs that the Greek emperor realised how slender was his hold on the new conquest. The King of France -- St. Louis -- had taken the cross in response to Pope Urban's appeal; and Venice, the real author of the piratical conquest of 1204, was also actively preparing. No pope, however, would hesitate between a restoration of obedience forced at the sword's point and a general return to obedience on the part of Constantinople and all its dependent churches. Michael’s shrewd move held up the military expedition. From the day when Urban IV sent his Franciscan envoys to discuss Michael’s proposal (28 July, 1263) the emperor knew his immediate danger was past. #### Urban IV died (October 2, 1264) before much more had been done than to make clearer than clear how diverse were the intentions of emperor and pope. Michael had proposed first of all to complete the work of national unity; to drive out of the imperial territories, that is to say, what Latin rulers still remained. Urban thought that the religious reunion should come first. #### Once a new pope was elected, Clement IV (February 5, 1265), Michael was able to begin all over again. It was a great advantage that Clement's plans for a crusade were directed to an expedition against the Holy Land itself. Constantinople now seemed secure against any western attack, and the emperor could safely begin the theological hedging and jousting. The Greeks, seemingly, proposed a council in which the differences of belief should be discussed. The pope replied, in the traditional Roman way, that the Faith being a thing that was settled, such discussionwas impossible. The pope's ambassadors could indeed go into the questions raised by the Greeks and, once the union was a fact, there could be a council to ratify it. And Clement sent a declaration of faith to the emperor (March 1267). #### Constantinople was, however, at this moment in the throes of an ecclesiastical upheaval, which produced three successive patriarchs in eighteen months. Politics had the main share in this and now, unfortunately, although the patriarch in possession was a strong supporter of Michael as emperor, he had the disadvantage of being violently anti-Latin. Michael, perforce, must go slowly; and then, while he was considering Clement's reply, the pope died (29 November, 1268) and there began one of the longest vacancies the Holy See has ever known. [ ] #### If the long vacancy solved, for Michael, the immediate problem how to frame a submission to Rome that would be palatable also to his patriarch, it raised once more the problem of the security of his empire from western attacks. His chief danger in the West lay in the King of Sicily, Charles of Anjou. For this leading Guelf had no sooner overcome the Sicilian Ghibelline (1266), than he began to show himself, in the East, a most faithful follower of Ghibelline policy. To all the kings of Sicily-Norman, Hohenstaufen, and now Angevin -- the emperor at Constantinople was the traditional enemy. It was an antagonism that went back before the crusades, dating from those days when the Normans first conquered from the Greek emperor these Italian lands. And when the Sicilian kingdom fell to kings who were also German emperors, the traditional Mediterranean policy they inherited cut across the simplicities of the papally planned crusade. For these imperialists were enemies, first, of Byzantium. They might conquer the Turk ultimately, but their present thought was rather the Eastern Empire. An assault of this kind had been in the mind of the Emperor Henry VI when death so prematurely carried him off (1197). Seven years later, with the active assistance of his brother, the Emperor Philip, the plan was realised and Constantinople torn from the Greeks -- though not to the profit of Sicily. In the next generation Frederick II, Henry's son was the champion of the imperialistic idea and, surrendering the whole substance of the crusade, he negotiated a settlement with the Turks without any pretence of destroying their power. And now the conqueror of Frederick II's heirs was showing himself just as hostile to Byzantium, just as openly averse to any war against the Turks. #### In 1267, while Clement IV and Michael VIII were seemingly planning a reunion of Latin west and Greek east, Charles began to style himself King of Jerusalem, and made the claim that he was heir to the last Latin emperor of the East. He was carefully building up a strong position for the future, gathering in claims and rights which, once Michael VIII was conquered, would become political realities. Clement out of the way, what should stay him? By the spring of 1270 his plans were completed, and to Michael VIII the end seemed very near. In his desperation he appealed to the cardinals and also to St. Louis. The saint, sympathetic to the scheme for reunion, and ever the enemy of such schemes of realpolitik as Charles of Anjou was promoting, halted his brother most effectively by summoning him to take his place in the crusade then preparing against Tunis. #### St. Louis' tragic death (25 August, 1270) set Charles free to renew his efforts against Michael