| #### 5. THE CHURCH UNDER THE COUNCILS, 1409-1418 i. Pisa, 1409 |

| #### #### The Council of Pisa opened on the day appointed, March 25, 1409. If judged by the number who came to it, and by the variety of countries from which they came, the council was a huge success, the most splendid gathering certainly that Europe had seen for two hundred years. All its twenty-three sessions were held in the nave of the cathedral, the last of them on August 7 of this same year. It seems not to have been easy for contemporaries to say exactly how many ecclesiastics took part in it. The numbers varied, of course, from one session to another, and seemingly they were at the maximum in the important sessions in which Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were judged and deposed -- when something more than 500 fathers attended. These would include the twenty-two cardinals and eighty-four bishops who came (102 other bishops were present by proxies), the eightyseven abbots (200 more were represented by proxies), the forty-one priors, the four generals of the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites and Augustinians, the three representatives of the military orders (the Hospitallers, the Holy Sepulchre and the Teutonic Knights), the hundred deputies from cathedral chapters, the deputies from thirteen universities, and the 300 or so doctors of theology and law -- these last a new and significant element in a General Council’s composition, for they were given a voice in its judgments. Moreover, seventeen foreign princes also sent ambassadors -- the kings of France, England, Bohemia, Poland, Portugal, Sicily and Cyprus; the dukes of Burgundy, Brabant, Holland, Lorraine and Austria; the prince-bishops of Liege, Cologne and Mainz; the rulers of Savoy, Thuringia and Brandenburg: the whole body of Christian princes in fact, save those of Scandinavia and Scotland, of Spain and of Naples. #### The council was a marvellously unanimous body. There was little or no discussion in its main sessions. All were agreed on the business that had brought them together, and the council had little to do beyond giving a solemn assent to the decisions as the cardinals and its own officials had shaped them. If any nation was predominant it was the Italian; fifteen of the twenty- two cardinals present were Italian, and so were ten of the fourteen chief officials, though the presidency was given to the French, and first of all to the sole survivor among the cardinals of the college of Gregory XI, the last pope before the schism, sole surviving cardinal, too, of those who had elected Urban VI in April 1378 and then, five months later, elected Clement VII. This was Guy de Malesset. #### The key-note speech of the council was made by the Archbishop of Milan -- Peter Philarghi, an ex-cardinal of Gregory XII's obedience -- who on March 26 excoriated Gregory and Benedict alike, for their crimes and their treason to the cause of religion. Meanwhile, before proceeding to any juridical consideration of the position of these rivals, the council solemnly summoned both to appear before it -- a ceremony five times repeated in the first month of its sittings. #### While the fathers were awaiting the expiration of the time allowed for the popes' appearance, they had to meet the practical problems set by two embassies that now arrived, the one from the Emperor Rupert [ ] (denying them any right to be considered a General Council) and the other from Gregory XII, inviting them to abandon Pisa and join him at Rimini in a council where he would preside. #### It was on April 15 that the imperial ambassadors were received in audience. They presented a lengthy memorandum in which Gregory XII's case against the cardinals who had left him was well set out, and the traditional doctrine that the General Council is subject to the pope in its convocation, its proceedings, and the ratification of its acts, was well argued against the new theories by which the united cardinals had publicly justified their action. Much of this criticism was unanswerable. Gregory had, at one time, undoubtedly been acknowledged as pope by these cardinals who had elected him. When, asked Rupert's envoys, had he ceased to be pope? The universal Church had not condemned him; he had not been convicted of heresy. To convoke a General Council is a prerogative that belongs to popes alone, and, in point of fact, Gregory XII -- they said -- had long ago actually convoked one, that would meet within a few weeks. Moreover, if the popes of the Roman line were really popes, the popes of the Avignon line were not -- if the cardinals of the Roman line were really cardinals, the Avignon cardinals with whom they were now joined were not cardinals at all. What then was their value as a basic element of this new union? The ambassadors therefore proposed a meeting between the council and Gregory XII. That pope would then carry out his election promises; and if he refused, Rupert would support the cardinals in their move to elect a new single pope -- a curiously illogical conclusion, surely, to the arguments made in his name ! #### The council heard the lengthy argument, and appointed a day for the answer. But the argument, and the way it was presented, seem thoroughly to have annoyed the council. The ambassadors realised how hopeless were their chances of persuading the fathers, and on April 21, without awaiting the formality of any official refutation, they left Pisa, secretly, leaving behind a public appeal [ ] from this assembly to a true General Council when this should meet. #### Gregory XII's own champion -- Carlo Malatesta -- had no better fortune with the council, although he managed to carry on the discussion in a friendly spirit. The cardinals appointed to meet him gave forty reasons why they could not abandon the work begun at Pisa; Gregory XII ought to abdicate and the best service that Malatesta could do the Church was to persuade - - or coerce -- him to come to Pisa and there lay down his authority. There was much discussion about the compensation to be given Gregory (and his relatives) if he consented; Malatesta seems to have raised a general laugh when he twitted the ambitious Philarghi with his known willingness to bear the terrible burden of the papacy; and the cardinals agreed to meet Gregory at Pistoia or at San Miniato for a conference. On April 26 Malatesta went back to Rimini and reported to Gregory that this was all he had been able to achieve. The old man wept, explained again his dilemma -- that if he went back to his first policy he would be deserting his present supporters, Rupert, for example, and Ladislas -- and finally he refused to meet the cardinals elsewhere than at Rimini. #### These embassies had distracted the council for weeks from completing even the preliminaries of organising itself. But now, on May 4, the fathers declared the union of the cardinals lawful, and that this was a lawfully convoked council, a true General Council with sovereign rights to judge Gregory XII and Benedict XIII; and by appointing a commission of nineteen cardinals and prelates to examine witnesses, the council began what, in effect, was a trial of the popes. That Ladislas of Naples was now besieging Siena -- only sixty miles away -- evidently making for Pisa, and that Gregory was subsidising him, no doubt stiffened the council’s resolution. #### The lengthy enquiry about the rival popes at last came to an end; a sentence was prepared, and the council made it its own. On June 5, 1409, the council solemnly declared that both Angelo Corrario and Peter de Luna, once called Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, were notorious heretics, and perjurers, ipso facto excommunicated and incapable in law of ruling as popes; and as such it deposed and excommunicated them. [ ] All nominations they might make were declared null; all Catholics were forbidden, under pain of excommunication, to obey them or give them any support; if necessary the secular authority would be used against them and their adherents; their censures against members of the council were declared null and void; and the cardinals they had created since the cardinals now legislating deserted them were no cardinals at all. #### How contradictory this was of all tradition -- and of tradition explicitly set forth at the very threshold of that Canon Law which so many of the council professed (to say nothing of theology) -- let two texts from Gratian witness: (I) Cunctos iudicaturus, ipse a nemine est iudicandus, nisi deprehenditur a fide devius; [ ] (2) Aliorum hominum causas Deus voluit per homines terminari, sedis autem Romanae praesulem, suo, sine quaestione, reservavit arbitrio. [ ] By what steps had so many, and so famously learned, ecclesiastics come to such a revolutionary position as to vote the mischiefs of the Schism, the opportunity which it provided for strange novelties to develop in the doctrine de Romano pontifice, and indeed to be developed as part of any zealous Christian's duty to restore peace and harmony to the Church. #### Since the time of John of Paris, whose De Potestate Regia has been described as part of the contest between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair, [ ] there had been in circulation two new ideas which appear in that work. First of all, there should function under the pope, an advisory council for the whole Church, of delegates elected by each ecclesiastical province; thus the faithful might have a share in the administration of the Church. Next there is a theory that justifies the deposition of a pope for heresy, on the ground that, besides the supreme papal power there is in the universal Church a latent supremacy exceeding the pope's power, which comes into play in just such an emergency. In that case orbis est maior urbe, says the Dominican. That a pope is answerable to the Church for the orthodoxy of his own belief was no new invention of John of Paris. The quotation from Gratian just given is one earlier evidence of the idea; and John the Teutonic adds two other causes for which popes may be judged, notorious sin and public scandal. This author says explicitly that in matters of faith the Council is superior to the Pope, and that it is for the Council to judge a disputed papal election. A third writer previous to the Schism, the Cardinal Bertrand, also considers that a bad pope -- although not a heretic -- is answerable to the General Council, and that should he refuse to summon it and take his trial, the right to convoke it passes to the cardinals. #### These three writers are, all of them, eminently respectable Catholics -- which is more than can be said of the three most revolutionary theorists on the matter which the century produced, Marsiglio of Padua, Michael of Cesena and Ockham. Marsiglio's theory of the General Council has no roots at all in canonist tradition. His idea of the pope as the Church's delegate and servant (to which Pierre de Plaoul was to give dramatic utterance in a famous council at Paris [ ] ) is of Marsiglio's own devising. Ockham is less simple -- more aware of the depths of the problem he is trying to solve. But for him the source of all authority is representation. Sovereignty lies in the Church as a whole, and the council’s power comes from this alone that it is the Church's agent. Since the man in whom the divine authority to rule the Church as pope is invested, receives it through an agency that is human -- since only the authority is divine, and not either the mode of its devolution or the detail, why not then, if it should prove convenient, two popes at once, or three, or indeed one for each country? #### It was not, however, to the theories of any of these ingenious revolutionaries that the canonists turned, once the election of Robert of Geneva had brought about the state of schism. They went where men ex professo so conservatively minded must go, to the canonists. Prior to the question whether Urban VI's election was valid was that other, who had the power to determine this question juridically? Was it within the competence of a General Council? This was the main pre-occupation of the earliest writers who studied the matter once the Schism was a fact, Conrad of Gelnhausen, for example and Henry of Langenstein. The conclusion to which they came was that it was for the General Council to decide, and this, not because the Council is the pope's superior, but because this is the exceptional case that falls within the Council’s special competence. #### It is only later on, with the second generation of the Schism, when the feeling grows that the case is desperate, that the desperate remedies appear in the shape of the new conciliar theories. It is now that we have Francis Zabarella, the leading canonist of his generation, declaring plainly that the pope is but the first servant of the Church, that his power derives from the Church and that the Church cannot so delegate its power to him that it retains none itself. Peter d'Ailly is no less extreme, and if Zabarella has read Ockham so too, it would seem, has the Bishop of Cambrai. The Church alone, he says, is infallible. That the General Council is infallible is no more than a pious belief, and that the pope is infallible is wholly erroneous. The papal authority is only a matter of expediency, a practical device to ensure good government. General Councils may judge the pope not only for heresy, and for obstinacy in sin, but also for opposition to the Council. Gerson's famous sermon at Constance [ ] does not say more. The Pope, for Gerson, is merely the executive organ within the Church, the legislative power remains with the General Council. #### Such is the intellectual and academic hinterland that has bred the men now to function, not only as reformers of Catholic life, but as the architects of reunion, the saviours of the papacy from schism. [ ] #### Nine days after this "crowning mercy" of the council, an embassy arrived from the King of Aragon, escorting the envoys whom Benedict XIII had sent, in fulfilment of his pledge to his own council at Perpignan three months earlier. #### Out of respect for the king the council appointed a commission to meet Benedict's legates. The news of their arrival in Pisa had been the signal for a great riot, and noisy crowds, bent on mischief, surrounded the church where they were received by the commissioners. The negotiations never went beyond this first meeting. It was explained to Benedict's party that their safety could not be guaranteed, so violent was the anger of the people against Peter de Luna at this moment when the cardinals were about to enter the conclave and, by electing a pope, bring the schism to an end; and that night the ambassadors left by stealth, happy to escape with their lives. They had previously approached the cardinal legate of Bologna -- Baldassare Cossa -- for a safe conduct which would take them to Rimini and Gregory XII; but he only swore that he would burn alive any of them who came into his hands. #### The embassy had indeed arrived at the least lucky moment of all, when the council’s creative act was, men believed, about to give the Church the pope of unity. On June 13 a conciliar decree had ordered the cardinals to proceed to the election of a pope, authorising them to unite for this purpose, although they had been created cardinals by rival popes who mutually denied each other to be pope; for this once they would elect the man they chose by an authority deriving from the council. And the cardinals swore only to elect the candidate who gained two-thirds of the vote of each of the two groups. The conclave lasted eleven days, and on June 26 it was announced that Peter Philarghi, Archbishop of Milan, had been chosen unanimously -- Alexander V. #### Alexander V -- pope by the authority of the Council of Pisa, was, like Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, a veteran of these ecclesiastical wars, and now seventy years of age at least. He was Greek by birth, a foundling whom the charity of an Italian Franciscan had rescued from the streets of Candia. He had later become a Franciscan, and a theologian of sufficient merit to fill chairs at Paris and at Oxford. One of the Dukes of Milan had found him a valuable counsellor; he had been given -- the see of Piacenza, thence promoted to Novara and, in 1402, to Milan. Innocent VII had created him cardinal and he had taken part in the conclave that elected Gregory XII. When Gregory's first fervour declined, Philarghi had been one of the most active, and effective, of his opponents. His nationality -- not Italian, nor French, nor Spanish -- made him a most "available" candidate in this first conclave for generations in which Italians and French men divided the votes. Guy de Malesset is credited with the proposal to elect him, and Baldassare Cossa -- late the strong man of the Roman obedience -- with the negotiations that won over to Philarghi the partisans of other candidates. It was Cossa who was to be all powerful in the short ten months' pontificate which is all that fate allowed Alexander V. #### The first thought of the electors and supporters of Peter Philarghi was the personal profit they could draw from his elevation. Even before his coronation the hunt after spoils was in full cry; and sees, abbeys and benefices were showered on all lucky enough to be near the new pope. [ ] And from Alexander V's willingness to make men happy the whole of his obedience gained. In the twenty-second session of the council -- July 27, 1409 -- a great comprehensive decree validated all manner of appointments and dispensations lately made without due reference to the papal authority, and the pope generously forgave all arrears due, on various accounts, to the papal treasury and lifted all sentences of excommunication and the like that lay upon defaulters. He also surrendered his claim to revenues that had accrued, from the estates of dead bishops and prelates, during the vacancy of the Holy See, and he asked the cardinals to follow his example and give up the half of what payments were due to them. Also, it was decreed that a new General Council should meet in April 1412, at a place to be determined later. Finally, in the closing session, August 7, 1409, the first preparations for this next council -- whose work was to be the reform of Christian life -- were outlined; local councils were to be summoned -- provincial and diocesan synods, chapters of the various monastic orders -- where matters calling for reform were to be discussed and schemes prepared. Then, with Alexander's blessing, and a last sermon, the fathers dispersed. #### At Cividale, meanwhile, seventy miles to the north-east of Venice, the council summoned by Gregory XII was all this time still struggling to be born. It had been convoked months before, and the place announced on December 19, 1408. But when it opened, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, 1409 -- the day after Gregory had been sentenced at Pisa -- almost no one had arrived. On June 20 the letters of convocation were renewed, and a second session took place on July 22, Gregory XII presiding. A declaration was then made that this was a true General Council, and also that the popes Urban VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII and Gregory XII were true popes: Clement VII, Benedict XIII and Alexander V being sacrilegious usurpers. The Emperor Rupert continued to support Gregory, who rewarded him by lavish powers to take over the revenues of all bishops and clerics in the empire who supported the anti-popes. Ladislas of Naples, too, remained faithful to Gregory XII: by now he was master of almost the whole of the Papal States. But Venice -- Gregory XII's own. native state -- upon whose territory the Council of Cividale was held, was wavering. The deed accomplished at Pisa, and the immense support given to it by all the princes, were not without effect upon this most politically-minded of all states. The Pisan council soon opened negotiations with the most serene republic, and on August 22, by sixty-nine votes to forty-eight, Venice went over to Alexander V. Gregory realised his danger, and announced his departure for Rome. But before he left he held a third session of his council (September 5). In this he announced that, as always, he was most anxious to bring the long division to an end. But now that Alexander V had appeared, what would his resignation and that of Benedict avail? However, if both Benedict and Alexander would resign, and their cardinals would promise to join with his to elect a single pope, Gregory XII would resign too. Also he would submit to the wishes of a new council if Benedict and Alexander would do likewise. Next day he left for Latigiana, and dropped down the Tagliamento to the coast where the galleys sent by Ladislas were waiting to take him to Pescara. Thence, with an escort provided by the king, the pope crossed the Abruzzi, and in November 1409 he took up his residence at Gaeta. #### There could hardly have been a greater contrast between the splendid position of Alexander V, the elect of this great parliament of the Christian nations, with seventeen princes, bishops innumerable, and thirteen universities supporting him, and the miserable condition of Gregory XII, now reduced to a single faithful supporter, Carlo Malatesta, for Venice had now deserted Gregory for Alexander, and Ladislas of Naples was serving his cause only so long as this served himself. There could hardly have been any greater contrast, except perhaps between the Pisan papacy's prestige now and what it would be in a short two years. All this grandeur was, indeed, of its nature, transient. For it rested on nothing more enduring than the opinions of scholars and the good will of princes, the novel opinions of scholars about the right of the Church