VIII, and he had already done much by negotiations with the Latin princes in Achaia and the Peloponnesus, when he met the greatest check of all, the election as pope of one resolved, before all else, to bring together Greek and Latin to defend Christendom against their common foe the Turk. Charles might now style himself King of Albania, and ally himself with Michael’s Greek rivals (1272), and even send Angevin forces and some of his own Saracen archers to attack Michael in Greece (1273): the new pope had passed too speedily from desires to action, the work of the Council of Lyons was a political fact, and on May 1, 1275 the King of Sicily was compelled to sign a truce with Michael. #### The motives of the Greek emperor in offering his submission to the various popes and so proposing to bring to an end the schism that had endured for two hundred and twenty years were, then, evidently no more than political. Such practical statesmen as Urban IV and Clement IV would no doubt have grasped this, and acted accordingly, long before any formal act of reunion was completed. Gregory X was more optimistic than such papal realists. He readily listened to Michael VIII's new offers and sent a distinguished commission of theological experts and diplomatists to Constantinople to initiate the good work. #### The four envoys [ ] -- Friars Minor -- took with them the creed or profession of faith, drafted by Clement IV. This the emperor, the bishops, and the people were to accept, and thereupon emperor and prelates were to take their places at the coming council. The arrival of this commission at Constantinople was the beginning of an immense theological excitement. It was immediately evident that the bishops would by no means obey mechanically any order from the emperor to submit themselves. #### The leading theological question was the Latin doctrine that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, or rather whether the Latins had any right to express this doctrine by adding to the so-called creed of the Council of Nicaea the words "and from the Son". [ ] The Greek bishops began by denying their right to do so, and gave the Latins an ultimatum to end the scandal by withdrawing the phrase. The emperor then took charge, and explained to his bishops, in private, that if this proposed arrangement with the Latins fell through, the empire was lost. As to the Latin formulae, no one could object to them as a matter of conscience, for the doctrines they expounded were perfectly orthodox. And he brought theological authority, and also earlier declarations of the Greek episcopate, to support the statement. The most learned man of the day was John Beccos, the chartophylax, [ ] and to him the bishops now looked for the reply that would non-suit the emperor's plea. Beccos, however, contented neither party. He did not refute the emperor; but he declared the Latins to be heretics. Whereupon Michael ordered his imprisonment. The patriarch, for his part, organised his bishops to refute the emperor's case and all swore an oath to resist the proposed union. #### The prospects of reunion seemed slight indeed. But the emperor could not afford not to buy off the danger that threatened from Sicily and Venice. He was helped by the conversion of Beccos to his views. In prison the chartophylax had set himself to study in the Greek Fathers the doctrine of the processions in the Blessed Trinity. St. Athanasius, St. Cyril and St. Maximus attested that the Latin teaching was the Catholic faith. Beccos, thereupon, revoked his judgment that the Latins were heretics and became the emperor's most enthusiastic aid. While the convert argued with the bishops for the orthodoxy of the Latin position, Michael tried a mixture of diplomacy and pressure. All that would be asked of them, he asserted, was a recognition of the primacy of the Roman see, of Rome's right to judge all cases in final appeal, and that they should pray for the pope publicly in the liturgy. It was in this last point that the final difficulty lay. The popes had tampered with the sacred wording of the creed: how could an orthodox bishop give them any countenance? Michael retorted by threatening the opposition with the penalties of high treason; at the same time he pledged himself that the bishops would not be asked to add so much as an iota to the creed. Reassured, the bishops consented now to accept the emperor's three points; also to make a joint protestation of obedience to the pope. #### When the Greek deputation reached Lyons (24 June, 1274) the council had been in session for seven weeks. It had opened on May 7 with elaborate ceremonial and a sermon from the pope. Then, on May 18, it had passed the decree establishing the point of faith about the Filioque, [ ] and on June 7 twelve decrees regulating the procedure to be followed in elections of bishops and abbots. #### The arrival of the Greeks interrupted these legislative proceedings. The ambassadors were received with solemn ceremony; they presented the letters from the emperor and the Greek bishops; they declared they had come to show their obedience to the Roman Church and to