to control the papacy, to set up popes and to pluck them down in appropriate season. Here was the source of all its power, and no papacy thus conceived could long continue to hold men's allegiance. #### Alexander V reigned for less than a year. [ ] The reign began with a military expedition against Ladislas of Naples -- excommunicated and deposed by Alexander on November 1, 1409 -- in which the French claimant to Naples, Louis of Anjou, and the warlike cardinal-legate of Bologna, Baldassare Cossa, joined forces. On the first day of the new year they recovered Rome. But the pope to whom they restored the shrine of St. Peter did not live to take possession. Before his death he had, once more, solemnly excommunicated Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and by a bull in favour of the mendicant orders [ ] -- Alexander was himself a Friar Minor -- he had managed to rouse the hostility of the University of Paris. This squabble came to nothing, for Alexander's successor rescinded the bull, but it is a squabble of more than passing interest, for the university, as by a habit now become second nature, while speaking of Alexander with the utmost respect, and in no way denying his authority, declared that the bull had been obtained from him by misrepresentations; it could therefore be disregarded, and from the pope misinformed the university would appeal to the pope truly informed; also the king's aid was sought, and Charles VI forbade the parochial clergy to allow any Franciscan or Augustinian to preach or administer the sacraments in the parish churches of France. #### The successor of Alexander V was Baldassare Cossa, elected on May 17, 1410, after a short three days' conclave held in the castle of Bologna. He took the name of John XXIII. About the events of that conclave we have no certain knowledge. It is known that Malatesta moved to delay the election, in the hope of reconciling the cardinals with Gregory XII. Cossa replied that this would be tantamount to a surrender of the Pisan position; moreover, were there any delay in providing a successor to Alexander his curia would disperse. #### Was the election of John XXIII vitiated by simony? The charge has been made, and very generally believed. Those who hold Gregory XII to have been the true pope in all these years can afford to be impartial about Cossa's character. He has indeed come down in the history books as a finished blackguard. But most of the atrocious stories are from the memories of men who had good cause to hate him, and when John XXIII came to take his trial at the next great council only a very small fraction of the charges made against him figured in the sentence of deposition. The first great patron of his ecclesiastical career had been Boniface IX -- a fellow Neapolitan -- who made him a cardinal in 1402 in reward for his practical service of finding badly-needed sums of money, and appointed him as legate to rule Bologna. For the next six years Cardinal Baldassare Cossa was the strong man on the Roman side, and after the surrender of Gregory XII to his relatives he was that pope's chief opponent, and luridly characterised as such in Gregory's later bulls. #### Historians have noted how, as his reign went on, all John XXIII's wonted political sagacity seemed to desert him. The truth is that his position was, from the beginning, simply impossible; and, after a time, every month that went by showed this more clearly. At first, indeed, his cause seemed to prosper. Malatesta and Ladislas of Naples continued the war on behalf of Gregory XII, but John retained Rome and occupied the city in April 1411. Ladislas was next beaten in the field, re- excommunicated by John, and a crusade preached against him; and in June 1412, brought for the moment to his knees, he opened negotiations with John and on October 16 acknowledged him as pope. Whereupon Gregory XII -- who was still at Gaeta -- fled, lest Ladislas should arrest him and hand him over to John. So far all had gone well; and the election as King of the Romans on July 21, 1411, of the ex-emperor Wenzel’s brother, Sigismund, had also been a gain to John, for Sigismund had been Gregory XII's enemy ever since that pope had supported Ladislas against him in Hungary. But this was the last of John's good fortune, and Sigismund -- for the moment his greatest support -- was soon to become the chief instrument in the pope's ruin. #### This Pisan line of popes was bound, by its pledges to the council of 1409, to summon a new council which would promote reforms, not later than 1412. The place where it should meet had not been determined, and when John XXIII convoked it to come together in Rome there was great dissatisfaction in France and Germany. John however, more confident perhaps since the submission of Ladislas, held firm and in the last days of 1412 the council opened. It was poorly attended; indeed, the delegates from France and Germany did not arrive until all was over, for on March 11, 1413, John prorogued the council until the following December. The solitary permanent achievement of the council was its condemnation of John Wyclif, [ ] but in John XXIII's personal history it figures as the beginning of the movement among his own supporters to make an end of him. . #### To some of his own newly -- created cardinals [ ] -- Peter d'Ailly notably -- the council was an opportunity to rebuke John to his face for his evil life, and the chief effect of the meetings between the pope and the various delegations was to spread far and wide the belief that John XXIII was indifferent to the cause of reform, and only interested in the papacy as a means of personal power. #### The reformers were, of course, far from being a united party. As always, side by side with the idealists, there were others chiefly interested in changes for the personal profit they might be made to produce. From France and from Germany there came, very generally, loud demands yet once again for the abolition of papal taxes on Church property and revenues. But the University of Paris, fresh from its recent experience of how little bishops were disposed to encourage ecclesiastical learning by promoting learned men to benefices, was now strongly opposed to any movement that would limit the pope's power to collate universally to benefices. The Roman Curia had been much more friendly to learning than the local episcopate; and so now the university expressed itself as shocked and horrified at the anti-papal tendencies [ ] -- although, in its turn, it was bitter with John XXIII when he chose Rome as the meeting place for the council. #### Here, then, was a first serious division among the reformers. The action of the King of France produced a second. The only reform in which he was interested was that the pope should give him vast new rights of nomination to benefices of all kinds; and his ambassadors warned the pope that were this refused him the king might make common cause with the university, and champion its theory of the liberties of the Gallican Church -- or perhaps follow the example of the Kings of England and enact, for France also, an anti-papal statute of Provisors. [ ] #### These disturbing embassies from France and Germany had scarcely left Rome when Ladislas suddenly broke his treaty with the pope. In May 1413 his armies invaded the Marches, and on June 8 he took Rome -- which made no resistance whatever. John XXIII fled to Florence, and appealed urgently for aid to Sigismund, and the emperor in reply demanded that a new General Council be summoned. John sent two cardinals to him at Como -- the Savoyard diplomatist de Challant and the great canonist Francesco Zabarella. With the emperor they decided on the place and the time for the council, the German city of Constance for November 1, 1414. John XXIII was now at Bologna (November 8, 1413). The prospect of a General Council in a territory where he was not the civil ruler dismayed him. He had no choice, however, but to accept; the initiative had, by his own act, passed to Sigismund. Pope and emperor now came together (November 1413 to January 1414), and on December 9 John published a bull convoking the council for the time and at the place the emperor had chosen. #### Ladislas, meanwhile, carried all before him in the Papal State, sacking Rome a second time in March 1414. Then he made for Bologna, and John; but the Florentines turned him back, and on August 6 death brought to an end this last meteoric fifteen months of his career. Their one lasting achievement had been to put John entirely into Sigismund's power. On October 1, 1414, the pope, reluctant to the end, and his plan to return to Rome thwarted by the cardinals, left Bologna for the council and on October 28 he made his solemn entry into Constance, very apprehensive about his own fate, and about that only. ii. Constance, 1414-1418 #### The great Council of Constance is the closing, transformation scene of the medieval drama, if the Middle Ages be considered as a time when the mainspring of all public action was western Europe's acceptance of the spiritual supremacy of the pope. Not, indeed, that the moment has arrived when that supremacy is rejected by large parts of Christendom; nor that there are, as yet, signs not to be mistaken of that coming revolution. But after Constance things are never again the same; the ecclesiastical system -- the Catholic Church built on the divine right of the popes to rule it -- has suffered a shock, and there has been a settlement. The intangible has been struck and to the ordinary man it has seemed to stagger if not to crack up. The great scandal of the attack at Anagni has now, a hundred years later, been evidently renewed. Rough hands have again been laid on the ark; and again the assailants have survived their sacrilege -- the harm done is none the smaller for the fact that the assailants are in good faith, invincibly ignorant and unaware of the sacrilege. #### The hundred years that lie between Constance and the first movements of the coming revolution, these last hundred years of a united Catholic Christendom, are a transitional period, in which a new order of things is struggling to be born, socially, politically, culturally, philosophically; they are a period in which it is not only the way in which popes exercise their power that is more and more generally questioned, but their very right to exercise it; the very existence, as well as the nature, of their spiritual authority over the Church of Christ. Ideas which are of their nature noxious, and even fatal, to the traditional theories and beliefs about the papacy, had already been given a kind of public recognition at Pisa. Now they were to be recognised again, by a much more imposing kind of council, a council itself recognised -- at one time or another -- by two of the three claimants to the papacy, and a council through whose activity came the pope whose legitimacy the whole Church