learn from it the true faith. Five days later was the feast of SS. Peter and Paul. At the mass, sung by the pope, the epistle and gospel were chanted in Greek as well as Latin, and the credo likewise (with the Filioque clause repeated three times by the Greeks). St. Bonaventure preached a great sermon. On the octave day, July 6, the formal act of reunion and reconciliation took place. The letters from Constantinople were read; in the emperor's, he repeated the creed sent to him by the pope and declared it to be the true faith, accepted as such by him because it came from the Roman church. He pledged his eternal fidelity to this doctrine, his obedience to the papal primacy. In return he asked that the Greeks be allowed to keep the creed unaltered by any reference to the procession of the Holy Ghost from God the Son, and also that their ancient rite be left untouched. And the emperor's ambassador confirmed all this by an oath made in his master's name. #### The General Council which met at Lyons in 1274 was summoned as a great assize to find means for the restoration of Catholic life no less than for the recovery of the Holy Land. With this in view, Gregory X had asked bishops in various countries to send in statements setting out the main reasons for the spiritual decay which he deplored, and to propose remedies. #### By far the greater part of the reforms enacted in the thirty decrees of the Council [ ] have reference to evils in the life of the clergy. . The pope, indeed, was to bring the council to a close with a sermon in which he declared that bad bishops were the principal cause of all that was wrong. [ ] In the council he made no scruple about a direct attack on scandal in the highest place of all, the negligence of the cardinals in allowing vacancies of the Holy See to drag on for months and for years. On more than one occasion already, the faithful people had intervened to coerce the indifference of the cardinals by locking them up until they came to a decision, and a decree of the council [ ] now authorised and regularised these extreme measures, imposing the conclave as the rule henceforward. On the death of the pope the cardinals present in the city where he died were to await ten days, but no more, for their absent brethren. Then, with but a single servant each, they were to take up their residence in the palace, living together in a single locked room without any curtains or screens to shut off any part of it. This conclave [ ] was to be so arranged that none might enter or leave it unseen by the rest, that there would be no means of access to the electors or of secret communications with them; no cardinal must admit any visitor except such as were allowed in by the whole body to treat of the arrangement of the conclave. The new pope -- so Gregory X seems to have intended -- would thus be speedily elected, for his law next provides that should the election be delayed beyond three days "which God forbid', the cardinals' food was to be restricted to a single dish at each of their two daily meals; after five days more they were to be given only bread with wine and water. There are regulations for the admission of latecomers, for the care of sick cardinals who may leave and then wish to return. The cardinals are forbidden to occupy themselves with any other business than the election, and all pacts or conventions made between them are declared null, even though they be confirmed with an oath. Nor is any cardinal to receive anything of his ecclesiastical revenues as long as the vacancy of the Holy See endures; these are sequestrated and at the disposal of the future pope. Finally, in order that these provisions may not become a dead letter, the responsibility for providing the conclave and guarding it is laid on the civic authority of the town where it takes place; heavy penalties being provided for those who over-act the rigour towards the cardinals which the new law demands. #### The cardinals objected strongly to the proposed law, and for a time there was a brisk duel between them and the pope, each striving to enlist supporters from among the bishops. And it would seem that the general sense of the council was against the reform as proposed, for it was not promulgated until some months after the council had dispersed. #### The most usual way of appointing bishops or abbots was still, in 1274, by an election, where the canons or monks had each a vote. A whole series of decrees enacted in this council shows the many serious abuses which affected the system, and how thoroughly, in these last years before something was devised in its place, the Holy See strove to reform them. Appeals against elections (or provisions) to churches are to be made in writing and to be countersigned by witnesses who swear their own belief in the truth of the objections made and that they can prove this: penalties are provided for those who fail to make good their charges. [ ] The elect must await confirmation before entering upon his charge. [ ] He is to be informed of his election as soon as possible, to signify his acceptance within a month, and, under penalty of losing the place, seek confirmation within three months. [ ] Voters who knowingly vote for one who is unworthy sin mortally, and are liable to severe punishment. [ ] No voter is allowed to appeal against the one for whom he has voted -- certain special cases apart. [ ] Far too many appeals are sent to Rome where the motive is not really serious. This practice is to cease [ ] and in cases where a double election has been made no objection will be allowed for the future against the majority on the score of lack of zeal, of worth, or of authority, where the majority numbers two-thirds of the voters. [ ] If objection be made that there is an evident defect, whether of due knowledge or otherwise, there must be an immediate enquiry into this. Should the objection be shown devoid of foundation, those who made it lose all right to pursue any further objection they have raised, and they are to be punished as though they had failed to prove the whole of their objections. [ ] Finally, to protect the successful against the malice of the disappointed, it is laid down that those who revenge themselves on electors for not supporting them by pillaging the electors' property or that of the Church or of the electors' relatives, or who molest the electors or their families are by the very fact excommunicated. [ ] #### The elective system was already beginning to raise problems almost as serious as those it solved. In another hundred years it would have disappeared in the greater part of the Church, and bishops be directly appointed or "provided" by the pope. The foundation of the new system was the decree Licet (1268) of Gregory X's immediate predecessor Clement IV, a lawyer pope who had come to the service of the Church after a great career as jurist and administrator in the service of St. Louis IX. By that decree Clement IV had reserved to the Holy See the appointment to all benefices vacated by death, if the holder at the time he died had been a member of the Roman curia or had died in the city where the curia then was. [ ] This new law had caused much dissatisfaction among the bishops, no less than among other patrons of benefices. At the General Council they strove to have it revoked. But though Gregory X was not, apparently, unsympathetic, he would do no more than modify it slightly, [ ] and allow that vacancies falling under the reservation might be filled by the patron if the pope had failed to fill them within a month from the holder's death. [ ] #### What of the man appointed? and especially of the man who was the foundation of the whole system, the parish priest? It had already been laid down, a hundred years before this time, [ ] that no one must be appointed to a parish who was younger than twenty-five. But this law had too often been disregarded, and so the Council now declared [ ] that all appointments which violated the law were null and of no effect. It also reminded the nominee that he was bound to live in his parish and, if he were not a priest already, that he must seek ordination within a year or else ipso facto lose his benefice. Non-residence of beneficiaries -- of bishops and of parish priests especially -- was one of the chronic weaknesses of the seemingly powerful structure of medieval Catholicism. The popes never succeeded in their war against it, nor against the related mischief that the same man held more than one benefice: only too often, indeed, policy led the different popes to connive at these evils, and in the end, more almost than anything else, it was these that brought the imposing structure down to the dust. At Lyons, in 1274, laws were made to control the pluralist. No parish was to be given in commendam [ ] unless to a priest; he must be of the canonical age of twenty-five and not already provided with a parish in commendam, and the necessity (on the part of the Church) must be evident; furthermore such appointments are good for six months only. Any Contravention of these conditions invalidates the appointment ipso iure. [ ] As to pluralists -- clerics who hold more than one benefice -- bishops are to make a general enquiry and if one of the benefices held entails a cure of souls, the holder is to produce the dispensation authorising this. If this is not forthcoming, all but the first received of his benefices are to be taken as vacant and given to others. If, however, he is lawfully authorised he may retain all he lawfully holds, but it is put upon the bishop's conscience to see that the cure of souls is not neglected. Bishops are specifically warned to make certain, when they confer a benefice that entails a cure of souls, that if the beneficiary already holds such a benefice he is dispensed to hold the second with a dispensation which explicitly mentions his possession of the first cura animarum. [ ] #### Episcopal control of the clergy is strengthened by a canon which forbids bishops to ordain another bishop's subjects without his leave: bishops who transgress, lose automatically the right to ordain at all for twelve months. [ ] The clergy are given a useful protection against the bishop in a new rule [ ] about visitation expenses. Bishops