was to acknowledge. No council ever sat so continuously for so long a time as did this Council of Constance; and no council ever changed so often its character -- if by character we mean its authority as canon law and theology define a council’s authority. #### In certain of its widely different phases this council enacted decrees that were as contradictory of fundamental Catholic practice as anything any heretic who appeared before it for judgment had ever held. The theologian who to-day studies the acts of the council has no difficulty in distinguishing between the value of the decisions to which it came in one or another of these phases. Nor had the popes of the united Christendom any difficulty at the time. But the new harmony of Christendom achieved in the council -- its great achievement indeed, because of which historians have been loth to speak harshly even of its really serious shortcomings -- was too frail a thing, on the morrow of the council, for all ambiguity to be stripped away from the council’s proceedings, the ambiguity which made it possible for the untrained mind of the ordinary observer to see Constance as an authoritative consecration of the revolutionary doctrine of Pisa that the General Council is the supreme authority in the Church of Christ; the ambiguity which, from now on, could be exploited by chauvinistic theologians, everywhere, in the interests of their princes whenever popes were enmeshed in any crisis of political or religious revolt. #### The history of the Council of Constance cannot ever be too closely studied. [ ] If it was the occasion of the disappearance of all controversy which of the men who then claimed to be pope was really the pope, controversy that had troubled the Church for forty years, its proceedings were also the cause of a survival of ideas -- materially heretical -- that harassed religion and sorely debilitated it for another four centuries and more. For example, the grave anxiety -- henceforth chronic -- arising from the fact that influential Catholics clung to theories that would make the pope the Church's servant and not its ruler, and that such Catholics only awaited a new chance to put them again into action, was to be not only a good excuse for lazy popes and weak popes and bad popes to ignore the clamant need for a spiritual restoration -- only to be brought about with the aid of a General Council -- but, much more tragically, it became a valid reason whereby good popes too hesitated, really fearing lest with the abundance of tares they would root up the little wheat that remained. These theories did much to bring it about that the popes of the next four hundred years were no longer so much the master in their own household as their medieval predecessors had been -- unless a pope knew that his primatial authority over the whole Church was unquestioned, in practice and in theory, he could hardly proceed to the drastic house-cleaning that was called for. Saints perhaps would have gone ahead, and in the name of God dared all; but the average pope was no more than an average in his own kind, and spiritual mediocrity was unable to surmount the general habitual feebleness which consciousness of divided opinion on this vital matter did so much to produce. #### The Council cf. Constance was in continuous session for three years and five months, [ ] and perhaps the most convenient way to study briefly what it accomplished is to disregard the timetable of events, and to set out the problems which it faced and the solutions it found for them. These problems were, in the main, the three matters of the Schism, the new heresies in England and Bohemia, and the reform of Christian life; the second of these will be more conveniently dealt with in the next chapter, where Wyclif's heresy, the work of Wyclif's disciple, John Hus, and the significance of the Hussite wars will be treated together. #### But before problems could even be stated, the council must organise its own procedure, and in these preliminary discussions, which went on all through December 1414 and the first weeks of the new year, traditional serious divisions showed immediately. The first to offer an agenda (December 7) were the Italians. To them this new council was but a continuation of the Council of Pisa. It should decree stricter censures than ever on Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and their supporters, and call on the Christian princes to put an end to the dissensions by force of arms; John XXIII's position being thus strengthened, the council could then be dissolved, to be followed by another General Council in ten, or perhaps twenty-five, years. The impudent naivety of this programme provoked a tough reply from the leader of the French delegation, Peter d'Ailly. His main thought, as always, was to heal the divisions of Christendom, and he now proposed that every effort should be made to conciliate the popes deposed at Pisa and to win them over to take part in the new council; and, thanks in great part to his effort, it was agreed that if Gregory and Benedict sent cardinals as envoys these should be received as such, and allowed the insignia of their rank. This was a first defeat for the friends of John XXIII, a clear indication that he was not to be any more the master of the council than was Gregory or Benedict. #### The English arrived on January 21, 1415, and some days later the Germans. Both joined the anti-Italian forces; and the Germans, in their plan for the council, made the revolutionary demand that not bishops and mitred abbots alone should have a defining vote, but also the proxies of absent bishops and abbots, the delegates of cathedral chapters also, and of universities; and that masters of theology and doctors, and the envoys of princes should also be allowed a vote. If all this were allowed, the band of supporters which John XXIII had brought from Italy -- in numbers almost half of the bishops so far present -- would be swamped at every vote. #### By what succession of controversy and compromise, of offers and of threats, John XXIII and his supporters were brought to surrender does not appear. It was, however, agreed that all these various classes of clerics and laymen should share in the council’s work, but not by voting as individuals in the General Sessions where the decrees were solemnly enacted. They should have their vote in the preliminary discussions on the decrees, and for these discussions the council was divided into "nations," after the fashion of the University of Paris. There were four of these nations, the Italian, German, French and English. When, by separate discussions, a solution had been agreed upon in each nation, it was to be adopted in a General Congregation of deputies from all four, and then reported to the General Session of the Council and officially voted. Each nation, whether represented at the council by hundreds or by single units, would thus have equal power whenever there was a conciliar vote. #### The political genius behind the scheme is evident; it was an innovation, and it succeeded. But such a system destroyed all possibility of the council’s being reckoned one of the General Councils in the traditional sense of the word, for in these the function of the bishops is to speak and vote, not as contributing to the general fund the quota of their own personal learning and wisdom, but as witnesses testifying to the belief of the churches they rule. Peter d'Ailly's argument that learned doctors of theology were of greater importance in a General Council than ignorant bishops, was beside the point altogether. The assembly he had in mind was no more than a congress of Christian learning; it was not a gathering of the teaching Church witnessing to the faith held everywhere by the faithful. #### The Council of Constance was well attended, if not by bishops, by doctors of theology and law, by the clergy generally, by princes, by statesmen, by nobles and laity of all ranks and of all degrees of virtue. The numbers varied largely during the three and a half years it was in session. At its maximum attendance there were 29 cardinals, 186 bishops, [ ] more than 100 abbots, 300 and more doctors either of theology or of law, 11 ruling princes -- the Emperor Sigismund at their head, and ambassadors from twelve other Christian princes. With their suites -- the elaborate suites of the princes and the great prelates -- and the huge spontaneous inflow attracted by the chances of profit which such a gathering must offer, the little city of Constance saw its normal population of 6,000 many times multiplied, over the long period of nearly four years. #### John XXIII had journeyed to Constance as to a doom that was certain; and, indeed, the immediate question in the minds of most of the prelates making the same journey was how to disembarrass Christendom of its latest scandal, a pope who was notoriously an evil liver. In the ten weeks between the first and second general sessions of the council, the opinion gained ground that John must go. A well-written pamphlet, of anonymous authorship, that set out his misdeeds and called for an enquiry by the council, was brought to John's notice sometime in February 1415. Whatever plans he had made to brazen out his position crumbled; he asked advice of cardinals he could trust, and they all urged him to abdicate, to spare the Church the scandal of a trial where the pope must be proved guilty of crime. John yielded, and at the mass with which the second general session opened (March 2, 1415), his solemn pledge to abdicate was publicly read. The pope was himself the celebrant of the mass, and at the words "I swear and vow" he left his throne to kneel before the altar in sign of submission. But he speedily changed his mind, and while the details of the resignation were being worked out, in the night of March 20, he fled from Constance in disguise, hoping to bring about the dispersal of the council. #### For a moment the pope's flight produced its intended effect, and the council seemed about to break up in a general confusion. But the vigorous action of the emperor saved the day, and he won from the cardinals a pledge that they would carry on. There was, naturally, a most violent outbreak of anti-papal feeling and the nations, trusting neither the pope nor the cardinals, forced on the third session, March 26, at which only two cardinals -- d'Ailly and Zabarella -- attended. This session is the turning point of the council’s history, the moment when it awakens to the opportunity before it and boldly takes the revolutionary step of decreeing that whether the pope returned or not the council’s authority remained sovereign and intact; that it would not dissolve until the Church had been fully reformed, the papacy and the Roman Curia no less than the general body; and that the council could not be transferred elsewhere without its own consent. #### To the envoys whom the