were already allowed to exact a certain support in kind when they made the official visitation of a parish. The custom was, however, doveloping of asking money or gifts; another abuse was to exact procurations -- the payments in kind – without making the visitations. The council deals with these abuses (already noted and condemned by Innocent IV) by decreeing that all who have exacted these unlawful presents must restore double their amount to the victims. If the restitution is not made within a month, the bishop loses all right to enter a church until payment is made; his officials, if they are guilty, are suspended from office and benefice. Nor is any willingness of the injured party to remit the amount due, or part of it, to affect the automatic operation of the law. #### Clerical immunity from the jurisdiction of the lay ruler was an ancient institution more and more contested in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Gregory X at Lyons made a concession to the princes, enacting [ ] that the cleric in minor orders who contracted a second marriage lost all his clerical privileges and was henceforth wholly their subject. On the other hand, another canon [ ] denouncing yet again [ ] the barbarous custom called ‘reprisals', -- by which, if the guilty party were beyond the law's power, the nearest innocent members of the community were made to suffer in his stead -- fixed a special penalty of excommunication and interdict for those who subjected ecclesiastics to this abuse. #### There are two new laws to safeguard Church property, whether from lay rapacity or from cowardly negligence on the part of the clergy who should be its special defenders. Excommunication is henceforward to fall automatically on anyone -- whatever his rank -- who, unauthorised, takes upon himself the occupation and administration of the property of a vacant see or abbey, and also upon the clerics or monks who abet this usurpation. Those who enjoy such right of administration are warned not to go beyond their right, and that they are bound not to neglect the properties entrusted to their care. [ ] The second law [ ] forbids prelates -- without the leave of their chapter and the Holy See -- to make over their lands to the lay lord as the price of his protection, retaining for the Church a mere use of the property. All contracts of this kind hitherto made without leave are now annulled, even though confirmed with an oath. Offending prelates are to suffer a three years suspension from their office and their revenues, and the lords who force such contracts upon them, or who have not restored what they obtained through past contracts of this sort, are excommunicated. #### The reform legislation of the Council did not only touch the layman in his relations with the clergy. In two canons, on usury and usurers, it strove to halt a mischief that lay at the very roots of social life. Already, by a law of 1179, as the Council recalls, the notorious usurer [ ] was barred from the sacraments, and if he died he was forbidden Christian burial, and the clergy were not allowed to take offerings from him. These prohibitions had been largely ignored, and now, not only are they renewed, but it is forbidden [ ] to states and rulers to allow usurers to take up residence within their territories, or to allow those already there to remain. Within three months they must be expelled. If the lord is an ecclesiastic, disregard of this new law entails automatically suspension from his office, a lay lord incurs excommunication, and a community or corporation interdict. As for the usurer himself, [ ] he is not to have Christian burial, even though his will directs that restitution be made, until this has actually been done or substantial pledges given according to forms now provided. Members of religious orders -- and others too -- who bury usurers in disregard of this law are themselves to be punished as usurers. Unless a usurer first make restitution, or give a real guarantee that he will do so, no one is to witness his will or hear his confession, or absolve him. If his will does not provide for restitution it is, by the fact, null and void. #### There is also a canon [ ] about conduct in church and abuses of the church fabric from which much may be gleaned about the day to day religious life of the time. Churches are places built for prayer, places where silence should reign, and this especially during the time of mass. All are to bow their heads in reverence whenever the holy name of Jesus Christ is pronounced, especially during the mass. The church is not to be used for secular purposes, such as meetings, or parliaments, nor as a court of law; if trials are held there the sentences rendered are, ipso facto, null and void. Churchyards are not to be used for fairs. It is a terrible thing, says the canon, if places set apart for man to ask forgiveness for his sins become to him occasions of further sin. This canon inaugurated the popular devotion to the Holy Name, and the great confraternity still so flourishing, founded by the Dominicans at the command of Gregory X [ ] to further the devotion. #### Five