council sent to him in his refuge at Schaffhausen, John gave a shifty answer, that only provoked at Constance a demand for strong action and for a new general session. In preparation for this, the English, French and Germans combined (March 29) to secure the enactment of four decrees that would officially establish the doctrine that in the Catholic Church the General Council is the pope's superior. But, only a few hours before the council met, the cardinals won over the emperor to support an alternative scheme, and he persuaded the nations to accept it; at the general session (March 30) it was this that was passed. The excitement in the city was, by this time, at its height; the divisions within the council were known, the Italians it seemed were still loyal to John, and also a party among the cardinals, several of whom had gone to join him; the emperor was gathering troops for an attack on the pope's protector, Frederick of Hapsburg, Count of Tyrol. At this moment came the news that the pope had moved still further into Germany, after revoking and annulling all he had conceded. Opinion now hardened rapidly against him, and at the next [ ] general session -- April 6 -- as a legal basis for operations against the pope, the council voted the original four articles of March 29. #### These most famous articles [ ] declared that this council, lawfully assembled, was an oecumenical council representing the whole Church Militant and that it derived its authority directly from God; that the whole of the world, therefore, the pope included, owed it obedience in all that concerned the faith, the extinction of the schism, and reform; whoever, then, obstinately refused to obey its decrees, or the decrees of any other General Council lawfully assembled, made with reference to the matters mentioned, was liable to the council’s correction and to the punishment it ordered, even were that person the pope himself; the flight of John XXIII was an act of scandal, entailing the suspicion that he was fostering the schism and had fallen into heresy; within the council, it was stated, the pope -- and indeed, all the fathers -- had enjoyed full freedom of action. #### As the emperor's troops moved out from Constance, the cardinals who had joined the pope returned to the council and John sent in an offer to abdicate -- at a price. He was to remain a cardinal, to be named legate for life for Italy, to be given the Avignon territories of the Holy See and the sum of 30,000 ducats in cash. All this the council ignored; it was now busy constructing a formula of abdication in which there would be no loopholes. Then, on April 30, John's protector surrendered to the emperor. The crisis was over. The pope could now be rounded up whenever the council needed him. #### On May 2 John's trial was officially demanded in the council on six general charges, namely notorious heresy, complacency in schism, simony, dilapidation of Church properties, misconduct and incorrigibility. While he continued, for the next four weeks, to fence with the successive citations to appear and take his trial, a special commission heard the witnesses and sorted out their charges as a preliminary to drawing up a formal indictment. Officials of the curia, bishops, and cardinals too, appeared to tell the story of John's misdeeds, ever since he was a disobedient and incorrigible boy in his own home. On May 17 the pope was arrested at Freiburg-in-Breisgau and brought to the castle of Radolfzell, near Constance. All the fight had now gone out of him; he wept and asked only for mercy, surrendered his seal to the council and wrote that he would, if they chose, abdicate, or accept and ratify any sentence of deposition they chose to pass. When the fifty-four charges, proved to the council’s satisfaction in the session of May 25, were read over to him, he had no reply to make save that he put himself in the council’s hands; it was holy and could not err, he said. He did not accept the offer to defend himself, but again begged only for mercy. Two days after this, on May 29, in the twelfth general session, sentence of deposition was passed on him and on May 31 John formally accepted it and ratified it and with an oath swore never to call it in question. And then he was taken off to the prison where, under the guard of Lewis of Bavaria, he was to spend the next three years. [ ] #### Just five weeks after Baldassare Cossa so meekly accepted the council’s sentence, the fathers met to receive the solemn abdication of Gregory XII. He was in fact, and to the end he claimed to be in law, the canonically elected representative of the line that went back to Urban VI, the last pope to be acknowledged as pope by Catholics everywhere. [ ] The abdication was arranged and executed with a care to safeguard all that Gregory claimed to be; and this merits -- and indeed, requires -- much more detailed consideration than it usually receives. [ ] #### Gregory XII sent to Constance as his representatives his protector Carlo Malatesta, the Lord of Rimini, and the Dominican cardinal, John Domenici -- to Constance indeed, but not to the General Council assembled there by the authority, and in the name, of John XXIII. The envoys' commission was to the emperor Sigismund, presiding over the various bishops and prelates whom his zeal to restore peace to the Church had brought together. To these envoys -- and to Malatesta in the first place -- Gregory gave authority to convoke as a General Council -- to convoke and not to recognise -- these assembled bishops and prelates; [ ] and by a second bull [ ] he empowered Malatesta to resign to this General Council in his name. #### The emperor, the bishops and prelates consented and accepted the role Gregory assigned. And so, on July 4, 1415. Sigismund, clad in the royal robes, left the throne he had occupied in the previous sessions for a throne placed before the altar, as for the president of the assembly. Gregory's two legates sat by his side facing the bishops. The bull was read commissioning Malatesta and Domenici to convoke the council and to authorise whatever it should do for the restoration of unity and the extirpation of the schism -- with Gregory's explicit condition that there should be no mention of Baldassare Cossa, [ ] with his reminder that from his very election he had pledged himself to resign if by so doing he could truly advance the good work of unity, and his assertion that the papal dignity is truly his as the canonically elected successor of Urban VI. #### Malatesta then delegated his fellow envoy, the cardinal John Domenici, to pronounce the formal operative words of convocation; [ ] and the assembly -- but in its own way -- accepted to be thus convoked, authorised and confirmed in the name "of that lord who in his own obedience is called Gregory XII". [ ] The council next declared that all canonical censures imposed by reason of the schism were lifted, and the bull was read by which Gregory authorised Malatesta to make the act of abdication [ ] and promised to consider as ratum gratum et firmum, and forever irrevocable, whatever Malatesta, as his proxy, should perform. The envoy asked the council whether they would prefer the resignation immediately, or that it should be delayed until Peter de Luna's decision was known. The council preferred the present moment. It ratified all Gregory XII's acts, received his cardinals as cardinals, promised that his officers should keep their posts and declared that if Gregory was barred from re-election as pope, this was only for the peace of the Church, and not from any personal unworthiness. Then the great renunciation was made, [ ] ". . . renuncio et cedo. . . et resigno. . . in hac sacrosancta synodo et universali concilio, sanctam Romanam et universalem ecclesiam repraesentante"; and the council accepted it, [ ] but again as made "on the part of that lord who in his own obedience was called Gregory XII". The Te Deum was sung and a new summons drawn up calling upon Peter de Luna to yield to the council’s authority. #### The work of Pisa was now almost undone, and by this council which, in origin, was a continuation of Pisa. It had suppressed the Pisan pope -- John XXIII. It had recognised as pope the Roman pope whom Pisa, with biting words, had rejected as a schismatic and no pope. One obstacle alone -- the claims of Peter de Luna -- now stood between the council and its aim of giving to the Church a pope who would b., universally accepted. To some of the nations who made up the Council of Constance Benedict XIII had been, for six years now, no more at best than an ex-pope, deposed by a General Council for perjury, schism and heresy; for others he had never been pope at all. Yet the promoters of the council, in their desire to remove all possible causes of future discord, had in 1414, by an agreement that was unanimous, disregarded consistency and invited him to take part in the discussions. Benedict had consented at any rate to send an embassy, and his envoys were received in audience on January 12 and 13, 1415. But the business of the embassy was really with the emperor, whom they were commissioned to invite to a meeting with their master and the King of Aragon in the coming summer, when means to re-establish unity would be discussed. It was nearly two months before they were answered, and then, at the urgent request of all parties, envoys, cardinals and the nations, Sigismund agreed (March 4). By the time he was free to leave Constance, however, the situation had been immeasurably simplified (for the council) by the disappearance of both Benedict's rivals. Benedict alone now stood before Christendom claiming its spiritual allegiance, and if behind him he had only Scotland and the Spaniards, he had also the prestige of twenty-one years' exercise of the papal authority and a long life unstained by any of the vices that stained most of the personages of the high ecclesiastical world, nepotism, simony, and undue regard for the favour of princes. #### Emperor and council took leave of each other in the general session of July 14; by the Feast of the Assumption, a month later, Sigismund had reached Narbonne, and on September 18 he entered Perpignan, where the King of Aragon awaited him and Benedict. The negotiations that now began, dragged on until the last day of October. Benedict -- now eighty-nine years of age -- was as ready to resign as ever he had been, but, as always, on carefully thought-out conditions which, somehow, could not but leave him victorious. The latest safeguard he had devised was a proviso that the pope to be elected after his resignation must be canonically elected -- an innocent phrase indeed, but whose inner meaning was that it must be left to Benedict to choose him, for, Benedict explained, he alone was certainly a cardinal, the single surviving cardinal created by a pope whom the whole Church had acknowledged, Gregory XI. #### Sigismund wasted no time in rebuttal of such subtleties as this, but simply repeated his demand that Benedict should abdicate; whereupon the conference broke up. But while the emperor was at Narbonne, on his return from Perpignan, the King of Aragon with envoys of the other princes of Benedict's obedience begged him to make yet another attempt on the old man's obstinacy, pledging themselves that if this failed they would renounce him and go over to the council; Benedict was to be asked to abdicate in the same forms that had been used by Gregory XII. The emperor's envoys found the old man in the impregnable rock fortress of his family at Peniscola. Again he refused; he announced the convocation of a new council, and he sent word to the princes at Narbonne that he would deprive them of their kingdoms if they dared to withdraw their obedience. This message put an end to their last doubts, and after a fortnight's discussion the details were settled [ ] of an accord with the council. Benedict's cardinals were to go over to the council, and to be received as colleagues by the other cardinals; the council thus fully representative was next to come to a decision about Benedict (i.e. to depose him) before electing the desired new pope, the sentence of Pisa being tacitly ignored, and the business done over again. All sentences against those obedient until now to Benedict, by whomsoever decreed, were to be declared null by the council, and also all Benedict's sentences against the council and its supporters. Also, the council would confirm all grants and favours and dispensations made by Benedict up to the day of his last refusal to the princes. Should Benedict die, his cardinals would not elect a successor, and if they did so the Spanish kings would give such successor no recognition. #### The council ratified this treaty two months after it was signed (February 4, 1416), but it was many more months before it began to go into effect, before the Spaniards arrived at Constance -- where they formed a new, fifth, nation -- and the new trial of Benedict XIII could begin. The first to arrive were the Aragonese, in October 1416, and the preliminaries to the trial began in the twenty-third general session, November 5, when a commission was named to enquire into Benedict's responsibility for prolonging the schism. He was cited on November 28 to appear before the council, and its envoys then had to make the long journey to Spain to deliver the summons. It was March 1417 before they had returned. Then came the consideration of his refusal to appear, a decree that he was contumacious, a new commission to examine the evidence against him, its report May 12, 1417), and finally, on July 26, [ ] sentence of deposition was given. No one had ever sinned more -- the sentence declared -- against the Church of God and the whole Christian people, by fostering and encouraging disunion and schism. Peter de Luna is declared a perjurer, a scandal to the whole Church, schismatical, and a heretic notoriously and manifestly; and thence it is that the council declares him deprived of all right to the papacy and excommunicates him; and Sigismund sent trumpeters through the streets of the little city to proclaim the great news that this ancient nuisance was no more. #### The Christian world was now once more united in its acceptance of a single spiritual authority, the council at Constance. It only remained to elect a pope. But the question now became urgent, who should vote in the election? As the law had stood for three hundred and fifty years [ ] none could be pope whom the cardinals did not elect. On the other hand the council did not trust the cardinals. Feeling ran high on both sides, and to serious men it must have seemed that there was again every chance of an election whose legality must be questionable. The problem had been for a long time in the minds of all when it was publicly raised by the Castilian ambassadors to the council in the April of this year 1417. They had then been told that the council would decide the procedure once all the signatories to the Treaty of Narbonne had joined it, and from this moment the election problem became the chief subject of debate among the nations. It was complicated by a second division of opinion as to whether the council should elect a pope now or, first of all, enact a scheme of general reforms. The emperor was anxious that reforms should first be dealt with; the cardinals [ ] and the Latin nations gave priority to the election; the English and German nations supported the emperor. #### Various schemes were drafted, and the discussions grew so violent that, in June 1417, it seemed as though the council was about to break up. The deadlock between the cardinals and their party on the one side, and the party in the council whom the emperor supported on the other, lasted until July 13, when it was agreed to allow the council to discuss the reformation of the papacy and curia before proceeding to elect a new pope; and a fortnight later the council, free at last from the incubus of the trial of Benedict XIII, turned to the question of reform. #### It was soon evident that there were as many plans for reform as there were sections in the council, and that, without such leadership as a pope alone could provide, the stress of the reform discussions must dissolve the council into a mass of petty factions. The cardinals again raised the question whether it would not be wiser to elect the pope immediately. They had the French on their side, and now only the German nation gave wholehearted support to the emperor's determination that the new pope should inherit an authority reformed and trimmed by the council, that the papacy should be reformed, without consultation or consent, while the Holy See lay vacant. Presently the two parties were in open public conflict and accusations of heresy flew from each side to the other. New quarrels -- equally bitter -- about precedence also developed between Castilians and Aragonese. The cardinals asked for their passports. The emperor spoke of putting their leaders under arrest. They swore an oath to stand firm until death itself. #### It was an Englishman who, in the end, brought all parties together, Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, uncle of the English king, Henry V. He had arrived at Constance less than a month after the death of his fellow countryman the Bishop of Salisbury, Cardinal Hallum, [ ] who had been the emperor's chief supporter in the council, and while the English there were still suffering from this sudden loss of their leader. Beaufort proposed a compromise -- and both sides accepted it; the council would first decree that after the election of a pope the question of reforms was to be seriously undertaken, and then immediately publish decrees for reform in all matters where agreement had already been reached, while, thirdly, a commission would at the same time be set up to decide how the pope was to be elected. This was at the beginning of October 1417, and by the end of the month an agreed procedure for the election had been worked out, which the council adopted in the general session of October 30. [ ] To the twenty-three cardinals there were to be added, for the purpose of this election only, six delegates from each of the five nations; the pope to be elected must secure, not only two-thirds of the cardinals' votes (as the law had required since 1179), but also two-thirds of the votes of each of the five nations; all these electors were to be bound by the conclave laws already in force, and the conclave was to begin within ten days of this decree. #### The carpenters and masons of Constance rose to the occasion nobly. By November 2 they had prepared fifty-three cells and accommodation for the electors' attendants in the great merchants' hall of the city. The emperor isolated the building with a cordon of troops -- there was to be no chance of any repetition of the events of 1378 -- and after a solemn session of the council on November 8, at which the names of the chosen electors were published, the conclave began. It was surprisingly short, and on St. Martin's Day, November 11, at 10. 30 in the morning, the announcement was made that the Cardinal Odo Colonna had been chosen by a unanimous vote, and had taken the appropriate name of Martin V. [ ] #### The election of Martin V -- the first pope for forty years whom all Catholics acknowledged as pope -- is, no doubt, the high-water mark of the work of the Council of Constance. It was not only an end accomplished but the means to further accomplishment, a means to ensure that reformation of Christian life throughout the Church, which, for many of the fathers, was the most important question of all. A very strong party had, indeed, only consented to give priority to the settlement of the papal question when experience brought it home to them that, without the leadership of a pope, the council would never agree on reforms. #### Of many practical matters that called for attention, the first and most important, so it seemed to all, was to bring about a better understanding between the papacy and the local ordinaries everywhere. Until a pope universally recognised had been elected, the council could not seriously hope to reach any agreement on reform that would be effective, and until, under the pope's leadership, the grievances of the episcopate against the Roman Curia had been frankly discussed, it was just as hopeless to expect that immense united action of pope and bishops through which alone could come the wholesale reformation which all openly acknowledged to be everywhere urgently needed. When, during the opening weeks of the council, the different delegates came in to Constance, each had brought its own plan of reforms -- even those Italians who had come in order to support John XXIII through thick and thin, had their proposals for a restoration of virtuous living among clergy and laity. #### The council was, from the first, in its own mind and intention, a body assembled largely for the purpose of reform, and its desire for reform is the expressed motive for the revolutionary theory of a General Council’s powers set forth in the decrees of its third and fifth sessions. The council here proposes, in fact, to reform the Roman Curia and the papacy, and no papal obstruction, it is stated, can lawfully withstand the council so acting. Until its task is finished it retains its sovereign authority despite all papal declarations to the contrary. Again, its power being from God directly, the pope is bound to obey the council’s decrees just as other Catholics are; and if he is disobedient the council can correct and punish him. #### Once the council had thus corrected, and punished, the pope who had called it into being (John XXIII), it set up a special commission of thirty-five members to prepare the needed reformation decrees. This commission immediately turned its attention