of the remaining canons are directed to the reform of legal procedure; most of them relate to the law governing the punishment of excommunication. Excommunication is not incurred by those who hold intercourse with the excommunicated unless these have been excommunicated by name. This is a clarification of a canon of the last General Council. [ ] Absolution, from any censure, which has been extorted by violence or threats is not only null and void absolutely, but also involves those using such threats in a further excommunication. [ ] Those who give permission to their servants or subjects to murder, imprison or injure in any way, whether it be the officials responsible for a sentence of excommunication against them, or relatives of the officials, or those who refuse all intercourse with them since the excommunication, are by the fact excommunicated a second time; so too are those who carry out these orders. If within two months they have not sought absolution from this second excommunication, they can only be absolved from it by the Holy See. [ ] Another new law [ ] is directed to check the hastiness of ecclesiastics in issuing penalties whose effects are general. Canons who, as a punishment, propose to suspend the church services, must now give notice of this in writing, with their reasons, to the person or persons against whom this action is directed. If the canons fail to do this, or if the reasons assigned are insufficient, they lose all right to their revenues for the time the services were suspended and must moreover make satisfaction for any losses thereby incurred to those they meant to punish. Also, and here is a reference to a superstitious instinct not yet wholly departed from our midst, it is most strictly forbidden to emphasise the fact of the divine displeasure, to which the suspension of offices supposedly testifies, by such detestable practices as treating the sacred images irreverently -- for example, throwing them to the ground and covering them with nettles and thorns. This the bishops are to punish with the utmost severity. #### To check the growing tendency to drag out law suits by maliciously contrived delays, and thereby to fleece the litigant, the council now enacted a most stringent canon. All advocates and proctors are henceforward to declare on oath, not only that they will do their utmost for their client, but also that should anything transpire in the course of the trial to convince them that his cause is not just, they will immediately withdraw from the case. This oath is to be taken at the opening of every judicial year, and heavy penalties are provided for neglect to do so or for any breach of the oath. Also, the canon fixes maximum fees for both advocates and proctors and puts upon them the obligation to restore anything accepted in excess of these amounts -- again under heavy penalties. [ ] #### Perhaps the Council’s most important piece of legislation, after the law establishing the conclave, was the twenty-third canon Religionum diversitatem nimiam, on the new religious orders. From the moment when religious -- men formed by the discipline of the monastic vows and life -- had first begun to give themselves to the apostolic work of preaching the gospel and reconciling sinners to God, there had been trouble with the parochial clergy whose peculiar business and charge this work had always been. It was from among the religious that the missionaries had come who had converted the West from heathendom. On their labours was built the greater part of the present fabric of parishes and sees. It was the religious who was the trained man, in the early Middle Ages, the parochial priest the more or less well-gifted amateur; and as with habits of life so was it with professional learning. The vast mass of the parochial clergy had nothing like the chances of study which were open to the monk. The revival of learning which produced the universities no doubt improved their chances enormously, and indeed it was the chief function of the universities to educate the clergy. But, even so, universities were never so many that the whole body of the clergy passed through them. And long before the medieval universities reached the peak of their achievement as seminaries for the education of the parochial clergy, St. Dominic first and then St. Bonaventure had provided the church with a new kind of religious who was primarily a missionary priest, and the last word in the professional clerical sciences and arts, theologian, preacher and confessor. By the time of the Council of Lyons in 1274 Dominican and Franciscan priests were to be numbered by tens of thousands, and almost as numerous again were the priests of other new orders that had sprung up in imitation. Some of the new orders were as admirable as the models which had inspired them. Others were less so. For very different reasons the appearance of both types ruffled the peace of the clerical mind. #### Already sixty years before the Council of Lyons, the Church had shown itself anxious and troubled by the task of controlling the new spiritual enthusiasm as it showed itself in the new