to the highly centralised control of the universal Church which the popes of the last hundred and fifty years especially had so largely develop. d -- that control, through taxation of church property and through appointments, which has already been described in its main lines. [ ] The question was now raised whether the practice of papal provisions should not be entirely abolished. The bishops favoured the proposal but -- a first serious division in the ranks of the reform party -- the universities preferred the new system; the popes, said the delegates from the university of Vienna, repeating what the university of Paris had said already, had more thought for learning than the bishops, in those to whom they gave appointments. About the next great source of general complaint, the taxes payable on appointments of bishops and abbots, there was also a marked division of opinion. To zealots who sought the total abolition of these fees it was objected that the pope and his curia must have some fixed source of revenue in the universal Church in order to pay the expenses of a universal administration. #### These discussions occupied the commission for the next seven or eight months, and meanwhile Sunday by Sunday, the best preachers in Europe (many of them bishops) never ceased to tell the assembled council the tale of the sins -- the clerical sins especially -- which afflicted the Church, to point out that episcopal simony and the simony of the Roman Curia were the chief cause of the decay of Christian life, and to exhort the fathers to pass from talking to action. [ ] #### But between the appointment of this special commission and the appearance of reform decrees in a session of the council, two years and more were to elapse. There were many reasons for this delay; it was not by any means mere clerical supineness. For one thing, since there was now no pope (for all but the Spaniards and Scotsmen, still faithful to Benedict XIII), there had devolved upon this heterogeneous assembly the all but impossible task of the day-to-day administration of the universal Church. This parliament now had to function as a cabinet, and a general department of state, and this at a time of long drawnout crisis. It had to consider and provide for affairs like the trials of John Hus and of Jerome of Prague for heresy, for the civil war in Bohemia that began after their execution, for nominations to vacant sees, for the arrest of the wicked Bishop of Strasburg, for the trial of the crimes of Frederick of Tyrol against Church jurisdiction; there was the great case of John Petit's defence of tyrannicide and Gerson's great attack on this theory, a case beneath which burned the great question of Burgundy against Armagnac that had set all France ablaze with civil war. Later the collapse of Benedict XIII's hold on Spain slowed down the whole activity of the council, for the Spaniards had been invited to the council in such a way that only after they had come to take part in it could it continue as a General Council; and it was more than a year after the Treaty of Narbonne before the last of the Spaniards had come in. Then, too, in June 1416, the emperor (now in England negotiating an alliance with Henry V, lately victorious at Agincourt) sent an urgent petition that the council would halt its plans for reform until his return; and he did not return to Constance for another seven months. And before he had returned, in November 1416, the trial of Benedict XIII had opened that was to take up the most of the council’s time for the next nine months nearly. Nor did this last great event proceed against any background of monastic calm. The English invasion of France, their alliance with the anti-royalist faction in the French civil war, and their victories, were an inevitable cause of the most bitter strife within the council. There were ever-recurring disputes about right and precedence between other nations too; and presently, as has been told, in the summer of 1417, the old question of the relation between the papacy and the council came to life again in the violent discussions about the way the new pope should be elected. #### Such were the causes and occasions of the delay in producing and enacting schemes of reform. When the council was at last free to attend to the problem of reform, it set up a new commission to draft decrees, and now the old controversies broke out afresh, and during August, September and October of 1417 they raged most violently. What the fathers were now actually debating was whether the Roman See should continue sovereign in the Church, or whether the Church should for the future be ruled by an aristocracy of its bishops, and university dignitaries. Were the cardinals, it was asked, of any real value to religion, or would it not be best to abolish the Sacred College as a permanent hindrance? The cardinals, offering to reform what was amiss in their organisation, stood firm for the traditional rights of the Roman See, and the Italians and Spaniards supported them. It was from France and Germany and England that the proposals came for radical changes; but even here opinion was not unanimous in each nation. #### It has been told how the Bishop of Winchester reconciled these warring factions, and there was now sufficient agreement among them for the council to enact five decrees of reform in its public session of October 5, 1417. [ ] The first of these -- the famous decree Frequens -- opens with the statement that General Councils are the chief instrument for the tillage of God's field and that neglect of them is the chief reason for the decay of religion. Therefore, within five years at most of the conclusion of this present council, another General Council shall be summoned, and a third council within seven years from the end of the second, and after that there shall be a General Council every ten years for all time. The pope shall consult each council about the place where its successor is to meet and this shall be announced before the council disperses; if the Holy See happens to fall vacant the council shall choose the place. The Church will, for the future, live from one General Council to the next. #### Then there comes a decree which provides a remedy against future schisms, and this decree, apart from the ingeniously minute procedure it enacts, [ ] a is interesting evidence that it was the mind of the council that not only this particular Council of Constance but the General Council as such is the pope's superior. The third decree provides a new profession of faith to be made by future popes the day they are elected. The fourth states that religion has suffered greatly from the practice of translating bishops from see to see, and that the fear of being translated has been used to coerce the freedom of bishops; to protect future popes, ignorant perhaps of the facts, from assenting to translations promoted by crafty and importunate self seekers, and also from any careless use of the papal power, the council decrees that bishops shall not be translated against their will, unless after the case has been heard by the cardinals and their consent obtained. Finally, there is a decree about the burning question of the pope's rights to spolia and procurations. [ ] Papal reservations of these are no longer to hold good, but such procurations and spolia are to belong to those to whom they would have gone had this papal custom never been introduced. #### There was, it may be remembered, a second clause about reforms in the Bishop of Winchester's settlement or pact, by which both the cardinals and the nations agreed to vote, in a general session of the council, a pledge that, after the new pope's election, the work of reform would be seriously undertaken. This pledge was given in the first decree of the fortieth general session held on October 30, 1417, three weeks after the voting of the five reform decrees just described. In this decree the council ordains that the pope to be elected must, in union with the council or with deputies chosen by each nation, reform the Church in its head and in its members and the Roman Curia also, before the council is dissolved; and the matters to be reformed are then set out in the decree under eighteen heads. But the commissioners of the five nations still failed to come to any practical measure of agreement about the detail of the reforms, and the Germans then suggested that two schemes should be prepared, the one of general reform, for the whole Church, and the other of reforms to meet the particular needs of the several nations; and that these last should be set out, not in decrees of the council, but in specially drawn agreements between the various nations and the pope -- the so-called first concordats. #### The Germans presented to the new pope, in the first days of January 1418, a list of eighteen suggested reforms; the French and Spaniards did likewise; and on January 20, Martin V sent to the nations for their study a draft of eighteen decrees based on the eighteen points of the council’s decree of October 30. It is worthy of note that the pope takes up all the topics which the council recommended, save one only: he makes no mention at all of the council’s thirteenth point namely, How popes shall be corrected and deposed for crimes other than heresy. It was from the discussions of this draft within the various nations, that there finally emerged the seven decrees of universal reform published ill the forty-third session (March 20, 1418), and also the text of the several concordats. #### These seven decrees deal almost entirely with the long-standing conflict between Rome and the bishops about papal taxation of benefices. By the first decree Martin V, with the approval of the council, revokes all privileges of exemption from the jurisdiction of the local ordinaries [ ] granted since the death of Gregory XI (1378), by whatever personages -- says the decree -- who acted as though they were popes; [ ] and he promises that, for the future, no such exemption shall be granted without the bishops' opinions being heard. All unions of benefices and incorporations made since Gregory XI's death are to be revoked if the parties concerned desire this, provided there has not been true and reasonable cause for the amalgamation. The pope surrenders all rights to the revenues of vacant sees, monasteries and benefices. As to simony, no law, says the pope, has yet succeeded in really extirpating this vice, so he now proposes one "with teeth in it". Those ordained simoniacally are ipso facto suspended from the exercise of the order thus received. Elections where simony has intervened are null and void, and they confer no right of any kind. Those who, so elected, make their own any revenues or profits attaching to the office to which they have been elected are bound to restitution. [ ] Both those who give, and those who receive, in simoniacal transactions are by the fact excommunicated, and this even though they be cardinals or the pope himself. The fifth decree abolishes a kind of papal dispensation whose very existence is surely evidence of immense decay in the religious spirit of the high ecclesiastical world, dispensations that is to say, which allow men to hold sees without ever being consecrated, to hold abbeys without receiving the abbatial blessing, to hold parishes without being ordained priest. All such dispensations are now revoked, and those who hold them are, under pain of losing the benefice to which their dispensations refer, to receive the appropriate order or blessing within the time the existing law appoints. The burning grievance of the papal tithe is next reformed, and the sixth decree gave some hope of relief to the sees of Christendom which had for so long been tithed by the popes, systematically, at every crisis of the fortunes of their own state and of the states of their allies among the Christian princes. For Martin V now revived the old law that only the pope could tithe and tax sees and ecclesiastical revenues, and he pledged the Holy See never to tax the whole body of the clergy except for some extraordinary cause that affected the whole Church, and even then only with the written consent of the cardinals and of what bishops could be consulted; nor would special tithes or taxes be levied on any particular country or province without the consent of the majority of its bishops; and such tithes, if levied, would not be collected except by ecclesiastics using only the authority of the Holy See. The last -- seventh -- decree deals with the needed reform of clerical life. It has nothing to complain of but that priests and bishops tend to dress like nobles, and that they even dare to appear thus clad, with only a surplice thrown over the " deformity ", to celebrate the divine office in their churches. The new law provides the new penalty of loss of a month's income for such unseemliness. #### These seven decrees, it may be thought, are slender fruit indeed after four years of conference between priests and prelates from every part of Christendom, reputedly zealous for the reform of Christian life. They are not, of course, the whole programme, but even the several concordats [ ] do not contain much more than prohibitions in restraint of the more glaring financial abuses. Nowhere is there any sign of constructive thinking, and it is surely a notable failure that nowhere is there any care to provide for the formation and the better education of the parochial clergy. The chief subjects, yet once again, are the claims of the bishops against the new papal control of the benefice system, and their complaints about the Roman Curia. #### The pope promises -- in all the concordats -- that there will not for the future be so many cardinals that these will be a burden to the Church, or that the dignity will be held cheaply. The maximum number is fixed at twenty-four, and it is promised that the cardinals shall be chosen proportionately from all parts of Christendom. They will be men distinguished for their learning, their way of life and experience, and will be doctors of theology or law -- unless they are of the kin of reigning princes for whom competens litteratura will suffice. None shall be created cardinal who is brother or nephew to a cardinal already created, nor shall more than one cardinal at a time be chosen from any one of the mendicant orders. The cardinals, moreover, are to be consulted as a body about new creations. #### Two nations speak for their own special interests in the curia; the German concordat recognises that in the present condition of the affairs of the Roman Church there is no other way to provide subsistence for the pope and cardinals but by the old method of granting them benefices and through the payment of the servitia communia. [ ] But no cardinal, the principle is laid down, is to enjoy a revenue of more than 6,000 florins from church revenues. Rules are made that the cardinals shall provide suitable priests to act for them in benefices which they hold, and that they shall not let out such monasteries or benefices to laymen, and that they shall not cut down the number of monks, and so increase their own profits. If, through the negligence of the cardinal’s deputies, the monastery falls into decay, and if the cardinal ignores the injunctions of the monastery's religious superiors, the Holy See is to be approached; and if the pope does not remedy the evil, the superiors are to bring action against the cardinal’s deputies as though they were the abbot and monks in whose hands the property once lay. The special concession to the English was simpler -- that Englishmen too, should be employed in the different posts of the Roman Curia. #### In all the concordats, except that with the English, there was also a clause restricting the number of suits to be heard in the Roman Curia. It would no longer, for example, be possible in Germany for suits that in no way touched on Church business to be taken to the pope for judgment simply because the suitor was a crusader; or (in Italy, France and Spain) to take to Rome matrimonial suits for a hearing in first instance. Penalties were also provided for litigants who interjected appeals to Rome that were judged to be frivolous. There are five clauses which reform the law and practice of clerical appointments, three of them applying everywhere but to the English, one applying to the English alone, and one universally. First, by whom are appointments to be made -- the question of Provisions? The pope, henceforth, will not reserve to himself the appointment to any benefices except those vacated apud sedem apostolicam; [ ] or by the deposition, deprivation, papal translation, or defective election of the late holder; or where the late holder was an officer of the Roman Curia. The other benefices to which the popes had been used to appoint would, for the future, be filled alternately by the pope and the proper collator. Secondly, to whom might benefices be given? The concordats restrict the papal practice of giving them in commendam. To no one -- not even to a cardinal -- is any abbey to be given in commendam which has a community of more than ten monks, [ ] nor any major dignity in a cathedral chapter, nor any parish, nor any hospital or hospice, nor any benefice worth less than fifty florins annual net revenue. These last two clauses do not appear in the English concordat, but this contains, like all the others, a clause by which the pope promises certain restrictions in the use of his dispensing power. For the future, no one will be dispensed from the need to be of the canonical age in order to receive the episcopate, [ ] or an abbey or a parish, 9 by more than three years: except in especially rare cases, and here the cardinals will be previously consulted. To the English the pope promises still more. The law already provides that more than one benefice shall never be granted to the same person (unless he is of noble birth or of outstanding learning), and the present custom by which lords (both temporal and spiritual) obtain dispensations from this law is to cease, and the rule be observed. Again, in England, the Holy See has of late years granted an unusual number of dispensations to allow beneficed clerics not to proceed to the needed holy orders and still keep their benefices, to the great scandal of the Church. All these dispensations are now revoked, and those who hold them must obey the common law in this matter and seek ordination, if they are otherwise suitable for ordination. Also, in England, it has been a serious obstacle to the cure of souls, and a cause of contempt for the bishops' administration, that papal dispensations have allowed beneficed clerics to live away from their posts and archdeacons to make their visitations by proxy. For the future such dispensations are not to be granted without reasonable cause which must be expressed in the dispensations; all dispensations granted so far without such cause are revoked, and it is left to the bishop to determine which these are. Likewise the pope revokes all faculties by virtue of which religious in England have obtained benefices, except in cases where the religious has actually been put in possession. For the future no such faculties will be conceded. #### The beneficiary, once appointed and installed, pays to the Roman Curia, as a tax, one year's revenue -- annates. This was now fixed as the amount for which the benefice was inscribed in the papal tax books under the heading servitia communia. [ ] If this is not a just amount the beneficiary's case will be heard, and a new assessment made, due account being taken of such special circumstances as a country's poverty at a particular time. Annates, also, will only be asked once in any one year, even though there is more than one change in the incumbency during that time; and an incumbent is no longer to be liable for his predecessor's arrears of annates. To France, then ravaged by the invasion of Henry V and the civil war, Martin V made the special concession that only half the annates would be asked for the next five years. To England the pope made the concession that there should, for the future, be no appropriations of parish churches [ ] unless the bishop of the diocese has satisfied himself that religion will really benefit from them. All appropriations made during the schism are annulled. #### The sole remaining changes of general importance are the regulations about indulgences. While in France, Spain and Italy the pope decided to make no changes, to the bishops of Germany he promised to be more careful for the future in granting indulgences, "lest they became cheapened, " and he revoked all those granted since 1378 in imitation of previous indulgences. [ ] To England also he gave a special pledge. Here the numerous indulgences granted by the Holy See to those who visited certain shrines or made offerings to them, and the special faculties enjoyed by those administering to such pilgrims the sacrament of penance -- together with the collectors [of alms for pious objects], of whom, it is stated, there are far too many in England -- are for many people, the concordat states, an occasion of sin. These people scorn their own parish clergy, and desert their parish churches for the shrines where these indulgences and absolutions can be had, and they take thither the tithes and offerings due to their parish churches. The bishops are given power to enquire into these scandals and to suspend the indulgences and the special faculties of confessors, and they are to report the matter to the pope that he may revoke these privileges. #### The concordats were only to run for five years -- perhaps because, in accordance with the decree Frequens, the General Council would then reassemble? -- but the English concordat is noted as binding for all time. [ ] |