missionary brotherhoods. These were almost always lay movements in origin; rarely was it to a priest that the inspiration to) lead this kind of life seemed to come. If there was zeal in plenty in these movements there was rarely any theological learning, or any appreciation that this was at all necessary for the preacher. Very often there was a definite anti-clerical spirit; sometimes there was heresy too. For very many reasons, then, the first rumours that a new brotherhood had been formed to preach penance and the remission of sins, and that it was sweeping all before it in some city of Languedoc or Umbria, can hardly have brought anything but deep anxiety to the Roman curia or to its head. #### When the bishops poured into Rome for the General Council of 1215 they brought with them from every see of Christendom the tale of disputes between clergy and religious. Sixty years later, with the new mendicant missionary orders at the flood of their first fervent activity, they took similar tales to Lyons. From Olmuc in Bohemia, for example, came complaints that the Dominicans and Franciscans had gradually ousted the parochial clergy from all contact with their people. Baptism was the only sacrament for which the parish priest was ever approached. And where the people went, there they took their offerings. The bishop's suggestions, in this instance, were drastic indeed. These mendicant orders should lose their general power to hear confessions, or to preach except in the parish churches. Only those should preach or hear confessions whom the local bishop chose and authorised. Nor should any new friary be founded without the local bishop's leave. #### The mendicants no doubt put forward once again the solid reason for their admittedly wide privileges; once they lost their exemption from all jurisdiction but that of the pope, how long would they survive in a world where there were bishops? In France, in the early days, the Dominicans, for example, found themselves treated just as layfolk, bidden to attend mass on Sundays, with the rest, in the parish church, and to confess to the parish priest as other parishioners were bound. [ ] Twenty years nearly before this time (1274) the differences between clergy and mendicants had blown into a great conflagration at Paris, where the university had demanded from the pope all but the suppression of the orders and, at the pope's bidding, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure had stated the orders' case. Now, at Lyons, the question was raised again: it had already become, what it was to remain for centuries, one of the chronic problems of the Church, and one of the chronic evidences how harsh a soil human nature is to divine charity. #### The decree now enacted deals drastically with all abuses, with institutes inaugurated in despite of existing law, and with lawfully founded institutes which have degenerated or seem to be tending that way. But it goes out of its way to protect and to praise the two great orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis. #### The Council of 1215 -- says the new law -- had forbidden [ ] the foundation of any new orders. This prohibition was now renewed, because, despite that law, rashness and presumption had brought into existence an unbridled mob of new orders -- of new mendicants especially -- who did not deserve approbation. Therefore, for the future, no one is to found any new order, or to enter one if such be founded. All orders and mendicant orders founded since 1215 and not approved by the Holy See are abolished, Those founded since and approved by the Holy See, and which live by alms collected from the general public and whose rule forbids them any rents or possessions, and to whom an insecure mendicity through public begging affords a living, must now follow this rule, namely members already professed may continue to live this life, but no more novices are to be received; no new houses are to be opened; no properties may be alienated without leave of the Holy See, for these properties the Holy See intends to use in aid of the Holy Land, or the poor and for other pious purposes. Any violation of this rule entails excommunication, and acts done in violation of it are legally void. Moreover, members of these orders are forbidden to preach to those outside their ranks, or to hear their confessions, or to undertake their funeral services. This 23rd canon, it is expressly declared, does not however extend to the Dominicans and Franciscans whose usefulness to the Church in general (it is explicitly said) is evident. As for the Carmelites, and the Hermits of St. Augustine, whose foundation dates back beyond the Lateran Council of 1215, they may continue as they now are until further decision about them is taken. A general scheme, says the canon, is in preparation that will affect them and indeed all the orders, non- mendicants included. Meanwhile members of the orders to whom this new rule now made applies, are given generally a permit to enter other approved orders. But no order or convent is to transfer itself as a whole without special leave of the Holy See. ####  |